The Text She Should Not Send.

CHAPTER FIVE

Elena — First Person

I stared at those four words for a very long time.

“Are you alright Elena?”

Four words,my name at the end of them like an inspection  .Like he had written it deliberately to make sure I understood he was not asking a general question, he was asking about me. The particular specific me who was currently pressed against a wall at the top of a staircase listening to her father arrange cameras on her own life. 

I should not have found it comforting.

I didn't reply immediately.

Instead I went to my room ,I closed the door with the quietness of someone who doesn't want to announce that they are closing a door. I sat on the edge of my bed and I placed my phone facedown on the mattress beside me and told myself with so much firmness ,that  I was not going to respond to that message.

Had he been thinking about me I asked myself.

My head was so messed up,which made me so restless.

In the hours I was restless, I showered,  dressed,made my bed with the kind of aggressive precision that meant I was avoiding something,went downstairs made a cup of tea I eventually didn't drink,went back upstairs,sat at my desk, opened my laptop,closed my laptop,picked up a book, read the same paragraph four times without retaining a single word.

Then finally I picked up my phone.

          His message was still there,patient,unhurried, as though he had sent it and then simply gone about his day with the calm certainty that it would be there when I was ready for 

I typed: I am fine, thank you.

I stared at it. It was perfectly adequate,it was cool and brief and it communicated nothing. But I was not cool with it.

I deleted it.

I typed: why do you have my number?

Better,slightly combative,which was appropriate to answer someone who had just put you in a  very big mess.

I deleted it too.

I kept my  phone down. Picked it up again, I was aware, in a distant,slightly horrified way, that I was behaving like a person I did not entirely recognise. Someone who had lost the steady,sensible quality I had always considered one of my more reliable characteristics.

One conversation,forty-seven seconds on camera, a handful of words by a window and four words in a text message and here I was deleting drafts like a teenager.

I thought about the video. 

It looked fated.That was the thing,it had looked like the beginning of something that had decided to happen regardless of whether the people involved had agreed to it.

I thought about my father's words, the one he said earlier,”She knows exactly what she's doing.”

Did I?

I also thought about the photograph still in my mother's journal. Reginald Ashford, 1993. My mother's open,laughing face.the story i had been told and the one the story suggested was completely different.

I finally made up my mind and picked up my phone.

Then I typed: the video has reached my father.

I looked at it. It was honest, it was filled with something real and relevant. It was not warm or any of the things I worried about being. It was simply a information,  one person giving another person a fact they probably needed to know.

I pressed send before I could delete it.

The response came in under a minute.

“I know, mine too.”

Four words. Then after a pause of perhaps thirty seconds,he sent another message.

“Are you safe?”

I sat with the question for a moment.

Then I typed back: safe but not comfortable. 

He replied me back:”same.”

And then,after another pause,longer this time, long enough that I had almost put my phone down again another message popped up.

“I want to explain something to you. Not over text,can we meet?”

“There it was”.

The question I had known was coming, but not exactly in this form.

I looked at my closed bedroom door. Behind it, somewhere in the house, my father was making a phone call about the issue that just exploded,my mother moving quietly thinking of what to do to try and calm my father down.

I looked at my phone.

Maybe it was time to find out what the something was.

Maybe I was making the worst decision of my life.

I typed back :where?

I Sent it before the sensible part of me could catch up.

His answer came immediately this time as though he had been waiting, as though he had written it already, as though he had known I was going to as where.

— ✦ —

An address, a time,tomorrow evening. 

And then,beneath it,one more line:

“Come alone. Don't tell anyone.”

I read it twice.

“Don't tell anyone.”

The first secret, the first deliberate,chosen and eyes-open secret between us.

I knew what this was. I was not raised naive about what things like  this were. The moment you agree to hide something is the moment it becomes real,the moment it stops being a conversation at a party and starts being something you are building in the dark.

I knew all of that.

I typed back:okay.

The most consequential thing I had said in years.

Downstairs,I heard my father's footsteps cross the hall. I heard him stop outside my door.

A knock.

“Elena.” His voice through the wood. Careful. Controlled. “We need to talk.”