Chapter 13: What She Carries
1224 Words
Elena did not text him that night.
She told herself it was because Wren had a bad dream at two a.m. and climbed into her bed and stayed there, small and warm and completely certain that Elena's presence was the only thing required to make the world safe again. Which was true. Which was also the most terrifying thing Elena had ever been responsible for.
She lay in the dark with Wren's hand fisted in her shirt and stared at the ceiling and did not text him.
In the morning she made oatmeal and cut strawberries into small pieces and watched Wren arrange them in a circle around the bowl before eating a single one, which she did every morning, which Elena had stopped questioning six months ago.
"Why the circle," Nessa had asked once.
"They have to be ready," Wren had said, with the authority of someone who had given this considerable thought.
Elena thought about that now. They have to be ready.
She drank her coffee.
Her phone was on the counter. Kai's last text was still there, unanswered, sitting in the thread like a stone she kept stepping around.
She had drafted four responses in her head last night. None of them were right. One was too cold. One was too open. One started with his name and she had deleted that one immediately because she knew what it meant when she started things with his name.
She put the phone in her bag and took Wren to Mrs. Carla's.
At the door Wren stopped and turned around with Biscuit under her arm and looked at Elena with the focused seriousness she reserved for important announcements.
"Mama," she said. "Today I want to learn something."
"What do you want to learn."
Wren thought about it. "Something big."
"I'll see what I can do," Elena said.
Wren nodded, satisfied, and went inside.
Elena stood in the hallway for a moment after the door closed. The building was quiet. Somewhere above her someone was running water, and the pipes made their usual sound, that low familiar groan that meant the building was old and had opinions about it.
She thought about a girl in a hospital four years ago.
She thought about a phone that rang and rang and went to a voicemail that said you've reached Kai Voss, leave a message, and the message she left that she was never sure he heard. The second call that went straight to voicemail. The third that was intercepted by a woman whose voice she had only heard twice before and who said, very calmly, that Kai was unavailable and that Elena should direct any further communication through the label's official channels.
Official channels.
She had been twenty-two years old and alone in a hospital bed and Sloane Mercer had told her to use the official channels.
She took the stairs down instead of the elevator because she needed the movement, needed something to do with her legs, and she came out onto the street into the flat gray morning and started walking toward the studio where she rented time on Thursdays.
Her phone buzzed.
Not Kai. Theo.
She answered it.
"I've been trying to reach you since yesterday," Theo said. He had the voice of someone who had spent a lot of time in rooms where people talked about art seriously, warm but precise. "The credit thing. Elena. That's enormous."
"It's a correction."
"It's enormous and you know it. Do you have any idea what this does for the gallery show? Your name attached to that song, to that catalog, it changes the entire conversation around your work."
She had not thought about the gallery show. She had been thinking about other things.
"Theo."
"I want to move the opening up. I know we said October but if we can get your name into the press cycle now, while people are searching for you, while you're the story, we should strike while"
"Theo." She stopped walking. "I need you to slow down."
A pause. "Are you okay."
"I'm fine. I just." She looked up at the building across the street. Brick, old glass, a fire escape that had been painted over so many times it had lost its original shape. "I need to think before I make any decisions. The credit is real. The rest of it I'm still figuring out."
"Has he contacted you."
She didn't answer immediately.
"Elena."
"Yes," she said. "He has."
Theo was quiet for a moment. She knew what he was doing. He was being careful, which was one of the things she valued about him, the way he was careful with her, the way he never pushed into spaces she hadn't opened.
"Do you want to talk about it," he said.
"Not yet."
"Okay." A beat. "The show. October is fine. We don't have to move anything."
"Thank you."
"But Elena." His voice shifted, just slightly. "Whatever you're figuring out. Don't figure it out alone. You have a habit of doing that."
She almost laughed. "I know."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." She started walking again. "I'll call you this week."
She hung up and kept walking and thought about what he'd said. Don't figure it out alone. You have a habit of doing that.
She had learned the habit young. She had perfected it at twenty-two in a hospital bed. She had raised it to an art form in the three years since.
The studio was six blocks away. She walked all six without looking at her phone.
Then she stopped on the corner outside the building and took it out and opened the thread and typed:
Tomorrow. There's a coffee place on Reed Street, the one with the green awning. Ten a.m. Come alone.
She hit send before she could draft it four more times in her head.
His response came in forty seconds.
I'll be there.
She put the phone away.
She went up to the studio and she worked for four hours straight, processing the architecture shots from yesterday, and she was good at it, she was precise and focused and her hands were steady the whole time.
But at the back of her mind, underneath all of it, the same thought turned over and over like something caught in a current.
Tomorrow she was going to sit across a table from Kai Voss.
And at some point in that conversation, if she was brave enough, if she could find the words, if the moment came and she didn't close the door the way she always closed the door, she was going to tell him something that would split his world in half.
She did not know what came after that.
She had carried this alone for so long that she had stopped being able to imagine what it would feel like to put it down.
Tomorrow she might find out.
Or she might sit across from him with her coffee and her armor and say nothing and walk away again and carry it for another four years.
She looked at the image on her screen. A glass building full of reflected sky, ordinary and sharp in the morning light.
She thought about Wren arranging her strawberries in a circle.
They have to be ready.
She saved the file.
She went home.
- Writer
