This story started as a character study and developed, with the characters telling me who they are.
This is adult material and no children below the age of 18 have permission to read it.
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Chapter 1
"The course of true love never did run smooth."
Act I, Scene 1, from A Midsummer's Night's Dream
- William Shakespeare
From her bedroom window Ann looked out over her postage stamp backyard, down the steep embankment, across the train tracks and down to the river. The setting full moon reflected off the small waves. It made Ann think of a band of fluid gems, flashing low across the night, but somehow scented from the summer. Across the river lay the black bulk of the Catskills, now only a rippling shadow, black against the blue last light of the summer sky. The hills had the shape of a woman lying on her side, under a blanket, hips and shoulders for peaks, waist and knees for valleys.
In her childhood, because this part of town lay next to the river, only life's dirt washed up in this nowhere of warehouses and whorehouses. Now, because of the view, those rich enough to afford to buy beauty in a city resettled the oldest part of the town.
She bought the building already renovated into a modern home from the shell of a meat warehouse. She then customized to her needs and taste. Ann used only a small part of the proceeds of the lawsuit and her inheritance, and banked the rest. She would never have to work again. She really didn't want to. Men still dominated accounting. A woman in that career had thousands of obstacles to overcome, without having the extra disabilities the accident left her.
She had pulled out from the new supermarket's parking lot onto the twisting river road, driving her parents home just as a young man in a fast car came over the hill at nearly eighty. He broadsided her. He killed himself, her mother and father. The accident scraped off the left side of her face, pulled out her left eye, and broke nearly every bone on her left side. The doctors gave her a new hip, a plastic kneecap, a steel pin in her shinbone and a fused left ankle.
They saved her leg, but left her pain and scars. She had even stopped the reconstructive surgery because she wanted freedom from any new pain. Scattered through her home were thermoses Ann kept filled with water and large bottles of aspirin and acetaminophen, so that wherever she was, they would be only a short hobble away. Ann's pain had good days and bad days. But even on the good days some part always ached, some movement always gave her sharp, sometimes blinding pain.
Then there was the other pain. The pain of missing her parents. Her acquaintances from work had all stopped visiting her while she was still in the hospital. For months after that, the only people Ann spoke to were lawyers, doctors and nurses. Then fewer doctors. After the town, the supermarket and the insurance company settled with her, and she bought her house, she didn't speak with her lawyers. Within a year, the only people she spoke to were at the plastic surgeon's or at the various stores Ann placed her phone orders with. Then she stopped the reconstructive surgery, and stopped speaking for days at time. But her being alone helped in a way. She didn't have to apologize for her disheveled appearance, due to the actual pain of getting dressed. She didn't have to worry about being gawked at, or pitied. And Ann didn't have to be afraid to cry when she missed her mom at night. Ann's solitude solidified, wrapping her in protective layers, like a pearl, or a mummy, insulating her heart from the pain of her fate, giving her, at last, a composure not based in thoughts or words, but in the simplest acts and feelings of continuing to live.
Ann saw her face as half a topological map of scars from the accident and the surgery afterwards, and half herself. Ann knew what she looked like. She knew she was still tall and slimly built, with fair skin made paler from being inside so long. People once told her she could have been a model. Such comments always made her think how shallow the commenter was. Her face was long, with high cheeks and full lips. The little bump in her nose that she thought so cute in high school had been amplified in the accident. She had let her black hair grow into a blunt cut, that she now parted on the right to better hide her eye patch. Since she knew what she looked like, she kept the two mirrors she used to cut her hair in a drawer in the bathroom vanity.
On a whim, while still in the hospital, she had mumbled to her lawyer, "Six million. Two million for each of us." She hadn't gotten that much, but the village and the supermarket had settled for an amount that was close enough. The village had since put in traffic lights on the hill and at the supermarket.
So now she had the home of her dreams, at least, on a crooked street that followed the river's steep bank. She squandered hours just being amazed by the view, while she painfully exercised her half dead left side back to as much life as it would ever have. Her bedroom was her domain. She could manage the stairs, but not easily, so she kept her exercise equipment, books, stereo and the television with VCR in the very large, wood beamed, exposed brick room. She even considered having a stove and fridge installed, but that would give her too good an excuse never to leave.
She walked, as best she could with her cane, to the light switches and turned them all off. In the dark light of the moon, she went back to the big west facing windows and looked out on her neighbors. The house at the end of the street, just turned into condominiums by a speculator, finally had a light on. All the apartments were supposed to be huge one bedrooms, ideal for the upwardly mobile young professional, or so the ad said. Because the street was bent towards the river, and because her building was higher on the riverbank's slope, she could see in. After a few moments she realized, as the partial image began to make sense, that what she saw was a woman wearing an iridescent turquoise robe, leaning back against cushions, reading a book on her bed. She could see the woman's face to the eyebrows, and her legs to just above the ankles. The woman had dark hair, shoulder length. She appeared to be a large person, broad shouldered, athletic.
Again she turned to the moon and the river thinking, "Ann, you mustn't." She looked around and figured out that none of the other neighbors could even see the new owner's window, because no other building was as tall as hers, no other building at just this angle. She also could tell that none of the neighbors would ever see her looking. Ann had had enough of the little voice that always told her to be a good girl. She knew that she thought about things too much, and that thinking let in memories, which always led into the downward spiral of heartache. She knew thinking had kept her a captive in her own home, thinking that no one would ever want to, or could stand to, see how she looked after the accident.
Ann, defying her thinking side, true to her feelings, turned back to watch her. The woman had brought her left leg up, to support herself against the pillows, and her robe had parted, showing Ann, inadvertently, that she was nude beneath the robe.
Ann went back into the dark room and dragged her favorite sling chair back to the window, and watched her read. She thought of nothing but felt a warm excitement, a slight tingle of anticipation, that she could, so easily join this woman and remain unknown. There was life beyond her room after all, if only vicarious life. Still, it finally occurred to her, that this could be better than the nothing she felt for so long after the crash, better than the avoidance of people she rigorously practiced.
The woman put her book down, and suddenly got up, leaving her robe on the bed with a shrug. Ann saw her flash by naked as she powered herself gracefully off the bed. A few minutes later, Ann saw the overhead light go out, but a small light that must be near the bed, remained on. The dark haired woman returned to the bed, naked now, and lay back against the cushions, hands behind her head, looking down at her own torso and legs, smiling to herself, at some delight well known to her.
Ann thought that any second the final light would go out and this window to the real world would go dark for her. The dark-haired woman was not, as Ann's father would have said, "a genuine, pin-up beauty." But she was real, and whole, and obviously her own person. She had a thin, almost bony face, with a long thin nose, but full lips over a prominent chin.
