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“I think?—”
Somewhere nearby, a wretched sob pierced the stillness of the apartment. A sound so full of fear and desperation, Juliette thought for a second that it couldn’t be real. Surely nobody felt these levels of horror. On the line, Helena’s voice sounded concerned.
“Jett?”
Another sob, a little less loud but all the more terrifying in its stringency, followed, and Juliette was on her feet and hanging up the phone before she even knew what she was doing. In the next moment, she was by Katarina’s door.
Should she knock? The silence deafened her for a second, suggesting she had imagined the crying. Surely she had. The sounds were so horrific, so full of pain and devastation. She must’ve imagined them, she must’ve?—
“No!” Katarina’s voice was much louder here, and Juliette forwent the knocking, throwing the door open and stepping into the dark room. The bed dominated the space. It was perfectly made, Juliette’s earlier thoughts of bouncing a coin totally justified. It was flawless. And empty.
10
OF DARK CLOSETS & DUSTY STAIRCASES
The third cry wrenched Juliette out of her horrified stupor and directed her steps toward the closet. It was much smaller than her own, built into the tiny alcove in the wall between the two bedrooms, and yet when she slowly drew the flimsy door ajar, it managed to house what looked like decades of terror and sorrow.
Katarina, knees pulled up to her chest and arms clutching them tight, was rocking back and forth, her face awash with steady streams of tears that seemed to drown out the blue of her eyes entirely. Hollow and expressionless, they appeared unseeing. She did not flinch when Juliette pulled the door fully open, nor did she appear to even realize she was no longer alone.
She seemed to be in a trance, consumed whole by the nightmare. A cry was followed by a hiccup, then another.
Juliette felt useless, powerless to stop the flood of sorrow and unable to just walk away, even if she knew that if Katarina had been aware of her presence she wouldn’t be happy. Well, happy or not, Juliette was not leaving, not when the sheer horror was etched on features that barely an hour ago had looked so arrogant.
After a moment of deliberation and remembering how Katarina still recoiled from touches, Juliette opted for sound.
“Shhh… It’s just a dream. It’s over now. Just a dream… A bad dream.” She infused her words with all the calmness she could muster while being completely overtaken by the same grief that seemed to permeate the room, turning contagious. Juliette wanted to weep and couldn’t understand why. She was home and she was safe, and yet watching this haughty, brilliant woman sob as if death had opened her rib cage and nestled there, was breaking her heart.
Emboldened by the absence of rejection, Juliette sat down, just outside of the closet yet close enough to feel the warmth of the huddled form.
Katarina’s unseeing eyes looked past her, and the tears kept falling, but Juliette sat still and, for lack of a better idea, whispered into the chilly air of the night flowing in through open windows, still saturated with petrichor and thunder.
“I don’t dream. Not really. Neither good nor bad.” She swallowed around the lump in her throat and went on, hoping that her mere presence, the sound of her voice, would pull Katarina out of the haze she seemed gripped in. “I am not afraid of much, so maybe that explains my lack of dreaming. Though I have to confess to disliking the dark. Ever since I was a child, my mother used to leave candles burning everywhere until I fell asleep. After a while, my father replaced them with little night-lights.”
A long inhalation next to her was the only sign that she was not speaking into a void. Katarina was coming around.
“I keep one on, you know. Or I used to, before you arrived.”
She settled more comfortably, the floor a familiar surface after years of being sprawled on almost every piece of parquet, floorboard, or linoleum of the Palais Garnier.
“The little pink lamp in the kitchen.”
Katarina’s voice was hollow, devoid of any emotion or intonation and much lower than what Juliette was used to. As if she had been screaming for a long time. Or sobbing.
“I usually light it in the morning before I’d leave for the Opera.” Juliette ducked her head, burrowing her face in her hands. The chill of her palms was a balm on her rapidly heating face. She couldn’t quite believe what she was sharing. Helena barely understood this and was only peripherally aware of Juliette’s strange habit. Gabriel used to tease her good-naturedly about it, and Francesca had never had the chance to learn it existed. Yet here she was, sharing her weirdness with this virtual stranger. And a thoroughly unpleasant one at that.
“So you don’t walk into darkness when you come home.”
This stranger, despite the existential crisis she was clearly going through, understood more than her closest friends combined.
“Yes, that.” Juliette touched her sternum, the pressure of the truth too much, yet she didn’t stop speaking. “And because when I walk at night, I always look up from the street, and seeing the light on makes me imagine someone is home. And that someone left the light on for me. In that moment, I matter. I matter enough to make an effort.”
Another sigh was her only answer for a long while, the quiet settling between them comfortably this time, like fog, blanketing the earlier fear.
“She wouldn’t leave the light on for you?”
For a woman who looked as if she drank pure lemon juice when Juliette’s sexuality was thrust front and center, Katarina was rather casual about speaking of Juliette’s past. And the woman who lived there.
The stab of loneliness, that shard of being left behind despite the love and the trust, the one that periodically twisted under her heart, popped up again, and Juliette knew it was time to endthis conversation. The weight crushing her chest was making it difficult to breathe.
