I did not take the phone. I shook my head and Maya put the receiver down on the kitchen counter and we both stood there listening to the faint sound of my own voice speaking into the empty air of her kitchen from across the room.
We couldn’t make out the words. We didn’t try.
Maya called a woman from her office on Sunday. I’m not going to say the woman was a psychic, because Maya is too practical for that word and so am I. What I’ll say is that the woman had, apparently, helped Maya’s colleague with something unexplained the previous year, and she came to the apartment and walked through it quietly and sat down across from me and asked me one question.
“Have you recently taken something that wasn’t yours to take?”
I started to say no. Then I stopped.
Eighteen months ago I had taken a translation contract that wasn’t meant for me. A colleague — a woman named Petra, who had been off sick — had been promised it. When she came back, the contract was gone and so was most of her income for that quarter. I had known. I had told myself it wasn’t my fault, that the agency had made the decision, that I had just said yes when asked. I had not called Petra. I had not apologised.
Petra had died seven months ago. An aneurysm. Sudden and total. I had sent flowers to the funeral home and told myself that closed it.
The woman from Maya’s office looked at me for a long time.
“It doesn’t close,” she said quietly, as though I had spoken aloud. “Not like that.”
She told me what to do and I did it. I wrote a letter — a real one, on paper — to Petra’s sister, whose address I found through the agency. I explained what had happened. I apologised without qualification. I included a cheque for the amount the contract had been worth. I posted it the next morning.
That night, for the first time in a week, my phone didn’t ring.
Nor the next night. Nor the one after.
I told myself it was over. I told myself the explanation was grief and guilt and the strange tricks a tired mind plays in a silent apartment, and the calls had been some mundane technical fault that had resolved itself, and the woman from Maya’s office had simply given me a reason to do something I already knew I needed to do.
I told myself all of that and mostly I believed it.
But here is what I have not told Maya, and have not told anyone until now.
The letter came back last week. Return to sender. Petra’s sister had moved, no forwarding address. The cheque uncashed. The apology undelivered.
And last night, just after midnight, my phone lit up on the nightstand.
My name on the screen. My number.
And this time, before I could decide whether to answer, the call ended on its own.
But the voicemail icon appeared.
I have not listened to it.
I don’t know if I’m afraid of what it will say.
I’m more afraid that it will sound exactly like something I deserve to hear.
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