Part 4: Your Angel, Nadine
by Swati Sudarsan
Michel O’Hara, Figure 11: San Francisco, digital photograph, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
Part 4: Your Angel, Nadine
Swati Sudarsan | JuLY 2024 | Issue 35
Begin the series here.
Nadine kept her body close to the Other Nadine’s body the entire car ride home.
Maybe it was the wine, or maybe it was the soft buzz of excitement to finally be alone together, but there was a palpable frisson between them—their elbows brushing, their fingertips bristling, one Nadine resting her chin on the other’s shoulder. A sweet heat came off the Other Nadine as she twirled her fingers into Nadine’s hair. She asked over and over like a schoolgirl, What are you thinking? What about now?
Nadine answered all her questions patiently, luxuriously even. I’m thinking about what’s for dinner, dear Nadine, I’m wondering if I should turn left here or the next street.
It made them both giggle—the idea that either of them could be thinking about anything other than what it would be like to get home.
“Ahhhh!” Nadine squeezed the Other Nadine. “We’re really doing this!”
“Yes,” said the Other Nadine, wrapping her arm around Nadine’s neck, prodding her nose into her hair. “Yes we are.”
And between them was their plan, like an ectoplasm, languid and oozing. Where one Nadine ended and the other started was lost somewhere in it. Only one thought cut through. A life together. It revved Nadine’s heart like a chainsaw, fed her heart-buzz, tender as it was voracious. Would it be weird if they kissed?
As they pulled into her driveway, Nadine’s phone buzzed. The weather app had updated itself:
Weather Watch: Extreme rainfall. Atmospheric disturbance. Winds.
The sky outside seemed to droop under its own weight, giant white clouds stirring above them. Rain began to drop onto the car, falling slowly at first, then with a steady insistence. Nadine shivered, despite the lingering heat of the wine in her cheeks and fingertips. For a moment she imagined the Other Nadine’s body siphoning off her natural heat like a parasite, growing in strength as it did. Let her have it, she thought. Wasn’t that exactly the type of sacrifice people make when building a life together?
A life together.
The thought made her blush. She and the Other Nadine as a unit, depending on each other for their daily functions. There was a beauty to the ritual of it, to the mechanics and gear-grinding of the day-to-day they would build in tandem. They would share a life in a deeper sense than even a marriage. One life, two bodies. It made her want to nuzzle closer to the Other Nadine, so she did. She nuzzled into Other Nadine’s neck, smelled the santal of her hair, listened to the drumming of the rain on the car, and felt her own emotions through the borders of Other Nadine’s body. The fear of the unknown, the turn of the day, the dawn of a new way of life—all neatly handled in the soft animal body of Other Nadine, whose blood was pumping, heart was throbbing, stomach gurgling…
“I’m not ready to step out,” Nadine murmured.
Other Nadine’s body in her arms felt comforting, like holding a hot pack. These moments in the car were a special sort of liminal space, an unreality between her old reality and the one impending.
“The rain is getting worse by the second,” said the Other Nadine.
The Nadines looked at each other, the seal between their eyes tightening, as if each wished the other knew some magic trick to make the moment last longer. They stepped out.
+
Fat pellets of rain fell in a sheet over Nadine’s house, draping it in a gauzy haze. If she hadn’t been the one to drive her car home, she could have believed this house was anyone’s. Its silhouette was a mosh of contradictions, at once reticent and looming, congealing back into the sad script of Nadine’s day-to-day life the closer they got. Broken shingles, colors swatched but never painted, flower beds with no mulch. Why did it look so unloved? And how could she be the very person who had lived inside it, acting out the haunted choreography of domestic diligence?
A brittle Venetian doll, she thought.
The torrent and gales pulled at them as they walked toward the house, but the Nadines clung to each other like fences in a hurricane. The Other Nadine’s warmth had dissipated almost spontaneously the moment they had stepped outside. Her coldness made Nadine think of people at funerals who had trouble accepting the finality of death, who had to be pried off the corpse when the event was done and the body was to be taken away. These people had trouble accepting the forward momentum of time, she thought. They couldn’t see that lives were bifurcated, over and over, and they were all mosaics of Befores and Afters.
And here she was, cusping toward an After.
So why did it feel like nothing? She blamed the wind, whistling into her coat, carrying away the thrill that had filled her body just moments before. She would find it again once she was safely inside, she was sure.
“Get your keys out,” yelled the Other Nadine, her voice trailing in the wind.
The storm raked past them, pulling up grass. She understood the Other Nadine’s motivation to rush inside, but this urgency, this impulse toward safety. Was it not banal? After they entered the house, there was no possible future where the two Nadine’s could cleave their lives apart. Not with any cleanliness or simplicity. There was no future where they could be anything but conjoined. Not that she didn’t want this with Nadine. But these were the last moments where every possible life, every alternative outcome, was still theirs.
Maybe this was why Dev called her selfish. “You think you are entitled to every shallow thing your brain thinks of, and when you don’t get it, you sulk in the corner like a brat.”
Was she really a brat? She just couldn’t see herself that way. It wasn’t like her life would suddenly be perfect. Resources would be split between the two Nadines, they would compromise, make decisions, and someone would get cross with the other. There would be times they had to get through the hum-drum and the quotidian before their next great adventure.
And how romantic was that? The patience.
She stepped out from under the umbrella and looked up. The rain plodded into her eyes, but she could still see, between the roiling gray clouds, one small wispy cirrus. Nadine thought it looked like the slash of a knife, where someone had sliced through the boundary of Earth into the skin of Heaven. She let the rain soak into her hair and clothing, and run down her face. Soon, she and the Other Nadine would be forever tethered together like two ends of a bungee cord. She’d seen this movie before. She knew what it was to give herself to someone else. To irrevocably, incorrigibly became theirs. But this time would be different. It was Nadine. The thought of resenting her, critiquing her into dust, stuck Nadine with a gashing blade of anxiety. Imagine the stress of hating your double. What would happen to her skin?
“Let’s go inside,” Nadine said, finally.
She stabbed her key into the door.
+
Something was wrong.
She knew it immediately when they stepped inside. The Other Nadine instinctively grabbed her arm.
”What is it?”
“Shhh!”
There was a faint clanging noise coming from upstairs. For a second, Nadine imagined finding a third Nadine in her house.
“Maybe a robber.”
The Other Nadine trembled, which shocked Nadine. Ever since she met her, she had thought of the Other Nadine as aspirational. She was the cool Nadine, the confident Nadine, the Better Nadine. But now she looked like a wet puppy who had been terrified into a bath.
“What should we do?”
She knew how Dev would treat her in this scenario. Like a wimpy horror movie boyfriend, who after aggrandizing himself for the entire opening sequence, would cower behind his prettier, smarter, more deserving girlfriend when the true terrors began.
“You hide in the coat closet. I’ll check it out.”
The steady drip drip drip of rainwater falling off Other Nadine’s jacket grew fainter. She tiptoed past the console, the half bathroom, and the storage closet as she made her way toward the kitchen. Something about her house really was different. Its aperture was tinted grayer, darker.
At the kitchen, Nadine’s stomach nearly flew out her scalp from shock. Every single one of the cabinet doors was open, her cleaning bottles strewn about and her wine bottles all pulled out, neatly lined up on the floor. And what was that smell…a stilted floral and musk, like it was covering up something foul. Her candle was burning on the dining table next to a pile of shredded flower petals, three torn open packages, and a lone plate covered in track marks of saliva and grease.
Dev came out from around the corner. He was holding a drill, still wearing his work scrubs.
”Well well well, look who we have here,” he said, pounding the drill into his palm. “The woman of the hour.”
There was a moment Nadine wanted to rush into his arms. There was a moment she wanted to grab the drill from him and smash his face raw with it. In real time, she stood there like a ventriloquist’s dummy, hollowed out of a voice.
“Nadine, let me ask you. Where have you been? In your state, you know you shouldn’t be going out. Don’t you care about anything I tell you?”
There was a Nadine who cared deeply about everything he said. There was a Nadine who clung to his every word like it was medicine. But that Nadine was vaporizing, turning whiter by the second. She imagined the shock of beauty she must be, her skin taking on the perfection of a corpse. This was different from the sickness that had haunted her for the last weeks. She was not exhausted. She was fluid, in the liminal state of everything, outside of herself and her body. No heart thumping. No palms sweating. She touched her hand to her chin. Ice.
“I asked you a question, Nadine. Where were you?”
Nadine swallowed.
“Never mind. I found your wine stash. Don’t you know everything I tell you is for your own good? I care about you, Nadine. When you’re good, I’m good. So why were you hiding it from me, Nadine?”
“Why were you looking in there?”
“Something was wrong with the pipes under the sink last night. They were all moved around, and I couldn’t get the garbage disposal to work.”
Nadine tensed at the thought of Other Nadine under the sink last night. What would happen if Dev found out about her.
“You know, I got out of work early today, and I thought, wow, it’ll be nice to spend some time with my wife today, in the coziness of our marital home. I work so hard, Nadine. I just wanted to see my wife.”
“You’re seeing me now.”
“Yes Nadine, I’m seeing my lying, thieving wife. I went to the grocery store to get you flowers, and you know what I saw there? Wanted signs pasted all over the store, with your face on them. Gummy fish, Nadine, seriously? I thought you were smarter than that. Don’t you know they’re full of microplastics?”
“That wasn’t me—”
“SHUT UP!” he roared, and Nadine’s mouth clamped.
“So then I came home and found three new boxes of creams. I told you already, Nadine. Creams will do nothing if you keep going out. You’ll get overstimulated. You’ll stress yourself out. Don’t you want to get better?”
“I’ve been feeling better actually —”
“Don’t lie to me, Nadine. I’m already very upset. Do you think I’m stupid? Did you think I’d never find out about your little escapades? Now I know just how little you respect me. God Nadine, I even had to eat my lunch all alone. You really fucking hurt me.”
Dev’s lip quivered. He let out an awful, strangled noise. Nadine realized it was meant to be a sob.
“You don’t know what you do to me, Nadine. You make me crazy. Don’t you know how much I love you? Everything I tell you is for your own good. I need you healthy. How else will you take care of me? I need you here.”
“I’m here, baby,” Nadine said delicately, trying to lace love into her voice. She needed him softened, but no tears bubbled up. Dev’s eyes had a deranged streak in them, one she’d never seen before. Who knew if crying could placate him anymore.
He palmed the drill and took a step towards her.
“You’re so careless, Nadine. It’s cruel how little you care.” He palmed the drill again. “But I know how you can make it better.”
Nadine exhaled, and she swore frost came out of her mouth.
“We’re going to have to remove your leg, baby.” He caressed the drill in his palm. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t hurt you at all. You understand why, right? It’s the only way to get you to stop leaving. To listen to what’s good for you.”
He turned the drill on. It emitted a whining, high-pitched whir.
“Come here, baby.”
Nadine took a step back as Dev took a step towards her. She felt the wall on her back as Dev took another step, rearing the drill up, aiming it at her thigh. His smile was so wide it was ripping into his cheeks. He knew he had her trapped. She felt around her, looking frantically for something to defend herself. Any weapon, any object that was sharp or heavy. Anything to get away. But she felt nothing, could see nothing, could not think of anything. Her mind had frozen, had absorbed the iciness of her skin.
Then there was a noise, the loud shattering of glass. Dev’s eyes expanded, first the pupils, then the eyeballs themselves, until his face was nothing but two black coins. He made that awful choking sob again, then slumped over. When he fell, he crashed backwards, knocking into the long line of wine bottles he had laid out, smashing them like a bowling ball striking out. Glass shards exploded all over him, and Nadine covered her face and head, emerging only after a silence took over the room. When she opened her eyes, Dev was shredded and lifeless on the floor. Hovering over him was the Other Nadine, a smashed wine bottle in her hand like a dagger, dripping red.
“What did you think, Nadine? I’m a widow by accident?”
As Nadine looked up, she caught her reflection in the window behind her. She saw herself twice over, the sky turning from dark to robin blue. A cloud-smitten sun emerged coyly from beyond the storm clouds, its corona casting a halo over her in the window. Her eyes snagged onto the Other Nadine’s. She drew in a breath and stretched her mouth into a smile. Her brutally whitened teeth glinted in the window, resplendent and sharp.
Swati Sudarsan is an Indian-American writer who grew up in the Midwest. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work is published in The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Catapult, Denver Quarterly, and The Spectacle, amongst others. She was the 2023 recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Fiction, and has also received funding and support from the Tin House Workshop, the Kenyon Review, Kweli Journal, and more. She now lives in Brooklyn with her black cat Toothless.
Michel O’Hara is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles, CA. Her most recent poetry can be found in One Art Poetry, The Rising Phoenix Review, The Blue Route, and The Sucarnochee Review. Her photography has been included in exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Los Angeles Center of Photography, Lightbox Photographic Gallery, The Curated Fridge and PhotoPlace Gallery. Michel is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Poetry at Antioch University Los Angeles.