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One of the first things that Helen ever said to her was “you must be fun at parties.”
Without missing a beat Carol had turned and said “yeah, I am,” and then fallen in love.
Maybe it wasn’t quite so sudden. Maybe there was a longer gap between the saying of it and the action. It’s possible she’s told the story so many times—so how did you guys meet—that there’s no way to tell anymore if it’s the real truth or not. Helen would know. Helen has just always let Carol tell the story the way she wants to because Carol is a romantic; Carol knows how to land the punchline to get a laugh or a satisfied sigh even if there are embellishments. Helen always knows the truth inside everything Carol does.
But Helen isn’t here.
-
Albuquerque stretches wide around her, burnt and alien and empty. It feels quiet and full of ghosts. The Others were creepy and corporate, annoying; not to mention Zosia with her tour guide enthusiasm and that big-mouth smile that… well anyway, Carol’s alone now and fuck it, whatever. Who hasn’t fantasised about living alone with wolves before?
She decides, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to be very busy.
In one corner of their bedroom there’s a crack in the drywall near the ceiling. Carol has dragged her heels about fixing it for nearly a year, but on Tuesday she rummages in the garage for spackle until she finds a tub of it behind all the ski gear and gardening tools. She sniffs it and sticks a finger in to find it rock hard, and sighs.
The hardware store is fast becoming her most frequented haunt. It’s good now to know that everything she needs is in the same place it was last time, not inexplicably three aisles over. There aren’t any carts blocking the one thing she needs to get to, no one has their yappy little reactive dog wrapping itself around her ankles as it tries to get to a Frenchie minding its business. She reminds herself of these things and walks faster, striding out with how easy it is to move around. It’s easy and good and fine and she likes it this way. The sound of the cart’s wheels on poured concrete echo slightly.
At home she scrapes the ladder up the stairs and thinks if Zosia ever comes back Carol will ask her to get any chips or scratches out of the tile herself, just for the humour of it. Zosia, eyes shining, will tell her where the tiles were made and what warehouse they shipped from and who packed them onto the pallet. Her delicate wrists, not used to the movements required when retiling stairs, might protest but the combined knowledge of thousands of master tilers will make it seem effortless anyway. Zosia will be down on her knees and she’ll be smiling and Carol will only think about how funny it is, she won’t be picturing anything else.
It doesn’t take that long to spackle over the crack and sand it down. There’s still paint in the garage from when they repainted a few years ago, enough to smooth over the bright white and blend it in as though nothing was ever amiss. She can see Helen in the corner of her eye on the bed, leaning against the headboard while she reads her book. Helen says “see, I told you it would take five minutes. You never listen to me.”
This is normal, though. Carol sees Helen everywhere now, a phantom floating through the places she used to live.
In the mornings when she makes coffee Helen frequents her periphery, waiting for her green tea. Carol finds she’s been making it by accident more and more often, getting halfway through peeling the skin off a wrinkled nub of ginger before she realises no one is going to drink it. The body craves routine. She wonders what the Hive is doing. She wonders what Zosia’s routine is, what her body craves and has to ignore for the greater good.
In the evening Helen’s feet press up against her on the couch until she reaches her hand out to find nothing there. Her fingers dig into the cushion and release, dig into her own thigh and hold. She and Helen both hate the couch, they’ve hated it ever since it arrived in the living room, but Helen’s sister designed it and they didn’t know how to say no to the gift. Carol had threatened all the time to go buy a new one. She said they could put this one in the guest room so whenever Lillian stayed she could look at it and maybe finally figure out how fucking ugly and uncomfortable it is, but then Helen would look at her like that and she would drop it.
-
She’d been invited to the party by a friend of Lori’s, and Carol had broken up with Lori about three weeks ago but decided to go anyway. She was in the mood to prove that she could be an adult about breakups this time. She hadn’t even gotten very drunk about Lori, though she was hoping someone at this dumb publishing party was decent at making appletinis so she could fix that. She’d worn her nicest jacket, the Docs with only a couple scuff marks, and she’d pulled her hair back. On the way over she’d done her best to ignore the tugging on her temples where it was too tight.
The room she walked into was full of people who knew about “real” books, the ones with typed pages and bound covers on a store shelf, not a dying laptop full of Word documents titled Draft 3 (revised), Draft 4 (formatted), Draft 4 (to print), Draft 4 (alt) that felt cheap and childish and should never see the light of day. She’d had a short story collection published through a small press and she clung to the tiny advance she’d received for it, proof of talent, but being in here with a sea of blazers and dress pants immediately made her shoulders want to rise up around her ears. She wasn’t like these people, was she?
The bar was just a table with bottles of spirits and plain mixers on it, so she asked the guy behind it to make her two whiskey sodas, implying she was taking one to someone else. While she went out the door to the patio she downed one glass and left it sitting precariously on a windowsill. She took the second with her, trying to sip it and mostly succeeding. Lori’s friend—Alison? Alisha?—was at the railing talking to two other people and, thank god, waved when Carol walked out.
It didn’t take long for the alcohol to kick in, warming her into a more comfortable personality. Carol understood this version of herself better, saw how she fit into the world, and often wondered what it would take to feel that way all the time. When hopefully-Alison brought up what the group thought of The Time-Traveler’s Wife Carol found herself talking about how she wished it had just committed to being a proper science-fiction novel and hey, why is everyone so rich in it, anyway? The words started to get away from her a little, her mouth moving faster than her brain could thread sentences together, and when she finished she found she’d stunned her companions into silence. Blinking, Carol registered that her glass was raised in front of her face. She drained what was left and heard a voice behind her.
“You must be fun at parties.”
Carol had already replied, “Yeah, I am,” before she spun on her heel to look at who had spoken.
The woman leaning back against the railing let out a stream of smoke, cigarette between her fingers. It was almost dark but she was still in sunglasses, those little oval ones most people had stopped wearing several years ago, and a belt chain.
-
(“I was not wearing a belt chain,” Helen exasperates when Carol adds that detail in one retelling.
Carol hooks a finger into one of the empty belt loops at Helen’s back and smirks, holding Helen’s eye until she sees the edge of her mouth twitch.)
-
“Is that not what I’m doing right now?” Carol asked the sunglasses woman, who took another drag of her cigarette before holding it out to Carol. Carol declined it, slightly starstruck. She was the coolest person that Carol had ever had the misfortune of meeting, all hazy at the edges, and Carol could already feel herself wanting to talk faster and louder so that she could try and convince her that she was cool too.
“Being fun?” The woman asked. “You think ripping on books you haven’t read is a good time?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
Carol’s whole body started to buzz and shudder, thinking she had to ready herself for a fight, until the woman’s face broke out into a smile that Carol wanted to crawl inside of.
She hadn’t read the book.
-
After they started dating Carol stopped going to parties unless Helen would come with her. Helen stays unflappable in every situation, including in crowded grocery stores while Carol complains about every body wash smelling like grapefruit. The Sprouts no longer carries any kind of grapefruit-smelling products and it isn’t crowded, and Carol thinks about Helen every time. She wants to read the label of a bottle over Helen’s shoulder while Helen checks if it has jojoba oil in the ingredients; she wants to stand next to her at a book launch for someone else and for once have a chance to fade into the background while she holds Helen’s hand. She wants Helen to ask what Carol thinks about someone’s outfit, and before Carol can reply she wants Helen to say something devastatingly cutting with no emotion, just under her breath so only Carol can hear. Carol wants to hide her laugh behind the sweep of Helen’s hair and study the slope of her neck to calm down. She wants to tell the story of how they met again, even though there’s only 12 people left in the world who haven’t heard it.
After the crack in the wall, Carol cleans out the hot tub and feels Helen watching her from the sun lounger. She gets the long-handled brush and cleans all the windows and when she squeegees them off she expects Helen’s face to appear behind the cleaned glass. She wonders if she’ll feel this way forever.
Not if those freaks find some way to absorb her into their happy little seven billion-strong cult, she supposes.
The problem with her life being her own is that it hasn’t just been hers for years. Helen has kept her knitted together, finding loose threads and tugging them back. Helen is the only reason anyone knows who she is, because without Helen Wycaro would never have seen the light of day. When Carol had gritted out the concept of a ship sailing on purple sand, her face already contorted into a grimace, Helen hadn’t laughed. She’d poked a gentle finger directly into the middle of Carol’s brow to break her frown, and when Carol opened her eyes Helen just looked at her and said we can get that published.
They were still living in their downtown apartment when she simultaneously sold the first Wycaro and lost her second—third?—agent to what Helen was starting to call the Sturka Effect.
“You have to be less stroppy about everything,” Helen had said. “They’re a business partner, not your girlfriend.”
Carol had crossed her arms and kicked at the table leg. “I’m not that stroppy.”
Helen hadn’t responded. Hadn’t bothered, because Carol could come to her own conclusions about that.
“I don’t know why you can’t just be my agent.”
“You want me, a historical non-fiction consultant, to transition to fantasy romance and learn agenting? Just for you?”
“Well it sounds stupid when you put it like that,” Carol said, and kicked the table again.
“Okay.”
“What?”
“If it would make you happy I’ll do it. But I’m getting someone else to be your actual agent, I’ll just… manage you. And don’t say you don’t need managing, because that’s your whole problem.”
Carol didn’t think there had ever been a time that someone had figured out what she needed so easily and just given it to her. She didn’t know how to react when she wasn’t required to have to fight for something. She got up from the table and walked to where Helen was sitting and kissed her. Hard, like she’d just saved her from a forest fire.
She kissed Helen until she felt something else, until she was nipping at Helen’s lip and listening for the breathy sounds she wanted to hear. When Helen pulled away, a hand gently on Carol’s chest, Carol let out a whine that was embarrassing even by her standards.
“You can go down on me later,” Helen said, wiping a thumb over Carol’s mouth. “I have to go ring Frank and quit my job now.”
Helen has always known what to do. Even outside of work, Helen has always known where they should go and who they should see and what restaurant is opening or closing down or moving to the next block over. Without Helen she would have spent 20 years just standing in a room. She doesn’t have her own life anymore because half of it is gone.
-
They had only kissed once when Carol took Helen to the driving range for a date. It was open late and served both beer and wine, which was gross, but the fact that they served something alcoholic was enough to make the idea fun and Carol wanted to show off her middling swing to the woman she was hoping to have sex with at some point.
Helen was not good at golf. Helen had the hand-eye coordination of a blind three-legged horse and if Carol hadn’t already fallen in love with her this would have done it.
“Can you stop laughing at me and tell me how to do it properly?” Helen asked, shuffling around on the spot.
“Wait just lemme hit a few more,” Carol said, just a little tipsy from the beer and in the middle of lining up a swing. She let her arms pull back and fall, heard the satisfying clock of the club hitting the ball. It was getting dark enough that she couldn’t really see where it landed, but Helen knew so little about golf that she was hopefully gonna be impressed anyway.
Something tapped her on the thigh and she looked down to see Helen’s golf club, Helen on the end of it with a look that Carol learned so quickly meant she needed to stop fucking around.
Suddenly feeling self-conscious about the very thing she hoped would happen all night, she let Helen take up a stance again and closed in behind her. Helen smelled like suede and some perfume that was girlier than expected, lightly floral. Carol wasn’t really any taller than Helen but something about that fragile smell made her feel bigger, and she slid her hands down Helen’s arms, felt Helen take a deep breath in.
“Put your hands closer together, it’s not a baseball bat.”
“I played softball, actually,” Helen said, and Carol brought her chin over Helen’s shoulder, felt the smirk after she said it. Helen’s hands flexed around the handle and Carol watched the veins pop.
“Lesbian,” Carol replied. One of her hands moved to Helen’s right hip and she let just the tips of her fingers slide into Helen’s front pocket. Anchor.
“Stop pulling moves on me and show me how to golf, Sturka.”
Helen didn’t hit the ball on the first try or the second, and she told Carol to stop saying ‘open your hips a little more when you swing’ because I’m not readying myself for childbirth, what do you want from me and eventually she turned in Carol’s arms and said “are we actually going to make out tonight or is this a golf lesson? Like, should I be paying you on the way out?”
Carol gently removed the golf club from Helen’s hands and threw it on the range floor, then gently guided Helen to the back wall. She wasn’t sure she’d ever understood a person as well as this. She wanted to know if Helen felt it too.
“You’re terrible at romance,” Helen said. “This doesn’t really bode well for your writing career.”
“Well you suck at golf,” Carol replied, and kissed her.
She learned quickly that she liked touching Helen’s jaw, thumbing the bone and pressing into the hollows, feeling the muscles move under her fingers. She crowded into the warmth of Helen’s body and felt Helen’s arms move over her back, pulling her in tighter. She wanted to keep being pulled, melt in until there wasn’t anything left but bones collapsed on the ground.
She could feel herself groaning against Helen’s mouth until she opened it, licked her tongue against Carol’s teeth.
Everything about Helen pulled her in, the perfume mixed with sweat, the wine taste on the outside of her lip when Carol sucked it between her own. She pressed her hips forward, grinding in, and let Helen run one of her hands through Carol’s hair before grabbing her wrist.
“You want to stop?” Helen asked against her mouth. She pulled back to look at Carol properly, her head thunking lightly against the wood behind them.
Carol blinked and looked back at her, tilting her head to the side. She felt Helen’s wrist hot between her fingers, imagined she could feel a jumping pulse. With her free hand she undid the button of her jeans, guided Helen to it and waited until she could see Helen had caught on, waited until she could see her eyes darken to an impossible blue. Carol ran her tongue over her own lip and waited for something else to happen; for Helen to say something, or to take her hand away, or kiss her again. But Helen wouldn’t do that. Helen was ready to out-wait her in a way that no one else had been before. All she did was stare back, a smile teasing somewhere at the edges of her mouth.
Carol knew it wouldn’t take long once she put Helen’s fingers against her. The way Helen took over, sliding down, Carol’s hand still burning around her wrist; the way she let Carol bury her head in her shoulder as she breathed harshly in Carol’s ear.
“Are you gonna come?” Helen whispered in her ear, which made Carol moan, and then: “Because someone over there just turned the club lights off.”
Carol, so surprised, laughed and came immediately.
-
Summer in Albuquerque is a particularly ugly heat, and Carol wishes she hadn’t decided to fix the leak in the roof in the middle of the day. There’s no Zosia now to bring her water from Jimothy Gronk or whatever his name was, or to happily pick up the bits she might break into if she falls off this boiling hot roof. What’s a little leak directly above the shower anyhow, Helen? You get wet in there anyway.
On the roof, she remembers telling Helen how she felt about that night at the driving range. It was after they’d gotten married and they were staying with Helen’s parents in New Jersey, cramped into a king single at Christmas. Carol knows that Helen’s parents didn’t really know what Helen saw in her, couldn’t believe the way Helen just blissfully explained every time that Carol was only prickly until you got to know her. They hadn’t experienced anything past prickly and didn’t seem that eager to try.
She told Helen: I knew that I was in love with you even before that but after you fingered me at the driving range—
And then Helen had snorted so loud they heard a bed creak in the room beside them, and they both hadn’t been able to keep it together.
“Okay,” Helen said, hiccuping, “Okay, after I fingered you at the driving range, even though we were both way too old for that, then what?”
Carol slid a hand up under Helen’s singlet to rest it on her stomach, let herself feel the comforting rise and fall for a moment.
“I just knew that you were… it,” Carol mumbled out. I was so in love with you.”
Carol expected this to be met with a very heartfelt aww or something of the like, and she remembers frowning when Helen rolled her eyes.
“What?”
“You weren’t in love with me, you idiot, you were just infatuated because I kept calling you on your bullshit. Don’t think I don’t know what Lori told me about you,” Helen said, shifting around awkwardly in the bed until she could look Carol in the eye. “That’s why I didn’t let you finger me until way later.”
Carol ducked her head into Helen’s shoulder and kissed the skin there because she knew Helen would know what it meant. Helen let out a hum, kissed somewhere into her hair in response.
“Do you think we’re still too old or could I get away with fingering you now?” Carol asked, and felt Helen’s stomach tense under her hand.
“Lillian would be so mad if we did that in this bed…”
But they did it anyway, and it’s so vile but Carol wishes that they’d done it more. She wishes that all those times they’d been too tired or she’d been too worried that rabid fans out turn up outside their hotel room door that she had said fuck it and had sex with her hot wife regardless.
Not for the first time, she wonders guiltily if there’s enough of Helen living somewhere in Zosia—in the hive—that kissing Zosia would feel like Helen. If she closed her eyes and stood on a little stool to fix the height difference… would she be able to pretend?
From somewhere below, from the burning pavement, she’s sure she hears Helen calling out “Babe?”
It’s so real for a second, until she remembers it can’t be.
She gets down off the roof. She sits inside until her heart calms down and the dehydration headache goes away. Then she goes back to the hardware store to buy a bucket of paint.
-
They talked until midnight at the publishing party, well after everyone they knew was gone. Alison’s name, Helen clarified, was actually Amanda. She lit another cigarette and said, “but I overheard her calling Lori a dyke to her agent so you should give her whatever name you want.”
“Albert,” Carol said, and when Helen laughed she knew. Even if Helen didn’t believe her, she knew.