Chapter 6
ELENA
Mara is sitting cross-legged on the couch with a bowl of leftover pasta and the particular expression she gets when she has been patient long enough and has decided that patience is no longer serving either of us.
I know this expression. I have known it for four years. It means the conversation I have been successfully avoiding all week is about to happen, whether I am ready for it or not.
I put my bag down, take my shoes off, and go to the kitchen for a glass of water, and when I come back, she is still looking at me.
“Okay,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
She points her fork at me. “You said you were no longer a virgin, and then you left for work, and you have said approximately nothing about it since, and it has been five days, Elena.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’re always busy. Sit down.”
I sit down on the other end of the couch, pull my knees up, hold my water glass with both hands, and look at her. She looks back at me and waits, because Mara has always understood that the fastest way to get me to talk is to stop asking.
“It was good,” I say finally. “It was really good. And it meant something, at least to me, and I’m not going to do anything about that, so I’m just putting it away and moving on.”
She chews a bite of pasta. “Who is he?”
“No one you know.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Mara.”
She studies me for a long moment. “You’re not going to tell me.”
“No.”
“Is he married?”
“No.”
“Is he the reason you look like you haven’t slept properly in a week?”
I look at my water glass. “I’ve slept fine.”
She makes a sound that communicates, with impressive economy, exactly how much she believes that. She puts her bowl on the coffee table and pulls her knees up to mirror me and says, more quietly, “Did he treat you well?”
The question lands somewhere soft. I think about hands that slowed down without being asked to. Attention that did not waver. The specific patience of a man who could have made that night about himself and chose not to.
“Yes,” I say. “He treated me well.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
The problem is that I see him every day.
“There’s no problem,” I say. “I’m letting it go.”
Mara looks at me the way she has always looked at me when I am saying something we both know is not true. She doesn’t push. She picks her pasta back up, and we watch television for an hour, and she lets me pretend, which is the kindest thing she could do.
Roman is already in his office when I arrive. His jacket is on the back of his chair, and he’s on the phone, standing at the window with his back to the glass. He glances at me when I come in to leave his briefing on the desk, and then looks away, and then looks back.
That second look.
It’s not long. Half a second at most. But I feel it between my shoulder blades all the way back to my desk.
This is the thing that has been happening for two weeks, and I don’t know what to do with it. He’s not exactly different.
He’s Roman, the same Roman he has always been, clipped and precise and completely unreadable to anyone who doesn’t know how to read him. But I do know how to read him, and something in the frequency of his attention has shifted in a way I cannot account for and cannot stop noticing.
The morning moves the way mornings move. Emails, calls, and a document revision that needs to go back to legal before noon.
I move in and out of his office four times, and each time the air in the room does the thing it has been doing, and I keep my face level and my voice even, and I don’t let any of it show.
At three o’clock, he calls me in to go over the agenda for Friday’s board meeting.
I sit across from his desk with my tablet, and he sits behind it with his reading glasses on, and we go through the agenda item by item, the way we have gone through a hundred agendas before, and everything is completely normal, and I am dying.
He is right there. The glasses, the open collar, the way he drags one hand across his jaw when he’s thinking through something.
I have cataloged all of it over two years from a careful professional distance, and that distance was always enough, it was always manageable, and now it is not, and I don’t have anything to replace it with.
“The Morrison item,” he says, without looking up. “Move it to the end. I want the Rezenkov numbers presented first while the room is still paying attention.”
“I’ll have the revised agenda to you by five.”
He makes a small sound of acknowledgment and turns a page, and I look at my tablet screen and type a note I don’t need to type because I will not forget it. I never forget anything he tells me, and the room is very quiet except for the sound of him turning pages and my own typing.
Then he looks up.
“Is there something else?” I say. My voice is even. I am extremely proud of my voice.
He holds it for one more second. “No,” he says. “That’s everything.”
I close my tablet and stand and walk to the door, and I don’t hurry because hurrying would mean something, and I am not giving this room anything it can use against me.
I make it back to my desk, sit down, and press one hand flat against the surface of it and breathe.
Five o’clock cannot come fast enough.
My father’s house in Queens smells the same as it always has. Garlic and something baked. I stand in the hallway for a moment after I close the door and let it settle over me the way it always does, like something I didn’t know I needed until I was already inside it.
Papa is in his chair by the window. He looks up when he hears me, and his face does the thing it has always done, opening into something warm and immediate, and I cross the room and kiss his cheek and pull the footstool over and sit close to him the way I have sat since I was small.
He looks tired.
A tiredness that lives in the eyes and in the set of the shoulders and doesn’t go away when he smiles.
“You look thin,” he says, which is his version of I missed you.
“You look like you haven’t been sleeping,” I say, which is my version of I’m worried about you.
He waves a hand. “I sleep fine. How is work?”
“Work is work, Papa.”
“Elena.”
We look at each other. He has always been able to do this, to hold my gaze long enough that I tell him things I had not planned to tell him, but tonight he is the one looking away first, and that has never happened before, and the knot that formed in my stomach on the subway ride here pulls tighter.
“I’m fine,” he says, before I can ask again. “Just tired. It has been a long few weeks.”
I want to push. I don’t push, because he is already carrying whatever this is, and adding my worry to the weight of it will not help either of us.
I stay for an hour. We talk about small things. A neighbor whose son just had a baby. A television program he has been watching.
I’m pulling my coat back on in the hallway when Carla appears from the kitchen. She has the look she gets when she has been waiting for me to be about to leave. Carla has always has excellent timing for conversations I do not want to have.
“He had another appointment last week,” she says.
Straight to it, the way she always goes straight to it when there is something she wants me to feel the weight of. “The bills from the last round of tests are already coming in. The insurance is covering less than they said they would.”
I keep my coat half on. “How much?”
She names a number she has clearly been holding in her mouth all evening, waiting for the right moment to put it down properly. It lands properly. I feel it in my back teeth.
“I’m working on it,” I say.
“You’ve been working on it.” She folds her arms. “Aleksei called again this week. He is still willing to take on everything. All of it, Elena, gone, and your father would not have to worry for the rest of his life.”
“I’m not marrying Aleksei.”
“He was very good to you.”
“He wasn’t.” I say it quietly, and I say it once, and I hold her gaze when I say it, and she looks away first.
A beat of silence. Through the wall, I can hear the low sound of the television from my father’s room.
Carla looks back at me. “Then you need to find another way,” she says. “Because I am one person and I am doing everything I can, and it is not enough, and I cannot keep doing this alone.”
She goes back to the kitchen.
I stand in the hallway with my coat half on and the front door in front of me and the television murmuring through the wall, and I don’t move for a long moment.
She’s not wrong. That’s the part I can’t argue with, the part that follows me out the door and down the front steps and all the way to the subway.
Carla is many things, most of them difficult, but she is one person in that house, and my father is getting worse, and the bills are real, and I am a twenty-three-year-old secretary whose salary does exactly enough and nothing more.
I sit on the subway with my bag in my lap and the dark window across from me throwing my own reflection back at myself, and I think about Aleksei’s controlled smile and my father’s tired eyes and Roman’s gaze across the desk this afternoon and the revised agenda I still have to send before seven and the number Carla put in my mouth that I cannot stop turning over.
I think about all of it, and I do not have a single answer for any of it.