I Stopped Pretending

Camille set the wine on the counter and took her time with the foil.

"You said you wouldn't miss it," she said.

"I didn't."

It was ten past seven. Jose sat at the island with his jacket on. The duffel stood by the front door where she'd had to step around it. She had stepped around it without a glance.

"I'm not going to talk you out of it." She worked the corkscrew in slow turns. "I only want to know if I'm allowed to ask where."

"I don't know yet."

"That's an honest answer. I'll take it."

She poured one glass and slid it across to him. For herself she filled a tumbler at the tap and left it standing on the counter, untouched. Jose noticed. He noticed and filed it, the way he filed everything now, in a room he didn't have time to enter.

"Whatever came this morning," Camille said. "Did you look at all of it?"

His stomach tightened. "Nothing came this morning."

"Jose." Gentle. Almost fond. "The concierge texts me when a package is left for the unit. I'm on the lease. I didn't ask you about it because I wanted you to bring it to me yourself."

So that was the answer to the question he'd carried all day. She hadn't trusted him. She had been patient, which was worse.

"Somebody wanted you to see something," she said. "Somebody who has been working on this for months and picked this week to deliver it. Ask yourself what they get when you walk out that door."

"The truth."

"What Rainer wants has always had your name on it."

He picked up the wine. Put it down again without drinking. "I need to look at it somewhere you aren't."

She nodded as if he'd asked for something reasonable, like a window open. "That's fair."

He stood. Took the bag. She followed him as far as the hall and stopped at the edge of the rug, as if there were a line there.

"Can I say one thing and then I'll be quiet?"

He waited.

"I won't chase you. I decided that in the elevator. Chasing is what he does." Her voice stayed low and even. She could have been reading a clause aloud. "I'll be here. The apartment, the firm, every piece of work we put our names on. I'll keep all of it standing exactly as you left it, and I'll keep it safe from anyone who'd like to see it fall."

She looked at him then, directly.

"Including you, if it comes to that."

The elevator took a long time. When it came, he got in and didn't turn around to see whether she was still standing on the rug.

---

The building by the river rented rooms by the week and didn't ask for much. Jose paid with a credit card he'd opened at twenty-two, before Camille, with a four-thousand-dollar limit and a bill that went to a post office box he'd forgotten he kept. He chose it because her name wasn't on it.

Unit 4C. A bed, a table, a radiator that knocked on a delay, so you heard it a full second after it should have.

He locked the door. Put the chain on. Stood a minute with his back against it, feeling stupid.

Then he took the envelope out of his jacket and laid the photographs on the bedspread in order, the way he'd lay out plans for a client who needed to be walked through a building before it existed.

Prep room. The cinder blocks. The gray sweatshirt. The lid. The blank line in the ledger.

He found a legal pad in the desk drawer and drew three columns. Over the first he wrote CAMILLE. Over the second, RAINER. He looked at the third column for a while before he wrote ME.

Under Camille he put: *pills. examiner. money. her mother. "I stopped pretending."*

Under Rainer: *photographs. lid. "I was there." who held the camera. who hid him.*

The last one he underlined twice and then pressed the pen down until it tore the paper. Rainer had never said the word *hid*. He'd said *he's been hiding*, as if Elias had gone off on his own, a deer in a thicket. Rainer chose words the way he threw punches. Carefully, and only where they would land.

Under ME he wrote nothing for a long time.

Finally: *signed whatever she put in front of me.*

He read that line back and it looked smaller than he'd expected. It looked like a footnote. He tore the page off and folded it in quarters, and in the folding he bit the inside of his cheek.

He sat very still.

---

He was eighteen. Rainer was twenty and had been gone since dinner.

Elias had finally slept, face down on top of the covers with his shoes still on, after being sick twice into the bucket Jose held for him. Fourteen years old. Someone at a bus shelter had sold him something folded in foil and told him it would make the noise stop. Jose sat on the hall floor outside his room with his back to the wall and counted Elias's breathing through the door.

The front door opened at ten past two.

Rainer came down the hall without turning on a light. Jose knew him by the walk. Then the bathroom light came on and he saw the mouth. Lip split on the left side, blood down the chin, dried dark on the collar. His right hand was wrapped in his own sleeve.

"Where is he," Jose said.

"He's not selling to kids for a while."

"Rainer."

"Don't." Rainer ran the tap and put his mouth under it and spat pink into the sink. "Don't do the voice."

"What voice?"

"The one where you're about to fix it."

Jose got up. He took the towel off the rail and wet it. Rainer let him, which surprised them both. Jose held his chin and turned it toward the light. The cut was deep enough to need stitches. Nobody in that house was going to take him for stitches. Rainer wasn't looking at the towel. He was looking at Jose's mouth.

"You're shaking," Rainer said.

"So are you."

Down the hall the water heater knocked twice.

Jose kissed him. It was bad. It was fast and clumsy, and his teeth caught the split lip, and the cut opened again, and everything tasted like pennies. Rainer made a sound against his mouth, half a protest, and then his good hand closed in the front of Jose's shirt and held on. They hit the wall hard enough to knock a frame crooked.

When they stopped, Rainer's forehead was against his. Blood on both their chins.

"We're not calling this an accident," Rainer said.

"No."

"Say it."

"It's not an accident."

Rainer laughed, wet and wrecked, and bled on Jose's collar.

Later Jose went back to check on Elias, because he'd left the door open an inch. A line of window light lay across the floorboards. Elias's eyes were open. He looked at Jose for about a second. Then he closed them, slowly, the way you do when you want someone to think you were asleep.

Jose stood in the doorway and watched his brother pretend.

He decided that was fine.

He pulled the door shut and went to wash the blood off his shirt.

---

The radiator knocked. A full second late.

Jose was sitting on the edge of the bed in a rented room with the legal pad in his fist. His mouth still tasted of metal. He couldn't remember the last time he'd thought about the door. Not once in fourteen years. He had remembered the kiss. He had remembered the blood. He'd built his whole life around not remembering the eyes.

*Did you ever look for me.* Nobody had asked it yet. He could already hear it.

His phone buzzed against the bedspread.

*Camille: Home safe? Don't answer if you don't want to. I only need to know you're somewhere with a lock.*

A second message, a few seconds later.

*Those river buildings always have trouble with the heat in the evenings. Ask the desk for the key to the utility closet on four. Sleep, love.*

Jose read it twice.

He hadn't told her the street. He hadn't told her the neighborhood. He had used a card she'd never seen. He'd walked the last six blocks because he thought a cab might leave a record.

The radiator knocked, late again.

She hadn't chased. She'd said she wouldn't. She hadn't needed to. He had walked out of the apartment believing he'd stepped off the edge of her map, and she had texted him the number of the closet on his floor.

He could feel his pulse in his bitten cheek.

On the other side of the city a man sat in a suit that still smelled of dirt, a man who had photographed a box being filled and kept it for three years and sent it anyway. Who had said *come see what you married into* and *you always pick the thing that lets you sleep.* Who had lied to him by omission in every sentence that mattered, and who was the only person Jose knew who had never once pretended to be easy to love.

He'd go to the desk tomorrow and ask for the key. He'd be grateful. That was the thing he couldn't stop seeing. He'd say thank you.

He dialed.

Rainer picked up on the first ring.

Neither of them said hello.

"Talk," Jose said.