Why Mothers Kill

“I killed,” I say. “And not just once.”

The young woman across from me is still smiling. At first she takes the sentence for a failed joke. Then the smile goes out.

“Excuse me?”

“You understood me just fine.”

She gives a short laugh, uncertain, as if she hoped she had only missed the punch line. I don’t laugh along.

“But you were never in prison, Anastasia,” she says slowly. “No charges. Nothing. If you had really killed someone—why are you sitting here, in this house, and not behind bars?”

“Because you don’t get punished for something that never happened,” I say. “No body. No file. Not even the days it happened on.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“No,” I say. “Not yet.”

Her name is Lena; she is young and well prepared. She has read my first book: the foreign language, the night shifts, the first keys of my own, and a life that I built up slowly and that did not fall apart again. That book reached a lot of women and brought me here out of nothing. She knows nothing about the second manuscript in my study.

Every morning I wake up in the same minute. No alarm clock. I lie still until the minute is over. The room stays where it is. Some mornings I am not glad about that.

She has come to tell the success story: a cleaning woman who became a writer. A good ending, clean enough for a magazine. For years I have answered such questions with a smile and a few sentences about courage. The first book tells what came after the escape, not what happened before it. Today the smile doesn’t hold anymore.

Her hand hovers over the recorder. On her wrist there is a half-washed-off blue star, apparently drawn by a child’s hand. She notices my look and pulls her sleeve over it. Then she looks at me again. She thinks I have just given myself away.

“These days you’re talking about,” she says. “Were you sick? Did you have gaps in your memory?”

I shake my head. “There is nothing wrong with my memory. That’s the bad part. I remember every day. Every single time.”

“Every time? Remember what?”

I say nothing. Some things sound like lies as long as they only happen to other people.

“You won’t believe me,” I say. “I wouldn’t have believed myself. That’s why I’m not explaining anything. I’ll tell it the way it was. You decide for yourself.”

A recording couldn’t touch me. What I did happened far away from here, a long time ago, and on days that no longer exist.

This is not testimony. It is a confession. I don’t expect absolution. I just don’t want to be the only one anymore who knows what happened back then.

“Turn off the recorder, Lena,” I say. “And take a pen.”

Her hand stays on the device. “It protects you too,” she says. “Word for word, so nothing gets twisted.” I only look at her. Finally she presses stop and reaches for her notebook.

“What I am telling you is in no published book,” I say. “This morning I wrote the last sentence of a second manuscript. No one has read it. You are the first outsider to hear the story in full.”

Whether the world will ever learn it, I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I first need one person who hears the truth and stays in the chair anyway.

She opens to a blank page.

“Good,” I say. “Then listen. From the beginning.”

It begins on a fall morning. In an apartment, in another country.

Her scream wakes me. Like every morning.

I stay lying there a moment longer and look at her, three years old, so small. I love her—and still, sometimes I just want to stay lying there and not get up again. Never again.

A mother isn’t allowed to think that way. The sentence comes automatically, before I even get my feet out of bed.

I slept maybe two hours. Maybe less. My body is heavy, as if I were lying underwater, and behind my eyes sits a pain that never fully goes away. Getting up is the hardest thing I will do today. And it’s only the first thing.

The stone lies in my belly and on my chest before I even open my eyes. Fear comes and goes; the stone stays.

At night I do the math: what we owe, what comes in, what is missing by the end of the month. In the morning I am more tired than in the evening.

I always wear the same underwear: bought years ago, thin from all the washing, the elastic gone slack. A new pair costs fifty, maybe a hundred hryvnia. For a hundred hryvnia we could buy bread for a few days. That’s how I convert everything now. Even if something were left over for once, I wouldn’t take it for myself. For the apartment, yes. For him, yes. For Arina, always. For me, never.

A few weeks ago I saw myself at night in the dark window: dull hair, sunken cheeks, eyes too big over dark hollows. A strange woman in my sweater. Since then I don’t look anymore.

And yet I used to fill one notebook after another. Words were the only thing that belonged to me. Today my strength isn’t enough for even one line.

Next to me my husband is asleep. Yesterday’s vodka still hangs in the air. The bottle stands on the floor, a last bit in it. Next to his head lies the little wire rabbit Arina drags everywhere. In his sleep Sasha has closed his fingers around it. The sight holds me for a heartbeat. I loved this man. Now I get up quietly so he doesn’t wake. That’s what is left of us: that I have to be quiet.

Wiry was made on an evening when Sasha still had jobs. He sat at the kitchen table, bent the wire with pliers, and cursed at the ears, which wouldn’t come out right. Arina was still too small to tell what the animal was supposed to be, but she reached for it and almost cut herself on a sharp spot. Sasha filed the edge down until I could run my finger over it. “Now he can take anything,” he said. Back then it sounded as if the promise were not only for the rabbit.

Now Wiry lies in his slack hand, and I look at those same fingers. They hooked up lamps, changed diapers, held my cold hands. Later they slammed doors and grabbed my wrist too hard. I pull the rabbit carefully out from under his hand. Sasha mumbles something and grabs at empty air. I stop at once. Only when his breathing is even again do I bring Wiry to Arina.

Even in the dark I can estimate how much is in the bottle, how long he will sleep, and what mood he will get up in. You read him like the weather. Except that with him, even in your own kitchen, you never quite stop holding your breath.

It’s just after five, still dark outside. The power went out again in the night, the refrigerator is silent, and the apartment is cool and damp.

The radiators are cold; in the apartment buildings the heating season hasn’t started yet. There are drops on the windowpane, and the night still hangs in the walls. Through the thin wall I hear old Halyna next door coughing, every morning at the same time. A dry, brittle cough. In this building everyone knows the sounds of the others.

Our apartment consists of two narrow rooms and a kitchen that is barely one. In the bigger room stand our bed and, against the opposite wall, Arina’s low toddler bed. In the smaller one the sagging couch, the table with the burn mark, and the wardrobe whose door won’t close are crowded together. The damp creeps up the walls. Only the walls belong to me. My grandmother, who raised me, left me the apartment. When she was here it smelled of chamomile and warm bread. As long as the walls stand, a piece of her is still here.

I am always the one who opens the apartment door. When someone knocks, the smaller room goes quiet. I ask through the door who is there and say the name out loud into the apartment. Only then does something move in there again.

I go into the kitchen and turn on the faucet. The water runs thin and ice cold. There is no warm water at this hour, not without power. I hold my hands under it until they go numb and wipe my face. This is how I have washed for weeks. When I turn it off, it keeps dripping: one, two, pause. One, two, pause.

Arina is still sitting in her low bed against the wall, has kicked her way out of the blanket, and holds her arms out to me. Her face is wet, her nose is running. She cries louder because now someone is there. I pick her up. She is warm and heavy, smells of sleep, and clings to me like a little monkey. For a few breaths that is enough.

Before I carry her into the kitchen, I set her on the edge of the bed one more time and push her feet into the new slippers. I bought them yesterday because the floor is cold. Arina wiggles her feet, as if she had to check whether the warmth really belongs to her.

She is small for her three years and too pale; at the temples her skin looks almost transparent. Her hair is fine and light, in summer almost white. A few soft strands tickle my neck when I carry her. In that light face sit two big dark brown eyes, her father’s eyes from the time when his look was still warm. She wears what other children have cast off: a sweater that is too small, tights with a hole at the knee. She knows nothing about that. She thinks she is beautiful because I tell her so every morning.

Then that is over too: my back hurts, my eyes burn, and she is simply heavy.

I carry her to the window. I can’t sing anymore. So I talk to her quietly and calmly and tell her the truth, because I have to tell it to someone and she is the only one who listens. We owe more than a hundred thousand hryvnia. A good eight hundred hryvnia in child allowance have to get Arina through the month; for the debt I have not a single banknote and no way to get the money. Sasha doesn’t work anymore. He isn’t looking for work either. I say it as gently as if these were the tenderest words in the world. Arina stops crying. She doesn’t understand the sentences. She is three. She only hears my voice.

Then a thought comes that I am ashamed of at once: with this voice I could tell her anything. Even something terrible. She would calm down as long as my voice only sounds gentle.

I push the thought away.

I set Arina on the only chair that doesn’t wobble and make her breakfast. There is not much to do, because there is almost nothing there. A piece of bread from yesterday; I cut off the hard edges and give her the soft part. With it porridge, cooked with water. Milk is expensive, and without power it doesn’t keep long in the refrigerator; what is left from yesterday I am saving for Arina’s evening. Arina eats. I watch her and take nothing myself. I tell myself I am not hungry. I have repeated this lie so often that my body almost believes it. As long as she gets full, that has to be enough.

Arina doesn’t push the soft bread into her mouth right away. She puts a piece in front of Wiry, who sits on the edge of the table, one ear higher than the other. “Eat too,” she says. The rabbit has no mouth, but that doesn’t bother her. She presses the crumb against the wire until it sticks and looks at me expectantly, as if I had to confirm that metal is allowed to have breakfast too.

“Wiry isn’t hungry,” I say. “He’s made of wire.”

“Yes he is. Belly empty.”

She holds the spoon out to me. A gray lump of porridge sticks to the tip. My stomach clenches. I could take it. It wouldn’t even be a full spoon. Instead I open my mouth and only pretend to eat. Arina watches me very closely.

“You didn’t,” she says.

“I did.”

“No. Again.”

This time I really take the spoon. The porridge is cold and tastes like water. Arina nods, satisfied, and goes on eating. One bite for me, three for her. Without thinking, I keep doing the math: how many spoonfuls are left in the bowl, how much bread will be missing tonight, whether I can soak the hard edges in water tomorrow. Then she pushes the next crumb over to Wiry and whispers something to him that I don’t understand. For a few seconds I hear only her voice and the scrape of the spoon in the blue bowl. Then outside the siren starts up.

You learn the sirens. At first we still ran down to the basement, Arina on my arm, the papers in my hand. By now we stay between two walls, away from the windows, and hope that every sound is far enough away. Some days have three of them, some none. One already came in the night; I sat it out in bed and didn’t wake Arina.

My days look so much like one another that sometimes I think I am living the same one.

The sound swells. The second one.

Soft at first, far away. Then louder, until the siren stands over the roofs and fills the whole sky. Arina lifts her head. She knows the sound. All the children here know it before they can talk. I take her off the chair and step with her into the hallway, between the two walls. She searches my face for the answer to the question of whether she has to be afraid. I put my hand on her head and press her face against my neck. In the same gentle voice I tell her that everything is fine.

It is not fine. But my voice stays gentle. And she believes the voice, not the words.

At some point the siren stops. No drone. Not this time.

I stay standing between the walls with Arina on my arm until her breathing is calm again, and only then go to the window. On the windowsill a dead fly lies on its back, legs in the air. For days I haven’t gotten around to wiping it away. Then I set Arina on the floor and give her an old spoon. She bangs it against the chair leg and is content. Children make a whole world out of very little.

Outside it is still dark. Over the roofs the black gets only a shade thinner. The phone confirms what the silence already said: over, for now. The city has made it through another night and breathes out quietly. With it I start over again too: the same day, the same motions, the same math that never adds up.

In the morning I already know what there is to eat: potatoes, porridge, sometimes a slice of bread from yesterday. Still in bed I divide it up: Arina’s plate first, then what is left. Hunger is no longer an event that comes and goes, but a cold room you get used to without ever getting warm.

Behind me the bed creaks, then the cough that comes up deeper out of his chest every morning. He wakes up.

Before he even reaches the kitchen, my shoulders draw together. I lay Arina’s spoon in the bowl without a sound and pull my sleeve over my wrist without knowing why. My body gets ready for him before I do.

I have learned to read him before he says his first sentence: by the cough, by the weight of his steps, by whether he lets the door fall shut quietly or hard behind him. On some mornings he is only tired and empty. On others he brings the tension into the kitchen with him. Then I walk on tiptoe through my own four walls and make sure nothing rattles, Arina doesn’t whine, no wrong word slips out. Some mornings stay quiet. That’s why I don’t trust the quiet either.

He comes into the kitchen. Unwashed, hair in his face, eyes half closed. He looks at me as if I were to blame for his headache, for this morning, for his whole life. Arina sits on the floor two steps away from him. He doesn’t even look at her.

He used to be a big, strong man with broad shoulders and hands that could fix anything that had to do with electricity. Only a shadow of that is left. His face is puffy and sallow, yellowish around the eyes; his cheeks are gray and stubbled. His belly bulges soft over his waistband while his arms get thinner and thinner. His brown eyes, once warm, have gone cloudy, and in the mornings his hands shake until the first swallow calms them. The vodka has changed him from the inside out. Even his mother would hardly recognize the man in front of me.

“Is Arina’s child allowance here yet?” he asks. “I need… thirty hryvnia. For cigarettes.”

The answer sticks in my throat. It isn’t the first time. The sentence always hits me in the same place.

“But that is money for the child,” I say.

Eight hundred sixty hryvnia a month—that is what the state pays for a child, and nothing else comes in. Of that he wants to smoke away thirty. Thirty, that is four, five singles out of the jar at the kiosk.

He rolls his eyes, as if I had said something annoying. Something he has heard a hundred times already.

“Don’t start again. I’ll give it back.” He reaches past me for the money on the counter. His fingers close around the bills, pause for a moment, push one back, as if something in him were still counting along. Then he takes it again. “There are potatoes. So your child can just eat potatoes…” At “your child” he flinches. Very slightly. He doesn’t look at me while he does it. “…just feed on potatoes, then.”

Your child. He says it every day. And every day he pushes her a little further away with it. Until she belongs only to me. My burden. My child.

“She is your child too,” I say.

He doesn’t answer. He never answers that. The bills crackle in his fist. His jaw works once, as if he had to swallow something down. I wait to see whether the mood tips.

He lets it go.

In the morning he only wants money. That’s the easier half of the day.

There was a time when this man made me laugh. Once the power went out in the whole building, and Sasha walked through the kitchen with a flashlight under his chin and played the news anchor until I sprayed tea across the table. That picture hardly fits the man in front of me, but it belongs to him just as much. The war, the vodka, and his own decisions did not change him overnight. Maybe that’s why it took me so long to see how far he had moved away from us.

He used to be the one who went out, who brought something home. Now he hides behind curtains, and I am the one who goes out on the street—who stands in line, who begs, who haggles, who brings in the money. I never go out later than I have to; when it is dark I want to be behind a locked door before curfew starts. During the day I stand in line: for bread, for water, in front of a government office that might help and mostly doesn’t. I swallow my pride. But I go. One of us has to do it.

I know where his fear comes from. Two weeks ago they took Taras, who lives three buildings down: in broad daylight in front of the store, when he only wanted to buy bread. His wife watched it from the window and could do nothing. Since then he has been gone, somewhere in a training camp, and she waits for a call that may come and may not. Sasha hardly goes out anymore. When he does, he goes hunched and fast, close to the walls of the buildings.

“Anything down there?” he asks. He has the empty cigarette pack in his hand, crushed.

“Nothing,” I say. “A woman with two buckets. Nobody else.”

“No dark car?”

“None. I stood at the window and looked all the way to both corners.” I say it like the price of bread.

Earlier, between the walls, I stood an arm’s length from our door, and the stairwell was quiet. No engine in the courtyard, no step above us. At the neighbors’ a bolt was slid back, then nothing more. Behind the wood, a breath that waited. That I don’t tell him.

He nods.

He goes to the window before he even takes his jacket. He looks down at the street for a long time, not like a man who wants to go out, more like one who is checking whether the street will let him.

Somewhere down there the van could be parked. The men in it ask for papers, for your age, for whether you have served. In the building people say that whoever fought back was beaten; that whoever got in doesn’t come back anytime soon. Maybe some of the stories grew bigger while they traveled from kitchen to kitchen. Sasha believes every single one anyway.

His hand rests on the window frame, and it is shaking. Very slightly, so slightly that he doesn’t notice it himself. I am afraid the money won’t be enough. He is afraid the street will take him and not give him back.

Today the street is empty.

He pockets the money and puts on his jacket. At the door he pauses for a moment. He listens. Then he is outside—fast, soundless, before the door has fully closed.

He isn’t going for us. He is going for cigarettes and vodka, even though down there exactly what he is afraid of could be waiting.

The door falls shut. Arina flinches. Her eyes hang on my face. I smile, even though everything in me draws tight too. She doesn’t see that.

Only now do my shoulders drop. I stand still in the kitchen for a moment and notice how tired I am. Then it goes on: Arina, the day, the number, the phone. My exhaustion has to wait, like everything that belongs only to me.

Then I put her back at the table. The porridge has gone cold. She eats it up and doesn’t ask why it is so little. She is three.

For now.

On the counter my phone buzzes. I don’t turn it over. I don’t have to look to know who it is.

The phone buzzes on the counter, a hard little sound. It lies face down. Then it goes silent. A minute later it starts again.

The number changes. The voice behind it doesn’t.

Sometimes they call five times in a single morning, until I flinch at every ring, even when it isn’t my phone at all. They have long since stopped sitting only at the other end of the line. They live rent-free in my head and demand their interest even when everything stays quiet.

Every morning I am afraid of the mailbox down in the hallway, that small metal box with the bent flap. Sooner or later there is another letter in it, and before I open it I know what is inside: how much we owe, by when we are supposed to pay, what happens if we don’t.

Sometimes the box stays empty for days. That’s almost worse, because then I am waiting for the next letter. The quiet is never good; it is only the pause before it goes on. I walk past the metal box without turning my head, the way you walk past a dog you hope is asleep. He never sleeps for long.

In a building like ours everyone knows more about the others than they want to. People used to knock at my door when someone needed advice. Now I am the one people shake their heads about behind closed doors.

It all started small. So small that it looked harmless.

At first it was about the apartment. It was old, a lot had to be renovated, and we had no money. So Sasha borrowed money. Just a little, he said. We’ll pay that back without any trouble.

In the beginning it was frighteningly easy. A small shop with a garish sign, a man behind a pane of glass, a form, a signature, and suddenly you had money in your hand. For a few days it felt like rescue. Nobody tells you that this kind of rescue has teeth.

Then he borrowed a little more. And a little more. Not for the apartment anymore, but for vodka, cigarettes, and everything that got him through the day. He drank the money away faster than it came in. At some point nothing came in at all. Arina had to eat.

So I signed too. I thought: just one more time, only until it gets better again.

It doesn’t get better.

The interest grows overnight. While we sleep, the number gets bigger on its own. That little bit of money has turned into more than a hundred thousand hryvnia. A hundred thousand that I cannot pay back in this life.

And part of it is in my name. Not only in his. I signed it myself.

Since then I carry that number with me, everywhere. It is the first thing I think of in the morning and the last in the evening. It sits at the table with us when we eat. It stands beside the toddler bed when I tuck Arina in. There is no moment when it is not there—a second shadow that never leaves.

At first I tried to pay the debt down piece by piece. I sold what could be sold. My good coat, which I still had from before. The ring, the last piece of jewelry left to me—the one thing I had never wanted to give up. I sold it for a fraction of its worth to a man who knew perfectly well that I had no choice and pushed the price down accordingly. It didn’t help. The interest ate up what I got for it in a single week. You can’t bail out a hole with a spoon if the water runs back in faster.

The phone goes silent again. A minute later it starts for the third time.

This time I pick up. I don’t know why. Maybe because I just want it behind me.

At the beginning the voice is friendly. A woman calls me by my first name, as if we knew each other. She asks how I am doing and says she only wants to help me. We’ll definitely find a solution, she promises.

“I don’t have the money,” I say.

Then the voice changes.

She doesn’t get loud. That’s exactly what is bad. Her voice gets quieter, calmer. Matter-of-factly she explains what happens if I don’t pay: what steps they can take, how fast the apartment can be taken from me, how quickly a mother with a small child ends up on the street if she isn’t sensible. She delivers the threat like a weather report. Behind her a chair squeaks. A child says something, very close to the receiver. “One moment,” she murmurs, turned away from the phone. “Not now. Go outside.” Then she starts up again in the same tone at the same place in her script. The line crackles. I hold on to the sound so I don’t have to understand her words completely.

“The deadline has passed, Nastya,” she says. At the end she is friendly again. “Someone is coming by today. You don’t want your little girl sleeping outside in the winter.”

Then the line is dead.

Today. They are coming today.

I stand in the kitchen, the silent phone still in my hand. The morning has barely begun and is already a different one. When they are coming, I don’t know. Who is coming, I don’t know either. From now on every step in the stairwell can lead to our door. I can’t conjure money out of nowhere. I can’t run away—not with Arina, and where to anyway? The money is barely enough for the next grocery run. What I would like most is to stay in the apartment and listen for steps.

I wait for the bad thing to come. The only thing I can still control: Arina shouldn’t see it on me. She shouldn’t notice how big the fear is. A child feels her mother’s fear like a draft of cold air under the door. So I smile. All day long I smile against the door.

For weeks I have barely slept. And when I sleep, the dreams come. Always the same dream: something heavy sits down on my chest, in the middle of the night, and presses. The old people call it Mara—the thing that comes at night and takes your air. I can’t move. I can’t scream. I lie there and feel something slowly closing my throat, and I know: if I don’t wake up now, I will stay here forever. Then I wake up, my heart up in my throat, and next to me Sasha sleeps and notices nothing.

During the day, in the middle of a movement, I no longer know what I was about to do. At night, instead, cold, clear thoughts come, and I push them away at once. The next time I lie awake, they come back more clearly.

Arina sits on the floor and hums to herself, quietly and off-key and content. She doesn’t know that someone is coming today. She knows nothing about the bent metal box down in the hallway. She doesn’t know that the walls around us could already belong to someone else. That’s my only victory this morning—that she doesn’t know.

After the call it goes quiet. The morning drags on. In the cool apartment we stay close together. Warmth is the only thing that costs nothing.

The radiators stay cold. The handle of the big window sits loose; you have to turn it twice before it catches. Sasha meant to fix it. That was in the summer. In the mornings I pull a sweater over Arina’s pajamas and put thick socks on her. On some nights I bring her into our bed, stuff a blanket against the cool wall, and lie down between her and Sasha. Again and again I wake up and check whether her feet are warm enough. I warm them with my own body. I don’t have anything else.

She moves the old spoon through the air and holds it out to me; I act as if I were full and say “yummy.” But she is getting bigger. One day the spoon will only be a spoon, and she will ask why there is nothing on it. She will see that other children have things she doesn’t have. I am afraid of that day. I hope that by then we are somewhere else. I just don’t know how yet.

So we play. I made up her favorite game when she was still very small. I take her cold feet in my hands, say I have caught two little birds, and ask who they might belong to. She squeals and squirms and shouts, “Mine! Those are my feet!” I act amazed, let them go, and catch them again right away. We can play it ten times in a row, and every time she laughs as if it were the first time. In moments like that I forget the number and the door and the letter for a few breaths. There are still such moments, short ones, and for them I get through the day.

I get up and look to see what is left for the evening. It doesn’t take long. A piece of bread with hard edges. Some tea. Yesterday’s milk, which doesn’t smell sour yet. The yogurt cup is empty.

I put the bread for later into the first bowl I grab. Arina looks over and shakes her head. “Blue one,” she says. Not that one. The blue one. For weeks she has eaten only out of it; why, neither she nor I know. I switch the bowls. The bread stays the same, but now it is right. Arina nods, satisfied. Almost nothing in her life is hers to decide.

There won’t be more than that tonight. I have to scrape something together, from somewhere.

From somewhere means: take from Arina’s money again. Or beg, stand in line where something is being handed out. The next morning everything is empty again.

I look at her and feel a dull pull under my breastbone. I love her. That is all I have left. I am too tired to get all the way to that love.

There are things I have forgotten, and they are exactly the wrong ones. I don’t know anymore when Arina took her first step. I only know that it came somewhere between a loan and a sleepless night; the picture is missing. With her first word I would have to guess. I didn’t celebrate those moments, didn’t write them down, only got through them. Other mothers have albums full of photos and know every date. I was there every day and still kept almost nothing. The exhaustion ate that time. Sleep and years I would have let it have; the memory of the first years with my own child, no.

But tonight she has to eat. So I have to go out.

I can’t leave her alone. There is no one I could ask. My mother is far away, and I have no friends. Sasha’s brothers have been gone since the first year of the war, and his mother hangs up when she hears my voice. Where Sasha is, I don’t know. So I take Arina with me.

I dress her in what she has: the tights with the hole at the knee, the sweater that is already too small, the hat that slips down over her eyes.

Today Arina doesn’t want to be dressed. She goes stiff, a little board in my hands, and pulls her leg up. “No,” she says. “No, no.” I can’t get her foot through the leg of the tights. She kicks, her heel hits my wrist. My hands are shaking; a few spoonfuls of porridge in the morning is all I have eaten since yesterday. The fabric slips out of my fingers, she twists, and suddenly I hear myself, sharp and much too loud: “Just hold STILL!”

She freezes. The silence afterward belongs to me.

It is my voice. So that’s how it sounds. I let go of her foot, slowly, as if the sound could be pushed back into my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, and pull the tights carefully the rest of the way up. She doesn’t fight anymore. I can’t look at her.

She likes going out. For her the street is an adventure, for me something else.

Every time I open that door, I leave the tired woman behind inside and turn into the one who functions: asks politely, haggles, doesn’t break down. Over all of it lies the sentence from the call: Someone is coming by today. Maybe I will be standing right in front of him. I go anyway.

I take her in my arms, lock the door behind us, and go down the cold stairs. Below, behind the front door, is the street. Gray and wet.

Before I open it, I stop and listen. Nobody here goes out anymore without listening first.

Then I push the door open and step outside.