I can’t hear Lena’s television through the wall. The creak outside her bedroom door. The pipes in the second bathroom that knocked every night at eleven like a small, reliable announcement that the house was still standing.
I miss it with my whole body sometimes.
My phone lights up on the nightstand.
Lena.
I pick up before the second ring. This is automatic. It has been automatic since the first hospitalization eighteen months ago, and it will be automatic for the rest of my life, and I have made my peace with that.
“Hey,” she says.
Her voice is not the scared version. It’s not the hospital voice or the pain voice or any of the voices I have cataloged and learned to read from the first syllable. It’s the other one. The voice she uses when she’s about to tell me something she has been turning over in her mind for a while and has finally decided I need to know.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Better. The new dosage is working.” A pause. “I need to tell you something.”
I sit up straighter on the bed. My hand tightens on the phone without my permission.
“There’s a man,” she says. “He’s been calling me.”
“What man?”
“Someone I know. Knew.” She stops. Starts again. “He’s been calling about money.”
“Lena.” I keep my voice even. “What money?”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“You called me at ten o’clock on a Wednesday to tell me about money that isn’t a big deal?”
Silence on her end.
“I borrowed money,” she says finally. “Eight months ago. Before the diagnosis got bad, before everything, I was covering a gap, and I knew someone who could help quickly, and I took it.”
“How much?”
She tells me the number.
“Eight months,” I say.
“I know.”
“You’ve been sitting on this for eight months.”
“I was going to handle it.”
“Lena.”
“I didn’t want to add to everything you were already?—”
“Stop.” I press two fingers to the bridge of my nose. The notebook is beside me on the bed. The locked room is in the middle of my diagram. Six jurisdictions. The contract I cannot break. The man down the corridor, whose world I’ve been living inside for a month, and whose name I’m about to hear connected to something that’s going to make everything more complicated than it already is.
I don’t know that yet. I’m about to.
“Who is the man?” I say.
“His name is Dario.”
