She goes into the guest bathroom at the end of the hall at eight twenty-four.
I note the timestamp and wait.
At nine twenty-seven, a woman comes out.
I sit forward.
The blazer is gone. In its place, a dark emerald dress, fitted, the kind that requires a decision before you leave the house. The hair that I have never once seen other than pinned flat against the back of her head is loose around her shoulders in long blonde waves. The mask is ivory and gold and covers the upper half of her face completely.
I know that dress.
I know that hair.
I watch the camera follow her down the stairs and into the ballroom, and I feel something move through my chest that is not quite any single thing I have a clean word for.
I switch cameras. I follow her.
I watch her move through the party. I watch her stop near the east wall, and I watch the woman in the red gown say something to her, and I watch myself cross the room. I watch myself stand between them. I watch myself walk her to the terrace.
I switch to the terrace camera.
We stand there for twenty-six minutes. I cannot hear what is said. I do not need to hear what is said. I was there.
I watch myself take her inside.
I switch cameras again. I follow us up the stairs. I watch my own bedroom door close at ten nineteen.
I watch it open again at four fifty-three in the morning.
She comes out alone. Hair loose, dress on, shoes in her hand. She stands in the corridor for a moment, her back against the wall, her eyes closed, then straightens and walks toward the stairs, disappearing from the frame.
I close the laptop.
I sit in the quiet of my office and look at the middle distance, and let it settle over me the way cold water settles. Not fast. Thoroughly.
She let me take her upstairs, and she said nothing. She sat across from my desk for three weeks and answered my questions, brought my coffee, and managed my schedule, and she said nothing.
She looked me in the eye this morning in the back of my car, and she said nothing.
The thing moving through my chest clarifies into something I recognize now. It is not confusion. It is not hurt. I do not do hurt; that is not a category I have much use for. It is something colder than both of those and considerably more focused.
I stand up.
10
ELENA
I wasseven years old the first time I held a baby.
My mother’s friend from the building downstairs had a three-week-old daughter, and she brought her up one afternoon. My mother called me in from the hallway, where I was doing nothing in particular, and said, “Come, come see.”
The baby was wrapped in something yellow, and her face was very small and very serious. She smelled like something I did not yet have a word for.
My mother’s friend lowered her into my arms and told me to support the head, and I did, very carefully. The baby looked up at me, and I looked back at her, and something settled in my chest that has never fully left.
I think about that afternoon sometimes. The way my mother stood behind me with her hands hovering an inch from my elbows, ready to catch, not catching, letting me hold the weight on my own.
My mother has been gone for eleven years.
