The Girl in the Fake Fur Coat

That year the snow didn’t fall until Christmas vacation was almost done with and by mid-day the ground had always begun to thaw and people avoided the places where the grass had gone brown in the autumn’s decline. I drove the back roads on days when it was too cold or the wind blew too hard, with nothing but a driver’s permit and a ’92 Mazda 626 that was prone to irritable starts and had no less than half a dozen previous owners. I bought it from Jed Gallup—who’d bought it for his then-teenaged daughter form Maxwell Bishop on the advice that it was a very reliable car—for $500, plus enough gasoline for me to get it home and deposit it in the grass beside the garage wall.

I loved that car, and intended to fix it up as soon as I could but I didn’t have the tools or the know-how to do such a thing, so I settled to keep it in the condition I bought it in and only drove it when I absolutely had to and I knew I wouldn’t get caught.

I went into town that day to buy lens cleaner and a new battery for my video camera because the old one didn’t keep a charge so well anymore and would often die with little warning just as I was reaching the climax of my latest masterwork. So I drove over to Ted’s Electronics to see if he had a camera battery that would fit my machine and while he was in back with the old battery in one hand and his other hand rooting around inside boxes I picked up the lens cleaner and laid it on the counter. My camera was old and the model had been discontinued for a number of years by that point so finding a new battery for it wasn’t going to be an easy task and I worried a little that I might have to buy a new one because the cost of a brand-new machine was sure to drain the last of what remained of my summer employment at Gossman’s Groceries.

Then Ted came back with a new battery in a theft-proof plastic casing and set it in front of me.

He said, “Now there’s no guarantee that it still works, but it’s the last of what I got. Take it or leave it.”

I said I would take and dug out the twelve bucks and seventy-two cents he was asking for it (I got a discount because he said he wouldn’t’ve been able to pawn it off on anyone else), plus the six ninety-nine for the lens cleaner, and he put everything, including the old battery, into a plastic bag with the store’s logo printed on the front.

“Now you be careful out there,” he said. “The radio said there’s a storm moving in from the east and we’re supposed to get six inches by this time tomorrow.”

I smiled and said, “Thanks,” as I took the bag from his hand and made my retreat out the door, which gave a slow, electronic ding each time it was opened.

I wasn’t until I had gotten outside and started walking the distance to my car that I noticed the first flakes appear in front of my eyes, and I looked down and saw tiny, white crystals beginning to build up the cracks of the sidewalk and in the lower corners of the shop-front windows and on the bumpers of curbside cars. Then, not a second later, I saw her come around the corner in a coat of colors that I thought must’ve come from an exotic animal, arms held aloft, and trailing the tight pack of Old Frank Malloy’s hunting dogs, which, despite many threats from the City Council, he refused to keep tied up.

She held something wrapped in wax paper in both gloved hands and she made low pleading noises to the dogs as one gripped the bottom of her coat with its teeth and tried to get her to stop. She raised her eyes up to mine for only the briefest moment, a cry for help, and before they even fell away. I felt the traitor of a smile begin to appear on my face and stay there long after her attention was back on the dogs. The dogs worked in tandem to get her to stop, one after the other latching onto the idea of gripping the hem of her coat and pulling her to a halt.

I felt bad about smiling like that when the situation was obviously less than amusing for her and I jogged over and used my one free hand to swat at their backs, while yelling, “Scram, Denver! Get lost, Willie! Leave ‘er alone!”

I might’ve actually made all those names up on the spot, I don’t know, but it got the dogs to turn their attention to me for a second and the one I thought of as Denver, a brown and white beagle, gave me a mournful look like he’d known he’d been bad. The rest resumed their terrorization of the girl and I made up names for the rest of them, yelled them out, louder this time, and they turned to me with eyes questioning and a little bemused, and then trotted away down the street.

After they were gone she lowered her arms and let whatever was in the wax paper fall down to the level of her mouth.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Happens all the time.” Though this was a lie because I had only ever seen Malloy’s dogs hunting around in garbage cans for food and never begging for scraps from someone they knew, much less a stranger. “What d’you got there that they wanted so badly?”

She held it out to me so I could see what was inside the wax paper. “Turkey sandwich. Lettuce. Tomato. Mayo. I got it from the deli over there.” She pointed vaguely toward Mr. Greenburg’s butcher shop and I smiled again because I never really thought of the place as a ‘deli’.

She took a bite from the sandwich and began to chew.

“So…” From the look on her face and the way she spoke I knew that she couldn’t’ve been from around there and I wanted to say something that wouldn’t make me sound like a country boy off of the farm and in town to buy feed for the hogs. Which I wasn’t.

“So, I haven’t seen you around here before,” I said.

With her mouth full she shook her head and stared at me with eyes clear and dark and blue, and I saw her brown hair falling to her coat in waves, and I saw the pale oval her face made colored at the cheeks and chin by the cold air, and I saw the pair of oversized waders she had tucked her black khaki pants into. I guessed her to be about the same age as I was, but, at the same time, she seemed like a little kid reluctant to move while held in the gaze of a larger kid.

“I’m visiting my grandparents,” she said, after swallowing. “Was visiting. I’m going home now.”

I tried to affect an attitude of unconcern, like I hadn’t fallen in love with her already and she was breaking my heart by leaving so soon. “And your grandparents are?”

Her expression changed from one of attentive neutrality to that of worried skepticism and I thought that, somehow, I had said the wrong thing and hurried to say, “I’m Conor, by the way. Conor Hawes. My dad owns Hawes Lumber.”

I reached out my hand not sure if she would take it, but she took it, and she said:

“Sarah…Lawley. My grandparents are Joe and Maurine Lawley. They’re retired and I don’t know what they did before.”

“Oh.” I tried to think if the name rang any bells but couldn’t come up with anything. “You’re leaving?”

She nodded. “I was supposed to already be gone but I missed the bus.”

“Oh. Well, do you need me to drive you back to—?”

“The man said there would be another one coming later. Tonight. He said one should be coming.”

I looked upwards toward the sky, which was gray past all the white flakes falling from it.

I said, “There’s a storm coming in, I think. I doubt you want to stay out here waiting for a bus.”

I could see that I was making her really nervous and I tried to give her a harmless smile to calm her but I could still feel her ready to run at any second. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that. I just wondered if you needed a ride.”

“I’m okay waiting for it,” she said.

“I’m sorry that I scared you.”

Her eyebrows came together on her face in a look of beautiful defiance.

I smiled, I couldn’t help it. She looked cute all annoyed and little bit flustered.

She looked back over her shoulder at the corner that she had come around not five minutes before. “You didn’t scare me. Those dogs scared me.” Then she looked back at me. “I don’t think you scare me, though.”

Once she’d turned away I let my eyes wander, down the pale line of her neck mostly concealed by the screen of her hair, down over the material of what could’ve been a t-shirt, though I couldn’t be sure because it was covered up by her coat, to her breasts where they lingered a little too long and when she turned back I could tell she knew where I had been looking.

I tried to think fast and distract myself from what could’ve only been foremost in my mind, so I asked a question. “What’s with the boots?”

“They’re my grandfather’s. He said I could have them. He said that it wasn’t a good idea to walk around in this weather in these.”

By “these” she meant two bulges in her coat’s pockets that I had somehow failed to notice before, out of which peeked rubber and material as well as two separate entwining trails of laces. She handed me her sandwich and pulled them out, showing me a pair of orange low-top sneakers that either hadn’t been worn before and were very well taken care of.

“Yeah,” I said, handing back her sandwich, “your feet would definitely freeze in those.”

She pushed the sandwich back toward me. “You keep it. I’m not that hungry anymore.”

I looked at the sandwich like a prize with its single bite taken out of it but then I reminded myself that it was just a sandwich, so I wrapped it up again in the wax paper and set it on the roof of my car.

By then the snow had begun to fall a little bit faster and the ground around our feet had begun to pale to white and tiny, white flakes of it hung in her hair and in the fur of her coat. I saw for the first time that I could remember that the first snowfall wasn’t going to melt and wash away, but was instead coming to stick and stay on the ground.

I asked, “Do you want me to wait with you? I mean, if the bus isn’t coming until tonight, you’ve still got awhile yet. Yeah?”

She nodded her head and said, “Okay. What did you have in mind?”

I didn’t know what to say. Stunned that she’d said “yes” and stunned that I’d even bothered to ask in the first place, so I didn’t have a pre-planned answer to her follow-up question. Which is why I said, “I think the movie house might be showing something new now, want to check it out?”

“Movie house.” She gave the words, especially the latter, an odd twang, as if she wasn’t used to saying them so close together. Unfortunately, it was all that I had and she had to’ve known that. “Okay. Anything to get out of this weather.”

I wondered if she wasn’t really used to the cold. She certainly wasn’t dressed for it.

“So where are you from, anyway?”

She kept her head ducked down as we began moving so I couldn’t tell if she looked at me. “Here. Me and my parents moved away when I was still a little kid. Kind of been moving ever since. Not really settled on any one place as my home. So.”

“Oh.”

“But right now I’m living in New York.”

“Oh! And how do you like that?”

Now that we were moving I felt more at ease and wanted to learn all I could about her. With each step I tried to position my body a little closer to hers so that my arm would almost be pushing into hers and I felt the hairs of her coat move and brush against the material of the old suede jacket my grandma gave to me. I kept glancing down at the fingers of her hand and thought about moving my own hand over so that it would meet with hers, thinking about our fingers entangling into a multi-knuckled knot.

“I’m studying to be a fashion designer,” she said.

“Fashion designer. That’s like college stuff, isn’t it? How old are you?”

She sniffed, and rubbed her nose, and looked up at me. “I’m seventeen, but I finished school early so now I’m in New York studying fashion. I was home schooled. With all the moving around there really wasn’t much else to do but study.”

She shrugged. “You know?”

“Really? You’re seventeen?” Two years older than I was. It’d be a lie to say that I wasn’t at least a little bit intimidated, but excited as well at the thought of an “older woman”.

She just shrugged again.

“So you live in New York all by yourself?”

“I live on campus, in the dorms. I’ve got a roommate. She’s studying photography, like fashion photography.”

Her eyes were looking into mine like she really wanted me to believe all of this, like she found it pretty unbelievable herself. “That’s very impressive.”

We were coming up on the town’s sole clothing department store, Willard’s Apparel, and a row of plastic mannequins were lined up behind the long window, dressed up in what was supposed to be the latest fashions but were really only an approximation of what could be found in the mail-order catalogues.

I pointed at the mannequins and said, “What do you think about those?”

I slowed my walk, thinking that we would stop as she went over each ensemble with her keen eye and picked out minor but telling details that would make or break the outfit, but instead she blew right on past them with giving a second glance.

She said, “Small town fashion: last year’s belts and mini-skirts thrown together with mountains of junky jewelry. Need I say more?”

I looked at the fake people in the window and thought of at least twenty girls who went to my school that would be pissed to hear her say that.

“So,” I said, about to ask another stupid question, “all the girls in New York dress like you?”

She turned to me, stopping on the sidewalk and positioned herself in about the middle so that she blocked my way, not that it wouldn’t have been easy to slip around either side had I wanted to.

“I have my own style. All the girls in New York dress like sluts and bitches. They all want to pretend like they belong on Laguna Beach.”

I tried to give her a small smile of apology and I said, “Sorry. That came out wrong. I really like your coat is what I meant to say. It’s…cool.”

She looked down at her fur coat as if she just noticed its presence that very second and couldn’t remember when she had put it on. She looked up. “It’s fake. I’m a PETA person. I could never stand to know that any animals were killed just because I needed a coat. It’s only made to look real.”

I took the opportunity to step forward and touch the fake fur along one sleeve, and even in the cold it crackled with static electricity and tingled in my hand. “It does. And it feels real, too.”

She stared at me for a second longer than she meant to, I thought, and then she said, “Thanks.”

Then she turned around again and the imitation hairs were gone from my fingers. She waited in front of me to start walking beside her again, looking back through strands of dark hair with what I could imagine was the most innocent questioning look her face could conjure up.

“So where is this movie house?” she asked.

“It’s just up here and the next street over,” I said.

The snow fell like a shield then and creaked under our feet as we pressed it thin and headlights from the cars moving along the street couldn’t touch us past the thick shower of flakes. We found the movie house where it situated itself in the middle of the block and the ticket guy inside the box wore a heavy winter coat over his uniform. I asked him what was playing and he told me the generic title of a CGI movie whose synopsis was immediately forgettable. I tried paying for both tickets but she took a fold of cash from the mouth of her left boot and peeled off half the price of our admission, so I only paid for my own.

Then she bought her own soda and offered to pay half for a bucket of popcorn, but I told her, “No.”

The theater was mostly empty at that time of the day, except for a scattering of people who must’ve had similar ideas about getting out of the cold and wet. The screen was illuminated by footlights and kept blank in the final minutes before the movie started so there wasn’t much to look at. We found our seats near the back where we would be able to “make our hasty retreat,” I joked.

I set the bucket of popcorn on the armrest between us and balanced it there as it sent up a salty wave of heat and smell that quickly filled the air around us. I kept taking a few kernels at a time and popping them in my mouth, listening to them squeak against my teeth and melt before swallowing. I waited for her to take a few kernels as well but her hand never ventured up to the bucket and I finally gave up, setting the bucket into my lap and taking a sip of soda.

“You seen this movie yet?” I asked.

She held the straw of her soda to her lips but didn’t drink, kept it pressed there like a shushing finger. “I’m not into kids stuff.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Not too long after that, the lights dimmed and screen flashed for a second and the first trailer of half a dozen came on screen. Noise boomed out of the large speakers on the walls and all the voices were amplified to ten times their size. I still felt the brush of her coat against my arm and for the first time I could smell the years of use rising from the fibers and it smelled like the streets after a rainy day and ghosts of restaurant appetizers left half-finished for the birds to eat.

I couldn’t focus throughout the first half-hour of the movie with her sitting so close to me, but after that I began to relax and I felt her relax, too, evidenced by her hand reaching over and lingering toward the rim of the popcorn bucket. Her eyes were transfixed by what was happening up on the screen and her face had lost its seriousness and dissolved into child-like wonder as her brain was dazzled by all the colors thrown out before her. I tried not to move, afraid that I’d disturb her, and inched the bucket slowly back between us so I didn’t feel like such a pervert.

I had slid down so that the back of my head almost came to rest at the top of my seat and gravity, as well as my unusual relation to it, was putting pressure on my lower back and abdomen that seemed to intensify the more I tried to ignore it. I sat up in my seat and stunned her with her mouth half-full and her hand poised at the rim of the popcorn bucket. It took her a few seconds for her eyes to become guarded again and boredom to eke in ever so slightly. She lifted her soda from the cup holder of her seat and put the straw between her lips but it was already empty.

“I need a refill,” she whispered.

Then she moved to slip past me.

“Can I kiss you?” I asked. It was a gutsy move and I might’ve not made it if it wasn’t bolstered by the memory of the look on her face several seconds before.

She turned a little to me, caught yet again in mid-composure, and I didn’t give her any time to think, heading straight in for it. It was brief and wasn’t how I wanted it to be, but her lips were soft and a little bit yielding and I saw her eyes slip close for one beautiful second. Then it was over with like it hadn’t even happened and she looked at me with eyes that could’ve been terrified or thankful and her lips parted just enough that I could see the white crescents of teeth.

She stood in front of me a few seconds more looking like a dark apparition backlit by the theater’s screen, then she broke free of whatever daze I had sunk her in and continued her way to the concession counter.

You she’s going to run, she’s just going to take off. Left there alone with just me and myself, I had plenty of time to second-guess all of my actions leading up to that point. I felt no confirmation that anything I’d done was “okay”. She could’ve been halfway down the street at that point. She could’ve even been in the ladies’ restroom barfing. Every scenario I came up with told me the end result couldn’t’ve been any good.

So I kept my mouth closed, despite my tongue’s pleas to lick and probe for any defining “taste of her”. A guilty curiosity.

I could easily resign myself to the fact that I’d lost her within the scant two-minute interval of her absence. So while I wasn’t awe-struck by her return (I wasn’t breathing either, so maybe I wasn’t getting the correct amount of oxygen to be “awe-struck”) I wasn’t necessarily eager to attempt a repeat of my earlier actions at any point during the rest of the movie or while we were leaving the theater. Better yet, she didn’t even bother to mention it as we made our exit.

Outside, the snow cushioned our walk back to my car and I kept waiting to find our footprints going in the other direction but they were already long buried by then. There wasn’t much talk on the way back but the taste of salt and sugar still hung in my mouth and I’d already begun to associate it as “her taste”, or the taste of “that moment” with her. When we got back to my car I held the door open for her and didn’t think for a second that she wouldn’t climb in.

It had snowed enough by then to turn the turkey sandwich sitting on my roof into and indistinct lump and I reached one ungloved hand in to extract it from its grave. Covered in a layer of tiny crystals it looked mummified and inedible, like a relic I could’ve been discovering for the first time, so I let it drop to the middle of the sidewalk. Maybe Malloy’s dogs would find it and have their supper after all.

I got in and started the car, ran the heater full blast. A bit of snow that had gotten in when I opened the door melted and soaked into my pants leg.

“So,” I asked, “what do you want to do now?” Hoping not to sound too hopeful.

“I’ve got classes that start in two days and if I’m late I might not be able to catch up,” she said.

“Um.”

She turned to me. “Can we just sit here for awhile?”

“Sure.”

I ran the wipers to clear the windshield and only succeeded in slightly improving the view. The first fall of snow had already begun to turn to frost and through the windshield single, intricate flakes clung like starfish to the glass of an aquarium tank. Other than that, it seemed to me were encased in a box of white.

The radio played and the station’s announcer was giving out tickets to a band I’d never heard of, to the fifth caller who could get through. Then they played a song by the band and it was song I had heard plenty of times but never struck me in such a way to be less than anonymous. The tune was catchy in an instant and forgotten in a heartbeat.

I reached into the backseat for my video camera, which I had laid there on the very-off chance that I might come across something to film while in town, and, as if by instinct, my thumb went for the ON/OFF switch. I immediately saw the vacant battery slot and went into a stiff panic as I searched my brain for where I might’ve put the batteries. Looking through the backseat again, I saw something white and crumpled, multi-faceted like a diamond imploding upon itself, and pulled the bag containing the batteries and lens cleaner into my lap.

Since I had no tools with which to open the plastic casing of the new battery, I slipped the old battery into its slot on the back of the camera and fired it up.

With me and her there in the car, I flipped open the screen on the side and aimed the camera at her; framed her face in the screen and hit REC.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Filming you.”

“You’re recording me?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

It took me a second to define the why and put it into words that didn’t sound cheesy or fake.

“Because you’re very interesting to me,” I said.

I didn’t quite expect the reaction I got. A wave of color seemed to start at her neckline and work its way up across her face and she began chewing her lips turning them to a deep red. She tried to hide in the tiny space of the passenger seat but there was nowhere she could go to escape the eye of the camera, so she put her hands up by her face and looked at me past the edge of her palm with eyes that seemed glassy all of a sudden and pupils huge as dimes.

She embarrassed me in her embarrassment.

I lowered the camera and shut the screen and she lowered her hands from her face. The camera would go on to record for another three minutes and twenty-seven seconds before the battery would suddenly give out and in that time most of what would be recorded would be her knees in her black khaki pants and the gray sky out of the passenger side window and a blurry close up of what I always assumed to be a cup holder.

My mind was like a flooding chasm, like my brain was swelling up with blood and my head was about to explode. I couldn’t think, or, if I did think, it was only about one thing.

I wanted more than just the “movie house” taste of her and I’d like to believe my actions were mutual, though logic and rationality became buried under a height of sensory detail. Whatever gravity our situation contained, I bore down on her as much as she bore into me and I came to examine everything as if under a microscope. Goosebumps and tiny hairs that stood on end at the back of her neck became like an endless terrain I could spend a lifetime traversing.

The strap of the camera was tight around my right hand and I couldn’t remove it without employing the effort of my left hand which was busy going inside of her coat and climbing the ladder of her ribs to where the shape of her bra could be felt through the fabric of her t-shirt, and my fingertips inched toward what the bra contained. But she moved her body, and lips, away out of reach and the sound of breathing was so loud that I couldn’t tell if it came from me or her.

“Not here,” she whispered.

“Where then?”

I watched her recede. At that moment everything felt a million miles away and even the line of storefronts that laid just on the other side of the glass could’ve been as remote to me as any other space she might’ve occupied at any other time.

When did she say her bus was coming? She didn’t. I felt the seconds ticking down.

I was difficult to leave the car, to move from that pocket of warmth to sidewalk where, I noticed I think for the first time, the temperature seemed to be swiftly falling. I cleared the windows with the brush end of an ice scraper I kept in my trunk, the frost layer gone to melt. I thought she might’ve been watching me as I went, but she remained a dark blur and every time I looked in I couldn’t find where her eyes lay.

I drove the back roads past Heissman’s farm. There was a tiny shack that technically resided on the farm’s land but which had remained unused for as long as I could remember. It laid just on the periphery of a field almost as if it were about to sneak away into the trees that surrounded everything that hadn’t been given over to cultivation. I watched the approach of that screen at the far end and aimed my wheels for the single-lane dirt road, invisible now, that led to the only destination I could think of on such short notice.

I kept the engine running so the hot air would keep blowing, so I could get her out of her coat.

I found her in the same way I had before but I couldn’t re-obtain the same focus. The world didn’t shrink to her and mine miniscule properties and I found my thoughts dominated by the shack with its one dark window and the field beside it, a white expanse. It set the scene for something different and I’d supposed she felt it too because her own interest in me seemed less than what it’d been before.

I heard a door pop and felt a cold gust of air. I had my eyes closed to shut out what lay around us (my brain might work better if I did), but I opened them then to see flying backwards as if she were being pulled almost but her body shifted and turned as it crossed the door’s threshold so I could see she moved under her own power. I thought, This is it, a delayed result, but a result nonetheless. Odd that she’d pick this moment to run, but then I saw her turn to give a glance back and the clump of her boots slowed as if to beckon.

I found myself shuffling across the island between the seats instead of opening my own door and getting out that way. I gave chase because that seemed what she wanted me to do, but unsure enough not to dig into the snow and bound after her at full speed.

She ran zig-zags, hindered by the over-sized waders and throwing up snow at her heels with each overcompensated step.

I caught up to her easily enough and could’ve tackled her to the ground, but at the last second I threw myself wide so that the tips of my fingers just almost came to touch the tips of her fur right before I found myself half-buried in snow. It was dry snow so the cold stood at a buffer, but, still, every inch of exposed skin was soon inflamed, and it didn’t help when she reversed to push a handful of snow into what was the only part of me that had remained unburied.

“No fair,” I said. I couldn’t brush the snow from my nose and cheeks fast enough to keep it from melting and stinging all the way to the middles of my ears.

I jumped up, a little angry, a little exhilarated because she had just given me permission, I felt, for what I was about to do next. I caught up with her again and caught her at the knees, bringing her down as gently as I could as I preceded her in contact with the ground. Somehow I had driven her out of one of her waders, revealing one pink sock emblazoned with strawberries (no comment), and was merciful enough to allow her to reach for it and begin to pull it back on before continuing my attack.

At first, I was going to shove snow in her face for doing the same to me, but thought that might be too cruel, so instead I used my weight to push her down into the snow since her instinct was the same as mine, to stay as far above as possible. She made a deep indentation and closed her eyes to await further punishment. I hadn’t noticed until that moment how hard I was breathing or how fast my heart was pounding, and I doubted it had much to do with physical exertion.

Her body felt very tense under me.

I needed to know where things were going to go next.

“What time do you leave?” I asked.

She opened her eyes and looked at me as if the question didn’t make any sense.

She said, “The bus’ll probably be late anyway.”

“But what time?”

I had to feel her shrug through my hands pinning her down and take that as my only answer.

Her eyes were green. I’d thought they’d been blue before, but they were green now, maybe some trick of the light, and I thought I could see myself hovering over her reflected in their centers.

“Could you let me up?”

I leant over and kissed her. I felt I had to take something by force, even if it was something she had given me already. She didn’t move against me or struggle and I took everything I could in one long moment: the way her hair smelled of citrus and vanilla, the tiny portholes of her nostrils that somehow channeled enough oxygen in and out of her, the uneven crescents of her fingernails, the heat radiating from her crotch as I kept one leg wedged in the junction of her thighs, and the dry skin of her chapped lips that no amount of spit could disguise.

Then I allowed her up and brushed the snow from her back and hair, and she finally got the dislocated wader the rest of the way on. There was no point in hanging around any longer. We walked back to the car, as if by some unspoken agreement, and got into and interior that had become just as cold as it was outside, the heater not working so well when you leave one door standing open. I piloted the car out to the road and pointed it back toward town.

I had grown dark early and the headlights illuminated specks of white as they swept in to tap at the windshield and fly past the windows. We came into downtown the same way we had left and the tires crunched the snow beneath as they headed toward the bus depot.

Businesses were closing up and I eased the car against a hard ledge of curb just past a bench enclosed in a corrugated-steel roofed structure. We both looked at it through the windows. Snow had drifted up around its base and filtered through the boards leaving behind pillows of white resting on the seat. I told her she could wait for the bus in my car and everything around us became empty and light was cast from the street corners in false halo that pervaded everything.

I had to know.

“Will you come back?” I asked.

She looked at me in a way that could’ve been terror or frustration.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

We left it at that. The thought of losing her wasn’t so terrible. There were probably girls like her all over the place.

I turned the headlights off and kept the radio low to leave my head swimming through the melodies. The afternoon seemed like forever ago when the only thing on my mind had been a new battery and lens cleaner. I knew I still had that image of her in my camera, knew I had proof that she existed at least at one time. I looked at the camera where it laid face-down into a cup holder.

It was then that headlights appeared at the end of the street and I saw the shape of her bus come rolling toward the stop. Inside the bus the lights were on and I didn’t see anyone else besides the driver. I thought of her riding all the way back to New York on the bus alone and staring out of the window as white landscapes rolled on by and the cold air rushed just inches from her face.

She got out of the car with just a, “Bye,” and shut the door. I noticed for the first time that she didn’t have any bags or luggage, though she had to’ve had at least one change of clothes I figured. Unless she came to visit just for the day, but all the way from New York?

I watched as she went over to the door and climbed on without looking back even once, and I saw her walk the aisle between the seats which I could see now held a few other passengers, and she sat in a seat on the side opposite of me so when the bus rolled away I couldn’t see her at all.

Of course I searched the phonebook for any Lawleys the next day after I woke up but didn’t find anyone with that name or any name that sounded close to it. I even tried entering her name into Google Search but I didn’t know enough about her to pick this one Sarah Lawley from the bunch, even when I added “New York” to the search criteria. It was a fake name anyway, I was sure of it, so I forced myself away from making any further inquiries and focused on starting a new project. Except I was pretty much snowed in and there wasn’t much to do around the house.

I found myself dragging my feet through the snow a lot and throwing myself down into the blanket, only to pick myself up and do it again. It was physical enough to be entertaining in a mindless way.

I’d still had that little piece of her left over on my camera. Her face and the sound of my voice. ‘Because you’re very interesting to me.’ Her face hidden behind her hands.

I deleted that once I came across it again after fooling myself into forgetting about it. “Are you sure you want to erase? Y/N.” As if I could hurt her by eradicating every last trace.

Whatever.


THE END