The narrow corridor widens and I can hear the echo of my footsteps; and not for the first time since this all began, I wonder why I’m not afraid. How could it be that throughout this whole episode, I never felt as scared as I should?
Because you’re smart, that’s why. You always were.
It’s Dina again, but this time the voice is encouraging, almost seductive. I know she’s right. It’s time I go back to being smart.
Unlike during our last encounter, this time Debby seems nicer, and not as short. She’s sitting behind a giant computer in a small room with bare walls. I remember having read somewhere that investigation rooms are never decorated with anything that might distract the suspect. Emptiness as a solution.
“Coffee?” Debby offers, looking at me almost affectionately, and I wonder why. None of the possibilities I can think of is encouraging.
“Yes, please,” I say, hoping I’ll be able to swallow and keep it down. I haven’t had even a tiny sip of anything since yesterday. Trap’s finally shut.
“By the way, who’s that Micha you asked about?” Debby casually enquires, and I freeze.
“Just a guy. Friend on the force,” I say with a voice that even I can tell sounds strained and unnatural, and I think of Neria Grossman. I have a friend on the police force.
Debby looks at me, narrowing her eyes with scrutiny. Too much scrutiny. “Jeez, you look awful,” she says, somehow suffusing the words with genuine concern. “Are you sure you feel well enough to help us?”
“So you took me off your suspect list?” God, Sheila, now you decide to open your trap?
“You?” she asks, with a look I can’t read. “You were never on it. We had your ER discharge letter.”
Now I can make out the look. She’s telling me the truth. I’d gotten so used to Micha’s lies and bullying that I forgot what the truth looks like. You silly goose!
“We wanted to show you something interesting we found on Dina Kaminer’s computer,” Debby says, and I try to listen. To listen very carefully. “Maybe you could give us more information, shed some light on this.”
At first I wonder whether they’re going to show me another picture of Frida Gotteskind’s drowned witches, but when Debby turns the computer screen in my direction, there’s no picture, only words.
“We found this in her Gmail drafts,” she says. “Dina wrote it shortly after you left her apartment. She probably meant to send it to you but didn’t make it.”
No, she didn’t make it. But I recall everything she did manage to do, including at our last meeting, and alongside the usual bitterness and rage that bubble to the surface is another, unidentified feeling in the mix. Focus! Focus!
I feel Debby’s pinprick eyes resting on me, but her gaze isn’t piercing; it’s soft when she says, “And I feel I should tell you before you read the letter, that Dina Kaminer was pregnant.”
Dina was pregnant. Dina was pregnant. Dina was pregnant. No, the words don’t go together.
I stare at Debby, who doesn’t take her eyes off me. Dina was pregnant. Dina was pregnant. The young Dina, sprawled on the grass, her voice humming the familiar tune, “No one wants kids, and no one needs kids, and we’ll never ever have them, n-e-v-e-r!”
But apparently she did want one, need one, she, of all women. Or maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise? Maybe the thing that scares you most is the thing you secretly crave? Maybe it was the same tenacious vitality that always drove her forward, the forceful energy that pushed her to get up and take action, that eventually made her yearn for a child of her own?
It always ends with a baby, you’ll all want one, just wait and see.
Some biblical exegeses claim that even Miriam the prophetess ended up getting married and having three kids, and I always wondered whether the rabbis behind this interpretation couldn’t bear that such a powerful prophetess chose not to have babies, or just felt bad for the woman and decided to bestow upon her the sacred gift of childbirth.
I expect the room to start spinning around me, but the naked walls are steady and still, Dina was pregnant. Everything sharpens and crystallizes like icicles, and all at once I realize just what has bugged me all along, what chafed at the edge of my consciousness at night before falling asleep, like an incessant itch.
Because I knew, I did. I knew it the moment she opened the door, her face bloated with that subtle hormonal fullness, that rosy glow, the distinct scent of pregnancy that I could always sniff out on a woman, even from the way she walked and sat down. She was carrying. And I almost knew it.
There, now you know.
I can’t read the email, the letters are dancing on the screen. Dina was pregnant. But I feel Debby’s expectant gaze on me, and force myself to blink and focus on the very short text.
Dear Sheila,
You left my house in anger, and I’m very sorry for that. It’s not what I wanted. Quite the opposite. There was a happy reason behind my invitation, and I wanted to clear the air between us, to mend years of wrongdoing.
You see, this is a period of renewal and great change for me, I—
