019. All Stairs Lead To Hell

I would tell Nina how I felt when I ate the last cookie. I promised it to myself. I promised myself my own death.

Tutoring continued as always, but with growing interruptions. Every time I said the word “math”, Nina had an excuse ready. Pick apples, sort the dish towels, dust the living room…Every excuse was a chore, and today was no different.

She dropped all her books on the couch, and as soon as the words could escape her lips, Nina said, “You should see my basement.”

I thought there was something down there, a dead animal, a giant Jesus Fish, something important she wanted me to see; but when she opened the door which led to complete darkness, I knew otherwise.

“There are cobwebs the size of Texas down there, I swear.” She started down the first step, with her hand in the air, searching for the railing. Just the way she took the first step, I could see the faith in it. She trusted God would hold her up. “I want to git them down, but I need your help.”

“Can’t reach?” I asked. I followed her down the stairs, but with less faith. I kept my hand on the railing.

Finally, her hand flicked a switch. I smelled the dust before I saw it. “Don’t you be makin’ fun,” she muttered as she grabbed a broom.

Apart from the dust, the only things that occupied Nina’s basement were an old couch with bright-orange flower patterns, and loneliness. The basement look neglected, and made me think that if there was a floor plan for heaven and hell, Heaven would be everything above Nina’s basement. That left hell to be everything below the house.

Nina swatted at webs in a corner, but missed them all. As I walked to her, I felt the dank air sticking to my skin. It grabbed me and rubbed its dirty hands on my skin, begging that I come deeper into its grubby palm. It was thick, like walking through Jell-o.

“You gunna help me get these down or no?” she asked.

I shrugged. “How am I supposed to help?”

She waved the broom in my face, giggling. “Ya can pick me up, cantcha?”

“Oh…yeah.”

I didn’t think it was real when my hands wrapped around her waist. I thought I was dreaming; myself standing so close to her, so close that I could breathe on her neck and see the little hairs stand on end. Her hips had the curve of a beer bottle, but with less depravity, and I knew I never wanted to let go.

“Will it hurt if I lift you here?” I whispered.

“You won’t hurt me none.”

I gripped tighter, and lifted. I tried not to think, and instead put all my effort into keeping her from falling. I thought for certain I would drop her, and she would break, and then…But I thought even more about the fact that my fingers were touching her waist, in such close proximity to her navel, to her legs, to her thighs, inside her thighs…

“Hold me still!” she shouted. Nina waved from side to side, and each time she swatted at the webs, she missed. She looked like like a baseball player with less clue than a cornflake.

I heard a laugh escape from her lips as I tried to keep her still. I wanted to stare at the wall, at the floor. My hands are touching her…but if I stared in any other direction I would drop her. So I didn’t think about where my hands were. I didn’t think of how I could feel her bones just under the skin, how they felt like bird bones, thin and hollow. When she leaned forward to swat the web one last time, her shirt rose up in the back, and I saw the very edge of her underwear. My face felt as though it were pressed against the fires of hell.

“Got it!”

I put her down immediately.

She giggled while I leaned over, breathing heavy. The air scraped out of my lungs and pushed passed my lips, making an awful sound.

“You look real beat. Am I a fat cow or somethin’?” She kept giggling.

No, it wasn’t you at all, Nina. You’re so light. What are you, eighty pounds? No, I was just touching your butt, that’s all. It makes me nervous, so I can’t breathe.

“I’m just not used to holding people for extended periods of time. But I’m fine.”

Nina held the broom like a soldier held his gun; against her shoulder with the handle in her palm. “Good! ‘cause there’s lots more corners.”

We did this twice more, until I begged for a break. By then, it was the lifting alone that strained me.

I saw dust fly in the air when I flopped down onto the aged couch. Nina flopped down next to me. I tried not to think about the corners we still had to clean. I wanted to ration out all this touching, like I had her cookies. I wished, now, that I hadn’t eaten them all just yet.

She stared at me. She did it often, but it was never uncomfortable. I always understood that she stared through people, trying to see God on the other side of a wretched, human form. When I whispered her name, I could see the shift in her eyes—she was looking right into my soul, now.

“Nina, can I tell you something?”

She nodded.

“I think you’re beautiful.” It came out. I didn’t understand it—but it came out, like nothing.

Laughing, she waved it off. “Well, heck, I think you’re beautiful too!”

“No, Nina, you don’t understand.” I leaned a little closer.

“What isn’t there to understand? You’ve got your pretty green eyes, and your naturally dark hair. Why I wish my hair—”

“It’s dyed…”

For a while, I stared at my fingers, trying to imagine them around her hips again. I couldn’t believe anything was coming out of my mouth. I wanted to hide under the stairwell or get out her door entirely. My heart was in my throat, suffocating me, and I could feel my stomach squish between my toes. But my voice was still there.

“What does God say about homosexuals?”

She looked confused, then became her old self. “God says that it’s wrong but I still think he loves them. They won’t go to heaven or nothin’ so’s some people say, but I don’t know for certain.”

Ask why. She would ask why. I waited to see if she would ask why.

“Nina, I really like you.”

It sounded all wrong. It was false. It didn’t mean anything, or it did but it meant the wrong thing, or maybe it meant what it should, but it shouldn’t come out of my lips, and now she would really kill me. She’d tell her dad and he’d have their whole congregation hunt me down and stone me. I could hear them crying: sinner!

“How do you mean?”

Four words. Four words I couldn’t reply to. How? I mean like the way a guy loves a girl, the way two people go crazy for each other and do a Romeo and Juliet because they hate their parents, the way people have sex and there is a baby but they get married anyway only to realize in the end they really love each other—baby or no baby—they just needed a reason to open their eyes wider.

I stared into her eyes, those deep, green and gold puddles that offered me so much comfort. She looked so calm, so gentle. Nothing she could have said would hurt me, if only because she looked so gentle.

“When…I say I really like you,” deep breath, “I mean that…” Whatever I planned to say, it wouldn’t form on my tongue and be spit out. I tried, with my mouth open, to say it. No, it wouldn’t.

I leaned closer, until I let my fingers crawl up her side and to her neck, holding her softly, like a mother holds her baby, and I pushed my lips against hers. You couldn’t call it a kiss. They pushed together, then they were apart again. The space between them was so much larger than the moment they had been together that it didn’t matter. There wasn’t even the sound lips make when they kiss, it just was.

My lips tingled, and again my face was pressed firm into the fires of hell. She still looked calm, and I wanted to find somewhere to die, alone.

Nina didn’t say anything. She only stared. Always calm, the same calm look. I couldn’t see her mind; I didn’t know what she was thinking. Only staring…

“Oh.”

It was a noise, I could hardly hear it. It must have slipped out of her unknowingly. Just a strange confirmation of what I had done.

I sunk into the dirty couch cushions. I stared at the giant webs instead of at her, wondering if we’d knock those down later, if I would get one more chance to hold her, before she threw me out of her life altogether.

A figure eclipsed my view. I felt it before I understood: something warm was against me, breathing on me, something human with life, and movement.

Nymphet-like and clumsy, Nina leaned over my lap and pushed her face into mine. Our lips pressed together again, but worse than before. They missed entirely, and I kissed—rubbed with my lips—her left dimple.

Then I saw the webs again, in the corner, disgusting and extensive.

Before I could come to terms with what had happened, Nina was on her feet holding the broom, like it hadn’t happened at all.

“We should get the other webs done ‘fore we forget all together.” She held her hand out to me, the angel reaching to pull the sinner from hell.

Had Trisha slipped something into my drink? Was I really lying in my trailer a bad trip?

No, because there she stood, with a big smile and a broom, waiting for me to take her hand.

We didn’t talk about it. I couldn’t even be sure it had happened. It only existed in my memory, and if we didn’t speak of it, then it must not have happened. No. I did not kiss her, and she did not kiss me. But I knew something had happened.

Nina had sinned.