Revenge15 min read
The Phone That Rang on the Tenth Anniversary
ButterPicks14 views
They told me grief gets quieter with time. They lied.
Ten years after the night that tore my life into two halves, a sound I had sworn I would never hear again woke me at midnight: the marimba ringtone. The old phone in the battered leather trunk that smelled of perfume and dust vibrated like a trapped insect.
I stared at it, then at Willem. He had stood, the ritual finished, and gone to the kitchen to warm milk—his way of making ritual into motion, as if movement could keep sorrow from settling like a stain.
I didn't move.
The ringtone was ridiculous and ordinary. The same default marimba a child would choose for fun. It sounded like the daybreak of everything I had buried.
"Answer it," Willem called from the doorway without turning back.
I did not mean to, and yet I did. My hand was an old soldier that obeyed a habit stronger than sense. "Hello?"
A small voice, bright as chipped sugar, said, "Mom, when are you coming home? I have a homework question and I don't—"
The word "Mom" punched the air out of me. "Elsie?" I croaked, as if I might wrench the name out of thin cloth and make it real.
"Isn't it me? Who else would it be?" She said it like a dare and then laughed, except the laugh was younger than it should have been.
Willem came into the living room, milk steaming in his hands. He paused. "Everything okay?"
I showed him the screen. The call log was clean: a live call at 9:29 p.m., May 1st. Ten years ago, nine twenty-nine. The hour the coroner could almost not pin down. The hour my life shrank to a single, long, permanent ache.
"Is this a recording?" Willem asked.
"It isn't." My hands shook so much the phone threatened to jump out of them.
"Where are you? What year is it?" I asked, actually asking myself.
"2011, May 1st, nine-thirty," she answered, breezy, like reading a clock off the wall.
I told her to leave home. "Now. Don't take anything. Go to old Mr. Sherman's house and stay there. Don't—"
"Why, Mom?" she said, that soft, petulant tone she used when homework tasted worse than failure.
"Don't ask. Just go."
There was a sound of shoes, the click of the door. I imagined her little feet hurrying across tiles, the loose slippers that always slid. I imagined the pantry light, the front door's cold handle. I imagined her at the neighbor's, safe under his thin blanket, mumbled homework complaints dissolving into sleepy complaints.
Then I heard a different sound: the phone clattering onto tiles, a scrape, a quick rustle—and a man's whisper: "Money. All the money on your bed. Open it."
I lunged, shouted, and dared the other end to keep talking. The call ended at 9:34.
The time the coroner wrote on the paper with that polite, clinical hand.
Willem's face looked like an accusation and a benediction all at once. "You—"
"Don't call me mad," I said. "I spoke to her. She told me it was 2011. She told me nine thirty." I handed him the phone.
He touched the screen as if it were a wound. "That phone—"
"I broke it," I said. Ten years of blame had a name: me. Ten years of a chest that held one person like a stone. "I smashed it that night."
He found the trunk. The phone buzzed hard enough to make the leather tremble. We could have let the moment be a ghost, an ephemeral mercy. But the phone was not a ghost. It was a bridge.
"Set the time back," I said, and the command came from a part of me that did not know how to be surprised by the impossible. "Set it to nine twenty-eight."
Willem cocked a brow. "You're saying it connects back twenty-four minutes?"
"Do you have a better theory?" I snapped.
He didn't, so he let me. The little digits slid, stubborn as a stubborn child, until the display read May 1st, 2011, 9:28. The phone chimed like something about to begin.
When she called the second time, I didn't waste mercy.
"Elsie, listen carefully. Don't go into the living room. Go to the stairwell. Find the gap between the door and the wall. Hide there. Do not come out until you hear my voice again. Do you hear me?"
"Okay," she said, small and solemn.
"You must watch him. Watch his face. Memorize the hat. If anyone sees you, do not answer. If you can't see, don't speak."
Her breath made the line tremble. "Okay, Mom."
I created a plan during those twenty-four minutes that felt like steering a ship through fog. I called Willem at work. He cursed his calendar, his clients, and for five minutes I was the tyrant queen of his life, ordering him home. He came. The minutes burned, but we borrowed time like priests borrow absolution and sped.
When the noise came—when the thief's soft shoe met tile—my fingernails scratched the leather so deep they bled. She whispered with fear into the line. "He's wearing a cap. Black. Cheap shoes. He looks small."
"Good," I muttered. "Stay still."
The line went dead at 9:34 again.
This time the scream that lasted in my skull was different. It was not only grief. It was rage.
II
I tried to change the method. I tried to contact the thief directly. I adjusted the phone time to nine-thirty, dialed numbers it shouldn't dial—Edison Burns, the type of man who drifted through the edges of neighborhoods like a rumor. The phone connected to a room full of music and laughter. He was on a pool table in a bar, arrogantly laughing with men who smelled of smoke and cheap cologne.
"Which Elsie?" he asked when I said the name. He spat the syllables like a bet.
Before I could teach him mercy, he hung up.
I called the police. They thought I had drunk too many years of regret. I called Mr. Sherman next, thought of the neighbor's tiny hallway where many of our family's photos had been taken, where Elsie used to hide. He promised to watch that night. He was old; his legs didn't move like they used to, but his eyes—my God—were steady.
I started to dig. Some clues were like stray hairs on a coat—hard to see until you know where to look.
"Do you remember the dinner ten years ago?" I asked Willem when he finally sat across from me, exhausted, vulnerable, not the skyscraper of a man I had married but a person who could hurt.
"Which dinner?" He made a joke to soften the truth. "You put lemon in my soup again."
"You were at the company party," I said. "You won a phone. You said the gift girl acted odd. You told me she smiled strangely. Do you remember?"
Slowly, the memory uncoiled. He had been younger; he confessed to me about the girl who pressed the phone into his hands with that forced smile. "She said, 'Don't celebrate too early. This phone won't bring you only luck.'"
"Who was she?" My voice was a dry thread.
"I don't know. I didn't think to ask her name."
I did ask, later. I followed traces until a private detective produced a face I had not expected to see again—the woman who had bent over my sickbed twice in another life as a caregiver. Katalina Alston. A name that had once been nothing to me beyond the syllables of a stranger.
Her photographs were everywhere in archives the detective kept: a shy schoolgirl in a "three-odd" trio; the girl who smiled at my husband at twenty; the girl who became a woman who looked like she could both soothe and wound.
"She worked the night clubs sometimes," the detective told me. "She had men who paid. She wanted to be seen by him. She wanted the world to make a place for her."
"Why would she do that?" I whispered.
"Love," he said. "Or what passes for it."
III
We tried other things. In another timeline I burned the phone, flew to Edison Burns' mother, begged, threatened, offered money. In another timeline I kept the phone and dialed the thief's cousin. In another, I tried to stop Willem from ever meeting Katalina.
Every time, the hour found its way back to the same slate: May 1st, 9:34.
In one timeline, I lost my legs in a car accident that night that I had tried to make him avoid. In another, Willem died in a construction accident when he drove home too quickly. Fate, if it existed, was a closed room with eight locked doors; every key I tried turned and revealed another corridor leading right back to that dark kitchen.
"You're obsessed," Willem said at one point. "You're killing yourself over a ghost."
"I'm saving her," I said. "I'm saving our daughter."
He looked at me as if through glass. "If you change this, will you change me? Will you change us?"
"God, I don't know," I replied honestly. "But some things I cannot not try."
The detective found a pattern. Edison Burns had been in the wrong place at the wrong time each life. He had a history of petty theft, of being the kind of man a better man might use to bury himself. If I pushed, he would confess anything. If I wanted to save Elsie, the obvious target was the man they had already put in chains.
I went to the prison. I crossed the cold room where Edison sat like a cockroach under glass. "Tell me everything," I said. "Who told you to go to the house that night? Who promised money?"
He spat at the floor. "Who's asking?"
"Me." I held the phone up against the glass so he could not look away. "If I give you money—"
"Why would I trust you?" he snapped. "You're one of them."
"If you tell me the truth, I can help you." The words were a lie and a truth at the same time. I wanted him to tell the truth even if it destroyed me.
He blinked, then told me the name that tasted like vinegar: "Katalina wanted me to be there. She said she'd pay. Said she'd make it simple—snatch stuff, get spooked, run. She said a kid might be there but it wouldn't be like—"
He didn't finish. He gave me the perfect, terrible phrase. "She told me to be a thief, not a murderer."
He put his head in his hands and sobbed. The story had the shape of a cruel comedy: a woman used a man whose options were broken to cover her own hunger.
IV
When I finally confronted Katalina, she sat like someone who had rehearsed being innocent in a thousand mirrors.
"I didn't plan a murder," she said. "I begged for a way to have him. I thought if Elsie wasn't in the picture—"
"You thought murder would make him yours?" I asked.
She smiled, small and awful. "I thought he'd come running. If the wife had no child, he would have no reason not to leave. He'd choose me. I didn't think anyone would die."
"You said he'd choose you," I repeated. "You said you'd consider someone else's life a variable."
"I said a lot of stupid things," she said, and then she turned the charm on, the practiced tilt of a head, the glossy look, as if she could re-thread every lie into a ribbon.
I had what I needed: phone logs, the detective's notes, Edison's confession. But what I wanted most was to watch her fall in front of people who should have judged her long ago.
"I want to tell the truth," I told Willem. "In public."
He stared at me as if I had invited him to dizzy heights. "You know what that will do to our family name," he said. "You know what that will do to her—"
"Public," I said. "Not only private. She needs to be seen."
He looked away. All lines pointed to the same painful cross: expose, and life gets messy. Hide, and the dagger stays sharpened.
V — Public Punishment (500+ words)
I rented the small event hall at the community center—the room with the bad carpet and better lights. I rented time on the local paper's live feed. I invited every hand that owed me a glimpse of the truth: neighbors, friends, the detective, the judge who had once listened to a story and closed a case with a gavel like a bandage. I printed out the phone logs on thick paper, had Edison escorted from the prison under guard so he could speak.
"Why are you doing this here?" Willem asked quietly as we took our places. He looked exhausted, as if grief had tired out his muscles.
"Because some truths need an audience," I said. "Because shame needs to be visible to lose its power."
The room filled with people who had watched the story unfold across years and rumor: reporters with small cameras, faces from school photographs, mailmen, and the elderly neighbor Eamon Sherman with his cane. Katalina arrived late, the way people do who believe the world owes them grace. She wore a coat the color of unread letters, and her hair fell like a curtain she thought would hide her.
Edison sat chained, a dark figure who already knew the taste of the world's scorn. He looked at me like a man who had been pulled back from drowning and asked whether he would rather sink again.
"Tell them," I said to Edison when the microphones were on. "Tell the whole thing."
He began haltingly, voice brittle with ten years of the truth throttled behind a mouth that had learned how to lie to protect itself. He said Katalina's name with the same shock I felt when I saw it in the files the first time.
"She called me," he said. "Said she'd pay. Said it was only a theft. Said, 'You make a noise, you take things, you run.' She said the house would be empty. She lied."
Katalina's face did not change at first. She worked her smile like a muscle.
Someone from the back hissed, "It's not enough."
I had more. Phone records, messages, an old bar receipt with her handwriting arranging a meeting with Edison the week before the murder. The detective read aloud an exchange where she had written, "Make it clean. He can't know."
"Why did you do it?" a reporter asked, leaning forward.
"Because I loved him," she said in a voice that wanted pity.
"Love," Edison spat. "You don't love. You make a ledger."
The room had the smell of linen and cheap coffee, and then the air changed. People leaned closer as if gravity had altered. Katalina's mouth opened. She blinked. Her bravado started to flake.
"You think this makes you holy?" she said to me suddenly, venom lifting like a moth. "You think you're the only woman who loved and lost?"
"Tell us," I said. "Tell us the truth."
She tried to spin another story: revenge, a miscarriage earlier, a life scraped raw. It echoed with her earlier confessions. "He promised to leave. He promised me a life. I thought—"
"Thought what?" Pastor-like voices in the crowd rose. "That you could butcher a child to build your life?"
At this, a woman in the front row stood and said what several were thinking: "You deserve what you get." Another hand slapped the table. Someone began recording on a phone. More recordings multiplied like insects.
Katalina's face shifted from composure to shock, to denial, to a mask of injured dignity. "This is a setup," she stammered. "You—you're making this up. He—Willem—he loves me. He will come back for me."
From the doorway, Willem's brother Jaxon Lopez—whose habit of staying out of family storms had been his armor—stepped in, then froze. His eyes went to me, then to Katalina, then to the sentencing faces assembled. For the first time, the armor cracked.
"You think I'm a monster," Katalina said. Her voice dropped. "I never meant—"
"It's too late for 'meant,'" Edison said. "She meant. She set it up."
A silence like the pause before thunder held the room. People began to speak all at once. Mr. Sherman, who had once had Elsie at his house, spoke in a small but fierce voice. "I remember seeing her near the hallway. I thought it was a kid—couldn't see the face. I didn't think then—"
"This is my child," I said, having waited for that small microphone to climb back into my hands. "This is what she did. She cost someone their life. She cost us everything."
The crowd's mood turned from curious to furious.
"Call the police," someone said.
They came within minutes. Officers who had been courteous to me in the past now stood up straighter, a different kind of professional face. Katalina tried to plead. "You have to listen. I—"
"You're under arrest for conspiracy and incitement to commit robbery and murder," the lead officer announced, clear and cold as metal. He read rights she had not thought to consider, and suddenly she was a small woman in a bright coat who could no longer fold into charm.
People recorded her as they would a fallen celebrity. The cameras loved her collapse. Her mouth opened and closed without sound. Friends turned away. A few who had once laughed with her held phones up like torches.
Katalina's reaction was a study in a fall: first denial, then outrage, then bargaining, then a raw pleading that tore the room.
"No, no—this isn't right! You can't—" she shouted, voice shredding.
"She told me she had no choice," Willem said quietly, a statement that cut like a bone saw. "That if Elsie were out of the way, I would look at her differently."
I felt the old knife that had lived in me for a decade cold and then slightly warmer. "Is that true?" I asked, and I wanted to hear the shatter.
"It wasn't supposed to go that far," she wailed. "I didn't mean for her to die!"
"You meant to end her childhood," Edison said. "You meant to erase my chance to help. You meant to be the center."
Katalina fell to her knees when the officers touched her wrists. There was crying that was not the sweet sort. There was the coughing, clumsy apology. People stepped away. Someone spat. An elderly woman muttered, "Justice," like a benediction.
She tried to bargain even then: "I'll pay. I'll give you everything. Willem, please—"
Willem turned away. He walked to the window, the height of our life between the glass and the pavement, and he looked small in a way he'd never been. "I married her once," he said to no one, a private prayer. "I am ashamed."
In the press that followed, in the mouth of the news feed, Katalina's downfall became spectacle. Her employers fired her. Her friends—those who had once toasted small triumphs with her—unfriended her in a long, ritualistic deletion. Men who had flirted with plans not meant to be kept wrote statements. The bar where Edison had been when I called provided a tab of call logs that placed him with the wrong crowd. Evidence piled like bricks.
She begged me for mercy in the jail van.
"Please," she said, and there was no baton of charm left, only the raw animal. "Eleanor, please."
"You told me to call life a ledger," I answered, my throat thick with old grief. "I am just making a ledger for you."
Her face crumpled into something between a child's and a criminal's. The camera lights were enough to make her eyes look like jewelry. People watched. They watched while the law did what the law does: process, book, hold.
That day, Katalina's public punishment was not only about bars or brass. It was about the slow stripping: of her social invitations, her small privileges, the comfortable myth people had allowed her to live under. It was the stares that turned into pointed murmurs in the grocery store. It was the neighbors who would not pick up the phone. It was the way her name, once uttered by acquaintances, became a knot of disgust.
She changed. Not by repentance, but by removal of her stage.
VI
After the arrest, the machine of law ate itself in quiet steps. Edison Burns' name was cleared of the sole sin he had taken upon himself under bad counsel and hopelessness. The truth did not bring Elsie back. The truth gave me no apology that could resurrect a child.
Willem left. We divorced not with a whisper but with the sound a building makes when it collapses: no ceremony, only a heap of legal papers and a slow, long grief that had to be paid for monthly, by phone, by lawyer, by the brittle transaction that our house once was.
I went to the hospital to see Elsie. She lived, after Katalina's unraveling, but not as the bright child of my memory. Ten years of what adults call treatment had hollowed out parts of her. She looked like me in the bone of her nose and like Willem in the sea of her eyes. She didn't recognize that I was the same person who had called those impossible numbers.
"Mom," she said once when the glass separated us. "You came."
"I always come," I said.
She laughed, a small thing. "You call a lot of people weird. We remember faces like library cards."
I learned to love a different way: quiet, careful, not triumphant. I learned to live in the house with fewer echoes. Willem's name stopped sounding like a promise.
VII — Aftermath and the Mall
Months went by. The town cleaned itself of the scandal like a machine clearing debris. Katalina's arrest made papers but also footnotes. People moved on.
One afternoon I went to the mall with Elsie. She wanted linens for a future I could hardly imagine—wedding fabrics, she said with a certainty that made me dizzy.
We turned a display bed and saw her: Katalina. She froze when our eyes met, like a photograph catching in midair. She had a child at her hip, a small boy with a puckish face, pressing a sticky ice-cream face against her skirt. Katalina's hair had more silver. There was a gentleness in her hands that frightened me more than any hatred ever had.
"Mom," Elsie said. "That woman looks familiar. I think I've seen her before."
Katalina didn't meet my gaze. For a second she looked like someone who had been through public burning and still had a skin. She kept her head down and counted coins in her purse.
She did not come to us. She walked away the way someone walks after losing everything but having to keep their steps measured. The child tugged at her hand and asked for ice cream. She bought a small cone and kept it together.
I had expected a fall from grace to look different. It had been smaller, more domestic than vengeance would have allowed. There was no final scream of judgement. There was life: public humiliation does not always result in ruin; sometimes it results in a quieter cage. She had been punished, yes—the kind you cannot put behind glass. She had been punished by the world and by the silence of those it used to call friends.
Elsie watched the woman go. "Do you know her?" she asked, dipping her finger in her spoon and drawing a tiny heart on the linen card.
"No," I said. "I didn't used to."
I thought of the phone and the impossible loop. I thought of the times I had failed, and of the times I had made the world right enough to breathe.
A boy tightened his grip on Katalina's hand and tugged her into a bakery. She bought him bread. He asked for a larger piece; she refused. Her punishment had made new habits: stingy with pleasures, generous in small mercies.
I left the mall with Elsie and the linens folded like small white promises. The world continued. The phone sat in a drawer at home, silent now. I didn't know what would happen if I set its clock again.
"Would you do it again?" Elsie asked me one night, in a voice that was small but steady.
"Would I do what?" I asked.
"Would you call the past again to try and fix things?"
I thought of the hall where Katalina had been taken away in cuffs. I thought of Edison's tears, of Willem's collapse, of the slow, public unpeeling of an ambition that had been built on cruelty.
"I would," I said finally, "if I thought it would save you without costing others the rest of their lives."
She looked at me like a judge who had seen both law and mercy. "Then don't," she said.
"Why?"
"Because sometimes we add people to our ledger and forget that a ledger can burn everything. We lose ourselves doing the math."
I nodded. Maybe she was right. Maybe some things could stay as lessons rather than wars.
VIII — Endings
I live now in the quiet between the seconds. I visit Elsie as often as the hospital allows. I carry small gifts she likes: new notebooks, a cheap pen she prefers, a sweater I knit badly but with warmth. I keep the phone wrapped in a cloth at the bottom drawer, because a superstition lives beside sense, and because some small part of me will always be the woman who reaches for impossible bridges.
Willem married no one else. He remarried in silence or in privacy; I do not follow the scraps of his life. Edison Burns got out after the truth knotted up the case; he vanished into work, a man made useful by labor and small contrition. Katalina served the time the law gave her and then served a different sentence the public cannot legislate: she learned to live in the light of other people's eyes.
Once, a friend asked me, "Do you feel better?" as if there were a simple symptom for resolution.
"No," I said. "I only feel different. I feel like someone who has learned to sleep with a room light on."
The marimba ringtone has not sounded since. If it ever does, I will listen. I cannot promise I will not answer.
The End
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