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 are 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.