The Watcher

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.”

“I… What do you mean?”

She adjusts her position and pulls her legs in toward her body so her knees are pointed at the ceiling.

“To begin with, it’s the food. It doesn’t seem like you eat anything. I mean, your clothes are practically falling off you. You were already skinny before, but now… you must have lost almost twenty pounds.”

Fifteen, I think. Fifteen pounds.

“It doesn’t feel good to barge into your life like this and sort of… question things. The last thing I want is for you to feel like you’re being monitored, but at the same time, I hope you understand that with your history… someone has to say something. It’s my responsibility. Who else is going to do it?”

My sister’s eyes make the briefest contact with mine, and I feel shooting pains under my skin. There’s a buzzing sound over by the window. I can’t see from here but assume a fly must have flown in the window by mistake.

“Hey,” I say. “I get what you’re saying, and it means a lot to me that you care. It really does. But I don’t have an eating disorder, I promise.”

She looks at me in disbelief, and I fling up my hands.

“You’ve never heard of people losing their appetite when they’re going through a difficult period in their life? That’s actually quite common, even, you know?”

“That’s just it,” she says after a while. “I understand that your separation from Peter has been hard on you. And that it must have been a rough period for the two of you before you decided to live apart. Still, we’ve hardly talked about how things are going, have we? And is that my fault? Was I not there enough for you early on, not asking the right questions?”

I look down at the stack of paper in my lap. We don’t usually talk like this, that’s true. I feel unprepared, even though deep down inside I knew that this would happen sooner or later. I think about what my sister had said to me a week ago, before I turned off my phone. We really need to talk—you and me—for real. And then I think about my response. How I suspected that something was wrong between her and Walter. I feel flushed.

“I know how much you want to have children,” my sister continues. “And of course I understand that it was hard on you that it was taking so long, that nothing came of it in spite of all your hopes. But I never suspected that it was such a big problem that it would result in you guys separating.”

I squirm, a gesture that would normally have caused my sister to change topics, but not now. This time she’s latched on to something and seems to have decided to follow it to the end.

“I know that I called at some point and asked. I could tell that everything wasn’t the way it should be, but you brushed aside all talk of anything personal, and you would start talking about renovations in your stairwell or a deadline or some other irrelevant thing. And then right after that, you suddenly said you guys were separating, just like that.”

My sister looks meditative.

“You’re keeping me at arm’s length, Elena. And I’m letting you do it. Or, I have been letting you up to this point. I thought that if I just waited and was patient, that sooner or later you’d open up to me. And I’ve been waiting for…”

Her voice breaks a little.

“I’ve been waiting to matter to you.”

Her words wash over me like a warm wave. I wish that I had the strength to look her in the eyes, that I could say the same thing, but I can’t. The fly keeps bumping into the window behind us. Someone should get up and swat it, but neither of us moves.

Suddenly my sister’s hands fly up to cover her face.

“It feels like I’ve let her down.”

Her words are muffled, filtering through her fingers.

“What do you mean? Who did you let down?”

She removes her hands from her face again.

“Just before she… before the end. Mama asked me to take care of you.”

My cheeks feel tight.

“What?”

My sister studies her fingers. Her voice is quiet now, tense. Just before she died, my mother expressly asked for my sister’s help. “Elena is going to need you,” she had said. “Promise me that you’ll take care of her.”

I shake my head, can’t believe what I’m hearing. Would Mama have asked my sister to promise something like that, asked her to be responsible for my future well-being, after everything that had happened? When I say that it sounds unfair and not at all like Mama, my sister shrugs.

“You were always her favorite.”

I start to protest, but she brushes it off.

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’ve come to terms with it. I did that a long time ago, actually. She and I were really very different. You two, on the other hand, shared everything in common having to do with books and reading. But there was something else, too. It was as if there were some invisible bond between the two of you, as if you two knew something that no one else did.”

It’s grown quiet over at the window now. The fly must have tired itself out. I rock from side to side. Finally I get up. My joints are stiff.

“There’s one thing you should know,” I say, stretching one leg at a time. “No matter what Mama asked you to do, you’re not the one who failed.”

My sister watches me in silence.

“I didn’t want to be looked after. You said that yourself. I kept you at arm’s length. How are you going to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped?”

Without waiting for a response, I walk over to the window. The fly is slowly crawling around along the bottom of the window.

“What have you been up to?” my sister says.

I turn around and follow my sister’s gaze to the stack of pages in my hand.

“Nothing. Or maybe…”

“Did you write something? Is that what you’ve been doing since we last saw each other?”

I wait a few seconds before nodding. My sister’s tired face brightens up.

“So you’re back at it? Wonderful. That’s exactly what you need. I really believe that.”

“I… it’s not really like my other—”

“I’d love to read it,” my sister eagerly interrupts, “and tell you what I think, give you feedback like I used to do. You used to say that I had a flair for the dramatic arts.”

As she continues speaking, I set my stack of papers down on the armchair, on top of my sister’s coat, then open the window wide and help the fly find its way out.

The sky is light gray, and the pavement outside is still wet. The rain has rinsed everything clean. The air pouring into the room is cool and fresh, and I draw it deep into my lungs.

I turn around and look at my sister. Am I ready? I have to be ready. And yet at the same time: Only a little while for this, a little while left with her.

“Do you… want something to eat?”

My sister gives me one of her wry smiles.

“Oh my god,” she says. “I thought you’d never ask.”