The Watcher

48

Someone calls me. I don’t know who. A girlfriend—that’s how she introduces herself. She’s not crying, not to begin with, but her voice is muted. She says Anna’s name and asks if we were very close. I’m completely at a loss for what to say.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your number is in her contacts list on her phone, so I’m just wondering how you knew each other.”

There’s no suspicion or insinuation in her voice. Even so, I’m flummoxed. Eventually I manage to say that we’ve met each other a few times through work. Then it hits me.

Were very close. Knew. Why is she using the past tense?

“We’re helping contact all her acquaintances,” the woman continues. “Her family asked us to do that.”

I freeze.

“There was an accident. It happened quickly. They say she probably didn’t suffer.”

She says that she’s a friend of Anna’s from her book club. They were supposed to get together that night, and it was Anna’s turn to host. But when the first women arrived at her place, they realized right away that something was wrong. The door was unlocked, and the fire alarm was going off inside. The charred remnants of the pie Anna was presumably planning to serve were in the oven. The table hadn’t been set yet. Apparently she hadn’t gotten to that. There was no way to be sure of what she’d gone down to the basement to get. Napkins, maybe, or even more likely, a couple of bottles of wine.

They found her at the bottom of the basement stairs, a steep, precipitous, treacherous fall. She was lying on the floor with one leg at an unnatural angle, her eyes staring blankly. One of the women screamed. Another had the presence of mind to call for an ambulance. When the EMTs arrived, they determined that Anna had broken her neck, probably in a couple of places and probably as the result of an accident, a “slip and fall.” She was wearing high-heeled shoes. She really loved heels. And apparently she’d gone up and down those stairs many times before, but it’s so easy for an accident to happen.

“A terrible, tragic accident, as I said.”

By this point, the woman on the other end of the line is quietly crying, the woman who had been tasked with calling to notify me. Then she pulls herself together and blows her nose. She says nothing can bring Anna back to life, but that it’s important to the family for everyone who knew her to be notified as soon as possible.

“We’ve all gathered over here now, those of us who were closest to her, at her place with her family. We think this is what she would have wanted.”

I mumble in agreement, and she wishes me well. I thank her, and we hang up. Afterward I sit for a long time with the phone in my hand, staring into space. When did I last see Anna? Or talk to her on the phone? Actually maybe it wasn’t that long ago, but it still feels that way. It feels like an eternity.

The distance between us grew quickly after we lay there in the bed and Anna said that stuff about my wife: She doesn’t seem normal. Afterward, I realized that something important happened at that moment, that it was as if an invisible force changed directions then and there, from having brought us closer to each other the whole time to now starting to pull us apart. What once appeared unabashedly obvious between us vanished and was replaced by Anna’s discomfort and anxious thoughts.

I started letting more time go by between phone calls. I canceled a date we had planned and then another one. Anna didn’t object, so I assumed we both felt the same way. We had filled some kind of emptiness in each other’s lives for a while, and now that was over. Our relationship was fading away on its own. That’s what I thought, but that’s not what happened. The end came in a completely different way, quickly and decisively.

A terrible, tragic accident.

I get up from the armchair on wobbly legs. The silence bounces between the walls while I survey what should have felt safe and familiar but didn’t at all. At one time, not very long ago, I viewed this as a home. Since the separation, it’s been reduced to a residence.

We’ve all gathered over here now, those of us who were closest to her, at her place with her family.

Anna had her family and her friends, people I don’t know, women and men I’ve never met. When they got together after her death, no one asked about me. And that was as it should have been.

I walk over to the window and peer out. I’m struck by an acute desire to call my wife, while at the same time realizing that this is out of the question. We weren’t supposed to have any contact at all for three months. That was our agreement, and I can’t break our silence for this, just to tell her that the woman I cheated on her with is dead.

The only thing that would give me the right to get in touch is if I’ve made a decision about how I want to proceed, by getting divorced or staying together as a couple. I close my eyes. When will I know? Then I look up again.

Maybe deep down inside I actually already do know?