Five Wishes

Chapter 5

Mack screams at the top of his lungs, as if he's being murdered. He's a booming baritone, and he's got impressive lungs. He basically sounds like a foghorn. A foghorn in a six-foot-tall, heavily-muscled frame.

I slap my hands over my ears. "It's okay," I yell over his yelling. "I can get another manicure. I mean, if you loan me fifteen dollars I can get another manicure. I'll look as good as new."

"Come on," he says, taking a break from his screaming. "Join me. Maybe somebody walking by will hear us."

It's Old School cellphone. Nobody's in the building, but he's right that there's a good chance somebody's walking by. I'm not sure that they'll hear us from inside the elevator, but like Mack said, it's not exactly airtight.

He starts hollering again, and this time, I join him. We sound like a couple in a horror movie, getting hacked to death by an immortal psychopath. We scream as long as our voices hold out.

After we finally stop, we stand and wait for a sign that someone has heard us. But there's no Good Samaritan running into the building, no police sirens, no nothing.

"You were pretty convincing. Maybe you really are an actress," Mack tells me.

I slump against the wall and slide down until I'm sitting on the floor. "I'm not an actress."

"You can be an actress if you want to."

"Don't patronize me."

"I'm serious."

I'm supposed to feel better. Mack's saying all the right things. He believes I can be an actress. He's opening the door to my dreams.

My dreams.

I struggle to see acting as my dream, but I can't. Do I have a dream, beyond paying my rent? Does Mack really see me as an actress or as something else? Perhaps he can tell me who I am and what I should be in life. Maybe he has all the answers.

But I don't dare ask him.

Besides, he's too busy staring at the ceiling.

"What are you looking at?"

He takes his fishing rod and jams it with all his strength at the trapdoor in the ceiling. The door doesn't budge, but the rod breaks in two.

He holds the pieces in his hands and stares at them, as if it's all a mistake and they're going to regenerate into a whole fishing rod by the will of his mind. "s**t!" he yells. "s**t! s**t! s**t!"

"I'm sorry. I know what it's like," I say, showing him my broken fingernails again.

"Are you comparing your fifteen-dollar manicure to my fishing rod?"

His voice is cold. Angry.

"Well, my manicure is prettier than your rod."

"My rod cost me over a thousand dollars. A thousand. I'll do the math for you, Marion. That's sixty-six of your manicures."

"That's a lot of manicures in a stick with a hook attached to it."

Mack shuts his eyes tight.

"Are you sleeping?" I ask.

"No. I'm picturing your boobs so I don't get upset."

"Oh. Okay."

He stays that way for a while. At one point, he covers his face with his hand and sighs, pitifully.

"We're dead, aren't we?" I ask. "This is it. We're done for. Goners."

He drops the pieces of his fishing rod on the floor and grabs the tackle box. He slams it against the trapdoor, which is either bolted closed or so old that dirt and rust have sealed it tight. The box makes a horrible racket on impact, and I think it's is going to fall apart, but it holds strong. The trapdoor, however, has met its match and cracks opens with a loud noise.

Mack has managed to bend back a portion of the metal door, but it's not totally open. Still, it's our first bit of success since we got trapped. I hop up and peer into the gap in the ceiling. It's just like the movies... a cable reaching up into a long shaft.

"Are you going up there?" I ask Mack.

"Yep." He puts the tackle box on the floor, underneath the trapdoor, and he steps on it in order to better reach the ceiling. He pounds against the door until it bends further, opening up wider. It's like opening a can without an opener. He's got it open a little, but it's not wide enough.

"You can't fit through that," I say.

"I'll fit."

"No you won't."

"Yes, I will."

"No, you won't," I say, shaking my head. I take off my shoes because I know where this is heading. I'm going to have to be the one to climb through the door.

"Yes, I will."

"Fine. Go ahead and try," I say.

Mack clamps his hand on the ceiling ledge and pulls himself up. My whole life I've never been able to do a single pull-up, but he pulls himself up like it's nothing at all. His biceps bulge with the effort, but otherwise it's easy peasy for him to haul his big body up there.

But it's not easy peasy for him to fit through the small opening. He gets his head through and then one shoulder, and then he's stuck.

"You're stuck," I say.

"I'm not stuck." He's trying to pull himself through, but he's not moving.

"You're really stuck."

"I'm not stuck."

"You're going to need the jaws of life to get you out of there. If you had a cellphone, we could call 911."

"I'm not stuck." He punches the trapdoor with his free hand several times. It opens a little more, but not enough to climb through. He groans as he pushes and pulls, trying to unjam himself from the door.

"You're stuck."

He swings his legs to try and dislodge his body from the trapdoor, but he's not going anywhere. "Sonofabitch!" he growls.

"I told you that you were stuck."

"I'm not-" He begins but stops himself. He's so stuck.

"Don't worry. I'll save you!" I announce.

"No! Don't save me, Marion. I'll get myself out," he says with more than a hint of panic in his voice.

"No way. I'm not going to have you die in here and leave me alone with a corpse. I'm going to save you, no matter what."

I leap in the air and grab onto his legs. I hold on for dear life, my arms wrapped around his thighs and my face smooshed up against his butt. "This is awkward," I say, just as Mack finally breaks free with the force of our combined weight, and we fall to the floor together.

We lie in a heap and catch our breaths. "I wasn't stuck," he says.

"You were totally stuck. I saved you."

Our limbs are intertwined. My dress is hitched up to my hips, and my left leg is wrapped around Mack's torso. Our faces are nearly touching, and I can smell his breath. Bacon and eggs, if I'm not mistaken.

"I think you're going to miss your audition," he says.

"I'm never going to be an actress. I should have had pancakes with my pie."

"You can be whatever you want to be."

He means it. He's dead serious. Mack has faith in me, which is a first in my life.

"No one's said that to me since Mrs. Fletcher in third grade," I say.

"Smart woman, that Mrs. Fletcher."

Tears sting my eyes, and I wipe at them with my hand. Being able to be what I want in life isn't the only issue, but I can't talk to Mack about it. He would never understand that I'm aimless, that I don't know what direction to take. He owns his own diner and apartment building. He knows what he wants in life and has taken every step to make it happen.

My tears graduate to weeping. Mack kisses my tears away as they fall onto my cheeks. "Don't worry. We'll get out of here. Eventually somebody's going to come by for a cup of coffee,"

"No they won't. You're closed. You went fishing."

His mouth sets into a tight line. "True."

He caresses my leg, from ankle to hip. The air molecules shift and buckle, changing from confidences and friendship to seduction and something much deeper. Serious.

Is this the normal evolution from friendship and attraction? Was this detour in our relationship inevitable, and should I go with the flow? Or is this wrong, wrong, wrong? Is it a terrible mistake to get cozy with a man I've been fighting with for two years? Is this unnatural, immoral, and just plain weird? Is this going to end in disaster, where feelings are hurt, hearts are broken, and I'm left without a place to eat really good pie?

I have so many questions that I don't know where to begin.

"When's the last time this carpet was cleaned?" I ask. My guess is never. It smells horrible, like rotten eggs and ashtrays.

Mack doesn't seem to care about the carpet. He's ogling my body parts, and his hand has traveled the distance to the space between my legs. I feel a finger tug at my panties, and then Mack's safely in the DMZ, that no man's land between the thighs and the just-been-waxed that makes my eyes roll back in my head and makes me put my hand over his to guide him further.

Sex in a broken elevator. Talk about some crazy-ass foreplay.

But I don't care. Gone is the worry about carpet-carrying diseases. Gone is the claustrophobia. Gone are the concerns about friends becoming lovers. Gone, even, is the certainty that if I don't get to a bathroom on the double, I'm going to pee in my pants.

That's all because of Mack's hand. His magical, warm, hand with one finger slipping inside me and the other rubbing me in just the right way. How does he know exactly how to drive me mad?

Somebody moans. I'm pretty sure it's me, but I can't be totally certain because it doesn't sound quite human. My body's rocking to the rhythm of his hand. I'm so close to an orgasm. I've gone from zero to sixty in ten seconds. "You can kiss me now," I suggest.

Mack's mouth captures mine with a wild ferocity. He possesses me totally. One arm circles the back of my head and pulls me even closer. I'm spinning around and around, and I'm about to take off to the stratosphere.

That's when the screaming starts.