Nora had met Margo at the station. She'd been smiling, eager to get back to work at the Museum and see all of her friends again. She'd wrapped her thin arms around Nora and hugged her, and Nora had hugged her back, feeling as though she might break if she squeezed too much.
"How are you?" Margo had asked. "How's Bill?"
She'd been quiet in the car, listening as Nora had recited the whole saga. She'd gotten so used to telling the story that it almost seemed like fiction to her, like the plot of a horror novel she'd read years ago. "You didn't know?" she finally asked. "It was in the Times and everything. And I called you..." She realized she didn't know where Margo had been at all, if her sabbatical had taken her somewhere the death of a New York city reporter wouldn't have made a difference.
Margo shook her head. "I was at my mother's," she said distantly. "In Long Island. She barely let me out of bed, let alone the house. She wouldn't even let me watch the news--she said it was too stressful. Doctor's orders. I had to rest."
When they finally reached her apartment, it was filled with yellow and brown leaves. They littered the top of her piano, drifted among the shelves of artifacts she had collected. They crunched under Nora's feet as she dragged Margo's suitcase across the hardwood floor and rested it on the sofa.
She looked back at Margo. Her friend's lithe body had deteriorated during her convalescence, and now she was thin, still weak; her body shook as she slumped dejectedly against the frame of the door. "Do you need help?" The offer was deliberately vague.
Margo shook her head, making a lock of her short brown hair (shorter than Nora had ever seen it; she had almost mistaken Margo for a boy at the train station where she'd met her) fall over her eyes. "I'm fine," she said. "The leaves shouldn't be too hard to clean up." She touched the withered leaves of a Japanese peace lily. "It's just...all my plants. I've been away for so long. They're all dead." She looked around, stared at the brown branches that festooned the apartment, bewildered. Nora went to Margo, putting an arm around her waist to support her as she stood looking at the peace lily.
"They're all dead," Margo said again. "I wasn't here to take care of them. I--" She sucked in a deep breath that sounded like a sob, and broke away from Nora, stumbling down the hall to her bedroom.
From the bedroom came a series of thumps, and then a crash. Fearing that Margo had hurt herself, Nora rushed in to see shards of a terracotta pot on the floor, surrounding a pile of dirt that held a cheery spray of green and indigo leaves.
"The goddamn African violet," Margo explained, her chest heaving, her face streaked with tears. "It was the only living thing in here." They both stared at it until Margo spoke again. "Leave it. I'll clean it later."
~o~o~
They went to Nora's. It was almost impossible for Margo to imagine Bill gone for so many weeks while she'd been lying in her childhood bed, nothing to look at except the grubby stuffed animals on the shelves and the tattered Bikini Kill posters on the walls, blissfully bored and zonked out of her mind on the painkillers she'd slowly been weaning herself from. She couldn't shake the feeling that he'd be there on the couch, bent over his laptop, waiting for Nora to drag her back to the apartment for a long, lazy night of good wine and rambling conversation.
Nora sat her on the couch and went into the kitchen, came back with a bottle of Laphroaig and three highball glasses. "I keep finding things of his around the house," she said. "I don't want it just sitting there, but I can't throw it out." She poured a shot into each glass, handed Margo one and set the other at the far end of the coffee table. "Cheers," she said, "I guess."
Margo sipped at the liquor, wincing as it burned its way over her tongue. After the burning came the taste of something dark and deep and strong, like the smell of a jungle floor where plants grow and die and rot without ever seeing the sun. "It's like kissing a bog person." She set her glass down.
Nora shrugged and sipped at her own glass. "You get used to it," she said.
One drink turned into three, and they ordered gourmet pizza and had more to drink. Margo began to tell Nora her own stories about Bill, the ones she'd never told anyone--how he'd show up in her office asking for a quote, drag her into a story, and within hours they'd be stuck running from people who wanted very much to smash his camera. How he'd ask her out to lunch and show her some little undiscovered place in the city he just thought she'd like--a single rose growing in a vacant lot, an abandoned factory with an entire ecosystem in its brick shell. How he'd tried to kiss her, once, and she'd pushed him away and told him to go home, and when he apologized he'd been the only man she'd ever known who was sincere about it.
"Oh," Nora said, and she poured whiskey into her own glass for the fourth time.
"It was before he'd even met you," Margo said.
Nora drained the glass in a single gulp and stood up. "It's late," she said. "Did you need to get home?"
Margo shook her head. The apartment had grown warm, and the whiskey in the glass at the end of the table had been evaporating slowly over the night, filling the air with the rich smell of the liquor. She felt dizzy. "Is it all right if I crash on your couch tonight?"
Nora sighed and helped Margo off the couch. They leaned on each other as they made their way to the bedroom, and then Nora pulled Margo down into the bed.
They lay next to each other, and Margo could hear Nora's breathing, see her eyes shining in the dark. She closed her eyes, trying to erase the reflexive panic that had begun to well up inside her, to block out the memory of fifteen years ago (had she really known Bill for that long? It too seemed impossible). When Nora touched her shoulder, it was as though an electric shock ran through her. Her heart seemed to stop, and she realized she could not breathe; her chest had closed up. She was drowning.
"Margo?" Nora whispered. She put an arm around Margo, slid closer to her. "Are you all right?"
Margo shook her head, and could not speak.
~o~o~
The whiskey had made Nora feel calmer than she had for a long time. With Margo there, talking and laughing with her, sharing memories and stories, Nora had felt for the first time since leaving New Mexico that things would be all right, that she could move on. Perhaps with Margo's help, even, and when she'd laid down next to her in the bed she and Bill had shared, she'd felt the warm glow of possibility between them.
Then Margo's breathing had become ragged, and in the faint light of the streetlamps she had seen Margo trembling. She'd been surprised and pleased and amused at first, thinking that Margo had become aroused with the whiskey and the close proximity. But Margo's eyes had widened in terror, and Nora had realized what she was going through.
She'd had nightmares, of course, and the nightmares had escalated with every strange incident, every monster or serial killer that she'd somehow been thrown into the middle of. Bill had always been there to comfort her when she awoke from them, and if he had ever had nightmares, he hadn't told Nora about them. Neither of them had ever had the panic attacks that Margo had, and Nora quietly thanked whatever quirk of neurology it was that had allowed her to escape the horrifying episodes. Fortunately, they were few and far between, but Nora had seen her share over the years she'd been friends with Margo.
The first time had been when the movie had come out. Some studio had optioned Bill's book about the Museum Monster, sent him a big fat check and an advance copy of the DVD when production was finished. They'd made a night of it, sat down to watch it together. She remembered Bill slowly realizing that he'd been cut out of the movie entirely; waiting excitedly for himself to come onscreen, growing disappointed and angry as it became clear that he'd been excised from his own story, then laughing wildly as the credits rolled.
But she also remembered Margo shifting nervously on the edge of the sofa, downing more and more wine as the movie went on. At first, she'd thought it was embarrassment from the tackiness of the movie or the odd sensation of seeing a Hollywood version of herself onscreen. Then, while Bill was still laughing, Margo had run to the bathroom. Nora had found her cowering against the sink, eyes wide, arms wrapped around her knees.
"I just feel so stupid," she'd said later. "It wasn't like the special effects were that good. It didn't even look like the Mbwun."
Now, she put her arm around Margo, pulled the other woman closer to her. "It's okay, I promise." But Margo's shaking did not stop for a long time, even though she twined her arms around Nora and pressed her face into the crook of her neck.