The next time I wake up, it’s because of rattling against the windowpane. The blinds are down, and at first everything feels groggy and incoherent, but then I remember and sit up straight. My text, it’s done. I pulled it off. I did it.
I spot the computer on the floor, lean down and pick it up, and scroll through the entire document, trying to muster any form of emotional reaction. But all I feel is a vast emptiness, as if an enormous explosion has occurred, a quake with its epicenter in my chest.
I turn on my phone, whose battery has died and which I haven’t bothered to plug in until now, and it immediately chimes—three texts from my sister and just as many voicemails. She goes from sympathy to worry to sarcasm. Am I sick? Or angry? Just how long am I planning to avoid her, anyway? And what about Friday, am I even planning to show up? Or are we meeting at my place this time? It would be nice if I could at least go to the trouble of telling her what the plan is.
I pick at the scab on my calf and fidget. What day is it, actually?
There’s a message from Peter, too.
He sounds a little lost, as if he had actually meant to hang up when the voicemail picked up but changed his mind at the last second.
“That didn’t go right the other day at all… I didn’t mean to just throw that out there… I understand that you’re curious. There’s a lot more I should probably say, but since you’re not picking up, it’ll have to be like this instead…”
I finger the phone.
“I see everything so clearly now. Please come home. Let me make you dinner or… well, at least agree to meet me for coffee.”
Then there’s a rustling on the other end, and the quality of Peter’s voice changes.
“Elena, what I actually wanted to say is that I love you, always have, always will.”
I can almost see him in front of me. His beautiful face with the slightly crooked nose, how the corner of his mouth twitches in that particular way when he has something important to say. Then he’s gone, and the message is over. I press the phone to my face.
“I love you, too,” I murmur.
Scarcely an hour later, I’ve taken a shower and located my printer in one of the moving boxes in the living room. I return to the bedroom, dry my hair, and put on clean clothes. It feels like I just shed my skin. In a way that’s exactly what I’ve done, peeled off the old and allowed what was hidden beneath the surface to emerge.
It takes a while to install the printer, but eventually I succeed. I open the file with my text, hit print, and watch while the paper starts feeding into the machine. One by one, the pages land in the tray, warm and upside down. While I wait, I listen to Peter’s message again.
Please come home.
I love you, always have, always will.
The printer has stopped, and I squat down, set down my phone, and pick up the stack of printed pages. I sit down on the floor, lean my back against the bed, and start from the beginning. I need to do a read-through, just one, before it’s time to proceed.
When I’ve made it about a third of the way through the text, I become aware of a sound down by the front door. A knock? Maybe. I ignore it and keep reading. After a while, the stairs creak. I don’t react now, either. Only when I clearly hear footsteps do I stop reading. They are coming closer. They come through the door and walk across the floor, over to the bed where I’m sitting. They move neither quickly nor slowly, those footsteps. They have an objective, but they’re not in a hurry. It could be a frightening experience, someone coming toward me, but it isn’t, because I know who it is.
I look up. And there we are face-to-face, yet again, my sister and I.
41
“Hi.”
My sister’s hair is combed to the sides, and when she tilts her face down toward me, I can see the gray roots along her part. The lines in her face seem deeper than usual. She looks tired, tired and old. This is the first time I’ve thought that about her.
“Hi. What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
I don’t mean to sound disagreeable or impolite. I don’t feel that way, not at all actually. Now that my sister is standing here before me, I realize that I’ve had a hunch that she would show up sooner or later. It was inevitable, downright necessary, that she did. I realize something else, too, that I miss her, that I have missed her for the last twenty years or so. I so wish I could talk to her about it.
She holds a little metal object up in the air in front of her.
“Spare key,” she explains.
I nod, assuming she has it from one of her girlfriend’s previous trips.
“I got worried. I’ve tried calling you a bunch of times this week, but it always goes straight to voicemail. I’ve left you messages, too, and asked you to call me back. I mean, I know how you can be, but I…”
My sister’s eyes drift over to my phone on the floor and then back to me. I explain that it’s been off.
“As I said,” she repeats. “I got worried.”
Our eyes meet for one second, two seconds. Then she shakes her head and looks around the room.
“My god, this place is like a crypt.”
She’s wearing a coat and there are little dark spots over her shoulders and breasts. So it must be cold and rainy outside. I had no idea. Not so strange, given that I haven’t been out since…
“What day is it?”
“Oh my god,” my sister says again. “What’s really going on here? You keep going on and on about the neighbors. Then you abruptly cancel our dinner. Then you barricade yourself in here and just…”
She makes a tsk, tsk, tsk sound with her tongue and performs a sweeping gesture around the room. Then she points to the window, looking resigned.
“I mean, take those blinds, for example. When was the last time you opened them, huh? Do you have any idea how it smells in here?”
My sister takes off her coat and folds it. She looks for somewhere to put it and decides on the armchair. After that she walks purposefully over to the window and pulls up the blinds and cracks the window open to air out the room. While she has her back turned, I flip over the stack of papers on my lap so the printed pages end up on the bottom.
“It’s Friday,” she says, “Friday afternoon, our day. I haven’t been able to reach you to decide anything, so I suppose I shouldn’t actually have…”
She smooths her dress over her butt and looks like she’s about to sit down on the bed. Then she changes her mind, walks over to the wall, and leans against it instead.
“But the way things stand right now,” she continues, “I felt like I just had to come over here anyway, because…”
“Because you were worried. I can tell.”
I think that it’s sheer luck that I showered and changed my clothes before she came. I probably look tired and pale. My skin hasn’t had any contact with fresh air for several days, and I haven’t slept a whole night in forever, but that’s nothing compared with what I must have looked like a few hours ago.
I’m expecting her to say something quickly and urgently, but my sister is quiet for a long time. When I turn to face her, she’s studying her cuticles. She looks sad.
“Sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have treated you like that. And I should have been in touch. It’s just that this week… it’s been…”
With her back still against the wall, my sister slides down until she’s sitting on the floor.
“It’s not just this week,” she says. “It’s the last several months, the last year.”