The next time I become aware of anything, it’s grown so cold. My legs feel cold on the inside. Then something extremely close to my face is beeping, and I wake up. At some point last night, somewhere in the midst of my insomniac wanderings, I must have headed back upstairs to the bedroom and fallen asleep in the bed, because that’s where I am. The blanket fell on the floor and the room is freezing. I forgot to close the window. I pull in my legs and wrap my arms around my knees. If only I could just get out of waking up one morning. There’s another beep, and I lazily reach over for my phone on the nightstand. The screen shows two new text messages from my sister. The first is four words long: You’re coming tonight, right? The second message is just as succinct, but the tone is different: 7PM sharp!
I force myself out of bed, pull on my bathrobe, and go downstairs. The same motions, bathrobe, and stairs as yesterday and the day before. The same motions, bathrobe, and stairs that await me tomorrow and the day after that. In the kitchen I put on the kettle and make tea, not that it matters whether I eat breakfast, but because that’s what one does, that’s the way a person behaves. Plus it gives me something to fill my time and thoughts with. Something different.
I sit down and blow on my tea. Between sips, I stare out the window, my gaze roaming across the little landscaped yard between the houses. A few birds are chirping in a bush. In the kitchen of the place across from mine stands a man wearing a suit and tying his tie. At the table in front of him sits a woman with honey-colored hair, drinking something from a cup. The sun hasn’t made it over the rooftops yet. A garbage truck chugs down the street. People hurry along the sidewalk. They’re on their way somewhere. Their steps have direction and purpose.
I turn my attention to the room I find myself in, and behold its drab, bare appearance: the missing bits of wallpaper, the worn handles on the cupboard doors. The furnishings consist of a table and two simple chairs. Yet another day of empty motions and artificial respiration awaits within these four walls; yet another day of silence and solitude. My sister is my only remaining link to the outside world. This is what it’s come to. This is what I’ve allowed it to come to. You’re coming tonight, right? I get up from the table and dump out the rest of my tea in the sink. I don’t know, I think. I really don’t know.
2
My sister squats in front of the oven and peers through the dirty glass.
“It’s done,” she decides, adjusting the pot holders before opening the door.
A pan of lasagna lands on the table in front of me, alongside a simple green salad and red boxed wine. It’s the same thing she’s served the last several Fridays. She seems to like lasagna. Or maybe she’s decided that I do? My sister holds up the box of wine and fills my glass first and then her own. After that she sits across from me and offers me the serving utensils.
“Go for it,” she says.
Soon two steaming helpings sit on the plates in front of us. My sister has a healthy appetite. She says something about the weather, about how waiting for things to warm up in the spring is the worst. After having tried to start a discussion about some new TV show I’ve never heard of, she asks how I like my new place. I answer that I’m sure it will be fine but that I haven’t really settled in yet.
My words sound stiff and fake. I feel that strangeness again, just like a few hours earlier when I stood in the front hall, just inside the door. I was dressed and ready to go out when this feeling of unreality came over me. This won’t do. I’m not up to this. I realized that I was going to have to call and cancel, that I couldn’t go to my sister’s for our now-traditional Friday-night dinner. Sit there eating and chatting, pretending as if everything is as it should be. No, not again. Never again. And yet, in the end, here I am.
“Yes, yes,” my sister says. “It’s not like you owe it to me to be happy there just because.”
The woman I’m subletting the place from is one of my sister’s many friends. She’s traveling around the world right now. That’s the kind of thing my sister’s friends do. They fly places and grab life by the horns. My sister and her husband used to travel, too—sometimes on their own and sometimes with other couples—but it’s been a long time since they’ve done that.
“I mean, we’re only talking about a few months,” my sister says, and I realize that she’s still talking about the town house, about my existence.
She rotates her wineglass in her hand, eyeing me thoughtfully. She had previously offered to let me live here, with her and her husband, and now I have the sense that she’s about to repeat the invitation.
“I’ll figure it out,” I say in answer to a question that wasn’t really asked.
Out of the corner of my eye, I think I catch my sister eyeing my plate and the food sitting there more or less untouched. I dutifully stuff a bite of lasagna into my mouth and wash it down with wine, not tasting it. Then I ask my sister a question about her job and listen as best I can while she answers. Things go better when we focus on her instead of me.
I empty my glass and my sister refills it. The alcohol does its part, dulling the sharp edges, dimming and covering. I feel almost real.
“How about you?” my sister asks after a while.
“What about me?”
“Have you started to give any thought to the future?”
I look down at my plate again, poking at the lettuce leaves. The future? The future is already behind me. That’s what I think, even if I know better than to say it out loud. I make do with a simple shrug, but my sister doesn’t relent. How’s the writing going? Have I started anything new? I moisten my lips and tell it like it is.
My sister leans toward me.
“You need to get back to writing,” she says firmly. “Work is the best medicine.”
I stiffen. “Work is the best medicine” is Mama’s old mantra. The words she smilingly used to counter all our efforts to make her rest, to not overdo it. The words she constantly repeated, right up until the pain made it impossible for her to speak, let alone sit up in bed and read or write.
My sister says the words so neutrally, as if they don’t have any deeper significance to her. There’s nothing in her voice to suggest that she remembers. Maybe she doesn’t. By the time Mama got sick, she’d already been living away from home for a long time. She lived abroad for so long and rarely came home to visit until the final stage.
I fill my chest with air and hold it in. Only when my chest feels tight and my ribs ache, only when I no longer have any choice, do I exhale again.
“Just so you know, I am actually working pretty much all the time.”
That’s true. I accept as much work as I can as a publisher’s reader and translator.
“It’s great that you’re busy, but you’re an author, Elena. Authors write, right? They don’t just dink around with other people’s texts.”
My glass is empty, again. I stare at the box of wine.
“I don’t have anything to write about.”
My sister pours me yet more wine and then gets up to fetch some ketchup from the fridge.
“What’s that thing your publisher always says, that writing advice… dig your own grave, or something?”
A strange sound, which could have been a laugh, hacks its way from between my lips. My sister raises her eyebrows, and once again I look away. I suppose I’m getting a bit tipsy.
“Dig where you are,” I correct her quietly.
“Right, that’s the one,” my sister says, picking up her fork and knife again. “Whatever. Anyway, I know you’ve mentioned the saying several times. So are you working on old manuscripts or what?”