Collisions

She didn’t know what to say when Neci appeared on her porch that first time, shower-wet hair dripping, toddler in tow, fingers pressed against the loose door screen. The sun rose behind her, casting a shadow across the entry. Her overalls stretched over the dome of her belly. Her face was puffed and red.

In a town like Comfort, word spread like a rash, and women like Neci found Sophia’s Parlor on their own, the itch of hopes and insecurities burning in their hands. Head bent, she would listen, offering soothing murmurs, a nod. After a while, the words would cool. A raw silence would open.

Then, her nails moving over the lines, she told the women those things she sensed they wanted to hear and some she guessed they already knew, just didn’t trust themselves enough to admit. Certain truths are easier to accept when they seem to come from someone else, more convincing adorned in the language of divination and fate.

“Due in August,” she replied to Sophia’s unasked question.

“You’d better come in,” Sophia said.

She led the way, conscious of Neci pausing to remove the toddler’s shoes, then of their sock footsteps behind her. Opposite from Sophia, Neci sank into the couch, an exhale of fur and dust.

Neci Llewellyn. Now Neci Barnett. Not across the street or in the checkout line at H-E-B, but here on Sophia’s couch.

Her mouth a line, she refused the tea Sophia offered, scolded the child for pulling the cat’s tail. Tears brimming, she hugged her body as if she might fall to pieces otherwise. Finally, she extended her hand.

Just from looking, Sophia could tell it would be warm: blotchy pink, a prominent Mount of Lunar, the marker of dreamy, creative types. She fought the urge to begin the reading right away. Picked the hairs off her sleeve. Swallowed her sympathy. People never do like to be pitied.

Just two months before, the church treasurer’s daughter had pouted where Neci sat now, secrets swelling in her palms. The memory made Sophia blush. Everyone knew the church treasurer’s daughter and Neci’s husband were having an affair. Behind the organ. Inside the book bus. On a pallet of breakfast cereal in the food bank. (There were dissonant chords and creased pages and crushed cereal boxes to prove it.) The story took hold, as stories do, the dirty details spat from church wives’ tongues with a disgust the same sour as envy. It even overshadowed news of a massive asteroid predicted to collide with earth within the next seven years. What was scandal but an everyday extinction?

“Someone has disappointed you.” Sophia leaned forward, spreading Neci’s palm.

“Disappointed” was putting it mildly, but Neci seemed to respond well to this interpretation of events. Unlike other clients, she didn’t roll her eyes or fidget, only studied her palm as if she really believed all the answers to her problems lay there.

Sophia furrowed her brows and focused on the reading. She tried to look as if she were just now learning about Neci, as if she hadn’t observed with interest the arc of her life: how shy she’d been when her family first moved to town, her tortured artist phase in seventh grade and rise to popularity in high school. How all her classmates, including Sophia, had seemed grateful to simply exist within her atmosphere.

She’d never forget that spring afternoon in the stuffy classroom where the Visual Arts club met after school. Sophia had joined the club simply because Neci was in it, and that day, they were the first to arrive. Neci was drawing in her sketchbook with the waxy crayons they gave out for free at the Hometown Buffet. Sophia sat next to her for a minute, tracing the initials etched into the desktop. “Can I see?” she finally asked. Neci slid the sketchbook to her. Flipping through revealed surreal landscapes, faces constructed from one continuous line. Near the back of the book were explicit renderings of female forms in various states of embrace. Neci turned red and covered the page with her hand, made some kind of apology.

“They’re actually really beautiful,” Sophia said. She moved the book so that they could both see, like sharing a hymnal at church.

“My parents say you can’t make a living as an artist,” Neci said.

“Not here,” Sophia agreed.

Then there was the sound of other club members approaching in the hallway. Neci snapped the book shut, but Sophia had understood.

It was because of this exchange that, later that year, when it seemed like the whole town was up in arms about Neci’s wildfire romance with a single father from Canyon Lake, Sophia had not been altogether surprised. Seemingly overnight, Neci had transformed into a mother and a wife, respectable. (The age gap and love child were details the town was willing to overlook.) It was a loss Sophia had mourned in private for years.

“You have a unique capacity for love, but on the wrong person it is wasted.” She said now. She touched the place where the head and life lines crossed. “You will have to make a difficult choice.”

Neci stiffened. “You know this is just for fun,” she said, loud enough so that the child would hear. He seemed preoccupied with his coloring book, filling in the shapes with furious scribbles. She clasped and unclasped her fingers. “Everyone has to make difficult choices. Tell me something I don’t already know.”

What she really wanted, Sophia realized, was for someone to convince her that her husband had not done those things, that he still loved her. Any anomalies would shift back into alignment and her life would resume its previous course. But much as she wanted to spare Neci’s feelings, Sophia considered it her duty to tell the truth as she saw it—regardless of how it would be received, regardless of her personal feelings. She’d always done her best to maintain these standards. Her conscience, she told herself, was clear.

Even if Neci’s husband ended the affair, it wouldn’t be enough. Look how much he had hurt her already. Her cuticles picked raw. Chapped lips. Skin dull with lack of sleep. And for what? What did he have to offer her? The damage was irreparable, the risk of a repeated offense too high. In her experience, betrayal was always part of a pattern, like a fingerprint’s concentric circles, an identifying feature.

“Would you like me to be more specific?” she said.

Neci withdrew her hand and wiped it on her pant leg. “That won’t be necessary.”

Sophia took several long sips of her tea.

The thud of a bird hitting the window made them both look up. Neci’s face was streaked with tears.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but he’s not going to change,” Sophia said.

Neci shook her head, but she was listening.

Sophia reclaimed her hand, tightened her grip. Skin didn’t lie.

“I think you know what you need to do. But see here—this line, the heart line? It says you’re strong.”

Neci was watching the child.

“Hey.” Sophia waited until she looked up. “You will be okay.”

That had been the start of Neci’s almost daily visits. She dropped by on the way to the salon, wanting to know if her husband would find her more attractive if she cut her hair or grew it out or colored it or if she dressed differently or lost weight. She wanted to know if it was safe to remove the training wheels from the child’s tricycle, if the baby would have its father’s nose, if she should switch from almond to oat milk, if Sophia thought the church treasurer’s daughter was pretty. Happy in Neci’s company, Sophia began letting her preferences inform her answers, something she had permitted herself to do only once before. Never cut your hair. Eat more. Let’s hope the baby looks like you.

Sometimes Neci would appear on evenings when her husband was nowhere to be found. He was working an extra odd job or picking up a backordered part from a distant hardware store or meeting with a Bible study group.

It’s always some excuse, Neci would say in her weaker moments. Does he think I’m stupid?

You deserve better, Sophia would say.

But in response, Neci would backtrack, racing to her husband’s defense. He’s working long hours to save up for a deposit on a house, she’d say, combing her fingers through the toddler’s hair. He’s stepping up. He’s found Jesus. When it came to Neci’s husband, Sophia learned it was better to hold her tongue.

On those nights when he was otherwise engaged, they would stay up, avoiding talk of the advanced hour, sometimes just listening while June bugs flung themselves at the lamplight.

Once, they’d fallen asleep watching a show and meantime the sun had gone down so that Sophia awoke in the darkness, confused as to where she was. A black-and-white movie played silent and smooth as a spacewalk on the screen, and as her eyes adjusted, she realized Neci was still on the other end of the couch, the toddler asleep in her lap. She was awake, face turned toward the window. 

“I didn’t realize it had gotten so late,” she whispered. “I’d hate to move him now.”

Sophia repositioned herself on the couch. “You know you can stay as long as you like.” The words glistened between them. It was too dark to read her expression, but Sophia felt her skin burn as Neci found her hand.

The night pulsed with their breathing, the sounds of the house settling. At intervals, a car drove past, its headlights tangling their shadows across the opposite wall.

Eventually, the child stirred.

“People would talk,” Neci said. “You know how it is.”

“In seven years who will be left to care?” Sophia gestured at the window, as if the asteroid were closer than it really was, visible to the naked eye. 

Neci moved to stroke the boy’s forehead. “I can’t think like that,” she said.

Sophia was trying not to think about her empty hand, how easily Neci had dropped it. She felt for the remote. A man and woman stood on a cliff, kissing chastely against a starry backdrop that was obviously a green screen. Perhaps he was trying to persuade her not to jump—or she was trying to persuade him.

Neci was still fixated on the boy. “I don’t know what I’d do without him,” she was saying. She stretched and yawned, her hand falling back into Sophia’s as if by accident.

They listened to the boy’s even breath. “Just this one time,” Sophia remembered hearing her say as they both fell asleep.

Later, there were other times, but they never spoke about how the rules had changed. Sophia was careful to imitate Neci’s nonchalance. It was nothing worth mentioning, it hadn’t happened at all.

She told herself she was fine with this. She was used to keeping things to herself.

On evenings when they didn’t feel like talking, she loaded up her desktop and clicked away at transcription orders, which was how she paid the bills, while Neci sketched asteroids, hands in various poses, the church treasurer’s daughter’s distinctive lips. She’d tear them out and crumple them into balls, launch them at the waste basket. Eventually she’d fall asleep on the couch, the child and cat curled nearby. Sophia would turn out all the lights and ascend the stairs, lie on her bed and take in the heat that had risen during the day, inspect the stories her clients had told her.

There was Alex at the grocery store deli, hair buzzed short, meat cleaver in a death grip, and, upon reaching to pull another sheet of butcher paper from the wall, the neat row of scars visible under the white sleeve, another kind of story told in skin. “How can I help you?” Alex would ask, as if she hadn’t sat in Sophia’s Parlor earlier that day, confiding the details of her childhood abuse. Sophia ordered a pound of turkey every week without fail, the slices of flesh falling paper-thin into plastic gloves.

There was Helen, whose twin daughters left for college last year. She kept cooking meals too large for her and her husband to finish, forgetting that it was now just the two of them. She would wake in the night famished and devour leftovers straight from the Tupperware, lick her fingers clean. Then, not tired anymore, she’d leash up her old dog and wander the empty streets, imagining her daughters walking home late from the library, listing at hazy parties, waking up in strangers’ beds. She worried herself sick over those girls, but there was more to it, something she had a harder time naming: she wished she could be them or one of their girlfriends, their whole lives ahead, mistakes still to be made. When she got home, she would make coffee and turn on the news and her husband would find her there, never even having noticed she was gone. She couldn’t seem to make him understand the strange void she felt. It was not just the emptiness of her daughters’ absence but an emptiness of self, as if for years she’d held something precious tightly in her fist only to open her hand now and find it bare. 

Sophia thought of her own mother, whose palm had been the first she ever read. That night, Sophia had awoken to her baby sister’s shrill animal screams. In the bedroom their mother rocked the bundle in a sleepless dance, so unstable that Sophia reached out to steady her, thought about what to do if she were to trip and fall. Eventually she slowed and sank into the glider. Sophia climbed onto her lap. The baby’s face seethed, and she smacked her lips as she fed. Their mother patted and hummed. After a while, her hand hung slack against her body. Sophia turned it over and spread out the soap-soft skin, the lines twisting and stretching like a metaphor. “What do you see?” her mother said.

These women compelled Sophia, the heaviness of their stories and the fact that they had only her to tell them to. The burden of bearing their secrets felt at times like a kind of gravity, invisible and fundamental. It gave weight to her existence, helped keep her feet on the ground. Whenever she thought of leaving Comfort, as she sometimes did, it was the thought of this unspoken responsibility that always pulled her back. She was needed here.

On that final night, she and Neci watched the news station’s 24/7 live asteroid coverage while eating takeout from the Chinese place next door. At least, the boy was eating. Neci said she wasn’t hungry, and Sophia pushed her food around. In the past couple weeks, she’d noticed that Neci had lost weight, her sharpened angles juxtaposed against the curve of her abdomen. Now when the baby moved, it was easy to discern the bulge of its head or heel in her skin.

Sophia had purchased more of the sugary cereal Neci liked, reminded her that she needed to eat for two. She felt strangely invested in the baby’s development. Just that morning, when Neci was researching infant cribs, Sophia had considered which room in her home could be repurposed as a nursery, wondered—before she remembered it was impossible—if the baby would look anything like her.

How innocently the thought presented itself, how startled it had left her. Suddenly she could no longer deny the impact of Neci’s presence. Her distinct imprint in the sofa. Her drawings piled in the wastebasket. The child’s toys scattered on the floor. Ultrasounds from a recent prenatal checkup on the nightstand. It was easy to imagine their life together could be permanent, a version of the future she had never allowed herself to entertain. In a matter of hours, it became, at once, her obsession and her deepest fear. How to manifest that future, what it would mean to be so exposed.

Now, Neci sat cross-legged on the rug and painted Sophia’s nails, her grip warm and familiar. She seemed preoccupied, painting carelessly, looking up at the live rally on the screen, where a pastor-turned-political-candidate was insisting that the asteroid was a doomsday myth.

Sophia rolled her eyes at the candidate’s remarks, but Neci seemed less skeptical. “He could be right.” She waved the nail brush around. “You never know. I’m just saying things aren’t always what they seem.”

“I didn’t think you were even paying attention,” Sophia said, disliking the needy tone in her own voice. “You looked like you were a million miles away.”

Neci blew on the paint and twisted the cap back onto the bottle. “I’ve had a lot to think about,” she said.

Sophia held her fingers awkwardly in front of her, afraid to smudge the paint. She said she understood it must be difficult—with the baby coming soon, with everything going on with Neci’s husband.

Neci smiled. “It’s amazing how you can practically read my mind.”

The coverage cut to an expert analyst, who was graphing the asteroid’s trajectory through space. A dotted white line traced an elegant arc toward earth.

Sophia touched her hair. She could feel the confession hot in her palms, the words forming on her tongue: how everything about Neci amazed her, how no one had ever made her feel so essential and how she didn’t care how it looked or what anyone else had to say about it.

But she realized Neci was still speaking, something about how they’d had a “good talk.”

They, meaning her and her husband.

Sophia examined her hands. She saw that she’d ruined her nails.

“We’ve turned a corner. We agree—we’re going to work things out.” Neci was talking fast, as if divulging a crush.

Sophia couldn’t stop herself. “But you’ve been so much better. You can’t go back to him now.” The child stared at her, his mouth full of rice.

“Don’t.” Neci glanced between Sophia and the child. “Look, it’s sweet that you care, and I do appreciate it,” she said.

“Do you though?” Sophia could feel herself slipping, a force pulling her out of her orbit.

Neci started stacking their paper plates, stuffing napkins into takeout boxes. “How can you even ask that? I’m not like you. I can’t just think about myself.”

Sophia allowed herself to absorb this statement.

“Just forget it,” Nicole said, sounding tired. “I don’t owe you an explanation.”

Sophia laughed. “Of course not. You don’t owe me anything.”

She was only dimly aware of Neci yanking the toddler toward the door, the rip of the velcro on his shoes, the door slamming shut. She felt the cat jump out of her lap.

After, Sophia only caught occasional glimpses of Neci. She’d hear the rattle of the stroller on the sidewalk and position herself behind the curtains so that she could see without being seen. She’d watch Neci tug the toddler by the hand and bend over to mist the baby with water to ward away the day’s heat. The baby, another boy. A few times, she saw Neci and her husband standing on the street corner with other church members, passing out flyers, holding up signs: NO ONE knows the day or hour when these things will happen…. Therefore, KEEP WATCH! and BEWARE of FALSE PROPHETS!!! The baby was strapped to Neci’s chest, and she held the boy by the hand. Eventually, Sophia didn’t see Neci or her husband around town anymore. She heard they’d moved in with relatives in Canyon Lake.

The last time they spoke was before the baby was born. They ran into each other in the shampoo aisle at the pharmacy, and Neci caught her hand before she could walk away. She explained that her husband had never loved the church treasurer’s daughter. He had made a terrible mistake. Her hand was sweating, and she couldn’t seem to look Sophia in the eye. She was grateful, she said, for all the free advice Sophia had given so generously. Before she left, she wished Sophia well.

I wish you well. It was the same pithy pleasantry the church treasurer’s daughter had offered months ago as she swept out the door. Their conversation was one that Sophia returned to often in her mind in the weeks after her and Neci’s falling out, once the rumors had begun to spread. The church treasurer’s daughter had spooned sugar into her tea, stirred loudly, given the parlor an appraising look. No, she wasn’t sorry, just to be clear, for any of it, she wasn’t there to beg for anyone’s forgiveness. It was only that she’d never felt so alive, and she needed someone to bear witness to it, someone who wouldn’t judge her. (Here, she jutted her chin at Sophia.)

The details came easily, how his touch had permanently altered how she felt in her body. She felt sorry, she said, for other women who’d never know what it felt like to act on their desires. She pitied Neci, no real friends to tell her how much better she could do. She had half a mind to tell Neci herself—

“Why don’t you?” Sophia had interrupted. “Why don’t you tell him to leave her. Why don’t the two of you leave town.”

The church treasurer’s daughter looked gratified. “Not the sort of objectivity I’d expect from a professional, but I’m sure you have your reasons.” She took a knowing sip, her lipstick a wound on the cup’s rim.

Sophia was silent. It was true that her suggestion was not without self-interest.

She’d exploited her position without thinking twice. She didn’t feel all that bad about it.

When the church treasurer’s daughter rose to leave, they shook hands like new friends.

In the months since, the steady flow of clients Sophia was accustomed to had dwindled. Even her regulars no longer kept their appointments. It had gotten out—from Neci or the church treasurer’s daughter, Sophia could never be sure—that she wasn’t always perfectly discreet. She had her own agendas after all.

In time, there would be some relief in being seen in this new light, and all things considered, the talk could have been far more damaging. Those weightless nights, slippery in her memory—objects in motion remaining in motion, press of their matching crests and craters. She knew she should count herself lucky.

Before Neci left the pharmacy that last day, she’d let Sophia feel the baby kicking. Hand on her belly, Sophia thought she could sense, in the alien heels beating against the walls of their womb-world, light-years away the steady movement of celestial bodies, just missing each other.

She’d often tried to picture the end—heat of impact sucking the breath from her lungs, her liquid body catching the light like an oil spill, the earth ravaged and primordial, trembling with potential. At that moment, beneath the humming overhead lights, the aisle narrowing around Neci’s retreating figure, Sophia wondered if she felt the same regret: that they’d never know what lay beyond obliteration. They’d never know if they could have survived it.