Elena Knows

Maybe tomorrow, when she opens her eyes and takes her first pill of the morning, she’ll know. Or when she takes the second one. Maybe

Do you think that Rita thought she was going to inherit my illness?, she asks. No, I think she couldn’t stand that you had it. She never said that. Sometimes it’s easier to shout than to cry

She’d choose Rita’s insults over her absence any day but she knows that it doesn’t matter what she’d choose because death has taken away her ability to choose. Her daughter is dead.

Rita, in her way, had God, a God of her own who she put together like a puzzle with her own rules. Her God and her dogma. Elena didn’t.

What’s left of you when your arm can’t even put on a jacket and your leg can’t even take a step and your neck can’t straighten up enough to let you show your face to the world, what’s left? Are you your brain, which keeps sending out orders that won’t be followed? Or are you the thought itself, something that can’t be seen or touched beyond that furrowed organ guarded inside the cranium like a trove?

If she couldn’t stand up when it was time to get off the subway, she would disappear into that black tunnel where she doesn’t know what goes on and, what’s worse, where Elena doesn’t know how time is kept. That other time so different to that time she keeps without clocks. Like a state of limbo, she thinks, a place where nothing goes either to heaven or to hell. Either heaven or hell would be preferable to being stuck there halfway, it always seemed like the worst option to her.

If it had been her who’d died, Rita would have been an orphan. What name does she have now that she’s childless?

What are you saying I’m committing? Pride and arrogance, to think that you know everything, even when the facts show something else. But isn’t that what you and your church teach every day? We teach the word of God. Appropriating the word of God is the greatest act of arrogance, Father, pure arrogance.

Elena’s deaf body is surrounded by deaf ears, she thinks, more deaf than her feet when they won’t walk. All of them deaf, deaf people who say they understand even though they refuse to listen

The smell. What was that smell? Elena wonders but she can’t remember, she can’t pin it down. It wasn’t death, the smell of death is different, she now knows. She didn’t know it when her husband died, because the death of her daughter was the real death. The smell of illness maybe. Of pain. The smell of the future, she thinks. Because, there, they saw for the first time what awaited them.