by Kat Hausler
“It was nice of you to give some money to that couple,” she says, but for some reason, he isn’t sure that she really thinks so.
“It just seemed like a stupid thing to fight about. I mean, there are already so many things to be unhappy about without making it harder on yourself.” Where was this wisdom when he and Helena were young? He feels like a charlatan.
Then they’re done with breakfast and he suggests walking around the city, but she looks at her phone and says something about not wanting to get back too late. They have another round of coffees and head out.
The walk to the train station takes longer than he expects, but the drive is shorter. Having a destination makes all the difference. They keep the radio on but don’t sing along this time. When they reach the city limits, he offers to drop her at the apartment while he fills the tank and returns the rental car, but she says, “Don’t be silly,” and gets out at the nearest S-Bahn station.
She doesn’t kiss him goodbye, but then it’ll only be an hour or so until he gets home.
• • •
Between one thing and another, it’s almost two hours before Joachim gets off the train near his apartment, and he feels exhausted just carrying his backpack up the stairs. They should stay home and watch a movie tonight. Order pizza. Of course she may want to go out, but he can suggest staying in.
The lights are all off and the apartment is silent. She must be taking a nap. He could do with some rest himself. Just slip out of his shoes and lie down beside her.
But when he opens the door to the bedroom, the bed is empty. He checks the sofa again, the bathroom, even the kitchen, as if she might be perched in the one corner he can’t see from the living room, watching in silence.
Why would she go out right after she got back? She could’ve waited for him. He calls her cell phone and listens to it ring four times. He pictures her reluctance, watching the phone ring, then finally forcing herself to pick up. She doesn’t say hello, but he can hear her breathing on the other end.
“Helena? Where are you?”
A long pause, her sigh not unlike the way she breathes asleep.
“I’m at home, Joachim. Where are you?”
He looks around the apartment again, and then he understands. Because this is, after all, his home and not hers.
Suddenly, anything he could say is too small to fill the gaping silence spanning between their two phones. “I thought we could stay in and watch a movie,” he finally says. “Do you want to come over?”
“Thanks,” she says. “But I think I’m gonna stay here for a while.” The way she says “a while” sounds like “forever.”
“Helena,” he says.
“I know, Joachim, I know. We’ll talk later. Bye.”
You couldn’t, he wants to say, but she’s already hung up. You couldn’t possibly know.
• • •
It’s hard to know what to do with the rest of the day. First he’ll go have lunch, read the paper. He could get a drink with Jean and Max in the evening if he’s not too tired. Or watch a movie by himself, something stupid to make him laugh. He doesn’t want to think any further than that.
The new bakery that opened in the empty store a couple of blocks from his apartment has strung two rows of balloons from the storefront to the branches of a tree—pink and blue and purple. But the bakery is closed.
He walks over to the windows, reaches up and tears loose a string of balloons. They aren’t helium balloons, so they just lie on the sidewalk, moving slightly in the breeze. Something slain but still twitching. He steps over to the last balloon on the string and stomps on it. Gunshot sound and then a blue shred of rubber. Purple, pink, blue again, bang, bang, bang. He keeps expecting someone to come running out of the darkened shop or one of the surrounding apartments and stop him. Or call the police. He’d go quietly. But no one does, and when he’s through with the first string of balloons, he doesn’t have the energy to reach up and pull down the second.
He continues to his usual bakery, asks for a sandwich, a newspaper, and another cup of coffee he knows won’t wake him up. Almost all of the tables are empty. He notices that they’ve put away the cooler for the year. Now that he thinks about it, it was a little cold for ice cream yesterday.
Well, it’s her loss.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Originally from Virginia, Kat Hausler is a graduate of New York University and holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she was the recipient of a Baumeister Fellowship. Her work has been published by 34th Parallel, Inkspill Magazine, All Things That Matter Press, Rozlyn Press, and BlazeVOX. Her novel Retrograde, which will be published by Meerkat Press in September 2017, was long-listed for the Mslexia Novel Competition. She works as a translator in Berlin.