Infinity

Sensitive Content Warning: This story contains references to sexual assault and to mental health conditions.

Even from across the street, I could see that she was beautiful. Her lipstick was always dark red, like the skin of a cherry, her dark hair in loose, flapper-girl curls. She had a quality about her that was timeless; she could have been twenty or forty-five. 

At that time I was working as an attorney for a large pharmaceutical company that specialized in weight-loss drugs. My office faced a high-rise building that had floor-to-ceiling windows, real plants in the lobby, and a doorman. I was one of two women on legal team that was based in downtown Brooklyn, thought I felt no alliance with my female counterpart, nicknamed ‘Easy Elly’ by some of the more assholish nepo-babies at the company. Though of course it was me that ended up pregnant with Henry McMullan’s spawn. 

In those early stages of pregnancy, between vomitting up cheese curls and half-assing a case involving a lawsuit by a dead celebrity’s family, the small glimpses I caught of her sustained me. I fed on these morsels of information about her like a repentant smoker on hard candy and nicotine gum. She never closed the curtains on her windows. On most days, she dressed up like she was going out: long dresses, tights, hair pinned up. But I always saw her at home, playing video games or watching reality TV on her gargantuan flatscreen. 

Make no mistake, my obsession with her predated my pregnancy by several years. But it was the day after the child was first conceived that the strange incidents started happening.

I was still recovering that Monday morning from the effects of whatever drug was in that office-party drink. Of course, I didn’t know what was wrong at the time. My head felt like it was full of cement. I was disoriented, not myself, but weirdly giddy and elated. I stumbled to the conference room, which was both quiet and loud at that moment, like the whistling of a neighbor’s tea kettle that you are not sure if you are hearing or imagining. I laid my notebook and purse on the mahogany table. A few of the men whistled as I sank into one of the maroon office chairs. Henry smirked at me and looked quickly away, which confused me. I felt an instant need to wrap myself in a bulky coat I didn’t have. Something about him made me feel uneasy, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was like food aversion after eating bad sushi. Henry had always been shy and sweet in the past, standing up for me in meetings without making it obvious, giving me pep-talks before presentations, and regularly stopping by my office to check in and offer me some of his extra oreos or sour candy. He had a picture of his skinny blond wife on the desk of his corner office, and a wedding band on his finger. 

“What’s up?” said Beckett Robins. He winked at me. “That was quite a party last night.” A couple of the other men nodded approvingly. I noticed that Henry was staring straight down at the table, his lips twiching. Beckett pulled my purse toward him and turned it upside-down. Like a plate shattering, the contents came spilling out with a crash: a tube of chapstick, a few receipts, movie ticket stubs, a tampon, a half-eaten Kit Kat, my keys, my pink faux-leather wallet, a bottle of Zoloft. I heard a roar of laughter as I snatched my belongings and stuffed them back into my purse. 

“Tu es loco,” said Chad in a tasteless Mexican accent.

Sean McMullan (Henry’s father) walked in and started the meeting. I excused myself and ran to the bathroom that was three floors down. My throat burned. I took the stall in the far corner and sank to my knees, dry-heaving into a toilet that still had a smear of someone else’s excrement in the bowl. 

“Are you alright, love?” This question came from the stall next to mine. I saw black heels on the dirty tiled floor. Her slim legs were clad in semi-opaque fishnets with little butterflies on them. Her soft white hand passed me some tissues under the edge of the stall. These were not corporate-issued bathroom tissues; they were three-ply and smelled like cold medicine. Her hand had multiple chunky rings, and her black nail polish was cracked. A tattoo of an infinity symbol on her index finger. Her voice was husky and reminded me of circus tents, speakeasies, and the song Lady in Red. I sniffed and pressed the tissues to my cold nose.

“I’m Abby,” she said. 

“Tara,” I whispered. 

“Nice to meet you, Tara.” She laughed. “Though I feel like I’ve met you before, isn’t that correct?”

So it wasn’t my imagination. This was her. I pressed my hand to my stomach and vomitted into the toilet. She reached under the stall again, and I squeezed her hand. It was warm. I suddenly felt drowsy. I leaned against the wall, not caring that that the ends of my hair were sweeping the floor. My eyes fell closed. 

When I woke up, the room was dark and my butt hurt. I felt a deep nausea like carsickness. I got up and let myself out. I took the elevator back to my floor. I was the only one there. I rushed to the conference room and retrieved my purse, then walked in a daze to my cubicle. I looked across the street. The lights were on in her apartment, and she was sitting on the leather couch, her back to me, watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. It occured to me only later to wonder what she had been doing in my office building.

The next weird thing happened a month later. My period was late. I wanted to believe my own memories, which told me that I had not been sexually active for over a year. But I couldn’t deny the truth. I walked to a chain pharmacy branch an hour away from my apartment and and walked up to the counter with three different pregnancy tests. A pharmacist smiled at me from a few feet away, where she was typing on a computer. She had a crooked smile, arched eyebrows, and green eyes. If I had to guess her age, it would be early 40s. Her ID card said that her name was Francesca Kamen. She was viscerally familiar to me, like a memory from a past life. My eyes darted to her left index finger, where I spotted the infinity symbol. She nodded at me.

“Take care, Tara,” she mouthed.

“Ma’am, are you paying for that with a card?” The bored-looking employee in front of me was staring at me like we were going to have a problem if I did not tap my card right this second. I paid and took my discrete white paper bag, cramming it into my purse. I looked back to where the other employee had been standing, but instead there was a balding middle-aged man there in the front of the computer. He looked at me curiously. I rushed out of the store. The walk home passed in a blur, and before I knew it I was walking up the steps to my studio. I put the pregnancy tests on the coffee table in the living room and laid down on the couch, my eyes falling closed. When I opened my eyes again just after 5 AM, the pregnancy tests were gone. I turned the apartment upside looking for them, then found twenty pregnancy tests in as plastic bag in one of the garbage cans in front of the building. They were all positive. 

Time sped up after that. My fetus grew. The company settled the lawsuit with the dead celebrity’s family for eight million dollars. I continued to observe the woman daily from the window in my cubicle, staying later and later at work and sometimes coming into the office even on weekends. The nights were peaceful there, and there was nothing I enjoyed more than the mental clarity that came with drafting memos in the wee hours of the morning, indie music in the background, looking up every once in a while to see her sitting on her couch or pacing around her apartment. 

 At twenty-two weeks, I went to my OB-GYN for an ultrasound and found out that I was going to have a girl. I blinked back tears as I left the clinic. I was going to be a parent. I would need to buy a crib and a baby carrier, cover the outlets in my apartment, order wholesome books like How to Talk So Kids Will Listen. I would have to protect a baby girl in this messed-up world where I hadn’t even been able to protect myself. 

As I rushed around the corner, I passed a woman with a wolf cut and tattoo sleeves. She grinned at me as she stubbed out her cigarette and patted me on the shoulder. We had a conversation full of non sequiturs that I mostly forgot immediately afterwards. I watched the infinity sign on her finger fly around and she moved her hands to emphasize her points. It all seemed to make sense at the time. 

“Come to my apartment,” she said. “We can watch Survivor and eat mac and cheese. My mac and cheese is so unbelievable, it might even induce early labor.”

“Okay,” I said. We took the L train uptown, then transfered to the downtown Q. We walked through the rotating entryway to her building. The lobby smelled like expensive floral perfume. The doorman nodded politely as we passed.

We took the elevator up to the twenty-first floor and entered her apartment. It looked a little different than it did from across the street. For instance, I had never noticed that there were no windows anywhere in the whole apartment. 

When I woke up the next morning, I was at my desk at work. It was still dark outside. What was I doing here? Then I remembered. I had gone back to my work cubicle after the woman had fallen asleep to try to solve the mystery of the windows. I looked at the building across the street. Her apartment was dark. I was filled with a sudden panic. What if something terrible had happened to her? I took the elevator downstairs and rushed to her building. The doorman protested when I passed by, but I ignored him. I ran to the elevator and pressed the button for the twenty-first floor. I felt very suddenly aware of all the teeth in my mouth. I hammered my fists on her door. After five minutes, a sleepy-looking women in a robe opened the door. But it was all wrong. Her face looked sort of like the woman’s but wasn’t the woman. There was no infinity symbol on her finger.

“Is everything okay?” the woman asked. “What’s going on?”

I pushed her shoulders, and she stumbled backwards. “WHO ARE YOU?” I screamed. “IMPOSTER!”

The police showed up some time later. They brought me to the hospital, where I was evaluated by a kind-looking woman with a long braid. When they admitted me, I didn’t protest.

I still visit the woman’s apartment sometimes. We do jigsaw puzzles and play “Life is Strange” and try out all the different flavors of Sour Patch Kids. We laugh about nothing and listen to true crime podcasts. But somehow I always end up back at this hospital, sitting up in bed with my body covered in sweat, the images of the woman beckoning like a siren’s song.