Persona-lity Novel | Part 4, Chapter 12: The Window

The coffee hadn't been enough.

He'd drunk it slowly, both hands around the mug, watching the kitchen get lighter as the city decided it was morning. He'd thought about waking Raul. He'd thought about knocking on Elena's door. He'd thought about a lot of things and done none of them because there was no version of the conversation that made the article not exist, and so he'd sat there until the coffee was gone and then he'd gone back to the couch and pulled the blanket up.

Not sleeping. Just horizontal. The specific retreat of a body that had run out of ways to be upright.

He lay there and looked at the ceiling and thought about nothing deliberately, which was different from thinking about nothing, and the apartment stayed quiet around him, and at some point the quiet got heavy enough that his eyes closed.

✻ ✻ ✻

The sound was not loud in the way explosions were loud.

It was loud in the way specific things were loud — sudden, wrong, the kind of sound that didn't belong in a morning and so landed harder than its actual volume. A crash. Glass maybe, or something hitting something else, and underneath it a sound that was almost human but wasn't quite, the sound of something being expelled from a body that had been holding it too long.

He was off the couch before he was awake.

Elena's door.

He didn't knock. He pushed it open.

✻ ✻ ✻

The window was open. Cold air coming through it in a wave, the curtain lifting. On the floor, glass — not the window, the window was intact — a picture frame, the one she'd had on her desk since she moved in, a photo of the three of them at some event two years ago, the glass face-down and cracked across the floor.

Elena was standing at her desk with her phone in her hand and her back to him and she was very still in the way that was not calm.

He looked at the window. At the trajectory. At what was missing from the desk — a small ceramic thing she'd made, a piece from her first year, lopsided and glazed badly and kept anyway because it was the first. Not on the desk. Not on the floor.

Gone.

Out the window.

"El," he said.

She didn't turn.

He came into the room. Stepped around the glass. Came to stand a few feet behind her.

Her phone screen was visible from where he stood. The article. The headline.

BEFORE THE GLITTER: The Story Elena Doesn't Tell

She'd found it.

"How long has it been up," she said. Her voice was very flat.

"Since last night. Around midnight."

"How long have you known."

"Since five-thirty."

She nodded. The nod of someone receiving information and filing it somewhere.

"Four thousand shares," she said.

"When I looked it was four thousand. It'll be more now."

Another nod.

He waited. He was good at waiting — he'd learned it in the ring, the specific patience of someone who knew the other person had to move first, who understood that the worst thing you could do was fill a silence that needed to stay empty.

Elena put her phone face-down on the desk.

Looked at the open window.

"The ceramic thing," she said. "The lopsided one."

"I know."

"I threw it."

"I know."

"I missed." She paused. "I was aiming for the building across the street."

He looked at the building across the street. It was not close.

"That's not physically—"

"I know it's not physically possible, I was angry." She turned then, finally, and looked at him.

Her eyes were dry. He'd expected — he didn't know what he'd expected. Something visible. But her face was the face she made when something was too large for an expression, when the feeling had bypassed the normal channels and gone somewhere deeper and quieter and more dangerous.

"She was there," Elena said. "At the gallery. That night. I knew someone was behind me and I — I knew and I turned around and I—" She stopped. "She wrote it down. She wrote all of it down and she used it."

"Yes."

"The seven stitches. The cheekbone." Her voice didn't change. "She counted my punches and wrote them down and filed them in a folder and waited."

He said nothing.

"And the stuff before. The — the file." She looked at the window again, at the cold air coming through it. "The four months. I've never — I didn't tell you that. I didn't tell anyone that."

"I know."

"She got it from somewhere."

"Yes."

"How."

Not a question she expected him to answer. Just a word she needed to say out loud.

He crossed the remaining distance between them and put his hand on her shoulder, the way he did, and she didn't move away from it which was its own answer about where she was.

"I should have—" she started.

"Don't."

"I was going to say I should have aimed better."

He looked at her.

She looked at the window.

Then something happened in her face — not breaking exactly, more like a long-held chord finally resolving, the tension releasing into something that was almost a sound. She put her forehead against his shoulder and he put his arm around her and she stayed there for a moment, not crying, just — present. Just letting the room be what it was.

Outside the window, Chicago was going about its morning, indifferent and enormous, not knowing or caring that a small ceramic thing had sailed out of a fourth-floor window and landed somewhere on the pavement below, and that downstairs someone would probably step over it on their way to work and not think about it twice.

"Raul's going to see it," Elena said, from his shoulder.

"I know."

"He's going to make something. Food. Probably a lot of food."

"Probably."

A pause. "That's not the worst thing."

"No," he said. "It's not."

He held on. The curtain lifted in the cold air. The morning kept going without them, the way mornings did, and after a while Elena straightened up and picked her phone off the desk and looked at the article one more time and then put the phone in her pocket with the screen off.

"Close the window," she said. "It's freezing."

He closed the window.

The room went quiet and warm again, the city muffled back behind the glass. The cracked picture frame was still on the floor. The desk had a gap where the ceramic thing had been.

"I'm going to make more coffee," Elena said. "The good kind."

"Okay."

She stepped around the glass on the floor, careful and precise, and went to the kitchen, and he heard the machine start, and he stood in her room for a moment looking at the gap on the desk and the cold window and the cracked frame and the morning going on outside.

Then he followed her.

✻ ✻ ✻

Some things you throw out the window. Some things stay. The difference is not always clear.