Latex and Ladders

Sybil Houston had worked countless long shifts in her life, or so it felt by the time her car crunched up the gravel to the lakeside cabin that Friday evening. Her feet ached, and the fluorescent lights of the hotel lobby were still swimming behind her eyes when she blinked.

The sauna sat among the pines with its one small window glowing amber. Woodsmoke. That was the first thing she registered, woodsmoke and the clean cold smell of the frozen lake behind it, and her shoulders came down an inch just standing there in the dark with her keys in her hand.

Viv had gone out ahead that afternoon, which was not unusual. Viv Wyles went out ahead of things the way other people went to the mailbox. Sybil had been told only, over breakfast, to bring nothing but herself and be at the cabin by seven. It was 7:12. She was counting it as punctual, because the hotel had a leak in the second floor men's room and a guest who believed his room rate entitled him to sympathy, and seven hours of both had scraped her down to something thin and tired and, she had privately decided on the drive, old.

That was the word she kept landing on. Old. Not in years, she was only forty-four, but in the way her knees spoke up on stairs, in the way she managed things instead of experiencing them. Three years ago, at a toy design conference in Gothenburg, a woman with sawdust on her sleeves and a prototype in each hand had asked her what she did for fun, and Sybil had honestly had to think about it. Viv had looked at her for a moment and then said, well, that settles it, you're coming with me, and that had been that. Sybil had been forty-one and she could not remember the last time she had laughed the way she laughed that weekend.

She wanted to feel like that again tonight. Quietly, modestly, with wine and the stove and the two of them. The entire hope was a simple evening.

She pushed the door open.

The sauna was warm the way only a wood-burning cabin gets warm, heat sitting in the timber like it lived there. The stove ticked. Viv was sitting cross-legged on the single bench, still in her winter coat, looking extremely pleased with herself, which was a look Sybil knew well and had learned to be suspicious of.

"Happy birthday," Viv said.

"It's not my birthday until midnight."

"It's your birthday evening. Close enough. Sit down."

Sybil sat. The bench was hot under her thighs and she hissed, and Viv laughed, and for a moment it was going to be exactly the evening Sybil had imagined. Then Viv stood, brushed pine needles off her coat, and pointed up.

The loft. Every sauna cabin out here seemed to have one, a low space under the roof reached by a narrow ladder bolted, or in this case apparently not bolted, to the wall. It was meant for kids in summer or storage in winter. It was not meant for anything, as far as Sybil knew, because they had never used it.

"Up there," Viv said, "is a suitcase."

"A suitcase."

"A very special suitcase. I have been planning this since September. Go look."

Sybil looked at her. Viv looked back with that face, the one that meant she had thought of everything and would not be talked out of any of it. Sybil sighed the sigh of a woman whose feet hurt, and got up anyway, because her partner of three years was vibrating slightly, and because some small ember in her chest, the one the hotel had spent all day smothering, had started to glow.

The ladder was narrow and it creaked. She went up it the careful way, one rung at a time, and hauled herself over the edge into the loft, where there was indeed a suitcase, a hard-shell one in a green so dark it was nearly black, sitting on a mound of pillows like a cat that had been placed there on purpose.

"Viv, what is in this suitcase?"

"Open it."

Sybil clicked the latches. Inside, folded with more care than Viv had ever shown toward laundry, was latex. A great deal of latex, in black and one deep red piece, gleaming faintly in the light from below. Sybil sat back on her heels among the pillows and just looked at it, and something in her face must have shown, because Viv's voice came up through the loft hatch, delighted.

"There's more where that came from. I bought the red one first, and then I lost my mind slightly and bought the rest."

"When did you buy all this? You said you were at the workshop."

"I was at the workshop in October. In September I was being a person of mystery." A pause, and then, a little less sure, "Do you like it? You look like you might be doing the thing where you don't like it."

"I'm not doing that thing." Sybil ran her hand over the red bodysuit. It was cool and strange and smooth under her fingers, and she had worn exactly none of anything like it in her life, and her heart had picked up in a way it had not picked up in months. "I'm doing the thing where I'm forty-four years old and my partner just bought me a suitcase of sin."

"That's a good thing to be doing."

"It might be."

She reached for the red one. And that was when the evening tilted, because she leaned to drag the suitcase closer, and the suitcase was heavy, and she shifted her weight onto the edge of the loft where there was no edge, only the lip of the opening and the ladder beneath it.

The ladder went first. It was not bolted at the bottom, she would learn this later, it was simply leaning, and her knee against the top rung was enough. It slid, clattered, and came down flat on the floor with a bang that made them both yelp, and the loft hatch became, as of that moment, a hole in the floor about ten feet above the ground with no way down except a drop.

There was a silence.

"Sybil," Viv said from below, in a strangled voice, "are you all right?"

"I'm fine." A beat. "I'm trapped in your sin attic."

And Viv started laughing. Not a polite laugh, the full ugly one, the one Sybil had fallen for at that conference, and it was infectious, and Sybil was laughing too, sitting among the pillows with the suitcase in her lap and no way down, and the tired old feeling from the drive over had gone somewhere and left nothing behind.

"I can't believe the ladder just gave up," Viv called. "I stood on it twenty minutes ago."

"Well, it heard about your plans and it disapproved."

"Can you jump? It's not that far."

"It is that far. My knees are forty-four too, Viv."

"I'll catch you."

"You will not. I'll wait for the fire department and explain it to them with dignity." Sybil looked down at her, framed in the hatch, cheeks pink from the stove, and felt the ember in her chest do something unreasonable. "Or we could just stay up here. You could climb up. That's a ladder problem you can solve."

Viv was already reaching for the fallen ladder to prop it, which was very her, solve first, feel later. She got it back up against the wall and tested it with one foot, and then came up, folding herself into the low space with her coat still on, hair full of static from the wool.