The Watcher

20

My sister texts me right after Leo has gone home. She texts, and then texts again. I see her name on the display but don’t answer, don’t even read what she wrote. So she calls instead.

“Are you OK, Elena? Are we OK, you and me, I mean…”

She keeps talking, but I only hear isolated words. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from far away. Everything about her seems as distant as she did in the dream last night. It’s only been a few days since we saw each other, and yet so much has happened. I should tell her about Peter’s text. Or that I’ve started a tentative new writing project. But for some reason, that feels insurmountable.

“Uh, hello?” she says after a while. “You don’t even seem like you’re listening to what I’m saying. How are you actually doing?”

Leo’s parting words a while ago did something to me, caused my thoughts about his essay to start spinning again.

“They bought him rabbits,” I mutter. “But then she just—”

“Rabbits? Bought rabbits for whom?”

“For Leo.”

I walk closer to the window and stand beside the table.

“What are you talking about? Who’s Leo?”

I tell her about the family in the house across from me. Explain that things don’t seem right between Philip and Veronica. And that Leo is a good guy, but he’s having a hard time. My sister’s confused silence switches into a cautiously positive tone.

“So you’ve met some new people? That’s a step in the right direction. And other than that… how are you doing otherwise?”

But I can’t answer, can only think about the rabbits, about Leo’s raw, uncompromising way of describing what happened the summer the Storm family rented an apartment somewhere by the Mediterranean.

On this one occasion, they visited a market, where, to their horror, they saw rabbits crammed into crowded cages. The animals were out in the broiling sun with no access to water. And no one seemed to care about their suffering since they were intended for slaughter. Leo started crying and wasn’t able to stop when he saw how they were desperately crawling all over each other inside the cages. He refused to leave, so his parents bought him two of the rabbits, let him bring them back to the apartment and keep them as pets. He loved those rabbits, loved holding their soft little bodies on his lap, and every day he was grateful that his parents had helped him save them from the harsh fate that would have awaited otherwise.

Then their vacation was coming to an end, and it soon would be time to travel back home to Sweden. The rabbits couldn’t come. His father was clear about that. Maybe they could give them away to someone else? Or simply set them free? Leo cried and protested, but deep down inside, he started preparing himself to separate from his furry friends. The days passed, and their return home grew closer, but still no concrete decision had been made about the rabbits. And then, on the last morning, it happened.

Leo was awakened by Veronica walking into his room. She lifted the rabbits out of the cage and carried them away. “Mom,” he said, “what are you doing?” But she didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to hear. He tossed his covers aside and ran after her out onto the balcony. It was already too late by the time he got there. He saw his mother fling first one and then the other rabbit way out over the railing. Their bodies sailed through the air in a wide arc before they made a steep dive for the ground four stories below. Leo didn’t know, he wrote, if he’d actually heard the smack as the little bodies smashed into the street or if that was a reconstruction after the fact.

Screaming, he rushed back to his room, slammed his door, and buried his head under his pillow. When his mother came to apologize, he would refuse to look at her. He’d scream that he could never, ever forgive her—that he hated her. He longed to focus all his seething rage at her. But she didn’t come. No one came.

What happened instead was that his father woke up and found out what had happened. Leo remembered his mother’s voice as only a mumble out there while his father’s voice grew louder and louder. At first Leo thought his father gave his mother the telling off that he himself wanted to give her, but then he was able to discern the words and he realized that his father didn’t care in the least about the rabbits. He was upset for completely different reasons. “What were you thinking, Veronica? You could have injured someone. Don’t you get that? A body falling from this kind of height—do you have any idea how heavy it is?”

The last thing Leo remembered before he squeezed the pillow over his head to keep from hearing any more of his father’s screaming: “Do you have any idea what you could have just done? You could have killed someone!”

“Elena? Did you say something?” my sister says.

I’m staring at the watering can on the windowsill, my breathing labored.

The purse being flung into the river.

The rabbits being hurled off the balcony.

“How are you doing? You’re breathing hard, like you just went for a run or something.”

Philip with the red-haired woman. Veronica’s tears at dinner the other night. Her dark look as she watched Philip walk away through the yard. And her ferocious scissors attack on that bouquet, as if it were a living body—someone she could picture in front of her, someone she wanted to rip to shreds, to annihilate.

“Hello? Elena!”

My sister raises her voice, forcing her way into the tumult in my head. If she were here, she would take me by the shoulders and shake me, demand an answer. But she isn’t here with me. No one is.

“I’m worried about him.”

“Worried about whom, the neighbor boy, Leo? Was that his name?”

I don’t respond. My eyes go to the second-floor window, the one above the Storm family’s kitchen. Even though it’s not particularly late, the curtains are already drawn. They may have been that way all day. I pinch one of the ferns on the windowsill, tugging on a leaf. Carefully at first, then more and more roughly.

“You seem really interested in that family, Elena. I just hope you’re also taking care of yourself. I mean, I did mention a few things the last time we talked… I can imagine that might have shaken you up, and I never meant to…”

I let go of the frond as if it had burned me. The anorexia you suffered from as a teenager. Mama told me.

“We’ll see each other on Friday. We can talk more then. Unless you want me to come over before then, of course. I’d be happy to do that if you want.”

“No,” I manage to say. “No, no. Friday’s great.”

I wrap up the conversation and hang up. I stare at those closed curtains on the second floor of the Storms’ house until my eyes hurt, then I stare a little more. What actually is going on over there?

I start up my computer and open a browser. The name Veronica Storm produces an astonishing number of hits. The only definitely right one is the home page of some yoga studio a couple of blocks away, where she apparently works, and then a link for a law-student alumni group. So, like her husband, Veronica is a lawyer, but no job at a fancy law firm for her. Instead she ended up working at the front desk in a yoga studio. What’s that all about? Because I assume that’s not a typical ambition for your average law student. Maybe something happened along the way; maybe Veronica veered too far into the darkness and ran afoul of the law, did something that ruled out admission to the bar once and for all?

There are worse things I could tell you—much worse.

Cold fingers feel their way up my spine, sending a shiver over my skin.

My email is open, and out of the corner of my eye I notice that I have a message. Without thinking, I click over to check it. Only after the message is open do I realize who sent it. My eyes widen and scan past the introductory lines. It says that he knows we decided we’d only get in touch if anything happened. It also says that that’s why he’s writing, because something actually has happened. My heart is racing. There’s more—several more paragraphs of text. But I have to read the beginning again, have to prepare myself.

I walk around the kitchen a few times, drink a glass of water. And, as I sit back down in front of my computer, I see Philip come strolling home through the yard. I follow him with my eyes until he disappears into the house across from me. After that I turn my attention back to the screen. I read the rest of the email, and it feels like Peter walked in the door and is standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders. He’s waiting to hold me, waiting for me to push back against him and lay my cheek against his chest. A puzzle with only two pieces.

I read it again and again.

I jump out of my chair, ready to throw myself into Peter’s arms. The sense of his presence is so strong. But when I turn around, there are only twilight shadows in the corner. The room is empty, and I’m alone—totally, totally alone.