Caroline Eriksson - The Watcher

I know. I’m talking to her right now.

I turn toward my house across from theirs, the one I will soon have spent half of my planned time in. Unlike the Storms’ home, none of the lights are on. My sister is somewhere in there, waiting. Maybe she fell asleep, although I doubt it. I haven’t called. I made do with texting her before I left Veronica. I wrote that I was on my way but didn’t respond to her question about reading the manuscript. Opening the front door, I wonder if she’s really read it. At any rate, I’ll tell her everything now, everything. I kick off my shoes, hang up my jacket, and call out hello. I don’t get an answer.

She’s sitting in the dark in the kitchen, in the same seat where I myself have spent so many hours. I didn’t see her from outside, but she must have seen me through the window. The stack of papers I printed out earlier today is sitting on the table in front of her. Even without any lights on, she notices my borrowed clothes and the bandage on my forehead and asks how I am, but her voice is somewhere else, lost in other thoughts.

I cautiously set the car key down on the counter. I don’t need to wonder anymore if she’s read it. Or if she understands the nature of what I’ve written.

“How far did you manage to read before you… understood?”

“Before I realized that the story was about you and Peter?”

I nod.

“Maybe the part about the… scar.”

I tense up and want to bring my hand to my abdomen. My fingertips twitch, but I resist the old, ingrained impulse. I don’t need to hide anymore. The truth is free. I have set it free.

“Although I had been told it was from an appendectomy. The barbed-wire-fence-when-you-were-a-kid explanation wouldn’t have worked on me.”

No, it wouldn’t have. My sister and I know all about each other’s childhoods, every accident, every scrape. That’s how close we were back then.

“Thomas,” she says now, “your first boyfriend. I hardly remember him. I think I only met him a couple of times.”

I shift my weight from foot to foot as she mentions his name.

“We were going to move in together. We had just decided that.”

My sister slowly shakes her head.

“I never had any idea that your relationship was so serious. I guess I thought it was one of those teenage things that would pass.”

She had lived abroad for so many years, moving back and forth between various places. It’s not so strange that she doesn’t remember every single detail in the life of her little sister, who’s six years younger. But it’s time for me to correct her about this specific part.

“I was a teenager when we started dating, but I was twenty-one when it ended.”

My sister’s eyes gleam. She is quiet for a while.

“And that thing Mama told me,” she said then, “about the anorexia. How does that fit into all this?”

I lean back against the counter.

“I stopped eating when I found out that Thomas was seeing someone else behind my back. More as a reflex than a conscious choice. I just didn’t have any appetite anymore. I lost a fair amount of weight, but it wasn’t anorexia. After what happened… after what I did and what I could have done. It was such a terrible disgrace in Mama’s eyes. She could say anything, just not the truth.”

My sister turns to the window. Perhaps we’re thinking about the same thing. Of the secret Mama had kept. And of what she chose to say instead. Perhaps my sister is also wondering why.

“You didn’t want her to tell the truth, not even to me.”

“Especially not to you.”

I wonder if my sister detests me now. Will she distance herself from me, just when we were starting to become close again?

“I mean, just look at how things turned out with Papa,” I add.

She turns on the kitchen chair, wondering what I mean. I explain that the relationship between Papa and me was never the same after that night when he and Mama came home earlier than expected and caught me in the front hall, sick and thirsty for revenge. Sure, he was present and involved in the beginning. He must have been. But then, once I recovered and returned to living, he pulled away, and I noticed that he had a hard time looking me in the eye. I don’t know if he was feeling fear or revulsion, and I don’t know if it was mostly the self-harm or the thought of what I was capable of doing to Thomas. I just know that the distance between us grew and grew.

“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.