The wind lightly breezed over her sun-kissed cheeks. Stephanie leaned her elbows on the handrail of the balcony. Her eyes overlooked the distant port of Jakarta. How did it look before the pandemic? Were there fewer boats like what she saw now? Where did the boats go? Stephanie imagined it had to feel different on the boat to have much fewer hands on deck. Lost lives spoke louder in the absence.
"I just wanted to know how much we have on our joint account," Lila began her story. Her right hand lay atop her long sleeve blouse on her left forearm.
"I wanted to arrange Companion visits to my nephews. They live in a different town. My husband and I don't have any other living relatives anymore. Not even siblings. You might ask why we don't have kids running around this flat. Well, I can't conceive a child."
Stephanie stowed the information away on her mental shelves. It was probably best to leave it at that. She needed to hear about what happened earlier today first.
"Maybe that's why," Lila mumbled to herself. A stretched distance between them and the next words that shaped honesty felt endless. Just like the vast azure sky over them reached their farthest distance above the crew on the boats, Stephanie could get lost in the dots connecting Lila's words and reality.
"As to what?" Stephanie dared to ask. The silence itched like a scab tempted to be scratched.
"We're never happy in the first place," she sighed.
Stephanie could fill in the blanks, but she wanted to hear the truth from Lila.
"What did he do, Lila? Everything that you said to me would be classified, unless you give consent for me to escalate it."
Lila shook her head in an attempt to brush away the tears accumulating at her lower lid. "You can't help. It's just between me and you, I agree. There's nothing you could do to free me."
Stephanie didn't think it was the case. Prattle's last meeting confirmed that they were on track to compile a proposal for the Department of Wellbeing. "Because?"
"Divorce is prohibited."
Out of all aspects of the social life of this new normal, the details of marriage institution sometimes slipped out of Stephanie's radar. It was either due to her singleness she would be out of touch naturally, or the government themselves didn't exactly broadcast the new sets of citizenship regulations.
"What happened, Lila? What did he do?"
"It's everything that he doesn't do," she broke into sobs.
She squeaked some more, then managed to recount her story. "It's his abandonment of my actual feelings, of my works, of my achievement, and above all, my dreams. When you're married to someone, this part of identity, the part that has shaped you for years and made you the woman that you are, is lost to his idea of blended unity. You don't matter anymore. And it's not even about a child. It's about him not embracing who you are, who you were."
"He didn't know I was the employee of the year in my department group before the pandemic. He didn't know I ever hosted a radio show, a corporate-owned frequency for the company's internal purposes, and I was happy to realise my childhood dream of becoming a radio host. He didn't know I was dying to help my nephews with therapists since they were enrolled in a cutthroat university, both of them with a difference of one year. And they still even need it today because now they're out of the programme—who would teach the students?—and they lost their self-purpose because they don't know what they should do without studying. If a part of you is ripped away, how fast could you rebuild your self-image?"
"And they're the closest people to your biological child."
"Yes," she snivelled.
"What happened this morning?"
Lila began after dotting a few more drops on her cheeks. "I was preparing an omelette for his breakfast. A quick fry of something else, and we talked about this while the food was cooking."
Like an ominous roll of thunder to initiate a night full of pouring rain, puzzle pieces in Stephanie's head started to slot into the final image. She didn't like the conclusion.
"We argued. He said that I should trust him. He puts money in the bank, so I shouldn't worry. But I asked for the service for my nephews and he let it rip. He said I was an ungrateful b- woman while he works hard to feed me and put a roof over my head. Maybe I started the question wrongly. I should've just straight out asked him to pay for Companions to see my nephews. They don't have parents anymore. I think their parents, my deceased sister and her also deceased husband, left them enough money to survive modestly. But the nonessential services like Companionship is something out of their monthly budgeting, I think."
Stephanie didn't bristle when Lila called out her job. "But . . . There's always a but, right?"
Lila rolled her left sleeve up accordingly. The cuff pushed up, making creased folds. Stephanie almost winced in agony when the unravelled skin of Lila's forearm showed what looked like a deep gash now covered with a gauze. Words fled her at a rapid pace.
"Was my fault to stand my ground and didn't back down. I should've stopped arguing because the next thing I knew, he grabbed a small knife I was using for cutting up the green onions as a garnish to slice my skin. An effective way of silencing your noisy wife, I believe." She clicked her tongue mockingly, but a drop of tear rolled down again on her rosy cheek.
She concluded, "And since my hands were trembling, I knocked the full plate of food off the table when my hands grabbed the counter. A mess on the floor. He- he hated it. He was disgusted," she sobbed. "He called names. Said that I was a good-for-nothing wife, that I shouldn't have stayed. He hated my cooking, he hated everything about me."
Stephanie decided it was enough after listening to how Lila had to mop the floor with disinfectant to remove the food smell. But she couldn't, wouldn't push. It had to have Lila's consent. "Do you mind me calling any medics now?" Stephanie readied her phone.
"Please, don't." Lila's eyebrows pushed together. "It's gonna be recorded in the house visit. Someone might alert him if medics come to this house. Only the grocery deliveries, cleaners, and you so far, and I don't want to get all of you banned or monitored. Besides, we have a limited number of medics anyway. I don't need to bother them." Her frequent lips-licking spaced out her words.
Stephanie wanted to scream and pulled at her own hair. But she managed to speak calmly, "It's their job. You clearly need stitches. What if it gets infected?"
"No, I don't. Stephanie, please, drop it. I know how to tend a household wound. It's just a knife cut after all. I've applied the rubbing alcohol and iodine enough to not get it infected. First aid kit is always stocked up here."
Stephanie couldn't refute this logic. "I can't expect myself to stay idle knowing what happens to you while I can pop over people's homes, make new friends, and survive in this pandemic. It's deeply unethical for me to turn a blind eye."
"If you want to help me, there's one thing you can do."
Stephanie perked up at the prospect. She listened attentively.
"You know nothing of this accident. Nor do any medical personnel."
Her imaginary plans got crushed as soon as they formed. It was just like that, Stephanie thought. A burst of angry flame burned the remaining trust between a husband and a wife, and she was looking at it from a screen.
Stephanie tilted her head, directing her threatening gaze at the lady. "Promise me one thing: when the wound gets worse tomorrow, you call me or any hospital. I'd knock some sense to your husband if the medical treatment becomes a problem in this household."
She knew it was manipulative, to use Lila's fear of making people displeased against her. But, as she knew it was the only way she could do without too much harm, she did it for Lila's sake.
Come to think of it, she thought she couldn't let it go. Lila could deceive anyone on social media or video calls because that was exactly what a screen could do. It selectively displayed what the person behind it curated. Lila had pretended everything was okay. She didn't want anyone else to catch the sight of the lacerations on her forearm? Fine, she could just always doctor up a story with a happy ending. But she couldn't fool Stephanie who came to her house smelling disinfectant in the air or her eyes who saw the stained gauze beneath her long sleeve.
The gauze, with a large dot of dried brown stain because of the povidone-iodine solution, burned her retina every time Stephanie tried to blink it away. It persisted through her sleep later that night. There was no azure sky, only the icky, brownish one.
~*~
That night, she tossed in her bed, making a tangled mess of the sheet. Was it possible to see an injustice and say nothing? The drop in the population put it into perspective. Who dared to challenge her stance now, not with the dwindling number of people on this earth. They should just focus on what really matters. What gave meaning to life if death kept swinging its scythe to cull the living from this world?
Every client that she got in touch with added a new lens of perspective to her dull eyes. She couldn't leave them hanging without a resolution. That was what separated this job from her old one. She could finally feel alive and help individuals who needed intervention in their lives.
I never regret this life, she wrote in her journal. She could help people in need. If the Department of Commerce thought this job was nonessential, that was their problem. Stephanie was a hundred per cent sure they wouldn't get their hands dirty to help an old man track his son's whereabouts or be burdened with the problem of a domestic violence case.
Screens that bridged communication between people in the pandemic had solved as well as ruined the essence of honesty and truth. Parts of the communication lost in the cold, sterile, face-to-face talk separated by a screen. They couldn't smell the baked goods or cleaning liquid in other people's life. They couldn't catch their wary or elated expressions when a certain trinket or photograph reminded them of something or someone else.
She fired up her email app on her laptop. It was as late as 2 am, the witching hour. People in the past associated a time window between two to three am as the period when the wicked roam the earth. It was the time when the supernatural activities took place, and people not in bed should be worried about the attacks of the Deceiver himself. But Stephanie often found clarity in the deep of night when the night birds stopped chirping.
She thought of Lila's request that started her day. Stephanie traced back the experience, feeling something was wrong. She went back to the message Lila left on her phone. Then, something started to click.
She didn't go to Lila's house right away, as Stephanie took her time to get ready. But the disinfectant smell, albeit faint, was still detected by her nose when she arrived. It had to be close to her arrival time, then. Damar, Lila's husband, might have slipped out when she was still inside the lift. Lila didn't ask her to come after the incident happened. She asked her in advance, probably in a hurry and discreetly from her husband. Stephanie could only assume it was due to either Lila had sensed the discussion would go horribly wrong so she would need one session to decompress, or it was—and Stephanie went out on a limb here—a rarity where Damar was home in the morning.
That second assumption made her think that the guy was barely home. She needed to investigate, but if that was true, there would be plenty of time to mobilise Lila out of the house.