The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

My friend, I urge you. Do not succumb to darkness. Lack of hope, as I learned long ago, is a deadly affliction.

Or did she fear resurrecting a time in her life when she’d made a decision she dared not question—for if she did, and found herself wrong after all these years, what was there to do?

At first she’d not believed that Dror could die without her knowledge. She, who had no patience for theories of the paranormal, could not comprehend that the world could be emptied of Dror’s face, his body and hands and eyes, without her sensing it. Yet there were the words.

Ester had cross-written on discarded drafts not to be clever, and certainly not to practice penmanship—but because there was a secret she had tamped down until it was a murderous weight inside her . . . and she needed there to be, somewhere in the world, at least one place where the truth existed.

Helen’s eye caught a line of cross-writing in a different ink, as though it had been added after the fact. No, not even a line. It was a single word, inked thinly and carefully between the lines of the inventory, like a spider hanging barely visible in a corner. אהבתי‏ An assault, a rebuke across the years. An outstretched hand. The inverted letters spelled the single Hebrew word that meant “I loved.”

People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there’s no audience, life is simple. It’s just doing what you know in your gut is right.