even doubt can be delicious
Helena was coming home from Paris, and Alice hadn’t left her flat in a week.
Not entirely true, she vaguely reassured herself, thumbing her lighter to get a flame going against the end of her cigarette. She’d gone to make sure Ulysses wasn’t dead. And Nathan. And just last Thursday she’d been manhandled into a waiting car and brought to a dingy flat in the east end, where a man was using a very expensive tie to create a makeshift tourniquet. She still had the bruises on her upper arm from where more force than necessary had been used to get her to move more quickly.
But it didn’t feel like leaving the flat, not really. Ventures out, even to the shop, felt like pounding the pavement of the same endless circle she resided in, looping back to her same front room, her same kitchen, the same empty spaces that she felt more and more like a ghost in. Like they’d already killed her, and she’d just kept right on working regardless.
Her fingers shook slightly as she brought the cigarette to her lips. She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath, and released in slowly. When she opened them, her hands were steady once more.
Helena is coming home from Paris. That was what mattered just then. If she compartmentalized things, it helped, she’d found. Nothing existed outside of the current moment, the current problem. Everything else would be dealt with when it came.
Her calm was her defense, and she wasn’t going to let it be shaken by anything less than a true disaster.
The sound of the front door opening had her snubbing her cigarette out on the brick, and heading back inside from where she’d been standing in the garden. “Better have those pastries out where I can see them, or no entry,” she called out towards the front of the flat, slipping off her sweater and hanging it on the hook by the door.
