Chapter Thirteen E: A Call from Tomas
Lena’s younger brother called late on Wednesday.
She could hear dishes clattering behind him in the restaurant where he worked.
“You didn’t tell me somebody was threatening your house,” Tomas said.
Lena sat down on the kitchen floor beside the refrigerator.
“Who told you?”
“A friend sent me a video about an unsafe house on your street.”
“It’s a rumor.”
“The video shows your front gate.”
Lena closed her eyes.
“Did it show the person who put the cord there?”
“No.”
“Then it left out the important part.”
Tomas did not laugh.
“You always sound calm when something terrible is happening.
”
“Nothing terrible has happened.”
“That isn’t the same as being safe.”
She listened to the kitchen sounds on his end of the call.
A waiter shouted an order and somebody dropped a metal tray.
Tomas moved somewhere quieter.
“You left your old job because you were exhausted,” he said.
“I know.”
“You told me you wanted a house where you could sleep without expecting an emergency call.”
“I still want that.”
“Then why are you doing the whole investigation yourself?”
Lena looked toward the window.
Celia’s porch light burned across the street.
“Because I know what a badly designed trap can do,
” she answered.
“And because I can see that people are already being pulled into it.”
Tomas was quiet for several seconds.
“Dad used to say you couldn’t carry everybody out of a burning building.”
“He also used to say you shouldn’t walk past the alarm.”
“He said a lot of things.”
Lena smiled sadly.
“He did.”
Tomas asked whether she had eaten dinner.
She admitted that she had forgotten.
He told her to make toast while they talked.
She did, and the simple task made her feel more tired than she expected.
“Do you remember the accident at the skating rink?” Tomas asked.
Lena froze with a piece of bread in her hand.
“Why?”
“Because you were the only person who wouldn’t let the manager blame the injured boy.”
“The rink had a damaged barrier.”
“I know, but everybody else wanted the story to end with the boy being careless.”
Lena put the bread on a plate.
“I wasn’t the only person who questioned it.”
“You were the person who kept asking when people told you to stop.”
She stared at the toast.
“That doesn’t always feel like a good quality.”
“It was a good quality for that boy.”
Tomas paused.
“Just don’t forget that you get to be a person when the questions are finished.
”
After they hung up, Lena ate her toast and went upstairs.
She took her father’s book from the bedside table and opened it to a page she had never marked.
In the margin, he had written that responsibility without rest eventually becomes another kind of mistake.
Lena closed the book and turned off the lamp.
She slept for six hours without waking.
