Part 18
Part 18 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
I didn’t go the next Thursday.
I told myself it was the roads. There was ice that morning, actual ice, the schools went on a two hour delay, and by noon the sun was out and the streets were clear and I sat at my desk until five thirty.
I didn’t go the Thursday after that either, and by then I had stopped explaining it to myself.
Here is the truth and it took me a year to be able to say it. I could not look at him, because when I looked at him I saw what she had chosen, and I had started to understand that she had chosen him, and that every Thursday at two o’clock for eleven years she had gotten in her car and driven eleven minutes to a man she could not tell anyone about, and that I had gotten Sundays.
I was thirty three years old and I was jealous of my brother.
Ray called on the eighteenth of December.
“How long since you been up there,” he said. No hello.
“Two weeks.”
“Three.”
I counted. He was right.
“Rosa says the lights are on all night,” Ray said. “All night, every night, the last week and a half. And the trash didn’t go out Tuesday.”
Something went cold all the way down my back.
“He’s never missed the trash,” I said.
“No,” Ray said. “He never has.”
I drove over with my coat open and no gloves. The lockbox was still on the front door. Somebody had put a wreath on the door of 2A, and it was crooked.
I knocked and there was nothing, and I knocked again and said my name, and there was nothing, and I got the key out and my hands were shaking so badly that I dropped it twice and I was talking through the door the whole time, saying it’s Claire, Danny, it’s Claire, I’m coming in, I’m going to open the door now.
He was sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, facing the door, fully dressed, shoes on.
The apartment was still clean. He had kept it clean. The bed was made with the corners done and the two mugs were on the card table squared to the edge and the calendar on the wall had a circle around every Thursday and three of those circles now had something in them, three small marks in pencil where he had noted, in his own system, that a person had not come.
The lights were all on. Every one. The kitchen, the lamp, the bathroom with no door, the closet.
“Danny.”
He looked up at me and his face did something I had not seen it do, and he said:
“Did I do something?”