She never packed up more than one box a day, and she didn’t pack one every day. Sometimes she only classified items, or thought about what she should do the next day. But this time, it was old winter clothes. She had already spent an arduous two weeks putting the ruined ones into trash bags, and he had taken them away, one by one, when he drove downtown or to the supermarket. That day, Lola was working with the last sweaters to be donated. They were wool and took up a lot of room, so she put them into two boxes that she taped shut. Sealing two boxes gave her a strange feeling of vertigo that she didn’t really know how to handle. She looked out the window. She forgot what she’d been doing, but then she opened the list and remembered. She went to ask him to take a chair outside for her, to the front yard. He was folding and putting away the towels he had taken off the clothesline, and he stood looking at her for a moment.

  “I don’t have to explain to you why I need a chair outside. I need it there, period.”

  He set the towels on the counter and looked at her again. She was wearing her pajamas, a pink jacket, and the felt slippers that were torn from so much use but always clean, and she held her list and a pen.

  “Where do you want the chair?” he asked.

  “On the porch, looking toward the street.”

  She followed him to be sure he took the right chair and that he didn’t bang the cedar door on the way outside. She waited for him to leave and angled the chair toward the sun. She half fell with a loud whistle at the end and a slight grunt of pain that she dragged out a few seconds before leaning back into the chair. She unfolded her list, but didn’t read it over. It was nearly noon, and the woman and boy would soon pass by the front door. She focused on the wait and then, gradually, dozed off.

  * * *

  One afternoon when her husband had gone downtown to run a few errands, the boy rang the bell. She peered out the kitchen window and recognized him immediately. He was with another boy his age on the other side of the gate. They were talking in low voices. She didn’t know whether to answer or not. She looked at the clock and saw that he should be home any minute. When the doorbell rang again, she made a decision and picked up the intercom receiver. She rested a bit before speaking. She was agitated. As always, the sound of her breathing preceded her voice in the yard, and the boys looked at each other, amused.

  “Yes . . .” said Lola.

  “Ma’am, I’m here to return something of your husband’s.”

  “What do you have to return?”

  The boys looked at each other. Lola saw the neighbor boy had something in his hand, but she couldn’t see what it was.

  “A tool.”

  “Come back later.”

  The other boy said something rude under his breath.

  “Come on, ma’am, let us in,” said the neighbor.

  The other boy had something in his hand as well, something long and heavy.

  “Come back later.”

  She hung up the receiver and stayed where she was. She could see them out the kitchen window, but they probably couldn’t see her.

  “Hey, lady, don’t be like that,” yelled the other boy, and he hit the fence three times with whatever was in his hand.

  Lola recognized the sound from the other night. The boys waited. When they saw she wasn’t going to let them in, they left, and she stayed beside the intercom a while, listening to her breathing gradually grow steady. She told herself everything was fine, that it had only been a conversation through the intercom, but she didn’t like those boys. Those boys could . . . She stood thinking for another moment; she knew she was close to something, something that hadn’t yet taken shape but that, in its intensity—she knew very well how her own head worked—was becoming a premonition. Then, suddenly, she brought her hand to her heart and heard the first sound, coming from the other end of the house. She went toward the bedroom watching her feet advance, careful of her speed, containing her nerves so her breathing wouldn’t quicken too much. She knew it was them. She needed to control her body. She was certain, and even so, when she reached the bedroom and saw them out the window, now almost inside her backyard, she was as startled as if the possibility had never occurred to her. They were at the back, ducking under the wire where the boy entered the vegetable garden. Lola hid to one side of the window. She saw them come toward the house and stop just a few meters away, now very close to her. They pushed on the garage door and found it was open—the garage was his, and it was his responsibility to lock it. Fear immobilized her. She heard the drawers in the metal cabinets opening and closing. They seemed like loud, strident noises. She thought about how she would make him understand that it was his fault they’d gotten in, that that boy he wasted his time with in the garden was a thief. Her breathing grew louder. She was afraid they would hear her, but it wasn’t something she could help. There were more noises in the garage, then the door again. She saw them leave through the backyard and go under the fence toward the other house, but she couldn’t see very well if they’d taken anything. She lay on the bed, put her feet under the blanket, and curled up in the fetal position. It would take a while for her heartbeat to normalize, but she would wait it out in that position so he would understand right away that she was not well. She decided that, whatever he asked her, she wouldn’t say anything. If she could wait, there would be a perfect moment to bring this up, a moment she would recognize immediately. And she decided something else, too. That the days were growing more complicated and she shouldn’t overextend herself: she would take a break from the matter of the boxes.

  * * *

  Lola remembered the doctor at the hospital perfectly. Though she didn’t know his name, she’d be able to pick him out in a crowd from meters away. He wasn’t at all like Dr. Petterson; there was a reason one of them worked on TV and the other at a third-rate medical insurer—the insurer her husband had chosen for the two of them when they retired.

  “How’s our patient feeling today?” That’s what the hospital doctor asked on the three or four occasions he came to see her at home. He was always overheated—Lola could smell his sweat, something she did not consider hygienic in a doctor. But it was the question he asked that bothered her most. Clearly addressing her husband, trusting only his opinion, when she was the one he was treating. Sometimes Lola imagined herself leaping spryly from her armchair and saying something like “You two take care of this, I have things to do.” But they needed her for the show. That’s what she always told herself, and she remembered that, with him, half her life consisted of having patience.

  “How’s our patient feeling today?” Her lungs hurt, she had terrible back pain, her spleen stabbed her every time she stepped a little more quickly than she should, but none of that mattered to this doctor. His question was about something else. Something that had nothing to do with Lola’s health. If she had listed all of her problems to Dr. Petterson, he would have been shocked at her untreated calamities, and he would have looked for some kind of solution. But these two men who were looking at her now—this doctor and him, especially him—were only interested in the supermarket incident and everything related to it. Symptoms before the incident, the results of the tests at the hospital, consequences of the incident. Incident.

  * * *

  The woman from the rotisserie told her once that it wasn’t good to worry, that she had to try to be more optimistic. People tended to tell her things like that, and Lola liked to hear them. She knew none of it was going to help, because she was facing something worse than death, too complicated to explain over the phone. But it was a nice gesture on the woman’s part: even if it didn’t help in the slightest, her patience made Lola feel better.

  * * *

  In the following days the boy came over with the folding stool—their stool—under his arm. He unfolded it and sat down to watch her husband work, or sometimes her husband rested a little while they talked. Once, he pretended he was digging into the boy’s stomach with his garden spade, and the boy laughed. During those days Lola paid special attention to whether or not he increased the ration of cocoa powder when he went shopping, but it stayed the same. She also took notice of the silences during their dinners. But he never said anything about it. Sometimes the omission soothed her; it relegated the matter of the boy to a lesser place, and she wondered if maybe it was a passing private obsession. Until she saw the boy out there again the next morning, and again her breathing rang out in the living room like a guttural alarm contained between the picture windows.

  * * *

  One night, things aligned in her favor: there was a robbery at the rotisserie. She found out from him, after he went to pick up dinner. Lola didn’t call the woman who took the orders; she decided it wasn’t appropriate, in spite of the intimacy that had grown from their conversations about her death. So they were dining on chicken again, and he was talking about the robbery. It was a good moment to ask about the boy, to subvert the silence he’d been subjecting her to: when he thought back to the conversation he wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the trap, he would find only the subject of the rotisserie, which he himself had brought up. She waited patiently. He talked about the gun the rotisserie woman kept under the shelf, about the wounds on her arm and the ambulance that had come. He said the woman had been very brave, explained why he thought her daughter—who also worked at the rotisserie—hadn’t been as good under pressure, how long it took the police to arrive, and how they’d interrogated the witnesses. Lola listened in silence, accustomed to waiting for him. Every three or four of his sentences, she would rewrite everything mentally in a single line, clear and concise, silently correcting his exasperating slowness. She forgave him. Then there was a silence, a long one, and she said:

  “So what about the boy from next door? You think he had anything to do with it?”

  “Why would he be involved?”

  “They’re the ones who bang on the fence. Him and another boy. They came by the other day and wanted to come in and return a tool of yours.” Lola wanted to stop, mete out the information, but now the whole problem was on her shoulders and she couldn’t stand so much weight; she had to drop it. “I didn’t let them in, but they came in anyway, from the back. They were in the garage, they went through your things. You didn’t lock the door. You should see if the drill and the soldering iron are still there.”

  “The drill and the soldering iron?”

  She nodded, controlled her breathing. Until she put it into words, she hadn’t really thought about the drill and the soldering iron, but they both knew those were his most expensive tools. He glanced toward the garage, and she realized she had managed to alarm him. She imagined him going through the tools and listing the ones that were missing while she found the number for the police station in her phone book. But he picked up his silverware again, raised another bite of chicken to his mouth, and said:

  “The fixed wrench.”

  He had to say something more, so Lola just looked at him.

  “For the kitchen sink. His mother asked for it and I lent it to them.”

  “And you didn’t tell me.”

  “It was several days ago. When they moved in.”

  “The day they moved in.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That day.”

  Lola waited until he was in the shower to check the garage herself, but she realized she couldn’t remember what tools he had or where they were kept. Nor did she know exactly what a fixed wrench was. And since the garage was the only part of the house under his management, she suspected that everything would be dirty and disorganized. She wondered if he could be covering for the boy for some reason, and it didn’t seem like an idea she could rule out. She felt for the list in her apron pocket, and thought that she would have to recall the facts and analyze them more calmly later that night. Make some kind of decision.

  * * *

  The next morning she put together another box. She filled it with old office supplies: dried-out pens, notebooks with yellowed pages, boxes of worn-out rubber bands, telephone books from past years. She was sure poor people would find those things useful, if only to know they exist, in case someday they came to need them. She went to the small office space he had set up on the phone table to organize bills and packed up some other things she found there. She wanted to also wrap the small ceramic Greek bust he used as a paperweight on the living room table, but she couldn’t find it. She knew sometimes she didn’t remember everything she had packed up. There were too many things and it was all on her shoulders, so it was only logical that details would escape her at times. The week before, they’d had to open a box because, in a moment of distraction, all of his shoes had been packed up. There were few towels, and the big mirror in the hallway no longer looked as good now that the table was empty. Nor were there any brushes or combs in her drawers in the bathroom. That was the worst, to find herself forced to always use his old comb.

  At noon she taped up the box, stuck on a label, and wrote Office Supplies. She went to look for him so he could carry the box to the garage, but she didn’t find him in any room of the house. Nor was he in the garage or the garden—she could see that from her bedroom window. They had agreed he wouldn’t leave the house without telling her, because that kind of disappearance was precisely what made her the most nervous. She might need him, and she had to be able to count on him at all times. She crossed the living room and opened the front door. She saw him on the ground, and her breathing almost hiccuped before the wheeze. She clutched the doorframe. He was sitting with his back against the wall and his forehead in the palm of his hand. Lola took in enough air and strength to say: “My god!”

  And he said:

  “I’m okay, don’t be scared.” He looked at his bloodied palm; there was a small cut on his forehead. “I think my blood pressure dropped, but I caught myself.”

  “I’ll call a doctor.”

  “Later. For now I need to go inside and lie down.”

  She prepared the bed for him. Brought him a cup of tea. Found the two latest issues of National Geographic on the hallway bookshelf and set them on the nightstand. She focused on doing all this at a logical speed: as quickly as possible, but without letting the movements agitate her. She was aware that this “moment” was his, and she had to do certain things to relieve him. But, frightened as he was, he might think only of himself, and someone had to go on taking care of her. It was an intense thing, in its own way. And Lola was up to it. Then he fell asleep. She walked to the living room with a final effort and sat down in her armchair to rest. She had to recover her strength—there was still a lot to do.

  * * *

  She woke up to the sound of pipes banging on the fence. She craned her neck to look out the window, but a cramp forced her back into her initial position. Although there was no one in sight, she knew who it was. The clock above the TV said 4:20 in the afternoon. She heard the neighbor’s high heels walking on her sidewalk toward the house next door. Then a door closing. She thought about the fixed wrench. She balled her hands into fists and stretched her arms out to the sides. It was an exercise from Dr. Petterson’s program that she used to stretch and loosen up. The cramp dissipated and she felt she could once again depend on her body, or at least part of it. In her imagination, she tried to bring the uncertain shape of the wrench into focus. She checked to be sure she was wearing the red felt slippers and that her cool-weather jacket hung from the coat rack in the entryway, beside the intercom. It encouraged her to see that the objects were arranged in her favor. She stood up, put her jacket on, and opened the front door. That’s how she finally understood what her intentions were, and it seemed to her that, clearly, this was a very sensible solution.

  She went to the house next door and knocked. By the time the woman finally opened, much of the energy from her nap had been expended in the wait. Now everything would be more difficult. The woman recognized her right away and invited her in. Lola accepted with a half smile. She took a few steps and stopped, unable to decide what to do or say next.

  “Would you like some tea?” asked the woman, and she walked toward the kitchen. “Have a seat if you like,” she called from the other room. “Please excuse the mess.”

  The walls were peeling. There was almost no furniture except for a table, three rickety chairs, and two armchairs covered in sheets that were transparent from use, knotted around the armrests so they wouldn’t slip off. The woman came back with a cup of tea and invited her to sit in one of the armchairs. They looked uncomfortable and Lola thought it would be hard to get up, but she accepted out of politeness. The woman moved quickly and brought a chair over for Lola to use as a table. Then Lola saw the magazines and papers piled on the floor beside the window. They took up a lot of space, and surely had no use.

  “I have boxes if you want,” said Lola. “They’re strong boxes, I use them to pack up and classify things.”

  The woman followed Lola’s gaze to her piles of papers.

  “No need, thank you. But tell me, what can I do for you? Is it about my son? He didn’t come home last night and I’m very worried.”

  Lola immediately understood the precision of her intuitions, and she remembered the noise of the fence from earlier that day. The woman was waiting for some kind of sign. She sat down in the other armchair, across from Lola.

  “I think he’s mad at me. Please, do you know anything?”

  Lola was on the right path, but she had to move forward carefully.

  “No. It’s not that. I have to ask you an important question.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10