ONLY MY SKIN THAT CRAWLED AWAY
They’d been driving around the desert for the exact number of days it took Gena to skip to a different song on Jessie’s playlist without asking.
It was a decent run though, going that long without getting on each other’s nerves. Gena had only tolerated some twangy, sleepy folk-rock because Jessie wanted a lonesome cowgirl vibe on her big birthday trip, but Joshua Tree on a Tuesday in the shoulder season turned out to already be the most melancholy place in America. In early December the days were short and cold enough that any Thelma & Louise antics were sealed up like the roof of the silver convertible Gena had optimistically rented and there was no shirtless Brad Pitt on the side of Route 62, just strewn trash and boarded-up buildings that Jessie remembered being vintage shops three summers ago.
But the sky above the park was still the widest Jessie had ever seen, especially this past year, and the clouds hung back enough so that they could see all the way from the Keys’ View lookout to the blue shimmer line of the Salton Sea. She loved showing Gena the desert for the first time, dropping names for what they saw along the hiking trail into the conversation like dollops of whipped cream; quail, mariposa, creosote, jackalope.
Gena kept stopping every few feet to take pictures. They had an earnest but noncommittal intention to “make art” on this girls’ trip, but had instead shuttled through the week touring Palm Springs’ dispensaries and plugging the new, awkward silences in their conversation with silly stop-gap debates about why American Horror Story sucked this season and which married men they knew and would absolutely fuck were they more mercenary, including their own (but never each other’s) husbands.
Gena invented a game where they had to switch sunglasses and tell each other what they saw through the other’s eyes. That sounded plausibly creative enough to keep Jessie from hiking too far ahead. Her pair of scuffed drugstore throwaways turned everything “whiskey-gold,” Gena said, like the dead end of a summer day. Gena’s polarized shades remade the world in blues and pops of crimson bursting from chuparosa bushes and, to her surprise, open veins of quartz in the boulders. They reminded her of the bloody strokes she’d made up on her own inner forearms, with a crueler brush.
Jessie peeked under her sleeves to see what color her scars might be now, six months After—always a little mental capitalization when she thought of time in those private epochs. Looking with Gena’s eyes, through Gena’s shades, Jessie thought her scars looked like fat, red sea worms, but Gena probably would’ve described something more gracious. Because that’s how Gena saw the world and Jessie could not.
“Feels like I’m at the bottom of the ocean,” Jessie said, pulling the sunglasses off.
The faces on the missing posters at the visitor center were never far from Jessie’s mind. There were backpackers who hadn’t been seen since July. Jessie absentmindedly erased her own footprints in the dirt with sweeps of her boot while Gena took out her camera again.
If their remains were ever found, weeks later, desiccated as cholla skeletons and clinging to one another in some pitiful sculpture, the final photo in the camera’s roll would be a record of their feet standing on the ground at the precise moment both women, unbeknownst to the other, realized that their long friendship might well be over when they returned to New York.
♦
They hiked another two miles before Jessie decided they had gone far enough. The sun was lower than the mountains and it was only three o’clock. Tracks went in all directions between the scrubby brush; not all of them were human. A thick blanket of clouds unrolled from the east and if it rained, even those breadcrumbs would wash away.
It was only an out-and-back trail, but neither woman fully trusted they were going the right way until they saw the parking lot. It was much closer than their fear (and dispensary purchases) made it seem. They laughed as they got into the car, agreeing that their epic trek surely earned a drink before they checked into the AirBnB. Gena’s hardcore whatever-it-was battered through the stereo without remark from Jessie.
A gust of cold wind buffeted them through the doors of the only saloon in town open for a proper happy hour. In Jessie’s Western movie, she and Gena were mysterious and alluring gunslingers, not two women on the wrong side of thirty-five and obviously not locals, dressed all in black and faces brightened with makeup even for a day hike.
It was dark inside, until their eyes adjusted to the glow of Christmas lights draped over the barback mirror. Greasy smoke poured off the barbeque pit out back, crispy at the edges with the bite of fresh-cut limes. Jessie hung back a few paces and watched every man perched on a barstool track Gena’s hips as she followed their waitress past a display case of souvenir T-shirts to a table in the center of the room. They turned their heads in unison, all wore the same oily jeans and heavy Carhartt jackets, and Jessie thought of Tippi Hedren walking past a murder of crows on a playground.
Far away from home, sipping from sweating mason jars of margaritas, and rolling her eyes at horny losers in Gena’s wake, everything felt familiar again. Like this wasn’t the first time Jessie had really hung out solo with Gena since Jessie’s last impromptu getaway, which also involved a lot of talking about men and making art. Only all of Jessie’s drugs were prescribed and she was on an involuntary hold.
Tequila made Jessie swagger as much as leering men goaded Gena into performance. Gena insisted they have another round, so it was the perfect cocktail for Jessie to play-act her seduction tactics on one particularly inappropriate crush. Loose-limbed, Jessie got up and stood behind Gena, and so laced her hands in Gena’s perfect curls to tilt her head back.
Gena smoldered on command, her dark eyes narrowed and glinting above her grin. Jessie just sucked on Gena’s lower lip, rough, like how she’d kiss if she were a cowboy, until the tip of Gena’s tongue nudged into her mouth.
“Hey, now.” Jessie laughed it off with warming cheeks.
Their floorshow was definitely noticed by the huddle of men at the bar; a big guy with a fat face as red as his hat howled and someone else whistled. Too many faces crowded the mirror behind the shelves of booze. The same expression of mean hunger smeared over their eyes as they looked at Gena, only Gena, and their reflections moved too slow when they lifted their arms to take long pulls from their beers, like the men were trapped under the greasy glass.
All of Jessie’s big cowgirl energy blew away like a tumbleweed. Even Gena picked up on the sudden shift in mood and asked for the check. The sun was down and Jessie dreaded what the twisting dirt roads would be like in the dark almost as much as having to walk by the men again to leave.
From the heated passenger seat of the car, Jessie watched Fat Face stroll out of the saloon and light a cigarette. He leaned against his muddied truck and she kept watching him watching them before Gena peeled out of the parking lot and he retreated in the side mirror.
They were speeding through the black, knowing that the darkness behind them meant no creeps were tailing the car, when Gena slammed on the brakes with a “shitshitSHIT!” and threw her arm over Jessie’s chest. Barely ten feet from the bumper was a padlocked gate and tiny white PRIVATE ROAD sign.
“I think this is it,” Jessie said, scrolling for the starred email from their host on her phone, holding it up to find a stronger signal. “Yup. Got the combination.”
Gena looked at her expectantly.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m going,” Jessie said, grimacing even before she got out of the car.
Gena pulled the door shut behind her.
“Gee, thanks.” She pulled her hood up and trotted to the gate. She grabbed the thick, cold chain until she found the rusted lock, hefting it with one hand and trying to line up all the numbers while directing her phone’s flashlight in the other. Her freezing fingers felt too big and before she could thumb to the final number, she fumbled her phone and it bounced out of sight.
She crouched and felt around. Gena was obscured behind the windshield. If a night could gather, this one was a thick blanket bunched the wrong way, alive and waiting for her to retreat before it unfolds again. Close, too close, Jessie heard twigs snap. She was suddenly aware of how puny the headlight beams were, how small she was in them.
Gena flicked on the brights and Jessie jumped. She snatched up her phone and finished entering the combination, relieved when the lock pulled apart and she could swing the gate open.
Jessie jogged back to the car and flung herself into the passenger seat.
“Aren’t you going to lock it behind us?”
“House rules don’t say we have to.” Jessie took one last look into the dark before she pulled the door shut so hard it made the window rattle. “And what if we need to leave in a hurry?”
Gena frowned. “It could be keeping things out, you know.”
“I’m freezing,” Jessie said, and that was her final answer.
♦
Gravel crunched under their tires on the careful drive down the street. The cabin was supposed to be on five acres of desert, but the listing didn’t mention that the land was in the dead center of a small valley—like a crater on the moon or a blast site—ringed on all sides by houses on the surrounding foothills. Jessie wondered how much rain it would take to pound it into the mud, hoping the storm that threatened them all day kept away.
A second combination to a lockbox and a finicky housekey later, and they were inside. Even accounting as Jessie did for an acceptable margin of wide-angle chicanery, the place was small and “rustic,” it turned out, was a euphemism for worn. The living room anchored the L-shape of the cabin, a narrow hallway led to the bedrooms and bath. The exposed wooden beams of the ceiling that had looked so earthy and warm in the online listing absorbed the light, drew the eyes down to the flimsy furniture and flat white walls. Crammed in the far corner was an open galley kitchen with scuffed green tiles set in dirty grout.
“At least the heat works,” Gena said.
“Ah, so that’s what that noise is.” The air vents shook with a bass-heavy hum Jessie likened to the Brown Note, that precise low frequency noise police pumped over loudspeakers for riot control. She felt the thrumming in her sinuses and teeth, not her bowels, yet, thankfully. They couldn’t find the thermostat.
“You’re like my husband. Just tune it out.”
Jessie tried. Every time she stopped acknowledging the sound, the heating system would kick back on with a soft thunk that sounded like a car door shutting outside and echoing around the valley. Even better, it made this noise at irregular intervals; Jessie’d be taking her best stab at mindful meditation as Gena poked around the kitchen cabinets, then, thunk, “Oh hey, the Manson Family’s just pulled up in the driveway!”
They wouldn’t see anyone outside if they were really there, because there were no blinds on any of the windows in the whole house and, like the drive up to such an imminent crime scene, it was pitch fucking black outside. But anyone could see them inside, in the light, just fine. Jessie shielded her eyes and pressed her face against the window across from the sofa to peer at a lone Joshua tree in the front yard. Its spike-fisted branches were flung up into the night. She tried not to imagine the red laser sight of a sniper rifle dotting her chest.
Gena called her husband, but Jessie used her last burst of energy to take a shower. The water got about as hot as she expected and, despite the listing’s promised amenities, there was no soap or shampoo, so she mostly just spread the trail dust all over her skin in a gritty film.
The house felt a hundred degrees too warm; Jessie pulled on the one tank top she had packed. She brushed her teeth over the sink, examining the faint sunburn on her neck. Her arms were still pale but for the long threads of scars up her forearms, puckered and pink, but less angry than they were even a month ago. She was getting used to this new skin. It was a part of After, too.
Jessie walked back into the living room to see Gena pulling a long face by the front door. Her stomach sank.
“What now?”
“Oh, I don’t wanna say…”
“Just tell me. A roach? A scorpion? C’mon, Ripley, we can handle a bug hunt.”
“The deadbolt doesn’t lock.”
“Well, fuck.” They tried pulling and lifting the door as best they could, but it was misaligned vertically because of course whoever took care of this dump didn’t give a shit that the house was sinking, like everything else in this town.
But the host made sure desert-themed dioramas littered every tabletop—ubiquitous succulents, palo santo sticks in ceramic bowls, rusted candelabra. A dusty stack of country records leaned against the living room wall with no player in sight. That’s when Jessie realized the house wasn’t really meant to be slept in at all; it was just a place for pink-haired Instagram models in floppy hats and ponchos to have their pictures taken as they clutched tin mugs of coffee and stared off into Coachella sunsets. #Grateful.
Jessie flopped onto the sagging futon before noticing the giant stain in the middle of it. Maybe the house was a backdrop for other kinds of pictures. The stain became even more suspect. She scooted closer to Gena to avoid it.
“At least it’s not blood.”
Gena put her arm around Jessie’s shoulders and squeezed. “I’m sorry. I wanted this to be more fun.”
Jessie caught Gena trying not to gawp at her arms, so she turned her palms out to give a better look. Jessie shrugged. “I’ve stayed in worse places, right?”
Gena winced.
“Scars are sexy. May I?” She put two fingers to Jessie’s left wrist, like she was testing for a pulse, started to trace the scar higher, higher.
She flinched. “I didn’t do it for the ‘gram’.”
“I know.” Gena put her other arm around Jessie and hugged her so long it had the opposite effect of comfort. In the window across from the sofa, their reflections looked close as ever, but Jessie’s arms wore the proof that it wasn’t true. When Jessie pulled away, her hair was pasted to her neck. Gena thumbed fat tears from her eyes that could have been for any number of things Jessie didn’t have the heart to say out loud tonight.
It was too late to drive back to Palm Springs, un-floppy hats clutched in hands, because they weren’t cut out for even the tiniest bit of roughing it. Gena suggested they sleep in shifts, which seemed extreme, but Jessie was probably only going to toss and turn anyway, so she volunteered for first watch.
The bedroom Jessie claimed had a floor lamp with a red, fringed shade, an odd-man-out amid the phony desert nomad chic. It cast a scarlet light into the room, part bordello, part slaughterhouse. She kind of liked it. It wasn’t the best light for actually seeing anything, but she busied herself laying out clothes for the morning anyway, the faster to flee at dawn. She hummed a tune she had just invented called “Leaving Murder Cabin (#Blessed.)” The thought of returning to a heated hotel pool lifted her spirits as much as her evening dose of meds.
Gena padded into the room wearing only a T-shirt and boy-shorts.
“Can I sleep in your bed?” She sounded more timid than tempting, but Jessie still rolled her eyes.
“We’re so getting murdered tonight.”
“We’re too old to be mistaken for co-eds. We’re probably safe,” Gena said.
She tucked herself under the covers before Jessie could say no. She didn’t know what Gena was playing at, if she was going to try for another hug, or a big discussion, or if Gena was just afraid to leave Jessie unsupervised. Gena fell asleep before she could find out.
Annoyed, Jessie took her cellphone to the living room.
She opened a window in the kitchen to let out some hot air and smoothed a blanket over the futon before sitting down. She sat in the dark, texting her husband most of the days’ events knowing that it was too late for him to reply. Something made her not tell him about the kiss. He wouldn’t be mad, because he only really got furious at her the one time, for what she had done to herself. She plain hated to admit that he was right though; she wasn’t ready to travel yet. But she had insisted. They both needed a break from his nurse duty.
If she were to try explaining to him, she’d say that Gena only knew one way to show love, but she didn’t want to be so cynical. Jessie was like the damaged nerves she could sometimes feel reknitting under the skin of her wrists, making her fingertips burn; love was the phantom limb of her feelings.
Jessie put the phone down and leaned back on the sofa, staring ahead through the wide front window. The lights of other houses dotted the hills, other lives as far from hers as stars. It would be easy to open the broken door and put one foot in front of the other to reach them across the empty dark. Jessie listened for the next thunk of the heating system to measure out time.
She stared until the lights in the distance blinked out one by one.
♦
She didn’t know what time the light in the bedroom came back on or if she had instead opened her eyes, but she knew it was the sound of a car door shutting outside that roused her from the dark hole of thoughts. The reflection of the hallway behind the sofa glowed lurid in the window and Jessie looked over her shoulder, trying to see if Gena had gone back to her own bed or if her shadow moved under the bathroom door.
The house stood still, more solid than it had ever looked in the light.
Jessie faced the window again. She could barely see her own reflection hunched on the sofa. She tried to listen for what was outside, under the pressure building up around her eyes, making her molars thrum in their sockets. The red, reflected hallway ended in darkness, too, blacker than the light years between stars and all the tiny joys of living. From that fanged shadow, a long, dark leg stepped forward and the rest of Gena emerged.
It took a breath’s time for her to register that Gena was naked. Cold uncoiled in Jessie’s gut. Gena’s bare feet slapped against the floorboards as she shuffled down the hall. The wild black brambles of her hair hid her eyes but her mouth shaped Jessie’s name out of wounded animal noises and in that keening was the plea between them for Jessie to decide what must happen to them now. Yet Jessie’s reflection in the window remained frozen on the sofa and when she felt the weight of Gena’s hand gripping her shoulder, she didn’t trust herself enough to push it away or pull Gena down closer to cover her up.
Clear as her own breath, the soft sound of drip, drip, drip fell steady on the carpet. She sat transfixed by that mirror-Gena in the window, with forearms black and slick as eels in the burning light and Jessie understood how far Gena would go to make them both the same again, right down to the topography of Jessie’s own skin.
It might feel like an act of love, if only Jessie’s burning fingertips could reach it from the right angle.
“It’s not the same,” Jessie said but all that came out was hitching sobs.
In the valley, all manner of animal chased each other between the larrea, their barks ricocheted off the rocks and careened back into the house through the open window in the kitchen. Her eyes were hot and wet, but she saw the murky faces surface behind the smooth windowpane like expectant sharks, and they began to jeer and howl at Gena’s back in the way Jessie had only known so many men to do, with desire and demands.
She turned to look behind her and her breath seized in her chest.
Gena was not in the room, but Jessie didn’t think for a second that she was alone.
They don’t see me, she thought. They never see me. It had been all she ever wanted, once. Perhaps she could still run right past them. She could run in any direction and even Gena would not see her anymore, if she ever saw her, knew her, at all, even now, or if Jessie was just as much of a reflection for Gena.
Please don’t see me, Jessie wished, before the heat and the barking and the smell of roasted meat became too much for the walls to bear and she felt the cabin shudder that much deeper into the earth and the front door bowed open with a resigned creak.
Please don’t see me.
♦
When Jessie slipped into bed next to Gena, only dawn could be seen through the windows, a safe, pale orange line above the foothills. Gena rolled over to face her, eyes half-closed and gummy with sleep.
“You weren’t here when I woke up,” she mewled.
Gena sat up and hugged her knees to her chest, pulling the white comforter up to her neck. She looked imperious as a queen sitting in a row of hieroglyphs. A pillow mark gouged her perfect cheek.
“I got up to look for you.”
“You did?”
“Uh huh. First, I looked in the other bedroom. But the bed was still made. So I went to check the living room.” She spoke without looking at Jessie, her voice faraway in remembering. “Then, I heard the saddest noise I ever heard. I was so afraid of what could make a noise like that.”
“Like what,” Jessie asked, not wanting to know.
“It was so pitiful,” Gena’s voice became higher, like she was trying to mimic it, but mock it, too, and Jessie’s stomach turned to ice. “The saddest little noise, like a mouse caught in a trap that just won’t die on its own. And then I realized what it was.”
“Stop it,” Jessie said, shivering deeper into the sheets.
“It was you. You were crying.”
Jessie’s fingertips began to tingle.
“I made myself go into the living room even though I was so scared of what I might find.” Gena paused and swiped an errant hair from her eyes. “You wanna know what I found?”
She shook her head, no, but her whole body was shaking and Gena wasn’t looking at her anyway.
“Nothing. The front door was open and you were gone.” Gena did look at her then, full-on. “You promised you wouldn’t do that to me again.”
No, Jessie thought and sat up in bed. “No, no. I was here the whole time,” she sputtered.
“It’s like I don’t even know you anymore,” Gena said.
The biggest accusation of all, the one they’d been dancing around all week, and before that, ever since Jessie carved those dividing lines into her arms; up and down the highway, and Jessie sped in one direction and Gena went the other, but never asked why. No tidy explanations in After.
Jessie rubbed and rubbed her bare arms but couldn’t get warm.
Her arms, now smooth as glass.
Jessie stared at Gena in stunned silence, the beautiful face was the same, more familiar than her own for all the time Jessie admired it, but the eyes were not the eyes she recognized. It wasn’t the color, exactly, but the cold shade of difference between Gena being afraid that Jessie was gone and Gena being scared that she was left alone.
“Give them back, give them back,” Jessie shrieked, suddenly, clawing the comforter away from Gena’s neck. “Who are you?”
Gena twisted away and swung her feet off the bed. Jessie launched at her back as Gena fled the room.
“They were mine. They were mine,” Jessie screamed behind her the whole length of the hallway, making deer antlers and sage bundles and rose quartz rain down from the upended table by the door, until she caught the back of Gena’s T-shirt and wrestled her to the floor of the living room. “Let me keep this one thing that’s mine!”
“I didn’t do anything,” Gena repeated and repeated as she kicked away and grabbed for the broken doorknob, as if saying it enough could convince them both that she felt no trace of guilt about anything, ever. “I didn’t do anything!”
Jessie yanked on the arms of the woman who was no longer her friend and flipped them over.
“Then why are you wearing my scars?”
Outside the open front door, Jesse saw all of the paths she might have taken away from this moment. The tracks were laid out before her in all directions, not all of them human. One set of footprints broke away from the rest to disappear beyond a solitary Joshua tree, whose shadow, she learned, neither lengthened nor constricted upon the demolished earth. §