She Was Never Human

The skiff bumped against the dock and I grabbed the piling before I went in the water, which would have been a fine way to end fifty-four years of careful living. The crossing had taken twenty minutes and my hands were still damp from the spray. I had driven three hours to the ferry terminal, then crossed to the island, and the whole time I kept asking myself what I was doing. A woman I had matched with two weeks ago, twelve messages back and forth, and then one message that said come to the island on Saturday, I'll be at the lighthouse, bring nothing.

I brought nothing. I did bring a jacket, because it was October off the coast of Scotland and I am responsible, which is my whole problem according to everyone who has ever left me.

The path up from the dock was gravel and mud, switching back and forth until the lighthouse stood over me, white and red banded, older than anything back home. Gabby was waiting at the door. Fifty-two, she had told me, silver in her dark hair and a face that looked like it had decided on its own terms how to age. She was wearing a wool sweater and rubber boots, which I appreciated, because I had half feared she would be in something from a catalog and I would feel like a fool in my walking shoes.

"You came," she said. "I gave it maybe sixty percent."

"Sixty-two," I said. "The boat ride sealed it. I wasn't rowing back."

She laughed at that and stepped aside to let me in. The keeper's quarters were small and warm, a stove in the corner, a kettle going, books stacked on every flat surface that was not a shelf. It smelled like woodsmoke and tea. She poured two cups without asking what I took, and she got it right, milk no sugar, which unsettled me more than anything else that afternoon.

We sat and talked for an hour or more. She asked about my work at the warehouse and I told her about inventory counts and the year I finally got the scanner system to stop lying to us, and she listened like it was interesting, which nobody had done in a long time. Then she went quiet, set her cup down, and reached under her chair.

What she brought out was a small tape recorder, the kind with the red button, the kind I had not seen since the eighties. She set it on the table between us.

"I'm going to tell you something now," she said. "And before I tell you, I want to dare you to do something. You can say no to any of it. That's the rule of tonight, everything is a dare and everything is optional."

I looked at the recorder. "All right," I said. "Dare me."

"Kiss me," she said, "before you know what I am. Afterward, the tape will tell you why it mattered. That's the dare."

Let me tell you what went through my head in that moment, because it was not what you would expect. It was not fear and it was not lust, or not only. It was the realization that she had built this evening like a man builds a bridge, every plank load rated, every step planned, and that she was asking me to walk it anyway. There was a whole machinery behind the wry smile and the kettle. And the strange thing is that the machinery made me trust her more, not less. A person who plans this carefully is a person who has been hurt planning badly.

I stood up. So did she. I asked her plainly, "You want this? Right now, this kiss?"

"I'm asking you for it," she said. "That's what a dare is."

So I kissed her. She tasted like tea and salt air, and her hand came up to my jaw and held there, steady, and I felt something I had not felt on a first kiss since I was twenty-two, which is the feeling of being met halfway. It lasted maybe ten seconds. When it ended we both sat back down like nothing had happened, which was somehow the most flustering part.

She slid the tape recorder across the table and pressed play.

Her own voice came out of it, recorded hours ago apparently, while I was still on the ferry. She was talking to the machine the way people do when there is nobody else to talk to. I am not going to transcribe all of it. The parts I remember: she said my name, Bradly, and said she hoped I was the kind of man who could stand to be surprised. She said she was fifty-two years old and had been fifty-two years old for a very long time and would explain that later if I stayed. She said the last man she told ran, and she did not blame him, but she was tired of telling people from the middle of something instead of the beginning.

Then the recording ended and she was watching my face with a level of attention I have only otherwise seen on people waiting for test results.

I did not run. I want that understood, because everything after depends on it. I sat there with my cooling tea and thought about my life, the flat, the shifts, the two years with a colleague named Karen that ended so amicably we still sent each other cards, all of it a long corridor of responsible decisions with no doors in it. I had told her in our messages that I wanted a thrill. I had meant something small, a motorbike, maybe. She was offering something else entirely.

"Okay," I said. "You're not what you look like. Fine. What are you, then, in plain words?"

"Later," she said, and she was smiling again. "Dares first. Truth after. That's the order, I'm afraid. I built it this way on purpose, so you could stop at any point before the truth and still go home with a nice story."

The second dare was the blindfold. She produced it from the same drawer as the recorder, a soft black cloth, folded neat.

"Let me blindfold you," she said. "And let me walk you through the lighthouse. All the way to the lamp room. I'll guide you the whole way, and you hold my wrist, and you'll know something by the end of it. That's the dare."

I looked at the cloth, and then at her wrist, and I made the calculation a sensible man makes, remote island, woman I met on an app, blindfold. Every sensible part of me voted no. But she had just shown me a tape recorder she recorded for a stranger's benefit, hours of her own voice spent on the chance I would want proof, and sensible men do not get offered nights like this twice.

I said yes. She asked me again, out loud, once more, so there was no doubt in either direction, and I said yes again, and then the world went dark.

Her fingers tied the cloth at the back of my head, careful, not tight. Then she took my hand and put it on her wrist and said hold here, so I did. Her skin was warm, warmer than mine, and under my thumb I found her pulse right away. It was slow. Slow like a sleeper's pulse, slow like nobody I had ever put a thumb on, and I had put a thumb on pulses a few times in my life, once at a car accident, once holding my father's hand in a hospital, so I know what a human resting rate feels like under a thumb.

Hers was not it.

"Feel that?" she asked quietly, as she led me toward the spiral stair.

"I feel it," I said.

"Keep counting," she said. "That's part of the dare. Count it all the way up."

The stair was narrow and I trusted her hand more than the wall, which said something. Thirty-one steps, she counted them for me, and the whole way up her pulse stayed where it was, steady and low and wrong, and mine was doing the opposite, climbing with every step, and I counted both, hers and mine, one under my thumb and one in my throat, all the way into the lamp room.

In the lamp room she let me stand there in the dark for a minute while the light swung overhead. I could feel it pass through my eyelids even through the cloth, a slow wash of brightness every few seconds, and I could hear the sea on the rocks below, patient about it, like it had all night. She untied the blindfold herself, one knot, gentle, and the room came back in pieces, the brass rail, the glass, her face.

The third dare was her face.

"Touch my face," she said. "Both hands. Take your time. Tell me what is different about it. There is one thing, and it is small, and you have felt a face before, so you can find it." She pulled her chair around so she was square to me, and she waited.

Let me tell you why I did not hesitate, because I hesitated at the blindfold and I did not hesitate here, and the difference mattered to me. The blindfold had been about trust. This was about her. She was asking me to handle her, and there is a kind of care in that request that a man my age does not get offered much. I put my hands on her face. Thumbs on her cheekbones, fingers along her jaw, the way you would hold a bowl you did not want to drop. "Still all right?" I asked, and she said, "Still all right."

Her skin was warm, that same warmth her wrist