“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.