“You know why I think people do drugs?” BFG asked her suddenly.
Lucky made the rock-and-roll sign with her hands, then rolled her eyes.
“Because it’s cool?” she said.
BFG snorted softly through his nose.
“I think they’re trying to fall in love with life again,” he said. “That’s what I see in the club every night. All the sex and booze and coke and shit, it’s not really about that stuff. It’s people who have fallen out of love with life trying to get back to how they used to feel, you know?”
She looked up at him. BFG was still nodding slowly, lost in his own thoughts now. Was that what was happening to Lucky? Had she fallen out of love with life? She certainly didn’t see much point doing the things others did to make their lives meaningful: working, marrying, having children, building a home. But she couldn’t remember a time when she had. Could you fall out of love with life if you were never in love with it?
Once, a few years after Lucky started modeling, she and Nicky had hiked around the cliffs surrounding Lake Minnewaska together. From the forest along the ridge, they’d looked down upon the flat black surface of the water, reflecting the white clouds and green trees above like glass. In the very center, a tiny splashing dot was traversing the lake. Mesmerized, they looked closer to find it was a solitary swimmer. Her red swim cap bobbed just above the water as her arms sliced tiny white tears into the lake’s surface. They sat side by side on a slab of rock, looking on like two watchful eagles, until finally the tiny, thrashing figure made her way to shore and pulled herself out, disappearing into the dense woods below. Afterward, Nicky had turned to Lucky.
That’s you, she said. You’re the swimmer.
Lucky shook her head and laughed.
But I’m right here.
But down there, she said. That’s how I see you.
Nicky knew. No matter how many people Lucky surrounded herself with, part of her was always swimming alone through a wide, dark lake. The only time she ever felt that there was someone in the water with her was when she was with her sisters.
But Nicky was different. Nicky was always the first person to ask a question in the Q&A section of a talk because she couldn’t bear for the person onstage to experience awkward silence after having made themselves vulnerable. She didn’t need to have a drink to dance or make a speech at a wedding or go on a date like most people did. She threw herself into the center of things. Nicky took those drugs in order not to fall out of love with life. All she ever wanted was to stay. And now here was Lucky, alive when her sister was not, destroying herself. It struck her with sudden clarity that the best way to honor her sister would be to live life the way Nicky had wanted to, wide-awake and not numbing any part of it. But she didn’t know how, and feared she never would, so she pushed the thought away.
She cleared her throat and looked back at BFG.
“Sorry about your dad,” she said eventually.
“Ah.” He waved his hand and returned from wherever his memories had taken him. “He was an old drunk.”
Lucky smiled ruefully.
“Mine too.”
He glanced down at her.
“That right?”
Lucky nodded.
“Love is a stranger, eh?” he said. He retrieved a penknife from his pocket and sliced open one of the plastic crates of drinks. He handed her a bottle of hard cider. “You want a drink for the road? It’s on the house.”
—
Lucky came to with her face between Troll Doll’s legs. Troll Doll’s hands were clutching the back of her head, kneading her deeper into her surprisingly engorged clit, her thigh muscles squeezing Lucky’s cheeks. Her mouth was filled with the briny taste of pussy. She remembered something a lover of hers in Paris, a French Caribbean model whose body had been the mold for a famous fragrance bottle, would say to her after he came. I take my death in that pussy. Lucky had laughed at the time, thinking it some error of translation, but now she understood. There was such a thing as death by pussy, and she was coming dangerously close to experiencing it. She yanked her head back and threw off the duvet cover, gasping for breath.
“I’m close,” whined Troll Doll.
Lucky sucked in a large gulp of air.
“I’m dying.”
Troll Doll took Lucky’s hand and shoved it between her legs, using her fingers to furiously work her clit until, with a piercing scream reminiscent of foxes mating, she came. Lucky wiped her fingers on the bedcover and lay down next to the flushed and panting Troll Doll.
“That was…” Troll Doll sighed. “Heaven.” She rolled over to face Lucky’s profile, searching her face eagerly.
“You have any weed?” Lucky asked.
Troll Doll rolled her eyes.
“You’re like a teenage boy,” she said. She turned to pull open the drawer of the bedside table, producing a vape pen. “You’ll be asking me if you can play video games next.”
Lucky tucked one hand behind her head, then used the other to purse the pen between her lips. Troll Doll rested her head in the nook of Lucky’s arm as she inhaled, stroking Lucky’s bare stomach thoughtfully.
“I knew you’d come see me,” Troll Doll said quietly. “I knew we had a connection.”
“Mmm,” murmured Lucky, watching the flume of vapor rise above her head.
Troll Doll kept stroking down and down until her hand was burrowed in Lucky’s underwear. Very gently, Lucky reached down to remove it.
“I’m good,” she said. “But thanks.”
Troll Doll looked up at her.
“I want to,” she said.
Lucky shook her head and took another toke. A silence passed between them and in it Lucky heard the echo of two words. Nicky’s baby. She should let it go, she knew, chalk it up to drug-induced delusion, but something inside of her kept reaching to believe the message was real.
