The Watcher

17

Since Leo went home, I’ve felt increasingly wound up. Something is on the move inside me. Some sort of change is either coming or has already occurred. After having wandered around as if in a trance for the last month, empty and indifferent, it’s like I’m waking up. Thoughts and feelings that remained at a distance before now rise to the surface and unsettle me. I get nothing done, but the hours somehow pass anyway.

When evening comes, Veronica shows up in the kitchen and starts cooking. For once her hair isn’t up in her characteristic high ponytail but is down over her shoulders. She’s wearing a dark-red sleeveless dress, and her lips are painted a similar color. She’s always elegant, but tonight she appears to have taken it to a new level. I imagine that the Storm family is expecting visitors, but in the end, Philip is the only one who has dinner with Veronica. There’s no sign of Leo, but his words still echo in the back of my mind, from his story about the purse being thrown over the bridge railing into the dark eddies below: There are worse things I could tell you—much worse.

Veronica opens the oven door and takes out a casserole dish that she places on the table. While Philip helps himself to the food, she pours wine into their glasses. The atmosphere seems romantic—the best possible conditions—and yet something goes wrong. It happens so fast. One moment they’re sitting there eating and talking, and the next Veronica bursts into tears. True, I can’t see her tears, but there’s no mistaking her body language. Her hands alternately wipe her nose and eyes. At first Philip sits perfectly still and stares at his wife. Then he turns his chair toward her and awkwardly puts his arm around her shoulders. She shakes him off, hastily gets up from the table, and runs out of the room. She doesn’t come back. Philip is left alone. He sits there twisting his napkin in his hands.

And in the darkness in the house across from theirs, I sit with my light off, a shadow among shadows. What I just witnessed actually wasn’t all that surprising, a normal dinner. A normal marital argument. But my sense is otherwise. It feels as if I’m onto something, something unpleasant, something frightening. I blink, and then there’s that black fire in Veronica’s eyes as she watches Philip walking away, the rage or hatred or whatever it is that he doesn’t turn around and discover. Maybe he suspects it, though.

That night I wander between the living room and the kitchen as usual. Strange feelings pulse through my body. The house across from me is dark and silent, and I stare at the façade, try to picture Veronica, Philip, and Leo in their beds. But when I picture the sleeping Veronica before me, she suddenly opens her eyes and stares straight into mine. As I watch, she gets up and slowly walks around the large double bed, a phantom in white. She doesn’t make a sound. Philip doesn’t hear her footsteps as she approaches.

I take a step forward, want to yell Watch out, but no sound comes out of my throat. Instead it’s as if my forward motion causes me to be sucked closer, into Veronica, and flung around in what’s pulsing and roaring through her veins. Everything that isn’t visible from the outside, everything she’s holding back, I feel all of it, I’m suddenly privy to it all.

All of a sudden I’m standing in their kitchen. Leo is there with me, and I reach out to run my hand over his hair. It’s a motherly gesture, and I realize that I’m his mom. But Leo ducks when I bring my hand over his head, and then I’m myself again. My own childless self. There’s a tingling in my fingertips. The tingling becomes an ache, a hopeless longing. It wasn’t meant for you, a voice says. It’s my voice, but the mouth that forms the words is my sister’s. Then it’s not just the moving lips but also the voice that belongs to my sister. You know, it is possible to live a happy life without children. I start crying, and someone reaches out to comfort me. At first I think they’re my sister’s arms wrapped around my back, then I realize that it’s Mama who’s here with me. Then I’m crying even more.

My mother embraces me, holds me, is my safe haven. I can’t believe it’s really her, that she’s back with me, so I cautiously disengage and lean back to look at her face. And there she is, my mother, bathed in a weak light, but otherwise the spitting image. She looks like she did long before her illness broke her down, the way she did that time all those years ago when she took my frail, obstinate body into her lap and whispered that I wasn’t alone, that everything would be all right, that she would never let me go.

Then I notice the shadow next to us, the shadow of someone twisting away from us, or maybe mostly from me, and I know that it’s Papa. I know that he’s leaving, even then, and when I turn back to Mama again, she’s lying in her bed, sick and gaunt. Work is the best medicine, she and my sister say in unison. Then Mama is gone, but someone is still lying in the bed. It’s Philip Storm.

He’s asleep and doesn’t notice Veronica Storm coming closer and closer. She stops by the head of the bed and stares at him. Her face is pale, her mouth a tense line. Then she raises her arm, and something flashes in her hand, something cold and sharp. Kitchen shears? Or a knife? I gasp, and she looks up. Our eyes meet, and she understands that I am there with her. It’s going to happen. Not now, not like this, I hear her think. But soon.

You’re not going to be able to stop me.

Her voice is in my throat. Her words come out of my mouth. I realize, too late, that Veronica has led me straight into a trap, that I walked into her darkness with my eyes open. Now she’s chained me, snared me, and there’s no turning back from here. From here there is only a slow, sucking motion down into the mire. Dark sludge rises around me, getting ready to swallow me, forcing itself into every pore, eventually making it into my mouth and my eyes. I can’t breathe anymore. It’ll be over soon. Soon it will all be over. If that’s what I want.

I wake up because I’m screaming.