Retrograde Page 4
He considers now what he would’ve said. That it had meant absolutely nothing, just been a few nights, because he was so hurt and lonely and depressed. That he’d felt guilty and regretted it. And now this. She would’ve had to forgive him because he had the courage to be honest with her, to face her certain wrath. She would’ve told him what to do about Ester. And she would’ve held him in her arms through all the years, protected him from his own failings and indecision, and from the loss of her.
He sits up with a start. He was starting to drift off on the sofa, dreaming of a chance he missed so long ago it’s not even worth thinking about. The fact is that he went back to the apartment with a stupid excuse about wanting to pick something up from the store but not making it in time. With Helena’s wide, storm cloud-colored eyes on him, knowing he was lying, but not how or why. She always knew.
But not anymore, he realizes. She doesn’t know a thing about it. As far as she knows, they’re still just bickering, without any serious issues to fight about. A small voice at the back of his mind tells him that now would be the opportunity to act differently, to protect himself from future regrets. To be honest when it’s easier to lie, be honest now like he wishes he was then. But the voice isn’t loud enough to stop him from picking up Helena’s phone again.
She has a few new messages. He skips through the ones from colleagues asking whether she’s okay, and focuses on two from a certain Tobi. The first says: Hey, was great getting to know you, would love to take you out tomorrow if you’re free. Dated Saturday. Well, she’s already missed that appointment. The next one, from yesterday, says, Hey, haven’t heard from you. Busy or not interested? Hope you’re just busy! With a stupid smiley at the end. Letting his mind go blank, Joachim opens the back of Helena’s phone and removes the SIM card. Then he puts the phone on the floor and stomps on it, over and over again. He puts the pieces in the bag with her things and throws out the SIM card. It could just as easily have gotten crushed in the accident. As an afterthought, he throws her bloodied clothing in the washing machine. He’ll have to buy her a few more things before she gets out.
HELENA
Helena wakes feeling clearheaded and optimistic. Joachim said she’d be out in a few days, and she’s seeing him again today. There’s nothing seriously wrong with her and she is lucky, like he said. They’ve already taken the drip out of her arm, and when the heavyset orderly brings her a tray with a stale muffin, weak coffee, and a heavy dose of oral painkillers, she asks him calmly for the date.
“July thirty-first,” he tells her after a moment’s consideration, then leaves the room. The old woman is awake today, staring blankly at the small muted TV set opposite her bed. She probably doesn’t know the date, either. Even the orderly had to think about it. But now Helena knows and things are okay again. A blow to the head will do that to you, knock a few odd facts out. It’s just a matter of starting over. Today is Tuesday, July thirty-first; yesterday was Monday, July thirtieth, and tomorrow will be Wednesday, August first. From now on, she’ll know exactly what’s going on. It was stupid to get so upset. A few days unconscious and she felt like she hadn’t seen Joachim in years, couldn’t bear to see him leave. He should be here soon. He said he’d come.
And soon he’ll take her away from here, and she’ll spend a few weeks working from home while her bones heal, and then it’ll all be okay again. Some physical therapy sessions, probably. She never broke a bone as a kid and didn’t expect to as an adult. But life’s always good for a surprise or two.
The orderly comes in to clear her tray and wipe up where she spilled. It’s hard to drink coffee with a cast on when you can’t sit up properly. At least Joachim didn’t see her eating so sloppily.
Some time later, he comes in. Funny how she can’t tell how long it’s been, how much time later. That’s the way things are in here, one big unbroken blur. You doze on and off throughout the day and stare at the dark ceiling half the night, so there’s not even really sleep to break things up. But soon she’ll be out of here, moving, living, each moment a fixed point in time, each fact firm and sure in her mind.
After he kisses her, her eyes move greedily to the daily paper under his arm. 2013. So there’s that. It’s later than she thought, not that she had a specific year in mind. The way you sometimes get busy during the day, and then look at your watch and find it’s already evening. Or like in early January, when you keep writing the wrong year because the change isn’t yet fixed in your mind.
Joachim opens his briefcase. He sets his laptop on the chair between Helena’s bed and the window, and then hands her four hardback books. She doesn’t recognize any of them; he must’ve just gone to the new releases table and stocked up. As if she’ll have time to read that much in just a couple of days. It’s touching, though. She almost expected him to forget.
“Thank you. These should be enough to keep me company for a while.”
“Well, you won’t be needing company for a few hours, but I thought they’d keep you busy while I catch up on the last few days of work.” He plugs his laptop into a spare outlet and starts it up.
“You’re staying?” She can’t believe her good fortune. But she shouldn’t show it. He’s always offended if she acts surprised at a time like this. As if she couldn’t believe he’d do something nice for her.
But he just settles into the chair with his laptop and says, “Of course.” Doesn’t even sound annoyed. So she picks up one of the books—a thriller set in the Weimar Republic—and begins to read, pausing every few pages to look over at Joachim, who’s wrinkling his forehead in concentration, clicking and typing in short sporadic bursts. He looks tired, and somehow older. Poor Joachim. This accident must’ve really taken it out of him. But it’s good that he’s here, and maybe, in some strange way, all this is good for them. He’s so gentle toward her now; they’re both so careful with each other. They never realized they could lose each other. He meets her wandering eyes over the edge of his screen and smiles. Whatever else, this is good, right now.
JOACHIM
Joachim leaves the hospital in the evening. He tells Helena he’s exhausted, and this is true, but he has another stop to make before he goes home. According to the labels in the clothing Helena was wearing when she got hit, she’s a size 38 and a B cup. He stops in a couple stores at the mall and in a thrift shop—because it’s not plausible that she’d own just two brands of clothing—and buys pants, skirts, dresses, t-shirts, blouses, tights, socks, and underwear. He’s on his way out when he realizes he’s forgotten shoes.
At home, he takes the tags out of all the clothing and puts a load in the washing machine. He’ll have to come up with an explanation for what happened to her other things. Not that he isn’t going to give her the real explanation, the truth, but he wants to do that in his own time. At the right moment. If she comes in and asks too many questions right away, he’ll be forced to say it at the wrong time. He doesn’t want to startle her; she needs to ease back into things, as if the here-and-now were a pool of cold water. She’ll need time to get used to it. And he will.
When he opens her purse again to get her ID, there’s none of the saving unconsciousness he experienced destroying her phone. His eyes burn as his shaking fingers peel the most recent address label off her ID to reveal his address. He can feel sweat tracing his hairline and the path of his part. He’s certain that the door to his apartment will open at any moment, that someone—maybe, impossibly, Helena herself—will catch him in the act. But once he’s finished, he returns the card to her wallet and the wallet to her purse, and everything is still and safe. He takes a deep breath and relaxes his clenched fingers, dropping the crumpled label. The address on it isn’t far from his own; he’ll need about twenty minutes to get there. That she lived so close all this time and never crossed his path! That she lived so close, and as if on another planet, in another universe with no connection to his own. He finds her keys at the bottom of her purse, weighed down by key chains like he remembers them, but the charms a
re different, and the keys lead to a different home.
Does she live alone? There’s no one he can ask, no way to find out without going there. He puts the keys in his pocket with the address label, picks up his own keys and leaves. He’s doing this for her as much as himself. They both need this time together, need to end things properly after all these years. Or not end them. They need to finally take all the possibilities into account. He’ll be fair to her this time; he’ll tell her the truth and let her decide, not wait for some letter to break the news to her.
In the train his mind goes blank again, as if he were on his way to work or running some errand. For a moment, he feels certain that she lives alone. It would be like her. Even when they lived together, she was always slipping off, hiding, disappearing for hours at a time. She could disappear even when they were in the same room, buried in inscrutable silence—him wanting to know what was wrong, and her saying “nothing” until he learned not to ask.
And if there is someone? If he unlocks the door and walks into a room full of people? How will he explain himself? He’ll simply say that Helena’s in the hospital, and he’s come to get some of her things. The crisis situation will explain away any strangeness. The train reaches his stop—her stop—and he leaves the station.
Outside, it’s cooler than before, the air fresh like after a storm, though there wasn’t any rain. The street lights have come on. He feels weary and wishes he were returning to his own home, not the one he just left, but a shared one, one that’s safe and warm and requires no dishonesty. One where nothing needs to be forgotten.
There’s only one name on her doorbell, a relief. While he can’t imagine her with roommates, he realizes in the silent, dim stairwell of her home that he could very well imagine a partner living there with her. After all, why shouldn’t she have one? After all these years. Helena’s a beautiful, intelligent woman. More beautiful than he remembered, even with the bruises. Odd, yes, at times maddening, but ultimately endearing, finally, after all, loveable. It bothers him that she should be alone. And it bothers him more that he’s happy she lives alone. He has no right to be. Then he remembers that Tobi who wrote to her twice since her accident, and that bothers him most of all.
The lights are out, the windows are closed and the apartment is cool, everything holding its breath. He waits a moment in silence, a burglar getting his bearings, honing his sixth sense to be sure he won’t be surprised by his victim’s righteous anger. But there isn’t even a breath of wind or the creak of a floorboard. She really and truly lives alone.
It’s a simple studio apartment with a single bed in one corner, a sofa, a small kitchen table in a little nook with that Mauritian painting that used to be theirs, dressers lining the walls. He finds some grocery bags under the kitchen sink and grabs a few items from each of her drawers. As he packs her clothing, he sees how far off he was with his earlier purchases. He thought it would be enough to have the right size, when each of these garments is so uniquely Helena’s he could’ve entered this apartment blindfolded and known it was hers just by opening a drawer.
Always that same limpid softness; everything she owns fits like a favorite t-shirt she’s been wearing for years, even if she just bought it. Then there are her colors: red, pink and black, the occasional kelly green or royal blue, but never gray, never white, never neutral. The flawless outward appearance of the apartment, not a speck of dust on the dressers, and yet a chaotic jumble within the drawers. She still hasn’t learned to fold. He recalls that she never wears anything that needs ironing, and lets her blouses drip dry to get rid of the wrinkles.
He fills another bag with her shoes, then takes a third into the bathroom for her cosmetics. Here, he realizes he’s been fooling himself: he couldn’t have said what brand of toothpaste she likes or how she puts up her hair. It could be anyone’s bathroom; the mirror could’ve held anyone’s reflection day after day. He doesn’t know her anymore.
He feels an overwhelming, painful weariness, an ache in his shoulders as he picks up the bulging plastic bags. He no longer wants to do what he’s doing, but he’s like a powerful machine running down, and can only slowly coast to a standstill. When he reaches his apartment again, he leaves the bags by the entrance to the cellar, goes down the moldering steps and opens the wooden gate of his compartment by the flickering light of the bare bulb overhead. He squirms through old furniture, rusted tools, and cardboard boxes to get to the shelf at the back, where he finds a creased envelope stuffed into a box of old books and papers. He puts it in his pocket, feeling the two hard, cool pieces of metal in one corner without opening it to look.
Upstairs, he sets the bags down by the sofa and sleeps for an hour, then gets up again to unpack them. They’re letting him bring Helena home tomorrow.
HELENA
Helena wakes ecstatic, with the blind, instinctive joy a child feels just before recalling that it’s Christmas morning. She’s going home today. She’s getting out of this place in a few hours. Joachim will be here to take her.
She had an awful dream the night before. It must be the painkillers. She and Joachim fought and he left her in the middle of some dark, eerie forest where she could feel slimy hands with long fingers groping at her ankles. She wandered, exhausted, for hours, and then abruptly found herself in the apartment with Joachim, who was on the sofa reading a newspaper. He kept telling her everything was fine and she’d only dreamt the part about the forest, and she began to believe him. But just as she sat down next to him, she heard a baby crying in another room and leapt to her feet. Yet how no matter how many doors she opened—and there were so many doors in their apartment now, one after the other, dozens, hundreds, millions—she could neither find the crying infant, nor return to Joachim. The last door opened onto perfect, impossible, unbroken darkness, and she was in the forest again, and she was in the hospital again, and she was hoarse as if she’d been screaming, but she must not have, or someone would’ve come.
Medication can have side effects like that. Magdalena’s sister Sara told her that, when she used to take sleeping pills, she could feel a dark, shadowy form standing over her bed every night, bending down to her, but never quite touching her. So there are all kinds of things like that. The dream doesn’t bother her anymore; only, it’s strange that she can remember all that about the shadow over Sara’s bed. Why something so trivial, a stray conversation, and so little of the past few years?
Her pulse speeds up and she feels slightly nauseous. She has to stay calm and take deep breaths. She still has a lot of recovering to do and panicking won’t help. Joachim said the doctor said she’d be better soon. That the blanks in her mind would fill in again. So none of it matters, now that she’s getting out of here. Soon she won’t even need the painkillers, and that will be the end of nightmares like this. She’ll tell Joachim about it later, and he’ll tell her some crazy dream he had and they’ll laugh together. She knows seeing him will reassure her. As much as the medicine, that’s probably what was messing up her sleep—being alone here, spending so much time away from her husband.
When he comes in later that morning with a tired smile and bags under his eyes, she knows she was right. It’s hard on him, too, being away from her.
JOACHIM
Someone catches Joachim’s arm as he comes into the hospital, and he looks down into Dr. Hofstaedter’s lined face, which seems a little kinder now. She smells like she’s just back from a cigarette break.
“Here to see your wife again, Mr. Schmidt?”
“I am.” He presses his lips together lest a single extra syllable slip out and betray him. It was foolish to be so open with Dr. Hofstaedter; she’s the only one who could give him away now. He holds the glass door and waits for her to enter. She smiles over her shoulder. After all, they both have Helena’s best interests at heart. Dr. Hofstaedter wants Helena well, and he wants Helena well, happy, and where she belongs. Wherever that turns out to be.
Dr. Hofstaedter walks quickly for a woman of her height, but sh
e holds the door of the elevator for him.
“She’s doing better? Your wife.”
He can’t tell whether this is a statement or a question he’s meant to answer. He can feel sweat appearing in the armpits of his dress shirt. “Yes, she seems better.” With an awkward attempt at a laugh, he adds, “But then, I’m not a doctor.”
“And yet, we doctors see so little of our patients.” The elevator comes to a halt, the doors open, and an orderly wheels in a miserable-looking old man. “If you hadn’t told me,” the doctor continues, “it’s possible I wouldn’t even have noticed her amnesia.”
The doors open again to let out the old man and the orderly, and then they’re on Helena’s floor.
“Well, my rounds await me,” Dr. Hofstaedter says. But just as Joachim starts to glow and sweat more than ever with relief, she turns back to ask, “You did tell her that you’d been separated, didn’t you? How long did you say again? A year? You’re very dedicated, after all that time.”
“About three.” He speaks the words as if expelling something lodged in his throat, and then coughs drily into one hand. “I was just on my way to discuss it with her.”
“Glad to hear it.” Dr. Hofstaedter is out of hearing range before he can manage another word.
He doesn’t know what to say when he comes into Helena’s room. He needs to say something, to keep at least a little of his promise to Dr. Hofstaedter, but it’s hard because Helena isn’t expecting any bad news. She’s smiling and watching him fixedly, as if he were about to do a magic trick. Or maybe just taking her away from here is enough to impress her now. He has to say something. He felt this way after Ester told him she was pregnant, back in the apartment with Helena, who’d had a good day at work and was making dinner. He knew he had to say something, but she wasn’t expecting anything, so there was no signal, no cue to prompt a confession. She believed him when he said he’d had a long day and was tired, and then, to his surprise, the evening passed without his telling her. He was just as surprised not to tell her the next day, but the day after, he began to realize he wasn’t going to.