“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.
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.