The Watcher

19

When I’m done reading, I stuff the pages back into the folder and close it. I need a few minutes to compose myself before I summon Leo back in. Should I treat this like a text, any old text, and evaluate it that way? Is that even possible given the atrocity of the memory it’s based on?

Leo comes back into the kitchen, and I can tell he’s trying to seem relaxed, but the tense lines around his mouth give him away. He has one of my writing handbooks in his hands, and before he has a chance to ask, I nod and say that’s fine, he can borrow it. Then I pull out the chair and tell him to sit down. There’s no reason to beat around the bush. I know how vulnerable it makes you feel to sit around waiting to hear what someone thinks about what you’ve written.

“It’s a powerful essay,” I say. “Very powerful. I was really moved, to be honest.”

Leo’s leg can’t stay still: His heel bounces up and down on the floor.

“You think I’m selling her out, that I’m making a mistake by writing about her like this?”

“I didn’t say that, but if I were your teacher and you turned in this essay, I would certainly wonder…”

Leo crosses his legs, right foot on left knee. There’s a nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“What would you wonder?”

“I’d wonder how you’re doing, how things are going for you, and maybe also… how she’s doing, your mother.”

Leo strokes his shin with his palm and avoids eye contact. There’s something worrying about the way he’s stroking his leg, and I think I’m on thin ice. That however I behave now, no matter what I say or don’t say, I’m risking making a mistake.

I glance down at the closed folder. Why did he want me to read this specific essay? Is this a cry for help? Why else would he invite me into his world, unreservedly reveal this kind of thing, the sort of thing one would normally hide?

Leo lifts his hand from his leg and pulls it through his hair.

“Obviously I have other memories, too. Maybe it would have been better if I’d picked a different one, something more cheerful.”

Then he starts telling me about a cabin where his family spent whole summers when he was little, a log cabin by a lake surrounded by woods. They swam and played there. His father took him hiking in the woods and taught him how to fish.

As he speaks, the discomfort gradually abates. What he says sets other thoughts in motion, elicits memories from my own childhood. Several summers in a row, my parents rented a cabin by a sandy beach on the other side of the sound. We drove there and Papa sang along to the music on the radio even though he didn’t know any of the lyrics. My sister and I laughed at him from the backseat. Mama smiled, and her hair fluttered in the wind as air rushed in through her rolled-down window. The cabin wasn’t that big, and my sister and I had to share a room, which neither of us minded. In the evenings, we barbecued and played games, and during the day, we hung out on the beach.

I remember that while my sister was swimming and Mama was lying on a blanket reading, my dad and I built a sandcastle. He was astoundingly good at it, showing me how you did everything from towers and domes to ring walls. When we came back out the next morning, our creations had been destroyed, wiped out by the high tide. We stood there staring, my dad and I, and I remember that I was afraid he would be sad, so I snuck my hand into his and wanted to say something nice. “It doesn’t matter, Elena,” he’d said. “That’s how the world is. Everything goes.” It was both beautiful and frightening at the same time, and I squeezed his hand harder. Little did I suspect then that there could be something prescient in his words, an omen that pertained to him, and to our whole family.

“Do you think I should have written about something else instead? Some cheerful memory from the cabin?”

I shake slightly, and the images of my own childhood fade away. I’m back in the kitchen with Leo.

“I don’t know,” I say, clasping my hands on my lap. “No one else can make that decision—only you. If we even have a choice, those of us who write. Some authors believe the story chooses them and not the other way around.”

Leo turns toward the window. His bangs hang down over the side of his face that’s turned toward me, and I can’t see his eyes.

“But it’s not like that for you, is it? You choose what you’re going to write, don’t you?”

He refers to some article he found online, an interview where I described my writing process: why I write, how I come up with my ideas, and that I usually take inspiration from the things going on around me.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “How did you find this article?”

“OK, maybe I googled you a little.”

“Googled me?”

“I’ve never lived next door to a real author before,” he says, blushing.

I don’t know how to react, neither to the words nor to the hint of admiration in his voice. I feel self-conscious, proud, and embarrassed, so I laugh. It’s as if something relaxes inside Leo, because he starts laughing, too.

When he stands up a little while later, I accompany him to the front hall and look on once again while he pushes his feet into his shoes by wiggling his heels back and forth. He pulls his hood up again, and I hand him the folder containing his essay. The laughter we just shared suddenly feels distant.

“Do you have a key today? Or do you think… Is your mom home from work?”

He pushes the hair off his forehead.

“My mom didn’t go to work today.”

“She didn’t?”

Leo shakes his head.

“Dad said she wasn’t feeling well and called in sick. He didn’t want to say any more than that, but I could tell something was up and… well, that she doesn’t exactly have the flu. It’s back.”

It? I furrow my brow.

“What? What’s back?”

He straightens up and clutches the folder with both hands.

“Right before that incident I wrote about. I mean, right before the part about the rabbits…”

As if he needed to remind me, as if the content of his essay weren’t already indelibly engraved. I nod.

“The period before that. My mom had been confined to bed for several weeks, kind of barely able to talk to anyone. It was just like that this morning. The bedroom door was ajar, and I saw her through the crack, lying in there with her back to the door. And before I came over here this afternoon, I stopped in at home, just to peek in on her. Either she was asleep and didn’t notice that I’d come in or she wasn’t up to rolling over. She was still lying in exactly the same position. As if she hadn’t moved at all the whole day.”

We look at each other. I don’t know what to say. There’s nothing I can say.

Leo shakes his bangs over his face and turns away.

“It’s so obvious,” he says. “She’s on her way into the darkness again.”