Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

Waiting by Derek Nikitas

Since we first published Derek Nikitas last year, the Brockport, N.Y., author has sold non-genre stories to the literary magazines Traffic East and Chelsea, and a mystery to Judas E-Zine. Mr. Nikitas is the recipient of an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina. Joyce Carol Oates has called his stories “very subtly written, and quite touching and powerful.”

Anne had been waiting, preserving herself for over twenty-six years. Not for religious practice — though growing up she’d gone to church most holidays — and not unwillingly. She wasn’t desperate, either. Maybe rather gangly, kind of moonfaced and pale, and a couple matchsticks taller than most girls, but not ugly. Not by anyone’s standard.

Was it fear, maybe? Some nights thoughts of love would strobe through her mind, but whether those flashes brought thrill or dread she couldn’t tell. When she imagined her deflowering and what came afterward, it all looked just black, like the inner wall of a cocoon, as if she’d get reborn from it all malformed, thrashing around, unfit for survival.

But then Anne met and fell in love with Daniel Green, a theology graduate student at SUNY Hammersport. Met him when he walked into World Wide Travel, where she worked as an agent. Said he wanted to book a flight to Israel for thesis research. Tall enough to duck under the blow-up plastic airplanes that dangled by twine from the ceiling. A bit chubby, balding at his crown, dressed in a brown corduroy suit coat and pants. His first words to her were, “’Scuse me, ma’am. I hate so much to bother you.” For real, and spoken in all seriousness with a Southern twang she later learned was Georgian. He’d asked her to join him at a college art opening, and after that first date several weeks passed before Anne truly understood that they were a couple. Before he even tried to kiss her.

Now, six months later, Anne and Daniel were alone in her bedroom, where frigid air leaked through the window cracks and plastic insulation screens. The radiator clicked out its thin warmth, and Daniel knelt beside the bed like a child praying before sleep. He looked away from Anne whenever he spoke. He was shirtless, wearing his slacks and shoes, belt unbuckled.

On the bed, Anne lay above the comforter — naked for the first time in someone else’s presence. She wore only her white ankle socks. Goosebumps sprouted on her arms and legs, and she clenched her teeth to stop their chattering.

After a while Daniel removed his glasses, rested his head against her hipbone, and squinted at his own fingers sweeping along her belly. His fingers tapped her ribs as if he were playing piano keys, playing a song that she’d heard often in her dreams.

Anne tried not to look at her own body. Instead she pushed her fingers through Daniel’s thinning hair. A tea candle on her desk cast faint shuddering light across her bedroom, outlining the open closet door, the twin bed, the flat map of Earth on the wall beside her. The planet’s continents shrank and bulged as they dragged away from the Equator. Anne had traveled across that distorted globe — to Mexico and Sweden, the Bahamas. Back in college she’d studied in France and for a while taken on the style of the young Parisian women she admired — pageboy haircut, dark skirts, and knee-high boots.

“Are you sure you want to?” Daniel asked.

“Yes — of course,” she said. “I love you.” She chose Daniel for better reasons than mere attraction. She chose him because she knew he’d guide her carefully and patiently into what awaited her after tonight.

“Do you hear something?” Daniel asked her.

“What?” She covered herself with her arms.

“I thought I heard something.” He pushed himself up, groaning. His pale gut glowed yellowish in the candlelight. Anne looked away, into the darkness of her bedroom doorway. It was empty at first, but as she watched, the blackness in the entrance took on a human shape.

Someone else was standing there.

“Who are you?” Daniel said toward the door.

“Richard?” said Anne. Her voice came out raspy — the remnants of a recent flu. Daniel’s hands were no longer touching her. In an instant she was unanchored and drifting. She wanted to grab something to cover herself, but her arms wouldn’t budge.

“Gloria?” It was Richard. Her roommate Gloria’s boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. He spoke from where he stood at the doorway to Anne’s bedroom. The wrong bedroom. He spoke Gloria’s name as if it belonged to him.

Daniel started to rise, but then he dropped just as swiftly back to the throw rug on the floor. The gust of his fall doused the tea candle and darkened the room. Through that fresh dark came an afterimage of Richard’s arm swiping, striking at Daniel. Then the thump of something hard against flesh.

Anne slid herself against the world map and thrust her knees against her chest, covered herself with a pillow. She couldn’t see through the darkness to where Daniel had dropped to the floor.

“Gloria?” It was Richard’s voice again.

“Richard,” Anne said.

“Anne? Is that Anne?” Richard said.

“What are you doing? Daniel? Did you hit Daniel?” Her shrill panicked voice rattled even her own heart. She was plummeting from the steady confidence she’d clutched just seconds before.

“Who?” Richard said. “What’s... where’s Gloria?”

“She’s not here!” Anne said. “This is my room!”

A sudden light shined, the overhead lamp, and it burned her eyes. She squinted at the vision that came blurred and bright like tropical noon. Daniel lay on his back with one arm crossed over his face. His skin looked all wrong to her, rubbery.

Richard was brush-cut and unshaven, darkness stamped in both his eye sockets. He clutched a chef’s blade that he must have stolen from Anne and Gloria’s kitchen. In the other hand he held a rock that was wet from melting snow and no bigger than a softball. It could have come from anywhere out there in that winter night, that rock he’d used to strike Daniel.

“I hit him. I thought you were Gloria,” Richard said in a voice unhinged. He struck the rock against his own forehead — a thick, meaty thump. Then he hissed at the pain.

“This is my room! What are you doing?” Anne said.

“Dammit! I thought she was in here with somebody — hiding in here — messing around. I took this rock first, and then the knife — I couldn’t stand it — hearing her in here with somebody else. I saw you people — naked — I didn’t think—”

Anne cringed at his voice, recoiled as if the air swarmed with razors all bearing down on her. She couldn’t hold her body tight enough in her own grasp. She wanted Richard to rush away, backwards, reversing everything, everything mistaken restored. All the way back to before they’d met him.

Maybe even to the time she and Gloria had waited under the sunburned Mexican sky for the old hombre who every afternoon led two horses toward their hotel and offered half-hour excursions.

High tide had thrust the Pacific waters against the promenade and drowned the steps leading down to the beach. White and Mexican vacationers bobbed like driftwood in waves that were warm as blood. At their table Anne and Gloria drank margaritas from plastic cups, and they swatted the fuzz-brown bees that had tracked the liquor scent. The Mexican heat siphoned sweat from their bodies. Even the hotel pools boiled. The booze worked more quickly in these sultry highs, hazing through the brain like a gas.

Like Anne, Gloria worked at the World Wide Travel Agency in downtown Hammersport. She was born Brazilian, raised in Brooklyn. At her desk back home she could fling reservations and confirmations across the known world — simultaneous calls in English, Spanish, Portuguese — as her fingers swiped over the desk globe as if she knew how to find by mountainous contours those places she speed-dialed. Gloria wore shirts that told secrets about her body — the silver waist chain attached to her belly-button ring, the vaccination scar burned onto her shoulder.

Under the dining hut, the other tourists gorged themselves on Mexican wraps and hamburgers, guzzled Sol cervezas, an almuerzo paced with the mariachi brass and strings. From within that shade came Jorge wearing his turquoise resort-staff T-shirt. He strangled the neck of a tequila bottle and pinched a shot glass.

“Aperitivo?” he asked them through his postcard grin. Anne had been swooning over his charm ever since she’d arrived, even though she suspected his tone was dictated by staff rules.

Jorge sloshed the tequila, even as Gloria slurped the last of her margarita and nodded consent. He poured a shotful and tipped the liquor through Gloria’s lips in one lewd gulp. Another staffer sprang from nowhere to drop a sombrero over Gloria’s head and to puff a shrill kazoo as Gloria swallowed, cringing.

“Y tu, senyorita?” Jorge asked Anne.

“No, no, thank you.” Anne slouched, eyeing her hands in her lap. She waited for the sombrero and kazoo and scrutiny to pass away.

“Abstinencia is a tender virtue, si, Santa Anna?” His accent swam like ice water through Anne’s heat and liquor daze. Maybe that was why she agreed to meet with him later that night after-hours at the hotel club, where the open bars drenched tourists in a torch-fire fiesta just beneath a mountainside jungle that was alive with iguanas and fist-sized tarantulas.

But instead of meeting him that night she stayed inside her hotel room. Instead she lay on her bed and fingered the beads that a peluquera had braided into her hair; she scratched the thigh and calf bites she’d earned on horseback in the mountains. She’d been saddled, and she couldn’t swipe the mosquitoes away or else she’d have collapsed into the dirt. They’d pierced and gorged with her blood, and she’d been forced to watch.

She knew Jorge was sitting out there at the bar with his amigos, puffing American cigarettes, waiting for her, fuming like the cherry tip of his smoke. She couldn’t chart the exact moment she’d crumpled — just small hesitations, minutes burned away until she realized she’d stalled too long to salvage an excuse.

Eventually, Jorge came searching, as she knew he would. She expected he’d come bearing down and demanding reasons. She’d worked herself into anticipating such a threat. But he gave only a quiet knock, and then said, “Santa Anna? Senyorita? Do you forget me? Estas aqui?”

She gazed unblinking nowhere. She’d almost wanted his anger; it would have offered the excuse that she’d been waiting for. But no movement, nothing but the translucent, dime-tiny crabs shuffling laterally beneath the bed.

She wanted to go back, but they were bound together in this cramped bedroom — Richard and Anne, and Daniel unconscious on the floor. Richard dropped the rock onto the carpet. He bunched the front of his cobalt work shirt in both hands, even while the knife still jutted from his clenched fist. He moaned and whirled and swung his clawed fingers into her open closet, tearing down outfits. The metal hangers shimmered.

“Richard,” Anne said. “We have to call an ambulance!”

“No! We can’t call anybody! We can’t!”

“Please! He’ll be all right! He’s just knocked out for a second. He’ll be okay. Just please call!”

“Don’t yell! No yelling! We have to wait!”

“For what?” she asked.

“Gloria,” he said.

“Richard, please—”

“She thinks she can just call me up on the phone and break up with me — on my answering machine. There’s no way, you understand? I won’t let that happen.”

“Don’t hurt anyone else. Please. You’ve already—”

Richard’s lips spasmed. He tightened his jaw beneath the bristles on his face and scowled at Daniel. Then he hunkered down on his knees, crawled toward him. He raised the chef’s blade and pricked the tip against Daniel’s sternum. The knife shivered there against Daniel’s skin.

“Richard, what—” Anne said.

“You got to be quiet,” Richard said. He was poised like some amateur magician that Anne couldn’t move to stop and couldn’t speak to dissuade. He groaned and lurched his shoulders as if a wave of nausea had splashed him. The blade sank down to the black hilt now pressed into Daniel’s stomach.

“There! There you are, dammit! You’re done!” Richard howled, jabbing one sharp finger toward Daniel’s head. He crawled back to the doorway, groaning through his teeth.

“You killed him!” Anne screamed.

The knife hilt hovered in place. It ticked gently like a stuck metronome. It beat as a heart beats. Blood rivulets rushed all at once, snaking across Daniel’s ribs onto the carpet. His weak hand clawed at the rug as if clutching for something. For Anne.

“No yelling! You have to wait,” Richard said. He inched toward Daniel again, crouched like an ape. Anne lunged whatever she held in her hands — a useless mass that puffed against Richard’s head and fell. Her pillow. Without it, she felt her body exposed to Richard and the cold air. She tried to pull the comforter over herself but everything was tucked so carefully, and her seizure-struck hands couldn’t grasp a thing.

“I’m going to lock you in the bathroom,” he said.

He grasped her wrist and yanked, and her body tumbled as if it was already a corpse. He dragged her off the bed. In one step, Daniel’s warm blood seeped against her left sock heel, and only the force of Richard’s pull kept her from collapsing as they shoved through the living room where the remnants of her and Daniel’s dinner sat on the coffee table — wine and shrimp-stuffed chicken, French-cut green beans. They’d been too anxious to eat much of it.

Across the kitchen and into the bathroom — a windowless closet where a bathtub, sink, toilet, and radiator were wedged together. It was an eyesore of peeling paint, of jutting porcelain and cabinet doors scuffing into each other. But the dusty radiator heat blasted her chill skin back to life. The door clicked shut behind her and she twisted the doorknob lock. Kitchen light seeped under the door. Out there Richard’s boots crunched the linoleum.

A tiny socket-bulb cast its light onto her skin. For a moment she forgot her nudity — this body that she’d prepared for Daniel, shaved and oiled and perfumed like a ritual. In the full-length mirror on the door she saw a woman hunched and diminished. A stranger.

She wanted the woman in the mirror to cover herself. But there were no towels for covering; all of them dirty and set for washing in the overflowing laundry basket in Gloria’s bedroom.

The radiator heat bled into Anne’s legs and her back. As each stretch of her body warmed, it melted away until she had no sensations left. She thought she could almost drift off like a dream of herself, but the instant Richard threw open the bathroom door she would slam back into all her pain and cold. She would feel whatever he wanted to inflict.

A month ago Anne had sat with the cordless in her hand, waiting for eight o’clock when she’d call Daniel on his cell phone. She was sometimes ashamed of her constant longing for his voice, but love was not easily stalled or reversed; it only plowed headlong forward.

Richard was there in the bedroom with Gloria, like always. Nights when he slept over, Gloria’s bedroom sounds drifted through the walls to where Anne lay on the couch in her pajamas, sipping chamomile tea and trying to read through European travel guides. Gloria lost her innocence at age thirteen. “And why not?” she asked Anne, with her voice already raspy from smoking since at least that same age.

Anne lost track of whole pages listening to those noises, straining to ignore them. But right now, Anne guessed, the two of them were probably spooning on the bed watching TV, Richard clutching a White Russian highball. His fingers always stained with grease, and his blue shirt stitched with Richey on the breast pocket because he worked down at the Northside Auto Garage. The woozy stench of motor oil on his body. One of Rich’s eyes, the left one, was sliced up from a knife fight a few years ago. The pupil of that eye looked as if it had exploded through the iris like a dark star gone supernova.

They were not calm in there for long. The fight started with Gloria’s ragged whispers about how Richard had worked an hour late at the garage. But he couldn’t reason with Gloria, couldn’t calm her. Then came the thud against the wall and Gloria bellowing, “I’m calling the cops on you!” She came screeching from her bedroom. And there was Richard close behind, grabbing at her with his clawed hands. Their two bodies flung together across the apartment and rumbled everything so that it seemed the house might implode. Gloria swiped up the kitchen phone, dialed nine and one but not the last one before Richard wrenched it away chanting, “sweetie, sweetie,” while she slapped at him. Her neck was already sprouting red welts in the shape of Richard’s fingers.

Nine and one was enough. The dispatcher called back and when no one answered the police came. Their red flashing lights whipped through the windows as they swerved up the driveway. The lights draped across the living-room walls like a sudden coat of paint. Anne sat on the couch, waiting. She knew she had only to wait, because she lived with the sense that human anger surged and always passed like bad weather.

“Did he do that to you?” the police asked Gloria, sitting with her at the kitchen table. She covered her neck with her own hands. By then, Richard was outside sucking cigarettes and pleading with another officer.

“It was an accident,” Gloria said. Her lipstick had dwindled into the cracks of her lips, and tears cut streams through her makeup. She had dressed for clubbing in candy-striped nylons and hoop earrings and hairspray, but now she was a party whose guests never showed. The officer watched stone-faced as Gloria recited the same crap excuses he’d probably learned verbatim from other women.

“Would you like to have him arrested, ma’am?”

“No. No,” Gloria said. “I shouldn’t have called you. I didn’t, even — just the first two numbers, but I guess that was enough because you called back. I was afraid to answer. I’m sorry you had to come all the way—”

“Where were you when this happened?” The cop glared at Anne where she stood in the kitchen archway. He was asking her. Now Anne was implicated, almost accused.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Anne said, and the cop lowered his head, nodding slightly, inking her words forever onto a notepad.

The kitchen phone rang. Richard answered gruffly, as if something other than silence had been interrupted. “No, she’s not here,” he said. “I’m waiting for her. This is Richard — who’s this?... Richard, her boyfriend... She’s not here, either. Tell me who you are... Neither of them. No one else is here right now.”

He hung up the phone. Anne heard his gasping breath just outside the bathroom. His shadow’s gray smear leaked through the kitchen light coming under the door. She smelled oil again, stained onto his hands. The blood of engines, and he’d left a black streak of it on her wrist.

Anne couldn’t bear the image of herself in the mirror anymore, so she clicked off the night-light with her shivering thumb. Now there was only the light shaft under the door. She peeled both her socks away — the blood on the left heel already drying. She stepped backwards onto the cold porcelain bottom of the tub. Never had she navigated that tiny bathroom in full darkness. She reached for surfaces that seemed to evade her touch.

“Anne? What are you doing in there?” Richard said. His boots shifted and his shadow grew.

Anne remembered the barber’s scissors stored in the medicine cabinet, but she couldn’t imagine piercing them through his skin and the tough red muscle beneath, forcing her arm to stab and stab until he collapsed. Her own flesh clenched with the notion.

“Please bring me some clothes?” she said.

“No. We’re just waiting for Gloria. Like I said.”

“I’m cold. And I’m scared. If you just bring me some pants, or a shirt. They’re in my closet.”

“I ain’t going back in there. I messed up bad in there. I don’t want to see that again — you know? I had too much to drink before — all this vodka.”

“Please bring me a blanket — something.”

“Shut up!” He kicked the door and the hinges crackled where they were bolted into the wooden frame. “I did it already. I can do it again to you, so shut up!”

Anne’s legs gave way, bringing her down to her knees near the drain coated with mildew and soap scum. Scented like fruity shampoo. She pulled the shower curtain shut — another flimsy, useless barrier. Each second she confronted the miracle of her brain still working.

“Just calm down in there.” Richard spoke carefully, word by word. “It’s going to be over soon.”

“Don’t,” Anne said.

“Nobody needs to freak out, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know. Don’t screw with me. You know.”

When she ran the hot water it came out rippling. At first her cupped hands stopped the water from slapping the tub bottom, but then it overflowed. It kept flowing and rising, hugging around her knees, channeling between her toes. Anne pressed her face under the surface of the water. Her ears filled and sang with the surge of the faucet. She was alive, but just yards away Daniel was dead and growing colder. She thought of his parents, all his relatives, who’d raised him for so long. She had taken him away from his family who had nurtured him and then she let him die. She hadn’t done anything to stop it.

They met Richard in a bar. Anne perched on a barstool bolted to the floor. Around her, spotlights dragged bright colors past silhouettes on the dance floor. Limbs flailed, blurred and artless. She tugged downward at her skirt hem that kept rising up her thighs. Gloria had been there, too, seated near Anne at the table, until she excused herself for the bathroom, only for a few minutes. They’d just become roommates and were celebrating here at Club Helium, where hovering balloons were anchored by ribbons, glowing like oriental lamps in the background studio lighting.

Gloria’s whiskey sour billowed in its glass while Anne waited for her to come back. She raised her head and scanned wide-eyed through the crowd for Gloria’s face. Someone watching, a stranger, might’ve mistaken Anne’s impatient glances for another kind of desperation. A guy like the one who approached her then, with his polyester shirt untucked and unbuttoned, tank top beneath, and his prickled hair moussed wet against his scalp. Rising from his pinched fingers was a ribbon tied to a balloon that was white and weightless as a pure human soul might be.

He leaned toward her, straining over the music, “You sitting this one out? You look pretty relaxed. I thought this balloon would be your color, you know?”

He tried to pass the ribbon, but Anne missed. The balloon swooped silently off toward the rafters. She could only face him for an instant — enough to notice the brilliant fractal defect in his left eye, a pupil spilling its blackness everywhere.

“I’m Rich, if you want to know,” he said.

Behind him Gloria hurried back to the table, bristling with big white teeth and painted lips and undulant black hair. Anne knew Gloria would divert the stranger’s interest; Gloria would save her.

In the bathtub Anne held her breath underwater until her throat heaved, until she believed she could hear Gloria’s voice wading into her ears from the kitchen.

“—showing up here uninvited,” Gloria said. She was in the kitchen with Richard, just beyond the door.

Anne’s ears drained. She sucked in moldy air. The shadows under the bathroom door were crossing and shifting now.

“How many times I got to apologize, Glory?” Richard said. “I don’t even know ’cause I got nothing else except for you. You think I give a crap for anything else?”

“Keep your voice down,” Gloria said. “Anne and Danny are in here — I can’t believe you just walk in, I mean—” she dropped her voice to a level meant only for Richard “—they’re supposed to be getting intimate in there.”

“I don’t care about them. I came for you.”

“You’re so considerate, Rich.”

“Where’d you go? I been waiting here.”

“On a date. I went on a date. Does that make you mad, Richard? You going to strangle me because I’m trying to forget about you?”

Anne’s muscles clenched as if all this language had come from her own mouth. Richard’s silence loomed so heavy with secret and peril that it became Anne’s silence too; it kept her implicated in this poised disaster.

“Who was it? On the date?” Richard said. He still sounded cautious, as if waiting on a breath for Anne to scream, for Gloria to smell death on him, for his own rage to spatter. It must have sounded to Gloria like calm.

“Never mind who it was. You don’t know him. Besides, the whole thing sucked anyway. I’m through, I’m saying.”

Knuckles rapped on the bathroom door. “Anyone in there?” Gloria asked. Her voice spilled through the door, splitting boundaries. The water rippled with Anne’s shudder. She clenched her eyes and waited for Richard to strike with another knife or something else that he was keeping concealed, maybe down the back of his shirt.

“I locked it on accident,” Richard said.

“You just need to lift the door like this,” said Gloria. She grunted as the door slammed upward against its frame. “The stupid lock comes undone really easy.”

Anne shifted onto her back and dunked her nose and mouth underwater. The ripples fell stagnant just as Gloria bustled into the bathroom. Anne flinched against the onrush of light, but she watched her roommate through a hairline split between the shower curtain and the stall.

And Anne could see behind Gloria where Richard hunched in a seat at the kitchen table with his back to the open bathroom door and his shoulders trembling. He tilted his head with one ear perked, listening for an outcry. But Anne knew the danger her voice would summon. If she uttered a warning, even whispered, he’d surely stab them both dead. So she swallowed all her noise deep into her chest.

Gloria lowered herself down onto the toilet seat. She fingered the silky hem of her thigh-high nylons like an intimacy. “What are you getting yourself into?” Gloria whispered. Anne winced, but then she understood that Gloria was talking to herself.

“Oh, sick—” Gloria said. “Come here, Rich — look.”

Anne’s airless lungs ached. She peered but could not see what Gloria was lifting from beside her feet. A chair scraped the kitchen floor, and there was Richard in the doorway — his unshaven face and those black-stained hands. His one undamaged eye scanned everywhere, even the ceiling, until it fixed upon the open edge of the shower curtain through which Anne saw him. His blind, shattered eye saw nothing.

“They must’ve — you know,” Gloria said. “’Cause look at — she cleaned up her blood with this sock and just left it here. Think I should go rail on her, knock on her door?”

“No,” Richard said.

Gloria said, “What are you all grumpy about? I told you the date sucked. I was going to call you tonight anyways, maybe even ask you to come over. But as usual you jumped the gun. Lucky I’m feeling forgiving.”

The toilet flushed, and Anne lifted her nose from the water. She inhaled a breath filled with Gloria’s sweet berry perfume. Gloria ground her body into Richard’s. She took his limp hand and pressed those grimed fingernails around her hips. But Richard’s dead sparkling eye still watched Anne, watched until Gloria flicked the light away.

How long Anne waited beneath the water and behind the curtain — she couldn’t count the minutes. She measured time by the distant thump of Gloria’s bedroom door, their voices and bodies settling into bed, Gloria’s smoky laughter, the steady chilling of bath water, ripple by ripple.

She wanted to remain until events reversed themselves, but her mind kept firing her muscles to run. She imagined escaping without her body, slipping upward from it through the bathroom ceiling and the apartment above, floating into the night air. She wanted to find Daniel in the ether and mingle with the particles of his afterlife. From ceiling height she watched her body dripping and cast in blue. Those limbs and ribs and spine were no more than any collection of bones, but she stayed tethered to them by nervous cords, webbed in dendrites and axons.

She wanted to cut those bonds — even as her body began to quicken, peeling back the shower curtain, slumping and slipping over the tub rim like a new birth. She watched her naked bones stand upright and walk, dripping bathwater onto the kitchen linoleum, gaining strength. She saw herself slump against the kitchen counter, saw her own hand draw another long blade from the knife block. She watched herself with that knife and believed that she could use it.

Copyright ©; 2005 by Derek Nikitas.