Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ihear the name through the study door early in the morning, when he thinks I'm still asleep.
I've come down for water.
The study door is nearly shut. David is on the phone behind it, using the low voice he thinks means privacy. I stop in the hall with my glass because my whole body has learned to stop when he uses it.
The rain is loud on the skylight over the stairs. It drowns out most of the words. But I have one good ear. I turn it to the gap and catch what I can in pieces.
"I know what I said." A silence. "Lena. Lena, listen to me.
I can't do this now. Do you understand what's happening?
There is a complaint with my name on it, and you pick this week to do this.
" Another silence, longer. His voice drops under the rain and I lose it.
When I catch it again, it's tighter. "No.
Don't. Do not come here. I will handle it. I have always handled it."
Lena.
I remember that name.
The name from the night we were on the sofa, when his screen lit up and he turned the phone face down before taking it into the kitchen.
It's just work. That's what he'd said.
Now he's said her name out loud, in his study, in a voice he has never once used with me. A voice with history in it. The voice of someone who knows the person on the other end well enough to be tired of her.
I go back up the stairs without my water.
I get into bed and lie on my back. Twenty minutes later, I listen to my husband come up and stand in the doorway while I pretend to sleep.
I keep my breathing long and even. I have become very good at this, at being a woman he thinks is asleep.
We have both become very good at pretending.
He climbs into bed. We lie a foot apart in the dark, close enough to touch and farther apart than we have ever been.
I don't ask him who Lena is. I want to be the person who asks. But asking is a door, and I've started to be afraid of what's on the other side of David's doors. So I leave this one closed.
Julia's message comes at two in the afternoon. It's a video, the worst thing I have seen in a long time, and I watch it four times.
It’s not live. She's recorded it.
That's the first wrong thing, before I even take in her face. Julia always calls. Julia would rather talk for an hour than type a sentence. But this is a video, thirty seconds long, sent instead of spoken.
She's somewhere dim. A bathroom, I think. The sound is close and boxy, and she's holding the phone too near her face, keeping everything else out of the frame.
Her left eye is blackened.
Not fresh. A day old, maybe. It's gone through the colors bruises do, yellow coming up under the purple. She's put makeup over it, but the makeup has failed.
"Hey. It's me."
Her voice is wrong too, careful and pitched low.
"Don't call the second you see this, okay? Just listen."
A breath. Somewhere behind her, a tap runs, or pipes knock in the wall.
"I need to speak to you. Not on the phone. I can't do this on the phone. I've tried to figure out how to say it, and there isn't a way that works in a message. So I'm not going to try."
She swallows.
"I'm just going to ask you to come. Come here tomorrow. Come when he's out. Just come, and I'll tell you everything. All of it. I know how that sounds."
Her eyes go somewhere off camera, then come back.
"You might think you know what this is. You don't. And Mal?"
The smallest pause.
"Don't tell anyone you're coming. Not anyone. I mean it."
Then she reaches up and it ends.
I watch it again. The black eye. The fear underneath everything she says.
You might think you know what this is. You don't.
I watch it a third time and then a fourth. I know what it is. I've known since the fingermarks on her shoulder, since the careful voice at my party.
It's Chris.
He’s hit her. He's lost his mind. It's gotten worse, and she's finally ready to say it out loud. She needs to do it away from him and away from anyone who might talk her out of it.
I make her words fit the story I already have, because that story has a name and a face and a history of bruises. I can't see the truth yet, so I reach for the version I can.
I call her back immediately. Of course I call her back.
It rings out. Four rings, five, and then Julia's recorded voice comes on, bright and old, from before all of this, telling me she can't come to the phone. I don't leave a message.
I text instead.
Julia.
I watch it deliver.
It goes unread.
One more call goes unanswered.
I want to text her about Chris, but it's too risky. Tomorrow, I decide. She said tomorrow. She wants me to come when he's out.
I don't know his schedule. Turning up while Chris is home could make it worse. It could be the thing that gets her hurt again.
So I play it safe. I call that being smart. I call it respecting her wishes.
Going over there now is what I would have done two years ago, before I learned to sit still and let important things wait for a better time.
I put the phone down and go back to what I was doing. The thought of her doesn't leave. It sits just under everything else, a small wrong thing I keep refusing to touch.
The rain continues into the evening. I move around the house without purpose, picking things up and putting them down. Waiting for David. Waiting for a call. Waiting for anything.
Then it happens.
I hear Luna before I see her, one bark at the front door, followed by scratching. I'm across the room, my heart racing. I get the door open, and she's there on the wet porch in the last gray light, looking up at me. She's fine. Better than fine.
But she's wearing a collar I’ve never seen.
Hers is red nylon, frayed at the buckle, with a little brass bone for a tag. This one is dark leather with no tag on it at all. It's buckled to fit her neck exactly. I kneel in the rain and turn the collar in my fingers and look for a note, a card, a name. There's nothing.
Someone had her. Someone kept her clean, warm, and fed for two nights. They brushed her coat, buckled a good collar around her throat, and brought her back to my door at dusk, unhurt.
I take the collar off with my hands shaking. I want to throw it into the dark. But I don't. I carry it inside and set it on the kitchen island, because I can't make myself put it in the garbage. I can't say why.
Quickly, I take out my phone and check the cameras, hoping to catch whoever brought her back. But the system is still down. Nothing. Not a single frame.
Shit.
Then I sink to the floor with Luna in my arms and tell myself it's nothing. A neighbor found her. A stranger kept her warm. Someone bought her a collar because hers was gone and brought her home without wanting thanks.
Luna licks the salt from my face.
I don't believe any of it.
I bolt the door behind us.
I don't know who I'm trying to keep out.