He Still Cares For Elsa

He Still Cares For Elsa
POV: Felix

"Elsa," she said. She was looking at the city. "Not the files, not the medical notes. Her." A pause. "What she was like."

I sat with the question for a moment. It was not a question I had been asked before, people had expressed condolences about my wife in the abstract, had spoken about the tragedy of it, had offered the formulations that social convention provides for loss. Nobody had asked me what she was like, which was the question that mattered and the one I hadn't been able to receive until now.

"She was funny," I said. It came out plainly, which was the right register for it. "Not the kind of funny that performs itself. The quiet kind, she would say something and you'd be two steps past it before you realised how funny it had been." I paused. "She found me genuinely amusing, which was..." I stopped. "Most people find me many things. Amusing is not usually among them."

Selina made a sound that was not quite a laugh but lived in the same neighbourhood.

"She was the best designer I've ever seen work," I said. "Not technically, there are technically superior designers. But she had this quality of understanding what a thing was supposed to feel like before she knew what it was supposed to look like, and she built from feeling outward, and the things she made felt true in a way that technically superior things sometimes didn't." I looked at the city. "She would have disagreed with half the things in this house."

"Which half?"

"The formal half," I said. "She liked things that looked like they'd been lived in. She always said houses should apologise a little for themselves."

Selina was quiet for a moment. "She sounds like someone I would have liked."

"Yes," I said. "She would have liked you."

A silence.

"I'm sorry she's gone," Selina said. Simply, without the formulation of condolence, just the plain fact of it.

"I'm sorry it took me six years to understand what happened to her," I said. "She deserved better than six years of me not understanding."

Selina looked at the city. "You couldn't have known."

"I chose not to look," I said. "That's not the same as not knowing. I chose not to have the autopsy and I chose to attribute the rumours to cruelty and I chose to put the grief away and move forward, and every one of those choices was made for reasons that felt right at the time and were also, specifically, what Martin needed me to do." I paused. "He understood my grief better than I did. He built around it perfectly."

Selina turned and looked at me directly for the first time since we had sat down. "You were a man who had just lost his wife and son," she said. "You were not equipped to be a forensic investigator at that moment. Give yourself that much."

I held her gaze. "You're being generous."

"I'm being accurate," she said. "There's a difference." She held my gaze a moment longer, and in the dusk light of the garden her eyes had the quality I had come to understand was not softness but clarity, the specific clarity of a person who has decided to see something plainly and is seeing it.

Then she looked back at the city.

I looked at the city too.

"The names she liked," Selina said after a moment. "For the baby. What were they?"

The question arrived quietly enough that I almost didn't register how much it landed.

"She had a list," I said. "She was very particular about names. She said names should sound like something the person could grow into, not something that already decided who they were." A pause. "She had seven on the list. We hadn't eliminated any of them yet."

"Do you remember them?"

"All of them," I said. "I remember everything about those months."

She didn't ask me to recite the list. She just nodded, as if the knowing were sufficient, as if what mattered was not the specific names but the fact that they had existed and had been considered and had been full of the particular hope that lists of names for unborn children contain.

We sat until the sky finished its work of going dark.

"Tomorrow," she said eventually.

"Tomorrow," I said.

"I'll be here when you get back," she said. Not as a promise exactly, not in the register of promises, but as information. The kind of information you offer when you want someone to have it.

"I know," I said.

She looked at me once more, briefly, the garden dark around us now and the city lights visible above the wall, and then she stood and pulled the cardigan tighter and went back inside.

I sat in the garden for a while longer.

Thinking about Elsa, who had found me amusing and built houses from feeling outward and deserved to have her story told correctly.

Thinking about tomorrow.

Thinking about a woman who had sat beside me in the dark and asked what Elsa was like rather than asking what Elsa meant, which was the question that would have served her own interests, and who had asked the harder, more generous question instead.

The garden was quiet.

I let it be quiet.

Then I went inside to finish preparing for tomorrow.

POV: Selina

I didn't sleep again.

This time it was not the vigilance of a person in an uncertain environment. The room was safe, Amaya was beside me, the house was as secure as Felix's considerable resources could make it. The not-sleeping was a different kind, the particular wakefulness of a mind that has received too much in too short a time and is still processing the delivery.

I lay in the dark and thought about everything he had told me.

Not analytically, not the way I had been thinking about things for weeks, with the careful, protective distance of someone assessing rather than feeling. I let myself feel it, which was different and more difficult and also, I was beginning to understand, more necessary. The compound. The seven women. Elsa's name in Strack's account of what he had been paid to do. Martin sitting at a hospital bedside with books for a woman whose death he had already commissioned.

I let that land.

Then I let the other thing land too, the garden, the dusk, Felix's voice saying she was funny, the quiet kind, with the specific quality of a person speaking about someone they loved in the past tense, which was the most naked and undefended thing I had heard him say.

He had not been performing in the garden.

That was the thing I kept returning to in the dark. Men who perform never ask whether their performance is landing, they simply perform and watch for the effect. Felix had not watched for the effect. He had looked at the city and talked about Elsa's list of names and not once looked at me to gauge what it was producing.

He had just told me.

Amaya stirred in the other bed and said without opening her eyes, in the uncanny way she sometimes did, "Stop thinking so loudly."

"I'm not thinking loudly."

"You're lying in the dark having an epiphany. I can feel it from here."

I was quiet for a moment. "I talked to him in the garden."

"I know. I watched you from the window." A pause. "I went back inside before it got intrusive."

"Amaya."

"I was checking the security rotation," she said, with the complete serenity of someone who has decided that this is what she was doing and history should record it accordingly.

I looked at the ceiling. "He talked about Elsa," I said. "What she was like. Not what happened to her. Her."

Amaya was quiet.

"He remembered everything," I said. "Seven names on a list. He sounded like someone who had been carrying those names for six years and had never been asked to put them down."

"He was," Amaya said. "People carry things longer when they don't have anywhere to set them."

I thought about that.

"I told him I'd be here when he got back," I said.

A pause. Then: "Good."

"I don't know what it means," I said. "I want to be clear about that. I told him that too."

"Also good," she said. "Knowing what you don't know is better than the alternative."

I looked at the ceiling for a while longer.

"David?" I said.

"He cried," she said. A pause. "So did I. A little bit. Into the phone where he could hear it."

"Good," I said.

"Yes," she said. "It was."

We were quiet after that, and eventually the quiet became sleep, and the sleep held until morning came through the curtains with the particular determination of a day that intends to be what it is regardless of what the people insi
de the house have spent the night working through.

I woke up and looked at the light.

Tomorrow had arrived.

It was already today.