The Watcher

47

ELENA

It’s really late by the time I park my sister’s car on the street outside the yard. It’s Friday night, and I meet a group of dressed-up happy young people moving down the sidewalk. The group parts to let me through. I feel like a shadowy figure as I pass them, a dark spot in the middle of all that glitz and merriment.

The light is on in the Storms’ kitchen, and I see two people sitting across from each other at the table in there: Philip and Leo. I wonder what they’re talking about, wonder if Veronica’s precipitous departure forced a new and different type of conversation between father and son, one that will lead to something good.

I sent Leo a text before I left the cabin.

The response came right away.

I turn toward my house across from theirs, the one I will soon have spent half of my planned time in. Unlike the Storms’ home, none of the lights are on. My sister is somewhere in there, waiting. Maybe she fell asleep, although I doubt it. I haven’t called. I made do with texting her before I left Veronica. I wrote that I was on my way but didn’t respond to her question about reading the manuscript. Opening the front door, I wonder if she’s really read it. At any rate, I’ll tell her everything now, everything. I kick off my shoes, hang up my jacket, and call out hello. I don’t get an answer.

She’s sitting in the dark in the kitchen, in the same seat where I myself have spent so many hours. I didn’t see her from outside, but she must have seen me through the window. The stack of papers I printed out earlier today is sitting on the table in front of her. Even without any lights on, she notices my borrowed clothes and the bandage on my forehead and asks how I am, but her voice is somewhere else, lost in other thoughts.

I cautiously set the car key down on the counter. I don’t need to wonder anymore if she’s read it. Or if she understands the nature of what I’ve written.

“How far did you manage to read before you… understood?”

“Before I realized that the story was about you and Peter?”

I nod.

“Maybe the part about the… scar.”

I tense up and want to bring my hand to my abdomen. My fingertips twitch, but I resist the old, ingrained impulse. I don’t need to hide anymore. The truth is free. I have set it free.

“Although I had been told it was from an appendectomy. The barbed-wire-fence-when-you-were-a-kid explanation wouldn’t have worked on me.”

No, it wouldn’t have. My sister and I know all about each other’s childhoods, every accident, every scrape. That’s how close we were back then.

“Thomas,” she says now, “your first boyfriend. I hardly remember him. I think I only met him a couple of times.”

I shift my weight from foot to foot as she mentions his name.

“We were going to move in together. We had just decided that.”

My sister slowly shakes her head.

“I never had any idea that your relationship was so serious. I guess I thought it was one of those teenage things that would pass.”

She had lived abroad for so many years, moving back and forth between various places. It’s not so strange that she doesn’t remember every single detail in the life of her little sister, who’s six years younger. But it’s time for me to correct her about this specific part.

“I was a teenager when we started dating, but I was twenty-one when it ended.”

My sister’s eyes gleam. She is quiet for a while.

“And that thing Mama told me,” she said then, “about the anorexia. How does that fit into all this?”

I lean back against the counter.

“I stopped eating when I found out that Thomas was seeing someone else behind my back. More as a reflex than a conscious choice. I just didn’t have any appetite anymore. I lost a fair amount of weight, but it wasn’t anorexia. After what happened… after what I did and what I could have done. It was such a terrible disgrace in Mama’s eyes. She could say anything, just not the truth.”

My sister turns to the window. Perhaps we’re thinking about the same thing. Of the secret Mama had kept. And of what she chose to say instead. Perhaps my sister is also wondering why.

“You didn’t want her to tell the truth, not even to me.”

“Especially not to you.”

I wonder if my sister detests me now. Will she distance herself from me, just when we were starting to become close again?

“I mean, just look at how things turned out with Papa,” I add.

She turns on the kitchen chair, wondering what I mean. I explain that the relationship between Papa and me was never the same after that night when he and Mama came home earlier than expected and caught me in the front hall, sick and thirsty for revenge. Sure, he was present and involved in the beginning. He must have been. But then, once I recovered and returned to living, he pulled away, and I noticed that he had a hard time looking me in the eye. I don’t know if he was feeling fear or revulsion, and I don’t know if it was mostly the self-harm or the thought of what I was capable of doing to Thomas. I just know that the distance between us grew and grew.

“It was my fault, that he left so suddenly after Mama’s death, that he moved so far away. I’ve always known that, always felt guilty that your relationship with him also ran out into the sand. I was the one he was trying to get away from, but it was as if you—”

“Elena, you’re not responsible for an idiot acting like an idiot.”

The words push their way up, sticking in my throat.

“I’m sorry.” For what I did. For lying to you all these years.

Then she gets up and comes over to me, comes closer and closer until she’s standing right in front of me.

“It must have been so incredibly awful for you. I can hardly imagine it. I’m sure no one can. And when I think of everything you’ve been through… Without my having any clue, without my being able to be there for you.”

She wraps both arms around me and holds me, hugs me tight.

“That’s over now. From now on, you’re not alone anymore. Never again, for as long as I live.”

My emotions are all in a jumble inside me. My longing to sink into my sister’s embrace—to lean into her and release my tears—is strong, but something else is stronger. I carefully free myself from her hug.

“That’s not all,” I say. “I’ve done something else, something even more awful. If you’ve read the whole text, from beginning to end, then you know what kind of a person I am.”

“What I know,” my sister says resolutely, “is that you’re my sister. We’ll deal with one thing at a time, and right now you need to eat. Eating disorder or not, you’re skinny as a string bean, and it’s not healthy, Elena. People need to eat. Otherwise they die.”

She pushes me down onto a chair and takes some food out of the fridge, explains that she went shopping while I was out. There are cold cuts, several different types of cheese and olives, crackers and grapes. She evidently also picked up a bottle of wine. She must have gone shopping before she read my story, when she still thought we’d have a relatively normal Friday night once I returned. Now everything is all upside down. We both know that, but my sister is still soldiering on. She strikes a match, touching it to the wicks of a few tea lights and setting them on the table between us.

I look askance at her as she sets out plates and glasses. What is going on inside her? What does she think about everything she’s just read? She must have a thousand questions.

“I was about to tell Peter,” I mumble. “Right when Leo came over.”

My sister slices a few pieces of cheese and places them, along with a little ham and a couple of crackers, on a plate that she pushes over to me.

“You said that he’d been in touch, and something about an accident.”

She stuffs an olive into her mouth and then prepares a plate for herself. I stare at the food in front of me.

“To begin with… we tried to get pregnant. Yes, that was it. And we tried for a long time, but we didn’t decide to separate because of the infertility. You understand that now, right?”

She nods slightly and pours wine into my glass. I’m not planning to drink any of it, not until I’ve gotten everything off my chest that needs to be said. Somehow, I need to get through the painful chain of events that occurred after Peter admitted his infidelity to me. I need to explain how it felt to learn that he had been inside another woman, not just once but multiple times. I need to express what it felt like to realize that he wasn’t planning to ask for forgiveness, that he didn’t even know if he wanted our relationship to continue or not. I need to express how this pulled the rug out from under my feet and how I—for the second time in my life—totally lost both my stability and my footing.

I need to tell about the days I spent in bed, how night and day blended together until the black gradually had streaks of red in it. The fantasies about blood and revenge. The speculative book I bought, the shady internet searches, the secret jogs, my surreptitious weight lifting, the muscles I tensed to the breaking point, the fantasies that grew increasingly violent, that felt more and more real. I needed to tell my sister about all of it. My throat grows dry and rough, and my eyes wander over to the stack of pages that is lying on the counter now. Or maybe I don’t need to describe anything at all. Maybe that’s exactly what I’ve already done.

“Simply put, I wanted to kill him,” I say hoarsely. “I felt more and more like I could really do it.”

I finger the base of the wineglass.

“And this time, Mama wasn’t by my side.”

No Mama to put her arms around me, hold me, help me hold on. No Mama who wouldn’t lose faith in me, who would continue to love me no matter what.

My sister takes another olive. I wish we didn’t have to go through all this, but there’s no other way around things that are painful. Not if we’re going to find our way back to a relationship built on genuine communication and intimacy.

“Earlier today you were talking about what it was like before Peter and I separated. You said you could tell that something wasn’t right between us, that when you called and asked, I changed the topic and started talking about something else. It’s true, but that renovation in the stairs, it was… it was maybe more important than it seemed.”

She pulls an olive pit out of her mouth and sets it on the edge of her plate.

“I’m listening,” she says.

Then I tell her about the elevator. Because of the building renovation, the elevator was temporarily out of order, but the engineering inspection would later show that there was something loose in the elevator doors up at the top, on the eighteenth floor, our floor. When Peter went to work the next morning, he happened to forget all the notices about the elevator being out of order, and he pressed the button out of habit. The door slid open, and he stepped forward. He didn’t notice until he was already standing on the edge that the only thing underneath his feet was an empty elevator shaft.

The room remains silent for a few seconds. Then my sister stands up and walks over to the counter to retrieve the stack of printed pages. She flips through them until she finds what she’s looking for. Then she reads aloud.

“I’m teetering on the edge. I turn around and our eyes meet, hers the same ones that once looked into mine at the altar in that picturesque little village church. They were filled with tears and emotion then, but now they’re black with the hatred of revenge. This whole time I’ve been worried about her… Suddenly I realize that I should have been afraid for myself.”

She raises a quizzical eyebrow, as if to check whether she’s at the right place in the text. I nod, and she leans over the table. The glow of the tea lights flickers over her cheeks.

“So what actually happened?”

I turn to look at the neat row of olive pits on her plate.

What happened was that I stood inside the door to our apartment and observed Peter through the keyhole, just as I did every morning. He didn’t know I was standing there, couldn’t feel my eyes on him, but as soon as he walked out our door, I staggered over to it. Every time he left, I wondered if he was really going to work or if he was actually on his way to meet her. My eyes were glued to his back. I could never tear myself away from the keyhole until I had seen him step into the elevator and go on his way. But on this specific morning, something else happened.

“I saw the elevator doors open, saw Peter take a step forward and then freeze, midmotion. That same instant, I happened to think of the renovation and remembered that the elevator was going to be out of order. The next instant, I’d flung open the door and was heading toward him. It all happened so fast…”

I stop. The silence grows between us. Finally my sister picks up the stack of pages again and continues reading aloud. Maybe she thinks it’s easier this way. Maybe the text provides some sort of distance to what we’re talking about, even if it’s all my words.

“Everything happens so quickly, and yet the moment stretches out and lasts for an eternity. She comes closer, is right up next to me. She raises one hand, then the other. Soon I’ll fall. Soon I’ll be dashed to pieces. Soon it will be over. Three, two, one. Now.”

She looks up.

“So Peter thought you were willing to murder him to get revenge, that you rushed out into the stairwell to push him into the elevator shaft?”

The edges of the Brie have softened, and the wine remains untouched, even in my sister’s glass. I force myself to look her straight in the eye.

“What do you think? What do you think I was planning to do?”

My sister sets down the stack of printed pages and looks away for a fraction of a second. Then she looks up and, in a steady voice, says: “I know you, Elena. You would never kill anyone.”

My sister puts her hand over mine and squeezes it cautiously. I stare at her fingers.

“No,” I say, “I wouldn’t.”

There are so many things I’m not sure about. I don’t know what would have happened if my mother and father hadn’t come home early that night fifteen years ago. I don’t know if my sick body would have carried me all the way to Thomas’s new girlfriend’s house or whether I’d have been able to put my plan into action. I’ll never know if, when it really mattered, I would have been capable of using the knife and the hammer for anything other than threats. Nor can I fathom how it was possible for me to cut and stitch up my own flesh—that the thought ever occurred to me, that I managed to do it without fainting from the pain.

Then there are the things I am sure about. I know that what I did to myself was something gruesome, verging on barbaric, and I will always live with the white marks on my skin that serve as a reminder. After Peter admitted to cheating on me, I fantasized about injuring or even killing him, and I know that those fantasies took an increasingly realistic and frightening form. But I also know that when I saw him by the elevator doors that morning, helpless and vulnerable on the edge of a precipice, there was only one thought in my mind: I needed to save him. The look in Peter’s eyes as I rushed toward him, on the other hand, revealed that he believed something totally different.

My sister pushes away the wineglasses and pours us water. I bring the glass to my lips and drink several gulps.

“So this whole text, that you wrote it at all, is this some kind of… I mean, is this an attempt to…”

My sister’s hand rotates in the air, seeking, searching. I turn to the window and look out across the yard. The light is off in the kitchen opposite us now. Leo and his father are no longer visible.

“I started writing because I saw some things, the kind of things that reminded me of what Peter and I had been through. At first I wasn’t really going anywhere with the text. They were just words that came to me that wanted out. But then… then it turned into something else.”

My sister checks to see what I’m looking at, and I realize that all my ramblings about the neighbors are fresh in her mind. She raises her hand and cautiously touches the bandage on my forehead, finally asks what happened, where I went tonight. But I can’t get into that now. My bewilderment, confusing my own life with what was going on in the house opposite me… I can’t explain that. I don’t really even understand it myself, not yet. I need time to let the whole situation settle, let all the parts fall into place.

“When Peter got in touch with me,” I continue instead, “I realized that he wanted to get back together. That’s when the text became something different. I thought that if I wrote down what happened, if I did that as ruthlessly and honestly as possible, maybe that could be a way of understanding and forgiving Peter. But most of all, of understanding and forgiving myself. That’s the only way we could have any chance of continuing our relationship.”

My sister picks up my plate and holds it out to me. I stuff a little strip of prosciutto into my mouth. The hunger is there somewhere, but I can’t taste the food.

“Mama always said that work was the best medicine. You said the same thing, not too long ago.”

She takes a bite of cracker.

“Yeah, I haven’t forgotten. Plus that writing advice I reminded you about—to dig where you stand.”

“That’s literally what I did this time.”

We sit in silence for a while before I go on.

“Ever since Mama died, I’ve been afraid something would happen, that I would wind up in some extreme situation of some kind. I’ve been worried about how I’d react if that happened. I’ve worried that maybe I would lose it again, not be able to rely on myself. Then this stuff with Peter happened, and I wavered, definitely, but when it came down to it, I did nothing… nothing that Mama wouldn’t have been proud of.”

I poke at one of the tea lights and watch its flame flicker.

“It was such a relief, the awareness that I would never again do anything like what I had done, what I was about to do when I was young. That I was able to cope, thanks to Mama, but also that I could cope without her.”

My sister has taken my hand in hers, and she’s carefully stroking it. I shiver. A black shadow hangs over the kitchen table.

“But what happened afterward…”

My voice fails me, and I cautiously pull my hand back, take hold of my water glass again and empty it.

There was someplace she needed to go. There was someone she needed to visit. After that everything would be over. Order would be restored. The filth that had been would be erased once and for all.

My sister’s hand is still resting on the table, but I pretend not to see it, can’t permit myself any signs of affection as I describe what happened afterward, as I describe the day I went to see Anna.