1967

HE ARRIVES TWO weeks later, at the beginning of September. The little girl is recovering—the only sign of the event is a mark that will fade as the years go by. But he’s not recovering. Everything’s broken. He doesn’t know if he’s breathing. He’s broken in two.

He doesn’t bring much with him, just one suitcase. For the first week we lie in bed and draw familiar maps of each other. I miss the little girl and ask about her. He turns away, his desolation too heavy to dress in words. I go to work in the mornings; I’ve started a temporary job teaching French at a school on the south side of the city. I walk out the door reluctantly because I know that he’ll draw someone else in his mind while I’m away.

And that’s what happens—the black settles into his eyes in just one day. When I come home he’s smoking at the window and won’t look at me. Finally he approaches me, moving his hand along the line of my hip. He lowers his hand onto my rear end. We lean against each other. I’m more angular than he remembers me. I have a scent that he doesn’t like, maybe from my day, or maybe it’s always been there.

“Shall we make some dinner?” I ask. “Potatoes? Rice?”

“Anything,” he says into the pit at the base of my neck.

He can’t stand the thought of potatoes, grains of rice that scatter and click against the floor, the red pillowcase, the patter of the rain against the window. He just wants to be inside me, constantly. It’s the only thing that makes him forget. Just Eeva from head to toe, Eeva who takes off her skirt and takes a shower, then comes to him. Let me hold you, he says, like in Paris. I take him deep. He forgets his regret while I rock him.

Afterward he rolls onto his back, lights a cigarette, although I’ve forbidden him to smoke in bed.

“It’s grueling being here all day long. Like having nails driven into me. Sawed in half with a blade of acid.” He says this as if I were to blame.

I get up from the bed. “Go, then. Why don’t you leave?” I say without looking at him. I fasten my bra and snap up my pants.

“I want to be with you.”

“Well, bring your daughter here.”

“I suppose you think Elsa would let me do that.”

“Just for a visit. Why not just for a visit?”

THE NEXT DAY the little girl is standing in the hallway looking uncertain, her doll under her arm, the toes of her shoes shining question marks.

I hug her for a long time. I can’t see the scar; it’s started to fade. She cries a little.

“Molla was rescued,” she says. “She doesn’t even have any scars. Daddy saved her.”

I whisper the words in her ear that my mother used to whisper to me. We stand there. The hallway doesn’t know about fires. The day doesn’t know about accidents.

“Do you have any milk?” she asks.

“We sure do,” I say.

He pours her a glass. She looks around.

“There’s no kids’ room here at all. Where do kids sleep?”

“They sleep on the sofa or with the grown-ups, in the same bed,” he says.

“They won’t fit,” she says, and drinks her milk. Then she looks at her father. “Daddy, you can take me to the park now.”

TWENTY-FIVE DAYS AND just as many nights. We have nights like cradles, and happy days as well. Sometimes the little girl comes over, other times it’s just the two of us. We have walks and meals and talks. He draws a little, it makes him feel better.

I don’t know that he goes to see Elsa five times that month. Many of those times they make love and it feels to him amazingly familiar yet new.

We, on the other hand, are separating from each other. To fill up the cracks and corners of longing, we make meals fervently, like communion. We sweep the helplessness from each other’s brows with a caress, weaving a trust day by day, night by night. It’s not enough.

One night he gets out of bed, dresses as if even that were an obstacle I’ve placed in his way. He says he’s going out. I won’t let him.

“You won’t let me love you.” I’m shouting, pouring the words over his face like a kettle of hot oil.

He convulses under it. He pushes me against the wall. The veins of his neck tighten under his skin. I might have thought, how beautiful, like jewelry, his blood making his veins stand out, if I didn’t know that they’re gushing with the power of hate.

“What do you want from me?” he says.

“That you let me, allow me.”

“Your love is the kind of love that smothers me. It doesn’t come from you. It comes from somewhere far away, another world. Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Eeva,” I say.

The name is just soundless syllables shaped by my lips. If you were watching from a distance, you’d think that woman was silently mouthing a prayer, a call for help.

“Eeva is no one,” he says. “She’s nothing but an image.”

He lets go of me. I take a breath. He’s already at the door. The door slams. He’s gone.

HE COMES BACK two days later. I’ve waited for him at the window one evening, another, watching the light change. He looks as if he’s crossed an ocean to see me. He has his gestures. I’ve lived in them so much these days that I’ve lost my own boundaries. It’s as if I’ve gradually flowed into him, or as if I was flowing and somewhere along the way I drained into the sewer, unnoticed.

He sits on the bed without saying anything. I sit on his lap. He lets me hug him, but not kiss him. That’s how I know.

“Do you hate me?” he says. “Are you going to hate me?”

“Why would I?”

“Because everything’s ending like this.”

He says it easily. Drops me like an object from a shelf. Neither of us speaks for a moment. I can hear his heart—it’s beating here, although it’s elsewhere.

“Your daughter can live with us. It can work.”

He’s silent. I continue: “We could go to the market on Saturdays. We could go to the seashore sometimes, drive right to the edge of the earth. Look at the waves, scream as they crash against the shore. On ordinary days we could have a dance. And bookshelves, and visitors. We could open jars of jam, build a fort wherever we wanted. No one would get mad if a little paint got smeared in the doorway. There’d be sand in the couch sometimes, but it would be no big deal. Pancakes, forts, jam jars. Nights when we can’t tell where one person’s skin ends and another’s begins. That kind of life.”

“Beautiful,” he says. “A beautiful story.”

“Just a story?”

“Yes, just a story. Like a dream.”

I’m silent for a moment, not breathing. “Can I see her again? Just once? Just one more time?”

He doesn’t answer right away. “I have to ask Elsa,” he says finally. “Elsa can decide.”

He gets up. I follow him. He goes to wash his face because he suddenly feels that he can’t see properly. But he can see; he sees Elsa. Elsa is in his mind, more clearly delineated than ever.

While he’s in the bathroom, I hide his shoes in the oven. I want him to be stuck to the floor. I get some syrup from the kitchen cupboard and pour it over his legs. He grabs the bottle out of my hand and throws it across the room. It hits the wall and spatters a senseless pattern there. I get some milk and pour that; he throws that, too. I get a bottle of red wine, pour it on his feet; the bottle shatters as it hits the wall. Too purple to look like blood; a festive splash like an exclamation mark in celebration of life. He thinks I’ve lost my senses. What art. Trivial, unpredictable.

We stand facing each other for a minute, five minutes, a whole hour. The sun sets, the night trails in through the window. The buildings crumble around us. I bite him on the collarbone and leave a broken line. He shakes me. The world falls away like a scrim, except that’s not true: the trees are there in the yard, the sky is in its place. He pulls me quite close to him again. I don’t intend to let him go. He’ll have to let me go. I sink to the floor, cling to his legs. He drags me down the hallway. The trip to the door takes three years and four months, as long as this has lasted. It takes forty years because that’s how long everything continues even after it’s over. Decades later he’ll be amazed that he’s still on his way down this hallway.

I throw myself in front of the door. He opens the door and steps over me. He closes the door. It’s so simple; he just closes the door behind him.

I lie on the floor, unable to get up. I listen to the silence flowing down the walls. I seep into the cracks in the floor.