by lize Spit
I pressed my head into the pillow, processing what I’d just found, trying to rewrite the memory of Jan’s last days. Maybe he’d forced open the slurry pit grate with a screwdriver, looked down at the black mire below and jumped in without thinking, with the boldness of a cat strolling out into the night without a curfew. Maybe it happened without a sound, maybe he inhaled the toxic fumes without even the cows noticing what he was doing. Maybe the tick marks on his desk pad weren’t birth dates, maybe they were the days he had planned to carry out this final act and then backed out.
If it was true what Jolan said the morning after Dad made us remove all the sharp objects from the house to protect Mom from herself—that people don’t really want to die, they just want to find a way out of their current life—then why didn’t Jan call me? It’s not like he had anything left to lose.
I didn’t get out of the bed until I heard Pim’s parents come home. There was a good chance that his mom would come look at Jan’s room as soon as she got home. I stuffed the letter back under the pillow, exactly as I found it, scratched out my name on the notepad, pulled the cap off the pen, moved the figurines back where they had been and put back the slippers and pants. Just before I stepped out, I looked around for a moment. The imprint in the pillow was the only thing that couldn’t be restored to its original state.
We left. Laurens didn’t ask me where I’d been for so long. He was probably glad to have Pim all to himself, or maybe he hadn’t even noticed I was gone.
“See you Monday, seven-thirty, at the bridge?” he asked, before our paths went separate ways. “Call me if you’re running late.” He did this after every school holiday, checked that our appointment still stood.
I nodded.
For weeks, the last thing I thought about before I fell asleep and the first image that came to mind when I woke up in the morning was Jan’s mother cherishing the wrong head print in his pillow.
8:00 p.m.
I ONCE LOOKED up the decomposition time for memories, just like I once looked up the decomposition time for underwear, but I couldn’t find it. In any case, it can’t be any longer than the time for glass, because, unlike glass, people—the containers of memories—don’t last for centuries.
What I remember about those summer days is that every single moment mattered, minute after minute, how it happened, where it happened. I remember lying on my back in the workshop and seeing the hedge clippers dangling from the roof. I remember where the pebbles were on the path when I biked to the hospital with Tessie and Jolan, how careful we were not to run over the slugs on the way back. It seemed important to take note of all the details so I could forget them later, so I could wipe away the memories bit by bit.
I wasn’t able to do this until I moved to Brussels, where there were other butcher shops, other streets, no pollard willows. Who said what, the color of Pim’s T-shirt, which muscles had hurt the most, how exactly the sand felt scraping my insides—it all slowly faded into the background. But the fact that it happened, that it had scarred me, was undeniable, and became harder to bear over time.
Laurens should be home by now. He must’ve already called Pim and let him have it.
My coat pocket buzzes.
It’s hard for me to look down, the rope around my neck is too tight for that now. I feel around in my pocket and fish out my phone. I hold it up at eye level so I can see the screen. My fingers are so cold they don’t even feel like mine.
Tessie. One unread message. The screen goes into sleep mode. I have to feel around for the button three times to get it to light up again.
“Everything okay there? You called 16x. Tessa.”
The message is so short it fits into the preview. My empty stomach is bloated, pressing against my diaphragm. It’s seven minutes after eight. Later than I thought.
Sixteen times is an exaggeration. The old Tessie would have never exaggerated, the old Tessie was fond of accuracy, and always signed her messages with “Kisses”, or at least with an “XO”.
This was all part of it. Changing her name. Dyeing her hair.
At first, it was hard to say whether she was recovering or just going through puberty. In most cases, they’re one and the same: puberty is recovering from the idea that you can be whatever you want to be, that you can choose any job you want. But not in Tessie’s case—not every teenage girl ends up in a new family. Now that she’s twenty-four, she’s stopped bouncing around from one thing to the next. Two years ago, Nadine convinced her to train to be a pastry chef.
I have to call Tessie. Tell her it’s not true. Sixteen calls—either she or her phone is mistaken.
If I call now, she’ll pick up; her phone can’t be far away.
I struggle to unlock the screen with my stiff fingers. It takes less than two seconds for her phone to start ringing, for the glowing line to snake through the entire town at lightning speed to connect us like in the telecom commercials.
The first ring. I can picture where her phone might be. Somewhere in Nadine’s house. Or in her pocket. Maybe it’s lying next to her on the bench in the bathroom where she’s painting her nails. Or on the bed, while she arranges her recently opened Christmas presents in her room.
I can picture everything—the room, the wallpaper, her little toenails—but I don’t know how it all fits into her life, and that makes her feel even farther away than she did when I couldn’t picture any of it. It’s like missing a train; the person left watching the train roll out of the station feels a stronger sense of having missed something than someone who shows up ten minutes past departure time.
Second ring.
So she’s not picking up right away, that’s normal. I get startled too when my phone starts vibrating. It always takes me a few seconds to understand that there’s a call I’m supposed to take. That’s what’s going on right now. Tessie has to twist the top back on the bottle of nail polish and try to pick up the phone with wet nails or dig it out of her bedsheets.
The last time we talked on the phone for more than a few minutes was last year, two days after Christmas, right after she sent me a Merry Christmas text. Even though she told us way in advance that we weren’t going to celebrate together that year, even though I’d spent days mentally preparing myself for it, when the evening arrived and nothing happened, I couldn’t shake the thought that Tessie and Jolan had gone out for dinner without me, maybe even with Mom and Dad.
I went out, decided to send both Tessie and Jolan a WhatsApp photo from the restaurant we went to every year. There I was, alone at a table around midnight, beside an empty bottle of wine and a half-eaten turkey. It took me a while to get it all in one frame. The bottle was left over from the previous patrons.
Tessie called first. She left almost no pauses as she talked. We chatted for more than an hour. She brought up a few shared memories, but after a while she moved on to topics I had nothing to say about: Nadine’s dog, decorating her new bedroom, the judo classes she was going to take so she’d be able to defend herself on the street, how important it is to get the proportions right when making cream-puff dough.
Her voice hadn’t changed a bit. Part of me was surprised Nadine hadn’t managed to change that too.
While we talked, I could hear the sound of incoming voice messages from Jolan on her phone. That’s how I knew they weren’t in the same room. But it didn’t reassure me.
Last week, on Christmas Eve, I went to the same restaurant again. This time I didn’t send anybody a photo.
The phone’s rung three times now.
How was my number saved in her phone? Would it read “Evie: 17 missed calls”, or “Eva”, or “Eva de Wolf”?
All I can feel are my knuckles. Hard white stones. I lower my arm, slide the phone a little higher on the ball of my hand so I can swipe my thumb to hang up. All of a sudden, it falls to the floor. I don’t feel it slip out of my hand; all I hear is it bouncing off the ice. It hits the ground, a few feet away from me, screen down. I can’t see whether the call has ended, whether T
essie has just picked up, or whether it’s gone to voicemail.
For a second, I consider stepping off the ice block, but even if I wanted to, I’m already standing on my tiptoes. The rope is stretched as far as it will go; the knot is tied so tightly that there’s no way I could loosen the loop and pull my head out.
There’s no turning back now. I’m heading downhill with no brakes.
I don’t have to say anything. I could just wait here in silence with Tessie. Then at least someone would be with me now that the ice under my feet is really melting away.
But if I say nothing, she won’t listen until the end, regardless whether she’s answered the call or let it go to voicemail. Who listens to someone who’s not saying anything? She’ll think it was a mistake, that I just butt-dialed her or something.
“Hey, Tessie,” I shout before I have a chance to consider whether this is really a good idea now that the music has stopped next door.
It’s important that I keep calling her Tessie. She’s never completely recovered from her diminutive birth name. As long as I say Tessie, she won’t be able to hang up.
I could tell her what I’m doing, how crazy it is, that the soles of my feet are freezing from the cold, but the tops are scorched from the heat, that it’s making my whole body shiver. I can tell her how the ice is melting slower than I thought, but still too fast, how I’ve never been so close to the edge of such a deep abyss.
Or I could keep it light, tell her about the slurry in the meat, and if she was on the other end of the line, if it wasn’t a voicemail, I might even hear her laugh.
“Tessie, it’s Eva,” I say.
My voice sounds hoarse. The rope is pressing against my vocal cords. I try to make some spit to get them lubricated again. The last time I heard my voice out loud I was talking to Pim’s little boy. My thoughts always sound different, more determined—in my mind, things aren’t formulated in the standard Flemish I grew up with but in the neighbor’s Brussels accent.
Should I hurry? You can’t talk to an answering machine forever.
If a voicemail is recording now, I’ve got about another two and a half minutes. The clock in front of me is still frozen, Mickey Mouse isn’t going to help me keep track of time. But I’ve gotten good at it. During all the sleepless nights over the past few years, I’d turn on my phone timer and let it run. After exactly two minutes, timed down to the hundredth of a second, I’d hit stop. I always knew it might come in handy.
“I’m at the party for Jan. Just stepped out to call you, I’m in the milk house.”
Only now do I hear how ridiculous it sounds. The milk house. Like all the place names in this town when you really think about them. The Pit, the forest of the forest, Kosovo.
Of course, Tessie doesn’t know what the milk house is. She won’t be able to picture where I am right now. It’s a remnant of a history she wasn’t part of. It used to be the heart of this farm.
“Jolan came too. He left already. He says hello.”
Maybe she already knows. Even if she does, she wouldn’t have come. She never asked what happened to me after we took her to the hospital, if I’d been all right without her.
She doesn’t know I started sleeping in her bed after she was gone. That I fed Stamper every day, changed his cage, pet him like she would have, with the same number of strokes on each ear.
That for the first few weeks after the summer, I kept hoping the phone would ring and it would be Laurens and Pim calling to apologize. I waited for that phone call for four years.
Tessie spent a few days recovering at Sacred Heart before she was transferred to a group home in Kortenberg.
I went to see her on the weekends during visiting hours, sometimes by bus, sometimes Jolan and I got a ride. We would draw portraits, measuring each other’s proportions with a pencil. I always made sure Tessie’s drawings were the best.
Mom and Dad didn’t come to the hospital unless Tessie asked them to, not because they didn’t care, but because they didn’t want to impose. On their first visit, they bought her a Cosmo Girl in the gift shop, because it was one of the only things with no fat or carbs. The next few times, they filled up on liquid courage, showed up thirty minutes before the end of the visit and said, “Don’t worry, we won’t stay long.” Then they’d sit in a corner of the room in silence, waiting for permission to say something, something a parent in a situation like this is supposed to say, but Tessie didn’t speak to them. Sometimes it seemed like all that was left of them was shame and skin. They were like old houses, completely torn down except for the facade, which was only left standing to comply with local regulations. After the visit, they’d walk down the long, sterile corridors towards home, letting the oncoming traffic pass between them.
About four months after she was admitted, in the winter of 2002, Tessie came home for dinner on Christmas Eve. Even then, on their own property, Dad and Mom didn’t dare to raise their voices. They had removed the keyboard from the hallway and taken all the soap out of the bathroom. There was no Christmas tree, no flicker of colored lights in the living room. Everybody did their best, but maybe that made it all the more painful, more obvious that we weren’t a family.
Tessie had to be back at the facility by midnight.
Everyone wanted to ride along. She sat in the back, between me and Jolan. Dad did his best to stay in the right lane.
“You could’ve stayed the night,” he said right before she got out of the car. I watched her disappear through the revolving door of the giant building with her backpack in hand. The further she moved away from us, the more calmly she walked. Dad stood there in the parking lot for a moment until the clock struck twelve. No other children were dropped off.
Sometime in 2003, in the presence of a psychologist, Tessie announced that she only wanted to see Mom and Dad when they were sober. After that, they kept their distance.
“It’s their choice,” was all Tessie said about it, and I nodded.
Shortly after that, the possibility of a foster family was discussed. By observing the contours of Tessie’s body as I drew her, I could follow her healing process. Slowly, her shoulders took on different shapes, became more solid. I left all the drawings behind in her room, so she would have documentation of herself, by me, throughout the period. Sometimes I wondered if she’d ever laid our portraits side by side, if that might reveal who had made her progress possible, if she’d notice that the kilos she was gaining were slowly falling off of me.
In 2003, Jolan moved out to go to college. After that, Mom and Dad only ate at the table on the weekends, when he came home from school. While I waited for him to return, for the table to be set again, I took over his bedroom and set up my own TV in there.
I spent most of my time upstairs, eating in one room, sleeping in the other. Soon Jolan stopped coming home altogether. Whenever I called him, he told me how busy he was. I often scrolled through his pictures on Facebook—usually partying, with a beer in one hand and a girl in the other. The distance between Leuven and Kortenberg was bikeable. I had a feeling he often visited Tessie without me.
I wriggle a finger between the rope and my neck, just for a moment, to relieve my throat. I take a deep breath. A little burp comes out.
“Pardon,” I say in French. “Tessie, do you remember that summer day we took you to the hospital?” I pause. Three seconds, three crocodiles. Just enough to remember our story.
In those last few meters before we got home, after we left her in the emergency room, Jolan started talking.
“We’re going to take care of each other, you and me,” he said. “The hospital probably already called Mom and Dad. I’m going to college in Leuven next year, and as soon as I’ve got some money, I’ll rent an apartment big enough for two, three if necessary.”
I wondered who the “if necessary” applied to, Tessie or me, but once we turned down our street, and our house was in sight, it didn’t matter anymore. Clearly, the news hadn’t reached anyone there yet: the aluminum shutters on the l
iving-room window were still rolled down, Mom was still sleeping in the armchair and had probably taken the phone off the hook.
The field next to the house was dotted with color. I started pedaling faster. I knew what it was—wet Monopoly money, whisked away by the wind. The box was still lying open on the patio table. The game board, a couple of unused pieces and the Community Chest cards hadn’t blown away, but they did get rained on. Only one bill remained, clamped under the edge of the lid—one hundred francs.
The rest of the pieces were under the table with the dog. One was missing.
“Did I ever tell you, Tessie, that the day we took you to the hospital, Nanook ate the Atomium? That was your favorite piece, wasn’t it?” I say.
The lid was full of rainwater. When I picked it up, it fell apart. The ink had bled onto the white patio table. I think the mirror image of the top of the Monopoly box is still there.
“I’m going to tell Mom what happened, what we decided. It can’t go on like this,” Jolan declared, and he marched into the house with decisive steps.
I stayed behind to clean up the game. I crawled around the garden collecting all the scattered cash. I found it on the trunks of trees, on the sides of flowerpots, under the hedge and out in the field. I found a Chance card against the umbrella stand. GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL. DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT 4,000 FRANCS.
I put all the cards in the bottom of the wet box. It wasn’t until I tried to rescue the bank that it hit me—that night, I would be sleeping in our room alone for the first time in my life. I was always the one who went camping. Tessie had never had sleepovers with friends.
Only after I’d collected all the money did I fold up the game board. And that’s where I found it: a little notebook with all the scores, its pages protected under the plastic cover. The scoreboard had been neatly drawn with a pen and ruler. In the top left corner was “TES”, in the top right “EVA”.
I had to flip through it three times, scan the dozens of pages, read all the scores several times, before I understood, before I was able to see it: every time Tessie sat alone at that table, she wasn’t talking to herself, she was talking to me.