By Emma Campbell.
“Who?”
“Laura Kline.”
“Oh, Laura. What about her?”
“She went crazy the other day.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Joey told me she tried to break into an apartment in his building and it took five people to get her away from the door.”
“Five?”
“I heard it was pretty bad. They called the cops, I think. I think they let her go with a warning, mostly about the noise she was making.”
Both men took sips from their water bottles. The sun was bright and hot on their backs. One man wore sunglasses; the other wished he had remembered his, for his eyes ached and watered against the clear day. They were high up, so high they could see the pale distant mountains standing stagnant in the afternoon sky. There were clouds, there were trees, and there was that sun. The men sweated in the heat and surveyed the expanse that lay before them: from the bottom of the cliff upon which they stood, across to those faraway mountains.
“Was anyone in the apartment at the time?”
“No. Nobody lived there. It was empty and cleaned out. Wasn’t even her own building.”
“Why was she trying to get in?”
“I dunno.”
“Anyone check up on her after?”
“I dunno.”
A hawk in the sky wheeled around with one eye distastefully on the men at the edge of the cliff. The men stared back, awed, mute. The man without the sunglasses shook his head.
“Did someone drive her?”
“What?”
“Was someone there with her? Someone must have driven her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She’s blind, right? Went blind a few months ago?”
“Oh hell, did she? How’d she do that?”
“Car accident and flying shards from the window. I heard. I think her sister died, too.”
“Oh, God.”
They paused and each took another sip, still hot from the long hike up. Golden-green trees surrounded them, just beginning to redden. The hawk was still high overhead and scrutinised them with that one-eyed gaze it refused to let waver. Directly beneath them, at the base of the cliff, the surface of an inky lake quivered in the breeze. In the shadow of the cliff, the water looked very near black. The man without sunglasses glanced down and a solid, ugly shiver crawled up from his sandaled toes, through his knees, into his thin chest. In his mind’s eye he saw for a moment a person hurtling down into the lake, falling straight as an arrow to spear and split the water. A fall from this height—but he shook himself out of it and broke the silence.
“Maybe she walked? Or took the bus.”
“But why there?”
“Well, which building was it?”
“Corner of Fourth and Oak.”
The man without sunglasses blinked his throbbing eyes to wick away the moisture. The back of his neck was burning.
“She used to live there,” he said.
“What?”
“That was her old apartment building. She moved out right before the accident.”
“You think she walked all the way to her old apartment?”
“I don’t know. Or the bus. I’m just guessing. I don’t know.”
A pause, a sip, a blink.
“You said she was yelling something as she was trying to get in?”
“That’s what I heard. I dunno what.”
In fact, nobody knew what Laura Kline had been yelling as she pulled on the door to the empty apartment. As she wept from white eyes and shouted incomprehensibly, people gathered around her and held her arms against her torso and pleaded with her to stop: Hey, hey lady, calm down, let go. Her own hands held the door handle and she would not release them. She could not see the door in front of her, but she knew that the peephole was there. She had peered through it many times from inside the apartment and now it looked back at her, mocking her, a dark and useless eye. She wanted to rip the door off its hinges and stomp that peephole to pieces, to scatter the shards across the carpet she remembered so very clearly, to break through to things that were known and familiar, even everlasting. She wanted to see the chair she’d sat in of an evening; she wanted to see the yellow walls and the dishes with tiny blue flowers around the edges. And more: the railing to the stairs, the table of darkened oak. The bed. But the sense of her ramblings was lost to panic and when the people around her finally pried her away from the door she, too, realized her words could not be understood. Still, in her mind, she heard her own voice begging to be allowed back in, insisting that the apartment was hers, it was all she had, her whole world—it held her sister and her eyes.
The two men watched the hawk orbit. They did not speak. The first man’s sunglassed gaze moved across the land with ease and greed, landing where it did with truth of recognition: seeing a mountain as a mountain, seeing trees as trees. The lake, to him, was a lake. To the man without sunglasses, though, the dark water at the base of the cliff looked very much like a hole in the ground and stared back up at him, unblinking. Behind that liquid eye, he saw, were tiny blue flowers, yellow walls, familiar things that lingered in memory even as the slam of a door made the world go dark. Once more the man was seized by the sight of a figure, falling, slicing into the lake, but this time, in a blind fury, the figure hurled herself from the ledge and reached out for what lay below in hopes that on the other side she would find what she had lost.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emma Campbell is an undergraduate from Pennsylvania who studies Biology and English. Her work has appeared in the seventh volume of The Oakland Arts Review and in The Gravity of the Thing.
