The Door, Still Closed

untranslation" has already begun — whether Nadia will still feel like Nadia to her."

She had not knocked yet. That was the fact of it. She had come all this way — down Vessel Lane and through the park where the elm trees were just beginning to drop their seeds, small papery things that caught in her hair — and now she stood at Nadia's door with her hand six inches from the wood.

The wrist felt strange without the cord. Not lighter, exactly. More like a sentence with its punctuation removed.

Through the door she could hear the particular sounds of her sister's apartment: the radiator's low click, something on the stove, the specific way Nadia moved through a kitchen — one drawer opened and then another, a habit Maya had catalogued without meaning to over thirty-one years of knowing her. The sounds were all correct. She had not lost the sounds.

What she didn't know was what would happen when the door opened. Whether Nadia's face would still carry the thing that made it Nadia's face. Whether the meaning of her would remain.

The card had said: the path records what is walked. It had not said what the walking cost.

She thought of the woman in grey. Her daughter's face across a table — still familiar, still anatomically her daughter, but somehow untranslated. The woman had said it came slowly. She had said she still wasn't certain which of them had changed.

Maya's hand moved toward the door and stopped.

There were two true things: she had come here because she wanted to know. And she had come here because she was afraid that knowing would make it real.

She raised her knuckles.