Sinister Shorts

Evan was strong and handsome in his hiking boots and khakis, and was also one of the least self-conscious actors she knew. He treated his looks as a joke and the adoration of the press as aberrant. She remembered thinking, someday Claude and I will have a baby, too. I will keep him awake all night and he will calm my fears.

Their argument scene took all morning, and at one point, when Evan pushed a little too hard, she ended up puncturing her shorts on a sharp boulder. She changed into another pair, and then they ate chicken sandwiches with avocado and tomato and drank lemonade for lunch. The sun rose in the sky, warming the day slightly. After lunch, they would film action to follow the argument. She would run into the creek, crying, stumbling. She would turn and shout at her husband, who would notice that, in her rage, she had gotten too close to Horsetail Falls. He would swoop down, intending to rescue her, but his sudden movement, her suspicion of his motives, and their unresolved argument would inspire her to step back even farther. Then, the script read, Evan would reach her and rescue her. They would reconcile, all the discord of the past erased in their shared recognition of this nearly fatal moment.

The camera crew set up the shot, and everyone took their positions. And the stuntwoman who was due to replace her after her first rush into the stream started throwing up.

“I can't breathe up here. It's like there's no air,” she said, crying.

The director stomped over, talked with her, found her a drink of water, waited for her to recover. She threw up again. The director said she had better get down to the lodge. One of the crew offered to accompany her, and the director, by now unable to speak directly to the stuntwoman, nodded, his face purple.

As she stuffed a small bag with water and a snack bar, everyone sympathized. They agreed it was the altitude and dehydration. Once she was safely out of sight down the trail, they grumbled about the amount of wine she had consumed the night before.

The director, able to talk again, pitched a fit. He had funding problems, timeline problems. They were wimps, shits, losers. They now had a full crew and no shot, and did they have any idea the cost of this setup, this day? He was so screwed.

So she had stepped forward to save the day. A hero.

An idiot.

She ran into the creek once, twice, three times. They shot again and again. The director stroked his chin, shaded his eyes, suggested some minor adjustments in the camera angle. They shot until her legs froze up and wouldn't move. They warmed her up and shot again.

And then he a

She ran into the creek, crying. She turned, shouting at Evan. He chased into the water after her. She stepped back, stumbled, and fell one hundred feet.

When she woke up, she had tubes in her nose and a room full of flowers. The doctors told her how lucky she was that two men on the crew were experienced climbers, and somehow managed to get her out of the pool she fell into. As mindful of her injuries as they could be under the circumstances, aware of the grave risks her battered body faced, they lashed her to a makeshift gurney and rushed her back to the lodge.

“They did everything they could do. You could have died.”

She wished, then, that she had died.

Claude came and cried with her, and begged her to live, not to leave him.

When, at last, the cast came off, they had all hoped so much… the surgeon's face had told her right away. As each instruction he made to her failed to elicit the proper action, the corners of his mouth dipped and solidified a little more. The look on Claude's face when she could not move her body from the waist down had crushed her.

Now, observant but druggily detached, she watched as Claude pulled the cover up to her chin, and kissed her cheek warmly. “Love you forever and forever,” he said, as he always said.

“It's been so hard for you,” she said, only the words slurred.

“Go to sleep,” Claude soothed.

She saw her early past, her first high school part in The Importance of Being Earnest. She had flubbed her lines, but got laughs in the right places. Arsenic and Old Lace, off-Broadway, she played one of the elderly aunts in a wig that itched. She took her clothes off for a revival of Hair and sang in Les Mis. She ran through her lines, reinterpreting.

Claude got up and the bed moved as he rose. She awoke and opened her eyes. “Comfy?” he asked her. “I'll turn off the light.”

“Lonely,” she said, “don't go. I have to tell you something…” She realized she had forgotten what. What was it she needed to tell him, something important? She tried to apply her mind to the problem, but the problem slipped away with Claude, on tiptoes. The light went off and she returned to her dreams.

Lucy left at nine. She had a family and didn't like staying so late, but she had a stolid sense of obligation. She was a saint, unlike Claude, who closed the door behind her, sighing with pleasure at a moment's solitude.

He drank a strong whiskey with ice and poked at the fire. In a flash, like the flash of a dry ember igniting, he realized he had already made his decision, and that it was the right one.

Clea should die.

She should die knowing she was loved. The falsity of his feeling would never get strong enough to penetrate the soft cloud of her belief in him.

The decision fell over him as gently and moodily as rain. He knew it was the proper choice under the circumstances. Clea would want him to have a happy life. Her love was unselfish and pure, unlike his. If only the full picture of the situation would not cause her such emotional harm, she would concur, he was certain.

The only question left was how?

He pondered alternatives. Suicide-there was plenty of evidence that Clea had been suicidal in the past, so why shouldn't she be suicidal again? Their neighbor Mrs. Winters had helped him get Clea fixed up after she had tried to drown herself when the nurse was out to lunch. She could testify. Lucy would, too. She didn't like Clea, he suspected, but it would have to happen off her watch so that she didn't look bad. Maybe Clea stockpiled pills? He liked the peacefulness of pills. She would go quietly, kissed on the forehead by him, loved to the end. But sometimes people threw them up, didn't they? Sordid thought.

A knife? During those early scenes, right after she got out of the cast and into the chair, they had taken pains to keep knives out of her reach. Since then, they had relaxed vigilance. A large knife like one used to slice a melon? Something with a sharp tip.

Ugh. He didn't think he could stab her, not even if he put her to sleep first. The police would be very suspicious with a stabbing.

Hanging? He got out of his chair and wandered around the entire downstairs. Hanging was out. She couldn't reach anything high enough that would hold her. A doorknob? No.

He had a baseball bat, and had played in high school. He knew one fell swoop could deck her. Then, push the wheelchair down the stairs. But she didn't go upstairs anymore, everyone knew that, and those clever forensics people might be able to identify a bat indentation or something.

Okay, asphyxiation. Didn't people tie plastic bags over their heads or something when they wanted to self-asphyxiate? Clea had the ability to do that.

But it was so ugly!

Yet this idea drifted like feathers into something better. Yes, he thought, suffocating her would solve a number of problems. With her asthma, the doctor would have no trouble assuming a natural death. Her memory wouldn't be sullied by suicide, and he could grieve normally, a real widower.