THE OTHER ANNA

FICTION

Elliott Gish

The storm has already started by the time Anna and I head back from the lake, the snowfall blown in loops and whorls by a snarling wind. We navigate the trail bent almost double, feet skidding over ice hidden beneath shifting clouds of white. Anna’s hand is in mine, mine in hers.

The two of us fall through the back door, tangled together and laughing those gasping little laughs that happen when you can’t breathe properly.

“You’re pink.” Anna grins down at me. The snow in her black hair beads into water.

“You’re not,” I tell her. I feel an icy trickle down the back of my neck, soaking into my sweater. I am reluctant to relinquish her hand. “You’re magenta. You’re burgundy. You’re… you’re blood orange.”

“Kate, those are all different colors,” she says. Her faint accent, one of the last traces of her Polish childhood, lends a hardness to her r’s and a softness to her th’s.

“Still true.” Taking a step back, I shake myself vigorously, drops of melt scattering and falling to the floor. There is a little puddle there already, spreading slowly from beneath our boots. “Let’s get warm. I’ll grab some wood from the basement.”

When I first slept at Anna’s house—which is to say, when I first slept with Anna—I had been delighted to discover the woodstove in her living room. I had never known anyone with a wood stove before; having a stove that burned actual wood instead of a heater seemed like an unimaginable luxury. Now I know that the stove exists because Anna’s landlord is too cheap to fix the central heating, and that wood stoves are an incredible pain in the ass. Still, there is something enchanting about having a real fire in front of you, and something very satisfying about being the person who makes it.

It was the other Anna who taught me how to build a fire, on a camping trip many years ago. I remember this without meaning to, without wanting to, as I make my way down the flimsy basement stairs into the dark, praying as I do each time that the boards won’t give way beneath my feet, that nothing will reach up from the empty space behind the stairs to grab my ankles. I know that there is nothing there, of course, but the slow, sluggish part of my brain that activates as soon as the lights go out begs to differ.

Anna’s basement is small and smells like rot. It is thick with little noises, water dripping, insects rustling, traces of living things that can’t be seen. It’s an old house, she says whenever I mention this. Things live in old houses. Half the packed dirt floor is swallowed up by a teetering pile of split logs. Like the stairs, it looks like it could collapse at any moment.

I move gingerly through the dark to grab an armful of kindling from the top of the pile, then freeze. From somewhere in the basement comes another noise, a new one: a faint but unmistakable hissing, like a kettle singing in the distance.

I settle the logs into the crook of my arm and squint into the darkness. The hissing comes again, louder, sharper, closer. The sound wends its way through the air towards me, then dies. I cannot see what is making it.

An animal. The wind. The house settling in on itself. Or…

But I can think of nothing to follow up that thought. Shaking my head, I turn back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, my logs cradled protectively against my chest. After I close the door, I slide the hook into the eye to latch it.

Anna is already snug on the couch when I get to the living room, her legs tucked under a blue and red checkered antimacassar. The battered radio on top of the bookshelf is tuned to one of those adult contemporary stations with music that thins and fades into the background, the mildest counterpoint to conversation. Fiddleheads of steam curl out of a pair of mismatched mugs on the coffee table.

“Coffee?” I ask hopefully, kneeling in front of the woodstove. The ashes are dead, no embers left glowing beneath them. I’ll have to start from scratch.

“Hot chocolate,” Anna replies, stretching luxuriously. She is an inveterate sprawler, always quick to take up as much space as she can with her long limbs. “Not the good stuff, though, just water and powder. I’ll make it properly tomorrow.”

The good stuff is the hot chocolate she makes with whole milk and kakao, squares of dark chocolate stirred in and left to melt at the bottom of the cup. She made it for me on our first morning together, laughing when my eyes widened with that first sweet sip. There were still crumbs of chocolate at the corners of her mouth when she kissed me later. It was the Polish way to make it, she’d said, although I would later learn that sometimes she declares any way she does a thing the Polish way to do it, like when she tries to spread cold butter on toast and ends up with holes in the bread.

I spare a moment to glance at the languid sprawl of her body beneath its field of checkered wool, admiring the way the light from the lamp behind her accentuates the sharp planes of her face, turning her into a creature of shadow and gold. She watches me build the fire and does not criticize my slow-moving hands or rush over to shove me out of the way and do it herself. She never does, and this is a surprise and a pleasure that I have not tired of turning over and over in my mouth, like a sweet. I find myself humming as I stack the logs crisscross on the bottom of the firebox, three layers deep, and toss in a handful of wood chips. There is an old newspaper on the coffee table, and I steal a few sheets to knot and throw on top, lighting it with a flourish. Anna mock-scowls at me.

“That better not have been the sports page,” she says, but she barely gets through the sentence before her face cracks into a smile. In spite of all her boyish outdoorsiness—the hiking, the flannel, the house in the woods—Anna is not a sports person.

I know that she is joking. I remind myself of this as I climb back onto the couch, pulling my half of the knitted blanket over my legs and reaching for my mug. My heart does not need to pound, my breath does not need to catch.

A deep inhale draws the twin scents of burning wood and hot chocolate into my lungs. The wind lashes fitfully against the house, scouring the glass of the wide back window. It looks out onto the pines that fringe the lake, thick and dark as Anna’s eyelashes, although I

can barely see those pines through the storm. I have been here so often over the past year—it has only been a year, barely even that— that I can trace the shape of them from memory, the rise and fall of the treeline just beyond the little deck outside the door.

She had a barbeque out there for her birthday in the summer, friends and family crowded together in the sun. Her people were kind, warm, curious about me. They asked me questions and listened to the answers while Anna worked the grill with the focus and intensity of a suburban dad. We stayed on the deck for hours, drinking weak cocktails in plastic cups and watching the sun sink slowly into the lake. When she was done with the grill Anna came and stood behind me, her hands resting lightly on my waist, and I leaned back into her touch, closing my eyes. That wasn’t a thing I thought to do or meant to do. It was as automatic as a blink.

The other Anna once threw a party with cocktails and a barbeque. The barbeque was abandoned when it started to rain and everyone fled indoors. The cocktail was thrown into my face when I dozed off in an armchair. When I woke the next morning to the sound of someone pounding on the front door, my lashes were sticky and smelled of gin.

“It’s supposed to keep up until tomorrow afternoon,” Anna says. “We might be snowed in when we wake up tomorrow.”

I like the thought of that: the two of us marooned here, an island in a sea of snow. “I’ll keep the fire up,” I say. “I’ve had lots of practice.”

Anna’s eyes roll in a perfect circle. They are brown, the color I have always liked the most for eyes. “You haven’t had that much practice.”

“Have so. Every time I come over you get me to do it. I’m literally slaving over a hot stove for you.”

“So am I,” Anna says, settling an arm across my shoulders. “Who cooked dinner?”

“You did,” I admit, curling in close to her. It had been a good dinner, too—roasted squash, asparagus, venison sausage. It’s the kind of food she likes to cook, the kind that makes me feel faintly guilty, as though I am despoiling it with my plain-cheese-pizza mouth. “But who brought dessert?”

Desserts are my forte. Tonight it was a strawberry rhubarb pie. The crust was too tough, but Anna ate three slices and declared it perfect.

“You did,” Anna admits in turn, very graciously, and plants a kiss on the side of my face. “Let’s stop before we end up tallying everything we’ve ever done.”

I murmur an agreement, and the two of us sit without speaking for a while. Anna is no Luddite, she has a phone and a computer, but there is no television in her house to paint it with color and noise. We have learned to do without, to fill the quiet with talk and music and, sometimes, nothing at all. I was worried at one point that the lulls in our conversation meant that she found me boring, that we had run out of things to say to one another, but when I voiced that concern, she just laughed and said she liked that we could be quiet together.

I reach over and touch her hair, enjoying the way it feels under my fingers. Coarse and soft at the same time, like the fur of some lovely animal. She turns a little at my touch and gives me that broad, goofy smile that always makes my own mouth unconsciously curl. Sometimes we sit together in public places, cafes and shopping malls and theaters, beaming foolishly at each other. Once an old man saw us smiling at each other like that as we waited out a rainstorm beneath an awning and demanded to know what, exactly, we were so goddamn happy about. We didn’t even answer, just burst out laughing and ran out into the rain, our feet slipping and skidding on the wet pavement.

I was not allowed to touch the other Anna’s hair, which was blonde. This was a rule made clear to me on our second date, when my hands strayed upwards towards its silky length and were met with a fierce and crushing grip. Startled, I looked up into blue eyes that didn’t blink.

“Don’t,” the other Anna said. Her hands, small as they were, could not completely encircle my wrists, but they could squeeze surprisingly well. “There are oils on your fingertips. It’s bad for the hair.”

A log in the fire pops and fizzes, some hidden pocket of moisture hissing to the surface, and I remember suddenly the noise that had come from the wood pile.

“There’s an animal in the basement,” I say. “I heard it down there earlier.” “An animal?” Anna sits up straighter on the couch, as though preparing to leap up and rush down the stairs that very moment. “What kind?”

The hiss echoes through my mind again. “I don’t know,” I reply. “I didn’t see it. But it hissed at me. A snake, maybe?”

Anna raises one expressive brow. “A snake,” she repeats.

There is something about the way she says it that I don’t quite like—a hint of skepticism, a dash of ridicule. Is it really there, I wonder, or do I only think it is?

“That’s what it sounded like,” I say, trying to ignore her tone. “It hissed like a snake, anyway.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m not sure. I didn’t even see it. How could I be sure?” My words are laced with a feeling that I can’t properly describe. Irritation, partly, like the rasp of rough cloth against vulnerable skin, but more than that. My heart begins its insistent thumping again. The song on the radio switches to something new, a treacly ballad that grates on the ears. The calm has shattered.

Anna shakes her head. “Kate, it’s winter,” she says, and there it is again—that whiff of something in her voice, that trace of scorn. Unless I am imagining it. “There wouldn’t be any snakes in the basement in winter. They hibernate. It could be some other animal. A racoon, maybe, or a rat. They hiss sometimes when they’re cornered. Do you think that might have been it?”

I was always imagining things with the other Anna. I imagined that she promised to stop drinking, that she would start going to meetings and stop going to bars. I imagined that she came in through the door at 5 a.m., whispering to some stranger whose face I never saw. I imagined that she struck me, once, the back of her thin hand striping my cheek in pink and white, and that she blamed the blow on the sound of my voice, how high-pitched it got when I was afraid or upset. “Like a mouse,” she said. “Like a goddamned rat.”

I must have imagined things, because when I told her about them later, she would insist that they never happened. It was just my silly mind, playing tricks. And so, when I say, “I don’t know anything about snakes,” it comes out sharper and louder than I mean it to. Anna flinches. “I don’t know if they hibernate or not. All I’m saying is that there was something in your basement, and it sounded like a fucking snake.”

Slowly, she pulls her arm from my shoulders. I feel every inch of it going, the cold it leaves behind, and I want it back. But I don’t know how to apologize for what just happened. I’m not even sure what I’d be apologizing for.

“Do you want me to go look?” she asks. Her voice is much quieter now, nearly buried under the banshee moan of the wind.

I want to say no, let’s just sit here together, warm and safe. Let’s rewind the last few minutes and record something better over them, make it so this never happened. Instead I hear myself saying, “Do you even believe me?”

She blinks, frowning. “What?”

“Do you think that I’m making it up? Do you think I decided to pretend I heard something, just to make you go down into the basement? Or do you think I’m crazy? That I’m hearing things that aren’t there?”

The greater part of my brain, the part that is in charge most of the time, can hear the senselessness of these accusations. I am horrified even as they tumble out of my mouth, knowing how foolish they are, how mean. But to the tiny piece of my brain that is in charge in this moment, the one that is always waiting for the sky to fall, they make perfect sense. Of course she thinks I’m crazy. Of course she thinks I’m lying. Of course she wants me to believe that there is nothing there. Of course, of course, of course. Anna lets the accusations lie, her face smoothing into blankness. She knows about the other Anna—not all of it, not everything there is to know, but enough to provide shape and context to moments like these. Frantic, tearful apologies for nothing in particular, nightmares that bathe me in bitter sweat, moments during sex when I suddenly flee to the corner of the room and crouch, shaking, until whatever’s in front of my eyes has passed. Usually she holds me through it, strokes my hair, waits it out with me.

But today she says, “You never say my name.”

She lays this truth before me without ceremony. Here is a fact, her eyes say. Do what you want with it.

“Yes, I do,” I say. I keep my gaze firmly upon her, not flinching or glancing away, the way a liar might. “I say it all the time.”

I hope that this denial will be enough, that it will keep the rest of this conversation at bay, but Anna is already shaking her head.

The light behind her flickers slightly, and we both look at it for a moment, distracted.

The flicker dies. The light stays on.

“Love,” she says, turning her gaze back to me. “Sweetheart. Babe. Sugar, one time, which was kind of weird. You call me all those things, Kate, and I like them, but you never call me by my name.”

There is no anger in this statement, no accusation, just a vast and quiet sadness.

What can I say to her? That those two syllables feel so heavy I’m afraid they’ll rip my tongue out with their weight? That I am so broken I can’t wear headphones or hear the phone ring or wake up next to someone without lightning zipping through my bones? That names are magic, and I am afraid to say hers aloud, for fear of what it might conjure in the dark?

I can’t say any of that. So I say nothing.

“I’m not her,” she says, and now there is an edge in her voice. “I’m not going to do the things she did. You do know that, right?”

I want to tell her that I know, that I have never once thought that they were alike, that it’s just my silly, stupid brain that gets things all mixed up. But my mouth is firmly shut, my tongue pressing hard against the roof of my mouth. I have begun to slide inside myself, to retreat to that place I used to go when the other Anna would scream at me for hours into the night. It took only the slightest raising of her voice to send me slinking into my own interior, looking out at the world from the bottom of a well. From down there I can see Anna’s face, creased now with love, with frustration, with concern.

The last time I looked up and out like this was at the other Anna, the night of the party. Everyone had already left; we were alone. She knelt over me in the bed we shared, drops of spittle flying from her mouth and into mine as she whispered a dripping string of hideous things, her fingers digging into me. The sticky cocktail she’d thrown in my face was still drying on my cheeks. It was dark, too dark for me to see her well, but I could feel the ends of her hair brushing my face. The oils, I thought frantically, it’s bad for the hair.

“The keys,” she hissed, her long nails carving bloody little halfmoons into my wrists. “You bitch, you whore, I know you hid them, give me the fucking keys.”

It’s not the other Anna in front of me now. It’s this one, the one that loves me, the one that would never hurt me. I know that, but my body doesn’t, and it will not let me speak. Anna waits, her eyes on me.

“I didn’t choose it, you know,” she says finally. “I can’t help that it’s the same as hers.”

There is a sudden gust of wind that shakes the house, and the power goes out. The syrupy ballad cuts off mid-syllable.

For a moment my eyes are dazzled by greenish afterimages, and I need to blink a few times before the ghosts of the room around us fade away. The place is not entirely dark—there’s the glow of the fire, the battery-powered night light in the corner. I can still make out the shadowy outlines of the room. Anna curses softly, first in English, then in Polish.

“This always happens,” she says, more to herself than to me, and hoists herself up off the couch. I can’t tell if she’s looking at me. I can’t tell if I want her to.

“There’s stuff in the basement,” she says. “Flashlights, candles, a couple of lanterns. I’ll go down and get them. And some more logs. We’ll need to keep warm.”

I don’t want her to go anywhere, not now, not when it’s dark and there’s this awful silence forcing its way between us. I want to wrap my body around hers like a vine around a tree and keep her there with me. But instead I nod, knowing she might not be able to see me, say, “Okay.”

She reaches down to cup my face with her hand, her thumb brushing tenderly against my cheekbone, and I bite my lip to keep my stinging eyes from overflowing. That casual touch, warm and brief, is overwhelming. It is so strange to be treated gently, to be cared for. It is so unlike what I have learned to expect.

“I’ll be back,” she says, and walks away. I hear the jingle of the hook lifting from the eye, the thump of her feet on the basement stairs. I try to keep my breathing deep and calm as the wind howls in protest, throwing snow in angry fistfuls across the night.

I gave the other Anna the car keys the night of the party. No one knows that. They think she found them on her own. But after hours of fending her off, waiting for her to pass out so I could finally get some sleep, I gave in. My face swollen, my breath hitching as I tried to stop crying, I told her where they were: the bottom drawer of my dresser,

hidden in the jewelry box my mother gave me, the one with the panel of stained glass. It was where I always hid them when her drinking threatened to spill over into something dangerous. She’d tried to take the car before. I knew she would try again.

Kneeling, she clawed through it until she had them in her grasp, jingling silver in the moonlight that streamed in through the window. It was a pretty night, in spite of the rain. I wish it hadn’t been.

“You thought you could keep me here,” she said, still clutching the box. Alcohol was so thick in her voice that I could barely make out what she was saying. I was surprised that she could still stand. “Make me stay here with you. Fucking cunt.”

She threw the jewelry box onto the floor. I heard the glass crunch beneath her shoes as she turned to leave, her unsteady legs taking her out the front door and into the night, away from me. I lay in bed and listened to her footsteps on the gravel, then the rumbling of an engine, then the noisy lurch of our junker car as it went over the curb and onto the road.

My hands lay in fists on top of the comforter as I waited for her to return. As the hours passed, they opened finger by finger, blooming.

What would have happened if I hadn’t given her the keys? I don’t think she would have killed me, although she probably would have hurt me. In another hour or so she would have passed out, and I would have gotten up for work, and by the time I came home she would have been awake and aware, ready to assure me that what I remembered from the night before had not happened at all. A reset. Everything would have been fine until the next time, the next bottle, the next bad night.

The police gave me the details when they came to the door the next morning. Over the shoulder, into the woods, a tree splitting the hood neat as an axe. It was quick, they said. Probably no pain. She might not even have known what happened. She was that drunk.

Still wrapped in the checkered blanket, I struggle to my feet and go to the back window, pressing one hand against the glass. The sky is a dark pool, the falling snow frantic schools of little fish. The cold is coming through the cracks in the walls and the floor, despite the fire. Shivers ripple through my body, and I pull the blanket closer, swaddling myself.

“Anna,” I whisper. My breath makes a silvery patch of fog upon the glass that lasts only a second before dissolving into nothing. This is my penance, this saying of her name, this plaintive murmur that she cannot even hear. This is me, on my knees.

From the darkness behind me comes a hiss.

I do not turn around, not at first. Instead I fold my hand into a fist, pressing it against the window until my knuckles ache.

“Hey,” I say, and I hear the tremble in my own voice as I turn to look behind me. “Is that you?”

There is no answer. The basement door is wide open, a yawning black mouth in the dark.

Stepping away from the window is the hardest thing I have ever done, but I do it, the blanket draped over my shoulders like a cape. I can feel my blood beating hard in my wrists. I take another step into the dark, closer to the basement door, and the hiss comes again, louder, closer. A smell drifts up from that black hole: old gin and sour sweat, cortisol and sleepless nights.

There is the sound of something heavy coming up the stairs. Slowly, one staggering step at a time. It sounds uneven, its legs not quite steady.

It could be an animal, I think.

But I know better.

“Is that you?” I call again, louder now, and make myself take another step towards the basement door. I am almost close enough now to step over the threshold. I want to believe that if I do, I will see nothing but Anna emerging from the dark, her arms full of flashlights and candles. I want to believe she will take me in her arms and lead me back to the couch, that we will close the hole between us and spend the rest of the night curled up together there. Talking, laughing, making love by the faltering light of a camping lantern, our shadows blown out and bleeding into each other on the living room wall.

But I know better than that, too.

That hiss slithers out of the dark again, and now I hear it for what it is. It isn’t the wind, or an animal. It isn’t even really a hiss. Instead, it’s the last sound in a word, so dragged out and mangled that its meaning is almost lost.

“Keys,” says the thing on the basement stairs. “Keys, keys, keys.”

I know that voice. I have snapped out of deep sleep for that voice,

left parties and abandoned friends, started crying and stopped, too, on command. It’s a voice I recognize not just with my ears but with the moon-shaped scars on my wrist, the chip in my front tooth, the shin that aches when it rains.

In spite of everything, I cried the morning that the police came. I am crying again now, effortlessly, the tears trembling at the edge of my eye before spilling down onto my cheeks. The blanket falls away from me, and I leave it on the ground.

“Keys,” it says, and now the word sounds even more distorted. It could almost be something else, like “kiss.” Or “Kate.”

If I step forward and look down the stairs I will see her, swaying and staggering her way towards me, her blonde hair falling into her face. I will see her smile up at me, that terrible smile that always spread so slowly across her face, like an oozing spill of oil. I will see the unnatural angle of her neck, snapped neatly on impact, and the shattered bones in her legs and hips pressing through the skin. Her hands will stretch towards me, grasping at my wrists, hoping to pull me down into the dark with her.

That is what I will see if I step forward, and that is why I don’t.

Swallowing around the knot in my throat, I close my eyes and say her name.