Hiding in Plain Sight

14

Older but not necessarily a great deal wiser, Bella telephones HandsomeBoy Ngulu as soon as she sets off from Fatima and Mahdi’s house. The thought of postponing their meeting until she is in a less delicate state of mind crosses her mind, but this strikes her as a cop-out, and she dismisses it. When Ngulu answers, she pulls over to talk to him.

“Hello, sweetness,” he says. “What is up?”

It takes all her self-control not to tell him that in her current state of mind there are only two people she considers entitled to address her with such an endearment: Dahaba and Salif. True, Ngulu has in the past been in the habit of using that term of affection, both in person and in his texts and e-mails. And indeed, each time he used it (“Is that you, sweetness?”), it seemed to dispossess her of some inner strength, robbing her of the power she always assumed she had over men, quickening her with feelings from the past. Which is all the more reason why she doesn’t want to hear it now. Another day, perhaps, but not today. But how is he to know how fragile she is?

She asks if they are still meeting.

He says, “I’ve been looking forward to it all day.”

“The Serena, right?”

“Right, the Serena.”

“It’ll be good to meet and talk.”

“I’ll be waiting in the back of the café bar, my dearest.”

She wonders if she should call off the tryst. Despite the verbiage, she isn’t picking up the kind of feeling she expects from a lover she is seeing after so long an absence. She senses stress in his voice, maybe dread; he sounds like an unhappy man. Nor, she notices, does he go the extra mile to express his sorrow for her loss. But she says nothing.

The first time they slept together, she was putting up at a three-star hotel, the Meridian. It was a rainy October night, and she’d come from Rome to do a bit of camera work for Oxfam. She recalls that night with amusement now. He’d climaxed before he even entered her, without so much as bothering to knock on her door. He wasn’t much good as a lover at first, but he was so young and handsome that, ogling his naked body and touching him here and there, her eyes at least felt fully satiated. Hence her nickname for him, Bell’Uomo.

As she drives, she lets Cawrala tell her where to turn while memory leads her by the hand. The second time they’d met, it was by chance, in Edinburgh. Bella had gone to Scotland to spend a romantic weekend with Humboldt. But Ngulu, who was there for a seminar on the causes of famine, spotted her walking in the rain holding hands with the sculptor. He followed them into a restaurant and sat at the bar in the corner, keeping an eye on them until they’d ordered their drinks. At which point he presented himself in a here-I-am sort of way. Bella was startled, but she felt relieved when it became clear he wasn’t going to make a scene. Speaking in Portuguese, she introduced him to Humboldt. He picked up the basics of what she said about him: that he was a Kenyan, working in Nairobi for Norwegian People’s Aid. He made as if to sit and almost pulled up a chair to join them at the table, but when they resumed their conversation in Portuguese and he couldn’t make sense of what either one of them was saying, and with Humboldt staring at him like an undertaker deciding the size of the coffin to put him in, Ngulu withdrew. Bella flew back to Rome that night and Humboldt went to London, where he was having an exhibition of his works.

Amazingly enough, she met Ngulu by chance again the following year in New York. This time she was with Cisse Drahme, her Malian lover, who was doing some research on African astronomical systems at the New York Public Library. They had just checked out of their hotel on a side street near the UN when Ngulu appeared before her and said, “Hi, fancy meeting you here.” On this occasion, Bella walked past him without a look. And when he caught up with her and said, “It is me, Ngulu,” she pretended she didn’t know him and asked him to repeat his name. If he was stalking her, she was determined to put an end to it.

Cisse took possession of Bella’s arm and the two of them walked away from Ngulu with their arms linked. He stood where he was, staring at them pulling away and wondering if he had mistaken another woman for Bella, for a time a woman of his heart.

But the next time she went to Nairobi, she was in a low mood, a big EU-funded project of hers having fallen through. She was again staying at the Meridian. Restless and in need of temporary entertainment, the kind tourists from the moneyed parts of the world enjoy when they are visiting Africa, Bella discovered she still had the landline telephone number Ngulu had given her when they first met, and on a whim, she tried it. A woman answered — his wife, his mother? She left a message with the woman, giving her name and the name of her hotel.

To her surprise and delight, he rang her from the lobby at six. When she came down, he was all spruced up. He was flaunting a well-maintained moustache, had a sports jacket on, a pair of jeans too tight in the crotch, and a silky shirt unbuttoned to display the tuft of hair on his chest. The handsome smile she remembered played around his eyes, his mouth forever parted in a grin. She knew right away that he would not mention either of their two previous encounters, as though he had wised up to the fact that reminding her of them would piss her off. And he didn’t. They talked briefly about what each had done since their last meeting, and in giving an account of his activities, he didn’t refer to either of her two prior putdowns.

At seven, she noticed he was looking ravenous. She took him to the Carnivore, where he ordered a plateful of meats — beef, ostrich, and hippo — which, according to him, had been cooked to perfection; in fact, he suggested she try it. Since she found the idea of a restaurant making an offer of some sixty types of meat revolting, and she had only a salad, there was a moment when she felt ambivalent toward a man who could bear to consume so much meat — and she thought maybe she should terminate her interest in him. But there was a strong feeling toward him and she stayed with him, paid the bill, and he took the rest of the food in a doggy bag, maybe because he could live on it for a few days, given that his salary as an NGO employee wasn’t high.

They jumped into a taxi and she took him back to her hotel, still uncertain whether she wanted anything more than a nightcap with him. But he was still handsome and young, and she was lonely, and when they got to the lobby, she took him up to her room and they made love.

The sex this time was scarcely better than the first. As a lover, Ngulu clearly was no Humboldt. Unhandsome as the sculptor was, rough in manner and uncouth in his comments, Humboldt lived for sex and art. Ngulu has no strong ambition of any sort. Moreover, he fell asleep soon after the evening’s one and only round of lovemaking, stirring only to spread his legs, raise his pelvis, and release a silent malodorous fart then yawning and stretching his limbs one at a time, all the while remaining asleep. And his penis is small. Still, Bella longs to see him. For the first time, she admits to herself that she admires him for what he is: a youthful angel of extraordinary beauty. And with Salif and Dahaba away, what is the harm? If she plays her cards right, she will get what she wants and still have a delicious evening to herself.

And yet she can’t help thinking about the questions Fatima asked about Aar and his attraction to Valerie. What would make an intelligent, loyal, loving, and attractive man link himself to such a woman? “What does he/she find in him/her?” is a question asked the world over. And the answer is “Nobody knows.” Still, she would not marry a man like Ngulu or have children by him. But knowing what she knows about the pull he nevertheless exerts on her, she is more generous toward Aar for having chosen Valerie and by extension toward Valerie, despite all her failings.

Stalled in traffic, she glances in the mirror, unable to decide whether she is any the worse for wear. But what about Ngulu? She wonders if experience has made him any better as a lover. Although the pay for NGO workers like him is modest, the demand for a handsome companion like him is high among the many unattached British, European, and North American female employees, for whom there are few good marriageable men. She is familiar with some of these women, including a former classmate from university she sometimes stays with when she is traveling. In fact, it is that classmate who told her that Ngulu had been taken up by a Canadian woman old enough to be his grandmother, a sugar mummy of exceptional stature, quite literally — a redhead more than six feet tall, with a voice as many-tempered as Paul Robeson’s. How does he address this elderly Amazon, she wonders—“Sweetness”?

Thinking of the unhappiness in his voice just now, she wonders again whether she should have canceled. The idea of being taken for granted makes her uncomfortable. And truly, it is time the man figures out what he wants in life and moves on. She will impress this upon him, she thinks. And at any rate, it is too late to cancel; a few minutes later, she is at the hotel.

—

He is waiting for her in the back of the café bar, just as he said he would be. And if Bella needed confirmation of her feelings, she gets it as she approaches him — his exquisite features no longer stir things up in her, which is how she used to describe his particular appeal to herself. He is like the favorite toy a child holds close to him for years as he falls asleep, touching, kissing, and holding it, drawing physical comfort from it. And now, it seems, the toy is broken or she has tired of it.

But as she comes closer, she sees that he seems eager indeed. He is up on his feet and waving enthusiastically to her. He takes a few steps toward her, meeting her before she reaches the table. They embrace awkwardly, and when their lips meet, his mouth is open and wet, in a more intimate kiss than she is prepared for. She frees herself quickly, saying, “Okay, okay, okay.” She allows him to lead her by the hand back to his table. He’s been drinking. There is an almost empty whiskey glass — not his first, she guesses — and a couple of empty beer bottles and a can of Coke.

“How have you been doing?” she asks.

“I’ve been doing very well, thank you.”

Bella squirms. She flags down the waiter. Ngulu orders another whiskey with ice, and then the waiter turns to her.

“What about you, madam? What can I get you?”

She says, “I have had a long day, and a longer night is waiting for me. Please get me a bottle of mineral water with a slice of lemon.”

When the waiter leaves, Ngulu takes the hand closest to him and, with a smile in his eyes, says, “Good. A very long night, I like it.”

She doesn’t even bother trying to set him straight.

He says, “My sincere condolences for your loss. Often, I ask myself what this world is coming to. Innocent people getting killed when they are just going about their business and working for an honest living.” He shakes his head and tells her about some of the casualties they’ve suffered in Nairobi at the hands of terrorists acting in the supposed name of religion, nationalism, or ethnic loyalty.

“And did you lose any friends or family in one of those incidents?” she asks.

He shakes his head, but says, “We’re all affected by it, every one of us.”

She knows that a million and a half Kenyans lost their lives in such violence around the elections a couple of years ago, and close to three million joined the ranks of the internally displaced. But she is in no mood to hear her specific, personal loss glibly lumped in with so many others. Granted, she agrees that in a general sort of way we are all affected at least momentarily by the footage of a bomb blast and the grisly carnage that results. But that is no different from coming across the collision of two vehicles in which passengers have died or been injured. We drive with extra caution for another kilometer or two then return to our habitual careless ways. Only when we are affected personally, when a family member or close friend loses his or her life, do we really feel the pain and cruelty in our guts, in the marrow of our bones. That is why in Somalia people pray that God spares those one loves while taking those one does not even know.

The waiter brings their drinks and then tots up their bill, scribbling the total and leaving it on the table.

“How are Aar’s children faring?” Ngulu asks.

“They’re having a difficult time,” Bella says.

“They go to school here, right? In the suburbs?”

Bella is not inclined to give him any more information than she needs to. She senses that their relationship is dying a natural death, although she is not sure this is the right moment to end it definitively. She will bide her time. What is the rush?

Ngulu asks, “Have you a plan for this evening?”

“I am planning for a very long night.”

“With me, I hope.”

“And what do you have in mind?”

He brings out a room key. “This is the plan I have in mind. I’ve paid for a suite for the night where I hope we will frolic and love and remember.”

Bella’s gaze shifts from the room key he has shown her to the mineral water, which she has not even touched. She weighs her words carefully before she speaks. She knows that she is in a more privileged position than the vast majority of women. She is economically independent, she has a profession in which she is well respected, she knows what she is passionate about, and she has friends on whom she can rely. Most important, she is not beholden to any man. She has had the run of her own affairs for much of her life, and it is not only in her nature but also in her means to withdraw unequivocally from any situation where she is not treated with the dignity she deserves. Life is tough on women, and Bella thinks she has been well prepared for it. If, as Sophie Tucker is thought to have said, a woman needs good looks between ages eighteen and thirty-five, a good personality from thirty-five to fifty-five, and plenty of cash thereafter, Bella has had all that she needs to make herself happy with her lot. So why should she permit this boy toy to behave badly toward her?

She says, with the calmness of Lot addressing his betrayers, “I wish you had let me know because I’ve made other arrangements. In future, always tell people what you have in mind. I might not have come if I’d known you expected me to spend the night with you. In fact”—she looks at her wristwatch—“I really must leave. Will you pay for my water, or shall I pay for it myself?”

And with that, she walks out of the café bar.

—

Bella is not proud of what she has done, but she feels that she had few options. She couldn’t let Ngulu get away with such insulting presumption. But she is angrier with herself than with him, for it is she who put herself in a position to be treated with so little respect.

It will do her good to spend an evening by herself, relaxing and eating leftovers or making herself an omelet. Then she can set to work cracking Aar’s e-mail and other accounts. Realizing that there was no way of knowing what personal secrets she might find once she cracked the computer’s code, Bella had decided not to seek Salif’s assistance in puzzling out his father’s passwords or bank details. It wouldn’t be fair to him, she thinks, nor would it be fair to his father. The living who happen to have access to the secrets of the dead must deal with them as though they were sacred.

She doesn’t recognize anything she is passing, and wonders if Cawrala has led her astray, but then she spots a familiar landmark and knows that she is on the Uhuru Highway. She knows the way from here. She silences Cawrala and drives the rest of the way home feeling calmer. Next time, she thinks, she will bring along some CDs, music to feed her soul. Jazz, in particular, has always nurtured and sharpened her creativity, bringing out the best in her.

She is only a few streets from Aar’s house when she hears her phone somewhere in her handbag. She decides she won’t bother to answer it. Likely it is Ngulu calling to apologize, and she has nothing more to say to him. In any case, she has never liked the idea of being on call like a medical doctor, obliged to answer every time the phone rings, and she disdains the habits of the text-messaging generation, who seem to think of their iPhones as extensions of themselves. On the other hand, what if it is Salif, or Dahaba having a difficult time and needing to be comforted or picked up? Didn’t Bella tell her to call her at any time of night or day?

By the time this thought occurs to her, she is home. She parks and deactivates the alarm, then goes into the house, turning on the lights in the kitchen. She pulls out her phone to see who has called. Gunilla!

Bella dials her back. They chat for a few minutes, and Gunilla asks after her and the children, speaking as a friend rather than as Aar’s colleague. Bella tells her about the sleepover at Fatima and Mahdi’s and her plans for a solo dinner of leftovers and a quiet evening of work. She makes no mention of her encounter with Ngulu, needless to say.

Gunilla says, “Of course, you haven’t had time to do a proper shop! In fact, you probably don’t even know your way around the neighborhood. You know, I’m not far from you, and there is a big mall close to my house that doesn’t close until about nine in the evening. I know how difficult it can be to figure out daily life in a city that you are not familiar with. Would you like to give me your shopping list, and I can get the items for you and bring them over later? I have to do a shop myself.”

“I don’t want to trouble you,” says Bella.

“Or how about this? You have a bite to eat. I’ll come for you in an hour or a little less, and we can go shopping together. I’ll take you home, and if you have the energy, we can have a chat and a cup of something.”

Bella’s heart surges with pleasure, but still she hesitates. “Are you sure you have the time to do all this?”

“I do,” says Gunilla, “and I’d love to see you.”

“Brilliant,” says Bella. “I look forward to it.”

As soon as she hangs up, Bella realizes that she has forgotten to tell Gunilla the address. She is about to ring her back when she remembers that, of course, Gunilla knows where it is. She has been here with Aar. Bella smiles to herself — she’s not the only one with a secret life.

Bella brings the carryall with Aar’s personal effects into the house. She puts the laptop on the desk in the study and plugs it in so that it can charge. She puts the rest of his things back in the carryall, which she hides under the bed. Then she goes downstairs and makes herself a bowl of spaghetti with plain tomato sauce.

When she is finished, she goes back upstairs and sits down in front of the laptop. She guesses at the password, trying various combinations of Aar’s pet names for her, Gacalisissima1, Nuurkayga3, Gabar, Gu’, TobanKaroon! She tries the date of her birth. After a few attempts, she hits on the right combination.

As she waits for the desktop to appear, something inside her goes very quiet. For a moment, she feels as if her heart were about to stop pumping blood to her head. It’s as if she has crossed the boundary between herself and Aar by accessing his private life without his permission. This is an infringement she would never have allowed herself while he was alive. What makes it kosher now that he is dead?

Bella hears a quick rat-a-tat knock downstairs. The time has passed more quickly than she thought. Gunilla is at the door, her idling car behind her. She says she will wait for Bella in the car. As she turns to leave, Bella notices that Gunilla is wearing the necklace that is the twin of her own, the one Aar got for them both.

She goes upstairs and turns off the computer, puts it in her room under the mattress. Now that she knows how to get in, there will be time to venture further later. She locks the bedroom door, shuts off the lights, sets the alarm, and locks the door to the house.

—

On the way to the shopping center, Gunilla speaks of her own delight at having met Bella. “Only I wish the circumstances were different,” she says.

“It can’t be helped.”

Indeed, Gunilla says, they almost met once.

“When was that?” asks Bella.

“Remember when you came to spend a few days with Aar in Istanbul?” Gunilla continues without waiting for a confirmation. “I was due to arrive from Stockholm two hours after he escorted you to the airport for your departure. He dropped you off and waited for me to arrive.”

Secretive Aar! “I was there when he bought that necklace,” Bella says.

“And did he tell you to whom he was giving it?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

“You were not curious enough, you mean?”

“He was a very private man, Aar,” Bella says carefully. “I think you too would have found it unbecoming to ask him questions of that nature if you had known and loved him as much as I knew and loved him.”

There is a silence, a silence that indicates that they have arrived at a sort of T junction in their conversation, no way forward, only to the sides.

Gunilla says, “How have the children been?”

“We’re okay when it’s just us,” says Bella. “But as Sartre says, ‘Hell is other people.’ When others are around us, there is turbulence.”

As if intuiting which “others” Bella is referring to, Gunilla says, “By the way, we had a three-way conference call at Valerie’s insistence, involving me, Valerie, and the Ugandan lawyer representing her. She wanted to enlist our help in a new idea she has: a trust in the name and for the benefit of the children, to be set up with UN help. Naturally, she suggested that she, as the surviving parent, be appointed as the trustee. She spoke at length about her business savvy, managing what amounts to millions of rupees — not that millions of rupees is that much.”

Bella says nothing, wondering to herself why Gunilla thinks this will be of interest to her. But, as a Swede and a UN bureaucrat, she is just being thorough. Or at least Bella hopes that is the reason.

“And you know what I also found out today?”

“What?”

Gunilla is pleased with herself. “The penny has finally dropped. Valerie has no legal right to the children or to Aar’s estate. One: because their marriage in England was out of community of property. Two: by abandoning the family, Valerie did not share a conjugal bed with Aar for several years, which is one way of defining matrimony. Three: you and the children, as per the will in the files, are the only heirs — and her name appears nowhere in it. Valerie knows it too. So this is her new iron in the fire, this trust fund. Apparently, she has charged the Ugandan with the task of getting it up and running.”

“Need we bother ourselves with any of this?” asks Bella.

“Not really,” says Gunilla. “Unless out of generosity you wish to involve her in a trust fund for the children — and I see no reason why — or you allow her as co-custodian, which I doubt is wise, given what you’ve told me so far. This is what I think personally.”

At the entrance to the mall, there is a police checkpoint. Gunilla’s vehicle is subjected to a thorough inspection by several plainclothesmen and some armed men in army uniform. When at last they park the car and enter the supermarket, it is getting near closing time. They divide Bella’s list, and Gunilla goes to get produce and drinks, while Bella gets everything else. Bella gets to the checkout counter in twenty minutes, as planned. Gunilla arrives a few minutes later.

“I know,” says Bella, “that it is never easy to shop on behalf of someone you do not know well. And we have the additional burden of shopping for two teenagers whose habits neither of us knows well either.”

As they drive away, Bella feels triumphant, as if she has accomplished a great feat. Gunilla says, “Having no children of my own, I can imagine how daunting it is to have this new responsibility.”

“Believe me, I’ve gone shopping with them when they were younger,” Bella says, “and without them was easier! At least when Valerie was around. Later, Aar set stern terms with them before they so much as entered a shop. Children are easy when they know where the boundaries are.”

“Have you checked in with them at Fatima and Mahdi’s?” Gunilla asks.

“I am working on the assumption that if there are calls to be made then they should be the ones making them,” Bella says. “As a child, I discouraged my parents from meeting my playmates, believing they would embarrass me. So unless I hear otherwise, I won’t call. They’ll call me when they’re ready to come home.”

“They are lovely children,” Gunilla says.

“I hope you’ll get to meet them,” Bella says.

“I have met them twice,” says Gunilla. “The first time when I went camping with them and Aar.”

Bella had forgotten. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Of course you did. Forgive me for having forgotten. Maybe we’ll do that again,” she adds softly. “I mean, camp.”

“I’d like that very much,” says Gunilla.

Bella feels that if the difference between formality and familiarity is made obvious by a speaker’s use of tu or vous in French or tu or Lei in Italian, then she and Gunilla have now gone beyond addressing each other formally and can assume they share amity, a closeness born out of mutual trust and potential friendship.

And suddenly Bella’s imagination is flying ahead into a future with the children — one in which Gunilla reencounters the children, but not at a restaurant or on a trip, but at a proper meal in that kitchen, where no one has cooked regularly for months. Surely Aar, who had to look after his children on top of traveling a great deal and often working late into the night, had neither the energy nor the desire to entertain. Her mind races with plans to explore the country with the children and learn to love it with them and think of it as her own. She will organize camping trips, visits to places of interest in the suburbs of Nairobi. She’ll encourage them to improve their Swahili and think of themselves as citizens of Kenya.

Her thoughts come back to the present as the car comes to a stop at the gate. The guard waves them in, and they park and bring their purchases into the house, sharing the intimate mundane task of putting them away in the fridge and pantry.

When they are finished, Bella offers Gunilla a drink. Compared to many Swedes Bella has known — and even compared to Valerie or Padmini — Gunilla is a modest drinker. It takes her a whole hour to finish her one glass of red wine. “I’ve learned from Aar to enjoy the pleasures of life and delight in the mercies that life has afforded us, always remembering that while we have plenty millions of others have nothing,” she says. “So what’s the hurry? Take it easy. Life is in no rush, so why rush?”

Bella recognizes her brother through and through in this sentiment. “How true!” she says, finding herself once again near tears.

“Since I met Aar,” Gunilla continues, “I no longer drink hard liquor, and I no longer take even wine when I am alone; I do that only in company and only after work. This modest drinking is rather uncommon among Nordic expatriates, you might have noticed,” she says with a smile. “Those among the UN staff who have seen me in Aar’s company say, ‘What next?’”

“What do they mean, ‘What next?’”

“They are wondering if the next time we meet, I’ll be wearing the hijab,” Gunilla says. “I tell them, ‘Don’t be daft,’ because they are daft. After all, Aar was a thoroughly secular man, cosmopolitan in his temperament, very modern in his thinking, soft-spoken and unassumingly humble.”

Now it is Gunilla’s turn to tear up. She rummages in her handbag for a tissue but finds none. Bella looks around, frustrated at how difficult it is to find even ordinary things in an unfamiliar house, especially one in which teenagers live. Gunilla says, “Pardon me,” and she is gone for a few minutes. When she returns, she is carrying a large packet of tissues.

“And here is something for you, Bella, dear,” she says.

At first Bella thinks Gunilla means the tissues. And then she sees that she is holding out an intricately wrapped package firmly sealed with tape. Bella receives it with both hands.

“What is it? What’s in it?” she asks, thrilled and surprised.

“It is a gift from me to you,” says Gunilla. “Open it.”

“I love gifts,” says Bella.

She is so eager to see what it is that she tugs at the tape impatiently. But the tape is stubborn, and she is about to resort to her teeth when Gunilla has the presence of mind to get up and fetch a pair of scissors, whose mysterious location she clearly knows well.

Bella gazes down at the gift, remembering a line from a poem by Apollinaire: “La joie venait toujours après la peine.” It’s a collection of photographs: Aar with friends at a party; Aar with Gunilla and the children camping; Aar in Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Burma; Aar with Gunilla in Istanbul. Bella has never seen any of them before. And they are good, very good, every single one of them.

“They’re Aar’s,” says Gunilla. “I’ve put them together for you and the children.”

“Grazie, carissima Gunilla!”

She receives the present with out-and-out joy, appreciative of the time and thought Gunilla has put into arranging them in an album and giving it to her and the children.

Bella embraces Gunilla, who says suddenly, “That reminds me. We had a phone call earlier today at the office from an elderly Italian lady. She said her name was Marcella and that she’d been ringing every UN office in Nairobi trying to reach someone who knew you.”

Bella sits up with a worried look. “Maybe Marcella called me on my Italian mobile number, which has been turned off since my arrival here. And Marcella hates e-mails so we’ve never communicated that way. We always use the telephone. That is typical Marcella, seventy-five and still volunteering in a Rome hospital. And you know what? She delivered me. Anyhow, what message did she leave?”

“She said to tell you, ‘Come mai ti sei perduta?’”

Bella asks Gunilla, “Do you know what that means?”

“My Italian isn’t perfect, but I thought she was telling you that you should be getting in touch with her. You’re lost or something, perduta? No?”

Relieved, Bella relaxes. She will call Marcella in the morning. And now Gunilla reverts to more Swedish ways. They chat and drink some more as if one or the other of them were going to go away at the break of dawn, never to be seen again. Gunilla promises that each glass will be her last, but they keep unearthing memories and anecdotes about Aar that they want to share. They page through the album together, Aar’s photos inspiring further recollections.

Eventually, they are too exhausted to talk, and Bella offers Gunilla a place to sleep, but Gunilla declines. “No,” she says. “I’m sober enough, and tomorrow I have to work. I’ll call you to let you know I got home okay.”

“Till tomorrow, then,” says Bella.

Later Bella starts to retrieve Aar’s computer from under the mattress, but she can’t bear the notion of any more incursions into his privacy tonight. Granted, she knows many things about him that no one else knows, but it is also increasingly evident to her that there are many, many things he did not tell her and that there are even things he didn’t want her to know.

She leaves the laptop where it is and goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Just as she comes out of the bathroom, Gunilla rings. She has arrived safely, thank you. And with relief in her mind, Bella sets the alarm and goes to sleep.