Thrust: A Novel

The story was that the Tabard Inn had been run by Marie Willoughby Rogers, who named the place after an inn from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Lilly went there originally because it was female friendly, not the usual misogyny cave. During the second big war, the inn had opened up as a boardinghouse for WAVES — the navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. She liked that. She liked the dark wood and she liked the low lighting and she liked the tiny indigo flowers stitched into some of the upholstered seats.

The last time she’d been there, she’d gotten into a fight with a woman she’d slept with exactly once before deciding she was too clingy, too needy, just wanted too much. The last thing the woman said before she stormed out was, “I’m not needy, Lilly — you’re just Antarctic.” If only the woman could have seen what Lilly needed most, which was to be cut open, aggressively, like an ice-cutting ship parting a frozen bit of sea. But all the woman wanted to do was kiss — incessantly, like some kind of fruit fly you can’t bat away — and cuddle and engage in a little sixty-nine. Absolutely meaningless.

In the bar today were four women and two men, and a girl bartender who looked to be about twelve years old. Youth culture—great. Her age, it seemed, was aging her faster and faster. The lines around her eyes increasing their creases, her eyelids growing extra lids. She sat down hard at the bar, averting the gaze of the mirror behind the bartender.

“Scotch, please. Neat. Make it a double.”

Here, at least, she could drink without some shithead pawing at her or trying to kiss her or making some pathetic pass. This town was filled with men who had no game, just suits and questionable taste in footwear and ties.

When a woman in an alabaster pantsuit sat down, one stool away from Lilly, she tried to shoot cold daggers from her eyeballs. Why can’t people give other people space when they’re clearly there to drink alone with their own rage and guilt? Isn’t it motherfucking obvious? Isn’t it all over me like porcupine quills?

But when the stranger failed to move, and Lilly turned to make her feelings clearer, what arrested her attention was the woman’s stern beauty. She looked to be sixty-something, maybe even pushing seventy. Her hair was silver, shoulder length, brushed back away from her face in waves. Her eyes were blue, or that kind of blue that fades with age. Even after Lilly turned away again, she could see her plainly in the mirror. The stranger noticed, but she didn’t flinch.

The woman ordered vodka on the rocks with a lemon wedge. Lilly’s relief that neither of them were drinking cocktails kindled a little warmth in her chest.

The infant bartender asked Lilly if she wanted another, and Lilly nodded. When the other woman received her vodka, she downed it and asked for another with her eyes and a slight nod to the child bartender.

Lilly’s mind drifted away from the bar and the stranger, lighting on her work, her success rate as a mental health professional. Some of the boys she’d worked with had been saved, in a way; they’d found foster homes and counseling and mental health resources. At least that’s what the data she entered said on the paperwork. But the follow-ups she’d conducted had been dismal. The truth was, no matter how hard she labored, nothing seemed to get much better.

She thought about her nightmares. Horror show.

She thought about her sex life. Ridiculous.

So when the woman moved to sit directly next to her at the bar, Lilly held as still as a statue. Anything was better than her life right now, wasn’t it? Anything was better than drowning in your own mire.

“I don’t mean to intrude,” the woman began. “But I noticed your hand is bleeding.”

Make the heart hard, like a baseball.

Lilly held her hand up and looked at it in the mirror in front of them. Sure enough. She looks like Vanessa Redgrave.

“Can I have a napkin, some water?” Lilly asked the bartender. She side-eyed the stranger. “I’m fine. Really. I must have brushed it against something — opened up a scab.”

“Must be a story there,” the woman next to Lilly said. “Not exactly a paper cut.”

No, no it wasn’t. Lilly knew where the wound had come from. She’d scraped her hand against a cinder-block wall after she left Mikael — done it intentionally, the pain the only thing she could give herself in the moment. He’d taken the umbilical cord, and she’d taken his story about some lost girl out in the world, and she had no idea what the fuck to do about any of it. Now he was gone. If they found him, he’d be truly fucked.