The Waiting
1139 Words
The knife is cold in her hand.
She is standing with her back to the wall beside the front door, the way she has seen people stand in movies when they are expecting something and cannot decide whether to run or hold their ground. She had decided to hold her ground. This is her flat. Her door. He does not get to walk toward it and have her be the person who moves.
She can hear him on the stairs.
One set of footsteps. He came up alone. She registered this without deciding to. He told the men with the earpieces to wait. The kind of man who can do that and have them actually do it.
She does not know what kind of man he is. That is the problem. She thought she did, once. She was thirty-one years old and she was wrong.
She is not afraid of him. She wants to be clear about this, at least to herself. She was never afraid of him, that was always the problem. She never held back the right amount. She walked into those three months in Lisbon like a woman who had forgotten that things end, and then they ended, and she had learned her lesson and she had built her walls and the walls were good.
She can feel them now. His proximity had made her aware of them in a way she hadn't expected. It had been so long since she'd needed to remember the walls existed that she'd stopped thinking of them as walls at all. Just the shape of her life.
Now they are walls again.
He is two flights below her. She knows by the sound.
The silence between footsteps does what silence does, it fills up with everything she has been keeping out.
She thinks about the morning after he left. She woke up, and the absence was immediate, not a slow realization, not a building suspicion. Just the flat fact of it before she even opened her eyes. She got up anyway. Made coffee. Went to work. She had a nine o'clock client and the client's hair still needed cutting.
She thinks about what came six weeks after that.
She thinks about the registry office, seven months after that. Her son's birth certificate in her hands, the pen in her hand, the column that said Father. She wrote what was true in the version she had, unknown, and did not let her hand shake.
She thinks about Lucas at breakfast this morning. The inside-out school jumper she fixed while he wasn't looking. The dog he wants that she cannot afford. The way he ran across the playground without looking back, that easy confidence that does not come from her and did not come from his father, who was not there to give it.
She thinks this is what you did not stay for.
She has thought about that sentence exactly once before, four years ago, on a night she was very tired and less defended than usual. She put it away immediately. She is thinking about it again now, standing with a knife in the hallway of the life she built without him, and she does not put it away.
She lets it stand. She lets it be true. She is going to need all of it.
The footsteps stop.
He is outside her door. She knows it the way you know when a sound you have been listening for has arrived, the shape of the silence changes. He is standing in her corridor breathing, and she is standing on the other side of her door breathing and there are four centimeters of painted wood between them and six years, and a child he does not know about.
She holds the knife at her side. Not raised, she is not going to open the door like a woman who is frightened. She is going to open it like a woman who has options.
He does not knock immediately.
She had expected him to knock. She had the timing of it in her body, the moment she would need to breathe, the moment she would need to decide. He is not following that timing. He is standing outside her door and not knocking, and she does not know what that means and the not-knowing makes the walls work harder.
She thinks about men with earpieces. The three cars parked outside. The government plates.
She thinks about the man she knew, a photographer on a working holiday, charming in a way that was not performed, attentive in a way that did not feel like effort. She had seen through parts of it. Not enough parts. The camera was always there, but the photographs never were, and she had noticed that, had filed it somewhere, she was not ready to open.
He was never a photographer. She had known. Not admitted, known, the way you know things you have decided not to look at directly.
Three black cars. Four men with earpieces. A man told them to wait and they waited.
She is going to need a much better story than the photographer.
He says her name.
Just her name, through four centimeters of wood, all the syllables, their correct weight. A-ma-ra. Her mother says it like that. Almost nobody else does.
She does not answer.
He says: please.
One word. She has heard him be charming. She has heard him be careful and warm and present in a way that made three months feel like a whole life. She has never heard him sound like that, like a man who has run out of everything except the single word left when there is nothing else to offer.
She hadn't known his voice could do that.
Then they already know about Lucas.
She presses her palm flat against the door.
Not I know. They. A "they" that has structure and reach and no respect whatsoever for the assumption that her life is simply hers.
She closes her eyes. One breath.
He could be lying. He could be using Lucas to get her to open the door, and the moment she does, she will have given something she cannot take back. She thinks about what kind of man arrives with three cars and four suited men and leads with please.
She thinks about Lucas. They already know about Lucas.
She straightens her spine. She adjusts her grip on the knife, not raising it, just making it visible. A statement. She is not naive, and she is not moved, and she is making a practical decision based on available information, which is that a man with government resources has come to her door with her son's name in his mouth.
She needs to know what that means.
That is all this is.
She turns the lock.
- Writer
