What Tears Us Apart

Chapter 10



December 31, 2007, Topanga, CA—Leda

AFTER THE NOISE and the smell and the clash of people on the flight, in the airport, in the cab line, after picking up Amadeus from doggie care, and enduring the ever-present cloud of strangers’ “Happy New Years” everywhere, Leda is finally home.

She pauses before the front door, Amadeus’s carrier under her arm, and digs out her keys. She turns the metal over in her palm—the key to her old life.

But when Leda enters the house, breathes in the stillness and the space spread before her, what rises in her throat isn’t calm, but panic.

Like swimming in open sea, the impression of smallness floods her, and she can only think one thing—What a waste. All that space, the ardent cleanliness, the expensive flourishes—all for one person. The silence screams it loudest of all—the guilt Leda rightfully feels. She’s always felt the guilt vaguely. From now on, images of the people she met in Kibera, the orphans, they will give her specific faces to feel guilty about.

Amadeus eyes her strangely, frozen in place by the door. Leda looks down on him, her storm of emotions knit together into a blanket of depression that wraps itself around her shoulders and leads the way to the bedroom.

She passes the bathroom and considers taking a shower. The shudder moves so fast through her shoulders that her hands flop like fish at her sides, and she realizes she doesn’t want to see her naked body. She’d rather pretend it didn’t exist.

She makes it to the bed and crashes down upon it. Rolling over, she takes her phone from her pocket. She’d turned it back on at the airport, found three messages. Two were a chipper girl with status reports on Amadeus at the doggie hotel. The other was a wrong number.

One month, she was gone. Including Christmas.

All this space and fuss for one person no one cares about. That no one should care about. And the one person who did, a million miles away, hasn’t called either.

But maybe he couldn’t call. Her heart crumbles at the thought of what’s keeping him from doing so. At the thought of him in the inferno.

Leda looks at the phone, her heart beginning to beat again. There is the number, ready. Waiting.

She dials, but already she is afraid. Afraid for him to answer. Afraid for him not to.

It goes straight to voice mail. His phone is off.

Dead.

But then it is beeping and Leda knows she has to speak into the voice mail system.

“Ita.” Saying his name makes her dizzy. Leda slumps against the wall, her left hand on the smooth paint. Tell him what you would want to know. “I’m okay.” No, I’m not. I’m alive and not much else. “That’s not true. I’m not okay, but I’m home. And...I’m...I’m sorry.” She hangs up the phone and throws it at the rug.

Leda thrusts her head under a pillow, feeling the world spinning away from her. She will be the first woman to drown in air, she thinks, gasping beneath the pillow, her heartbeat like a war drum.

After a minute, she peeks out and stares at the phone on the rug.

She snatches it up and hugs it to her chest. Then, the silence a monsoon on a tin roof, she buries herself under the pillow and miraculously falls asleep.