Page 15 of Hunger

She's asleep.

She's on her side, curled the same way she was last night, one hand tucked beneath her cheek.

The stone is still on the nightstand. The lamp is off. The streetlight beyond the window throws a thin pale strip across the floor.

I look at the violin case in the corner.

I cross to it. I don't touch it. I crouch in front of it. The handle is worn smooth in the center where her hand has held it many times. The leather there is soft.

I look at it for a long time.

I don't open it. The case isn't mine. The thing inside isn't mine. There'll come a day when she'll open it again, and I want to be the kind of creature who waited for that day instead of the kind of creature who looked first.

I rise and cross back to the bed.

She has shifted in her sleep. Her face is turned a little more toward the window. The blanket has slipped down to her waist and one of her arms is exposed to the air of the room, the pale inside of her wrist turned up. I look at the faint blue veinsbeneath her skin, the dark line of her hair where it falls across the pillow.

I lower myself to my knees beside the bed.

She's been good. She's been very good. She used to be good at something and someone made her stop. The shape of that loss is now in me alongside everything else I've learned about her. It's a pain I didn't know I was capable of feeling on behalf of another person.

I look at her hand on the pillow, the thin white scar near her index finger.

I don't touch her.

I stay until the first gray shows in the east, and then I climb back out the window and close it carefully behind me, and I go home.

* * *

Jenny

I wake Saturday morning to gray light through the curtain and the tick of the heat kicking on through the vent.

I lie in bed for a while. Saturday means a noon-to-eight shift at Mr. Burger, which is the longest shift of the week but also the one with the latest start, so I have time. I stare at the ceiling. The stone is on the nightstand. The light in the room is the dull gray of a winter morning with low clouds.

Eventually I get up. I make coffee. Lisa is gone — she has a study group on Saturdays that meets at the library at nine. Dee's door is open and her bed is unmade, which means Kevin picked her up at some point in the night and she's at his place now. I drink my coffee at the kitchen counter and watch the snow that started overnight pile against the bottom of the window.

I shower, dress, and let myself out of the apartment.

The hallway is cold. The stairs are cold. The walk across the parking lot is cold. The Granada is parked under a low drift of new snow and I scrape the windshield with the plastic scraper I keep wedged behind the driver's seat. The work warms my hands inside the gloves.

I unlock the driver's side door and get in.

There's a flower on the passenger seat.

I stop with one foot still on the ground.

It's small. The branch is bare and dark and the flowers along it are yellow, a clean bright yellow that doesn't belong in a parked car in Nebraska in December. Five-petaled. Open. Three of them along a single thin twig. The branch lies on the seat as if it's been set down with care.

I look at the door I just unlocked. The passenger door. The windows, intact. The dashboard. The back seat. The floor.

The car is exactly the way I left it last night. The cup from the gas station is in the cupholder. The map of Omaha is folded on the dashboard. My old scarf is bunched in the corner of the back seat. There's no sign that anyone has been in here. There are no footprints in the snow around the car except mine.

I sit down slowly. I close the door. I sit in the cold car and look at the flower.

It just sits there. Yellow on the gray vinyl of the seat.

I reach out and touch it. The petals are real. They give slightly under my finger and spring back. The wood of the twig is smooth and the tiny leaves at the joint are tight green buds.