The Watcher

45

She stands beside me as I get up. She doesn’t help me but seems ready to step in if I should fall. Then I shuffle into the cabin after her, step over the threshold straight into a large living room. It’s dark and very cold. The way it is in a cabin where no one’s turned on the heat, where no one’s been for a long time. The realization hits me yet again: No one is here.

Veronica flips a switch, and the room is instantly bathed in light. She shows me the way to the bathroom and takes out the first-aid kit and a half-filled package of gauze.

“Here,” she says, handing me some gauze. “I don’t think you’re going to need stitches. It doesn’t look like it.”

I lean over the sink and start cleaning my face. Veronica disappears but soon returns with a long-sleeved T-shirt and a fleece jacket as well as a bag for me to put my dirty clothes into.

“We must wear about the same size,” she says, without making eye contact.

Then she closes the door and leaves me alone. I clean myself up in the sink, carefully washing around the gash on my forehead. It’s swollen and tender, but I quickly determine that Veronica is probably right. The wound is wide but not particularly deep. And it’s already started to clot over, as I’d thought. When I come back out, wearing her clothes and with a bandage on my forehead, she’s sitting in an armchair in front of a coffee table with a glass of whiskey.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” she says.

She shakes her glass gently in her hand, and the ice clinks. At first I felt OK, but now I notice how weak my legs are. The dizziness is lurking somewhere.

“You don’t know me. At all. And yet you let yourself get caught up in Leo’s anxiety, so much so that you drove out here. Can you explain why?”

Just then the room does a somersault before my eyes, and my field of vision flickers. I hear Veronica’s voice more distantly now. It tells me to lie down on the sofa. She guides me there, and I sink into the cushions. I close my eyes for a long while, and when I look up again there’s a glass of orange juice on my side of the table. Somehow I manage to lean forward, take a couple of sips, and then fall back onto the sofa again.

Veronica crosses one leg over the other and takes a drink of her whiskey. Now her face shows no sign of fear. Maybe because I’m so weak. Or because she knows the police will be here soon.

“Tell me. How did you end up becoming worried as well?”

My first thought is that I don’t need to answer, that I don’t owe her an explanation. Then I think about the drive out here and how I ran across the lawn after her, of the terror in her eyes when she turned around and realized I was right behind her. The moment when I realized that neither Philip nor the redhead were here.

I lean forward and drink a little more juice.

“It was… it was something I saw.”

Veronica doesn’t take her eyes off me. Close up like this, she’s almost unimaginably beautiful.

“Something you saw?”

I open my mouth and hear myself telling her about that morning, what I witnessed from my kitchen, the flowers and the scissors, the hacking, chopping, and tearing, that tattered bouquet and the subsequent screaming and crying.

At first Veronica looks pale and then flushed.

“Oh, that,” she says. “Yes, that was… I appreciate how that must have looked strange, strange and a little… crazy, maybe.”

She raises her glass to her lips but immediately lowers it again.

“That wasn’t like me at all, but there is an explanation, you know.”

Then she tells me that she was supposed to go away that weekend. It had been planned for ages, and Philip had promised he would stay home with Leo. But the day she was supposed to leave, he told her that he had to go on a business trip, a meeting that had been set at the last minute, an important client that needed him.

“I objected, said that he knew how much I was looking forward to getting away. But he went anyway, even though he knew it meant that I’d be forced to cancel my plans. I was so incredibly angry. I guess I sort of lost control a little.”

She brings the glass to her lips again, and this time she drinks most of its contents. I stare at the hollows in her neck, watch the skin moving as she swallows. It’s as if something has been triggered within me, something I can’t stop.

“Then, just two or three days after that, I saw something else, too. You were eating dinner. You started crying and ran out of the kitchen. After that you didn’t come—”

Veronica sets her almost empty glass on the coffee table between us with a little bang.

“What is this, some kind of hobby of yours, sitting at your kitchen table and watching us? Is that what I’m meant to understand?”

I try not to tense up, try to sound honest and apologetic at the same time.

“It’s happened. A couple of times.”

“Why? Don’t you have a life of your own?”

Her tone is sharp.

“No, I guess I don’t. Not since my husband and I separated.”

That stops her.

“Oh” is all she says.

My headache returns, and I close my eyes. Then I happen to think of my sister, who’s still at my place, waiting. I have to get hold of her and tell her I’m OK. I feel my pockets but can’t locate my phone. Then I remember the bag with my bloody clothes. My vest is in there, too. My phone must be in one of the pockets. I sit up and reach for the bag, then rummage around in it until I find what I’m looking for. I type a quick text to my sister and put the phone away. Surely I’m feeling a little better now that I’ve rested for a bit? If I just take something for my headache, I’ll probably be able to drive home.

“I should, uh, I should probably be…”

Then I remember and carefully turn my head to peer out the window. The road through the woods out there is dark and empty.

“Shouldn’t the police be here by now?”

But Veronica doesn’t seem to hear me. She’s busy refilling her whiskey glass.

“Can I ask why?” she says, putting the cork back into the bottle.

“Why what?”

“Why did you separate?”

I squirm.

“We’re not divorced. It’s a trial separation.”

“A trial separation? What does that mean?”

“Well, the idea is for us to spend three months apart and then decide how to proceed, if we’re going to proceed.”

Veronica carefully taps her wedding ring against the glass in her hand.

“And?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What do you think will happen? Are you going to save the marriage or get divorced?”

Something flickers through me. Please come home. I love you, always have, always will.

“I don’t know,” I say, looking down.

Something in the bag by my feet beeps, and I realize that must be my sister responding to the text I just sent her. My temples are throbbing. I don’t know what to do, don’t know what’s expected of me. I don’t feel sure of anything anymore.

Veronica’s voice reaches me, tears me away from my own thoughts.

“…about my wanting to go back to school, that’s why we’re fighting, Philip and me. Because he can’t get it into his head how important it is to me, that I’m being serious.”

She cocks her head to the side.

“You know what I mean?”

I lean back on the sofa, then forward again.

“Yes… I… maybe.”

Veronica takes another swig of the whiskey.

“You know,” she says, “I left the university with only one year to go before I earned my degree.”

She was pregnant with Leo and thought she could finish the last few classes after her maternity leave. But the years passed, and it never seemed to be the right time. It never worked, either because Leo was too little or—usually—because Philip’s career wouldn’t permit it. She took various part-time jobs and waited for it to be her turn.

“‘Your turn will come, honey. Your turn will come.’ It became a sort of mantra. I don’t really know when he stopped repeating that—maybe when Leo was five or six. Something happened at that time. I think Philip sort of got used to having me stay home and started to really enjoy it. But by then, I wasn’t doing very well at all. I’d lost all my energy and was… well, I simply wasn’t a good mother. Thank goodness Leo was little. He doesn’t remember very much from that age.”

I ask if she has anything I can take for my headache, and Veronica brings me a pill and a glass of water. She’s a good way through another glass of whiskey.

These days, she says, Philip sings a completely different tune. He encourages her to explore her creativity, find her own way of expressing herself. And god knows, she’s tried. Watercolors, pencil drawing, silversmithing… you name it, she’s tried it. But something has always gotten in the way. The paintbrushes broke, the tongs she was supposed to use for silversmithing disappeared.

“At first I didn’t understand why, but then, well, it was obvious! It was never the intention for me to do any of those things. I don’t need to explore my creativity. I need to finish my degree. I don’t want a hobby—I want a job! I want to do the work I went to school for. There’s nothing wrong with yoga, but if I need to listen to another ‘om’ during work hours, I’ll—”

Veronica glances quickly in my direction. Her eyes have grown foggy, and she laughs, a hard, joyless sound.

“Maybe it’d be best if I didn’t finish that thought.”

She explains that she signed up for a low-residency distance-learning program, a way of getting going on her degree again. It was supposed to start with a weekend seminar with required attendance, but that was the weekend she wasn’t able to get away. Now, she apparently has to wait at least a year for the next seminar to come along.

“The worst thing is that Philip doesn’t understand how much that class meant to me. He can tell I was disappointed, but he thinks he can make it up to me by giving me things, as if I need more earrings or spa visits or surprise parties.”

There’s another ping from my bag. I hesitate, but Veronica is so involved in her account that it would seem impolite to pull out my phone. It’s as if someone pushed a button and now she has to get everything she’s been holding back off her chest, everything that has apparently built up over a number of years. If there’s anyone who can understand what that feels like, it’s me.

“Anyway. So he took me to this spa last weekend, and then I told him that I don’t want any more lavish birthday presents, that what I need from him is something completely different. I really thought I’d gotten through to him, thought he had finally understood, but then I found out that he was planning a surprise party for me here at the cabin. One of our mutual acquaintances accidentally let the cat out of the bag. Philip had apparently asked her to help arrange all the practical details.”

A mutual acquaintance. I picture Philip and the redhead: them disappearing into a building’s front door, leaning over a restaurant table, making plans and chatting about the cabin. A surprise party? How could I have been so wrong?

Veronica has gotten up now and is pacing back and forth in the room.

“He was trying to be nice, he said, when I backed him up against the wall. But I don’t get what he was thinking. I mean, given how badly I’ve been doing lately, how disappointed I’ve been in him… how could he think that the solution was a party? It wasn’t until I said he should scrap the party that he understood how serious this was. Or maybe it was when I said I needed some space to think, that I wanted to come up here on my own for the weekend.”

I empty the juice glass and then pull my hands inside the sleeves of the fleece jacket.

“Are you cold? The radiator should have started warming the place up by now.”

I heave myself forward and sit on the very edge of the sofa.

“If you’re planning to report me to the police for something…”

“Pfff,” she says, reaching up to finger one of her earrings.

I look up at her questioningly.

“I didn’t know if I should call the police or the ambulance. And then I realized who you are, that you’re a neighbor, someone Leo knows. And I thought that… well, maybe we didn’t need to involve the police after all. But all that blood on the deck… well, that would… maybe that would be hard to explain. And you’re totally fine now, right?”

Our eyes meet. If I’m not mistaken, she looks like she’s feeling a little guilty.

“So you… never called the police?”

She shakes her head.

“Leo likes you. True, I’ve been a little distracted lately, but I’ve gleaned that much, at any rate.”

Leo. I screw up my eyes. There’s something I’m looking for, the answer to a question that I’m not really sure how to ask.

“We’ve kind of neglected him a bit, both of us. Philip and I. He’s always done such a good job of looking after himself. It’s easy to forget that he…”

When I look up again, Veronica’s eyes are trained on some invisible point in the distance. Then she blinks and sets down her glass.

“I’m going to deal with this,” she says decisively. “I’ll talk to him.”

I think of the pen marks on Leo’s neck, of his stolen shoes, and of all the other things. I carefully nod in response, say that that sounds good. Then I support myself with my hands and get up off the sofa. We stand facing each other for a few awkward seconds. Then Veronica reaches her hand out to me and I take it. She’s as warm as I am cold.

“You’ll get your clothes back as soon as I’ve washed them.”

She says there’s no hurry, that we’re sure to run into each other again in the future. Otherwise, she knows where I live, she adds with a wry smile.

On the way to my car, I take out my phone. My sister has sent two texts. Great that you’re OK, the first one reads. Let me know if anything comes up. PS: Respond with a NO if you DON’T want me to read your manuscript while you’re gone. There’s not much else to do here.

At first I think she’s kidding, then I remember. Her reminder of how she used to read through my writing. That I once told her she had a flair for the dramatic arts. I hold my breath and bring up her second text.