Baltimore by Jelena Lengold

mother wouldn’t approve of. I knew what was wrong by the sound it was making. I recognized the whrrr, followed by a click, and then nothing; I wanted to shout to the guy outside that the problem was in the starter, and that he needed to replace the brushes, and in the meantime, if he wanted to start the car, that he should bang on the starter with some kind of a rod, really hard, so that the brushes come in contact with what they’re supposed come in contact with and strike a spark.
    “What’s happening?” she asked. “Why are you so quiet?”
    “I’m tired. Suddenly, I’m extremely tired.”
    Then I told her how I met this girl who was adopted and how, for some reason, I feel terribly sorry for her.
    “Why?”
    “What do you mean, why?! Her real parents simply abandoned her when she was just a baby and she lived in a hospital for a year, until some other people came to take her. And do you know what she does now? Let’s say the two of us are driving somewhere and she says she needs to stop and buy some cigarettes. Before getting out of the car, she always says, as if joking: ‘You’ll wait for me? You won’t leave, will you?’ The first few times she said this, I didn’t react. But then, on one occasion, I stopped her and said very seriously: ‘I won’t leave and I won’t abandon you. I don’t abandon people.’”
    “Like they abandoned you?”
    This was a low blow. We were talking about someone else, not me.
    “Who abandoned me?”
    “Your mother abandoned you,” she said softly, but very clearly.
    There was no mistake about it. I didn’t misunderstand her or anything like that.
    “Why do you think that?”
    “You told me yourself. Between that man and you, she picked him.”
    There was nothing more to be said here. I knew, better than she did, that it was the truth. And still, I was as surprised as if I’d been told I was the one who was adopted, and not that other girl. As if I’d suddenly been told I was an alien, or something like that.
    See what’s ahead of me now? Years and years and years. During which I’ll know she had abandoned me. Dinners during which I’ll know she had abandoned me. Birthdays during which I’ll know she had abandoned me. Conversations during which I’ll be pretending I didn’t know she had abandoned me. Or, will I pretend to be bad at hiding the fact that I know she had abandoned me? Which one of us will be better at pretending that we don’t know what we know? And how long could this go on?
    I could’ve cried, of course. That’s something a person can always do. But somehow, I feel like this now also falls under the repertoire of those bogus things that had lost their meaning. Only a week ago, I thought I knew how things stood, roughly, anyway, and now, I’m back to knowing nothing, without hope of ever finding out. I didn’t have any time left to ask her anything, and besides, I think the question would be too complicated for this period of the day. In other words, if I’ve been fed lies all my life, if I answered with lies, and if everything in my life up to now was a lie, then damn it, do I even have anything sincere to offer?
    I know exactly what she would say. “Is that your real question or are you asking something else?”
    Shit! At one time, I was the one who liked to relativize things.

Better that you hear it from me now than later, from one of them. I’ll look like I was hiding something, as if it were something important. I think they exaggerated and made too much of it.
    Anyway, it has to do with the time I didn’t speak for almost three months. All right, maybe it was closer to four months. But no longer than that.
    It all started out as a joke one evening while we were playing cards at home with our friends. However, no one knows that during a card game, I also play that little gambling game with myself. For example, I say to myself: if I lose, in the next five days I’ll get hit by a bus while crossing the street. And then,