Retrograde

  “Helena, is that you?” Outside, the sky is completely dark. What time is it? How long did her appointment take?

  “Shhh, Joachim, go back to sleep.” He hears her uneven steps sliding across the floor. Is he imagining it or did she slur her words? No, she’s just tired. She had to get to the doctor’s office and get back all by herself. Still, something doesn’t make sense here. Why would she tell him to go back to sleep when he’s on the sofa, not even covered with a blanket, so obviously waiting for her?

  “Turn the light on,” he says, sitting up, somehow not quite able to stand. “I have to get in bed, anyway.”

  Another moment of darkness—is she hesitating or feeling for the switch?—and then the lights come on. Her face is flushed, her hair tousled, half out of its ponytail. One leg of her pants is rolled up to expose pale skin where her cast used to be, and the thin silhouette of her arm under her sweater shows that that one’s gone, too.

  “Your casts,” he says, sinking back into the sofa cushions.

  “Yeah, I got them off. They did some X-rays and my bones were healed.”

  He feels himself overflowing with a warm gratitude he could never express to Helena or anyone, a prayer answered before he dared to make it. She really was at the doctor’s office. It must not be as late as it looks. It’s starting to get dark earlier.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Good,” she says, without moving from her position by the door. “My ankle’s still pretty sore, but at least I can walk around.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come pick you up. I must’ve fallen asleep waiting. What time is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, almost before the question is out of his mouth, as if she’d been waiting for it. “I was so hungry after the doctor’s that I stopped to get something to eat.” She must know how her voice sounds, because she adds, “I had a couple glasses of wine to take the edge off my ankle, but I guess I’m not really used to drinking more than a glass anymore, because it went straight to my head.”

  There was something else strange, something he meant to ask her about before he fell asleep. Then he remembers: that crutch lying in the entryway of the house, abandoned. He would’ve worried if he hadn’t just heard from her that she was in a taxi. “Was that your crutch downstairs?”

  “Oh,” she says, shuffling into the kitchen. “Yeah. I didn’t want to take it in the cab with me, so I left it there.”

  Another answer that makes sense, so that’s okay. Or it should be. He hears the faucet running as she pours herself a glass of water, but he can only see her as a silhouette because she left the overhead light off in the kitchen. Shaking off his stupor, he gets up to get ready for bed.

  When he comes out of the bedroom in his pajamas, she’s locked herself in the bathroom. He finds his phone on the floor beneath the sofa and sets his alarm for the next morning. He’s surprised to see that it’s after midnight. How late was the doctor’s office open, and how long was Helena at a restaurant by herself? The strangest part is that he has no missed calls. Not only did she not ask him to pick her up from the doctor’s office, but she didn’t even ask him to meet her for dinner. And it wasn’t a quick dinner, was it? Not just something she grabbed on her way back. She sat down in a restaurant, ate, and had a few glasses of wine. By herself?

  He settles into bed and closes his eyes against the swarming, bewildering darkness around him. Maybe she met a friend for dinner. Why doesn’t she say so? Maybe she just isn’t saying much because he was so tired; maybe she’ll tell him about it tomorrow. Maybe.

  He hears the bathroom door open, the bedroom door open and close, feels her weight sinking in next to him with the cautiousness of someone trying not to wake a sleeper. There’s nothing he can accuse her of. He doesn’t even know what to be afraid of now, but he is, very definitely, afraid.

  “Helena,” he whispers, trying and failing to keep the urgency out of his voice.

  “Mm-hmm?” She’s tipsy, tired, comfortable in bed. He shouldn’t bother her but he can’t help it. He has to say something, anything. He has to somehow get ahold of her in this strange, shifting darkness. Otherwise she might not be there when he wakes up.

  “Let’s go away together,” he says.

  “What?” She’s already drifting away from him, going away all by herself.

  “This weekend. Friday, after work. Let’s go away for the weekend.” The idea forms piece by piece in his mind until it seems already real, inevitable. “We can stay at some country inn in Brandenburg or Meck-Pomm, catch the last sunny days. Just the two of us. We can finally have some time to talk.”

  “This weekend?” she asks, and her voice is suddenly harder, no longer muffled by wine or drowsiness. “Are you sure?”

  Her wariness startles him. She always wanted to go away for the weekend; one of her constant complaints was that they never took any trips together. And it’s not like he’s talking about hiking, just a couple days of sitting out by some lake, watching the clouds pass. And talking, having to talk, because there’ll be nothing else to do.

  “Of course I’m sure. I’ll rent a car and pick you up after work on Friday. We can come back Sunday.”

  “Okay,” she says. “If you want.”

  Through the darkness, he feels her awake beside him for a long time after.

  HELENA

  Helena considers putting off her return to the office until the next week, but on Friday she decides to go in for half a day. She can’t put it off forever. She doesn’t discuss it with Joachim, who leaves while she’s still in the shower. It must not have occurred to him that she’d want to go in this week, or maybe ever again.

  Before she leaves the apartment, she throws a couple of changes of clothing, her toothbrush, and cosmetics into his backpack, recalling how incapable she was of carrying it down the stairs just a few weeks before. A lot can change in a few weeks. Sometimes, it seems to her that more has changed in these past couple of months than in the three years before.

  Has anything really changed, though? All of this around her, this old life draped over her, is just a temporary illusion, a trick of the light that will pass as the sun moves across the sky. She’s the same person she was before the accident, and the life she has outside of this apartment is there waiting for her to pick it up again. Even Tobias was more or less waiting for her call.

  Can it all be over just like that? Was this time with Joachim just a random episode with no consequences? One that will, afterward, seem like a bizarre, anachronistic dream? Or is it the start of a new time in her life? They have the weekend to find out.

  The weekend. How unlike him to suggest it out of the blue. He never wanted to go out of town. When they were married, it was hard even to drag him on a day trip to one of the lakes outside Berlin. Is there some special purpose to this trip, or is he trying to show her that he’s changed? But she’s changed, too, and not necessarily in ways that makes them more right for each other.

  The thought of the weekend reminds her that she needs to call Tobias and say she won’t be able to see him, but she puts it off, tells herself he might not be up yet. She’s tempted to take a taxi to work, but she’s made too much of a habit of that already, and she can’t afford it. Besides, just like going back to her office, the U-Bahn ride there is part of getting back to normal life.

  She texts Tobias from the train to say she won’t be back until Sunday evening. She says she’ll call him later, although she isn’t sure she wants to. His reaction to her story about Joachim was, understandably, less than enthusiastic. She didn’t expect him to be happy about it, but she expected… Whatever it was, he didn’t give it to her. She still wants to see him again, but she can’t ask him to wait forever for her to figure this out. Not that it’s her fault. Crossing in front of that truck might’ve been, but not the rest of it. But maybe she was too hasty in leaving Joachim the first time around, and that’s what’s making things so difficult now.

  She clocks in a little late for the flextime syste
m, but nobody cares about that now. Uli, on her way back to the HR office as Helena comes in, is the first to greet her, the face to go with that voice on the phone. She claps Helena on the shoulder and then removes her hand, not quite sure how delicate Helena is. “Well, are you back in shape?”

  This question repeats itself in one form after another as Helena makes her way to her desk, a blur of faces and inquiries and concern. She feels dizzy by the time she sits down next to Doro, but the overexertion is mental rather than physical. She didn’t even try to call up all these incidental faces or names during her convalescence, and now the familiarity of them rushes at her in a confused jumble, more information than she can process at once. Luckily, she doesn’t have to call anyone by name, just nod and smile and thank them for caring, tell everybody she’s going to be okay.

  “Should I tell everybody to piss off?” Doro asks with a wink as Helena carefully takes her seat.

  “Only if you can say it nicely.”

  “I hate to be the hundredth person to ask, but are you okay? I’m not just talking about your bones.”

  “More or less,” Helena says. “Let me see if I can remember my password for the worklist, and then I’ll tell you about it in the kitchen.”

  The little employee kitchen, with a window overlooking the small courtyard, gives Helena a sense of long-forgotten familiarity, something like what she always feels driving past her old school on the way to visit her parents. Doro takes a mug out of the cluttered cabinet and puts it under the espresso machine for Helena, as if she might no longer know how. Helena closes the door.

  “Did you call Tobias?” Doro asks.

  “I saw him Monday night.”

  “And?” The growl of the espresso machine comes to a halt and Doro hands Helena her mug, puts in one for herself.

  Helena pours some UHT milk into her cup from the Tetrapak on the counter. “I didn’t remember him.” She leans against the wall to take some of the weight off her leg. Golden light is coming through the little window, but in an hour or two, they’ll have to put the lights on. It’s that time of year when things are more brilliant, more intense, but briefer. “I liked him,” she adds, “but.”

  Doro seems to already know what the problem is, to have known all along. Helena is too slow for this fleeting, golden season. “Are you still staying at Joachim’s?”

  Helena nods.

  “Did you talk to him about… everything?”

  Helena shakes her head. “He wants us to go away for the weekend. I guess we’ll talk about things then.”

  “Do you think you’ll…?”

  Doro doesn’t finish her question but, whatever it is, Helena doesn’t know the answer. Instead, she tells Doro what it was like to see Tobias again, as if for the first time.

  “Apparently he really likes you,” Doro says.

  Helena nods again. He offered to let her stay at his place if she still needed help getting around, or to help her move back into her old apartment. He couldn’t understand how she could continue to stay at Joachim’s. But it was all too abrupt. She couldn’t leave just like that, in the middle of the night. She wants to leave gradually like light fading from a window pane, its departure unnoticed until dark.

  “Where are you guys spending the weekend, then?”

  Helena shrugs. “Somewhere nearby. It didn’t seem like he had anything planned.”

  “Well, I can’t say I envy your position.” There’s something in Doro’s voice that Helena dislikes, the implication that she doesn’t envy Helena’s position, but if she were in it, she’d handle it a hell of a lot better. Doro doesn’t know, nobody knows, what this is like. It isn’t a normal situation. Time has always moved forward steadily without stopping or asking anyone’s opinion. It isn’t fair that Helena has to sift through it now, decide what to keep and what to throw away. Doro’s never had to choose between two different versions of herself.

  “I guess I’ll let you know how it goes,” she says.

  • • •

  Helena tells Uli she has a doctor’s appointment and has to leave early. If there’s some advantage to getting run over, it’s that no one asks you for a doctor’s note.

  She takes the bus from her office to her apartment, and the familiarity of the route is jarring: every graffiti, every train station, every used car lot, grocery store, and pothole along the way is still stored in her memory.

  She doesn’t remember where she hid that letter all those years ago, doesn’t even remember hiding it, but she knows herself, knows she wouldn’t have been able to look at it, wouldn’t have been able to throw it away.

  She finds it in a moving box at the bottom of her armoire, mixed in with college papers, old Christmas cards, and faded ticket stubs from movie theaters and airports. Still in its envelope.

  The return address is unfamiliar, but she remembers the station where she got off last time, and when she gets there, she squints at the minute streets winding through the station map until she finds it.

  It’s a ways from the station and her right leg is trembling by the time she reaches it. The door to the building is propped open and a moving truck is parked out front. Helena makes her way in and through the courtyard to the rear building, where she stops to rest before starting up the stairs.

  It would’ve been easier if the front door had been locked. It would’ve been easier to ring, wait a few seconds and limp away relieved that no one was home. It still would’ve counted.

  Even now she doesn’t know what she wants here. What can she possibly say to Ester? She barely remembers what she said the first time: They screamed at each other a bit, and then cried for a long time after. In the same room, but not really together. At some point, Ester opened a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen, and they both had a couple of glasses, still not really together, just miserable in the same place. Ester’s kitchen had a ripe, garbagy smell, and there were fruit flies hovering in it. Her roommate, a mousy girl with glasses, came home not long after Helena called Magdalena to come get her, and Helena was relieved that Ester wouldn’t be alone. She didn’t want to be responsible for her.

  By the time Magdalena arrived, Helena was drunk and didn’t know why she’d come. Ester was sitting in a creaking kitchen chair with her head in her hands, saying something like, “God help us.”

  As far as Helena can remember, they didn’t talk much about anything; there was just that first moment when Ester opened the door, knew who she was and grabbed her by the wrist. The last thing she remembers of the visit is looking over her shoulder as she left—did she say goodbye?—and being startled by how young the other woman was, just a girl really.

  When she reaches the right landing, she stops to catch her breath. Is this really happening? How can it be that Ester still lives at this address? Helena’s presence in this building feels abrupt, as if she’d skipped over the entire process of getting here, simply stood up from her desk and found herself outside this door.

  She rings once, briefly, hoping again that no one’s home. But a rosy-cheeked woman with henna-red curls answers almost immediately. She’s put on a little weight, dyed her hair, and it takes Helena a moment to recognize this calm, puzzled face as the same person who opened this door years before. Ester doesn’t recognize her.

  “My name is Helena Bachlein,” she says. “I was here a few years ago about…” She doesn’t know what word to put into this blank, how to sum it all up. “About Joachim Schmidt,” she says finally.

  Ester’s face goes completely white and then turns a deep pink, all her blood let out at once and then dumped back in.

  “Please come in,” she says.

  Helena can’t be sure how accurate her memory of the apartment is, but if it was anything like the chaos of dirt and dim lighting she recalls, a lot has changed. The hallway is crowded but tidy, with two shoe racks and a row of coat hooks painted to look like the legs of a caterpillar. Ester shows Helena into the kitchen, which is also a delicate balance of clutter and tidiness. The stack of dishes
drying by the sink glistens in the sunlight coming through the window, but seems seconds away from collapse.

  Half the wooden table Helena sits down at is covered in piles of papers, magazines, and groceries; the other half is so freshly polished she pulls her hand away from the damp surface.

  “Can I get you something to drink? A cup of tea?” Ester asks.

  “Sure. Thank you.” For a moment, Helena wonders whether she’s made some kind of mistake, wandered into the wrong apartment. Was the name on the door really Ester’s? But no stranger would’ve let her in this quickly.

  “I notice that you’re limping,” Ester finally says as the kettle’s coming to a boil. “Did you hurt yourself?” She sets two cups of fennel tea on the table.

  “Yes,” says Helena. “I was hit by a truck crossing the street. In fact, that’s why I’m here.”

  “Oh?” Ester looks so surprised that she must already have come up with another explanation for Helena’s arrival. Helena can’t imagine what it could be. She’s still not sure what she’s doing here herself.

  “You know,” she begins, without knowing what else to say. The cry of a baby from the next room interrupts the silence before it can spread too far.

  “Excuse me.” Ester leaves and returns with a minute infant in blue pajamas. It goes on wailing but still seems to Helena to be in another room, not quite there. Or maybe she’s the one who isn’t quite here.

  “I’m sorry,” Ester says, draping a blanket over her chest and arranging the baby under it, “but if I don’t feed him, he’ll be screaming the whole time.

  So she has a baby, Helena registers belatedly. For half an instant, she’s sure that this is Joachim’s baby, the one she said she got rid of, but she dismisses the ridiculous idea before she even finishes thinking it. This baby is only a few weeks old; the other one would’ve been walking and talking by now.

  Anyway, that would’ve been too easy. Just ring Ester’s doorbell and find everything undone, the affair ended amicably, the child on her lap, no hard feelings.