I Want to Know Why
Courtesy of the author.
I never call back.
“You going to answer that?”
She hears her phone, face down on the kitchen table, vibrating noisily and repeatedly, signaling a call. Briefly lifting it to confirm the caller is who she thinks it is, she places it back face down. “No, it’s just a spam call.”
Her father absentmindedly nods and turns the page of his newspaper, spooning himself a heaping pile of cornflakes. Her appetite ruined, she gets up and leaves the table, taking her phone with her.
Think of all the calls you’ve missed or ignored in your lifetime. Sometimes it’s just bad timing: say, you’re eating breakfast with your dad, or you’re at the doctor’s office, or maybe you know it’s bad news and you’d rather hear it in a message, or the person calling makes you nervous. She has no singular answer as to why she declined this call, but maybe the simplest answer would be that she thinks, in that time and place, that it’s best to just let it go to voicemail. Or maybe she’s setting boundaries. Not only for the caller, but for herself.
She shoves her phone into her purse and runs upstairs. Upon entering her room she throws her purse, and it slaps the far wall and rips a piece of a hanging photo, leaving the half with her smiling friend laughing on the wall. Sitting down on the edge of her bed, she stares straight ahead, thinking of everything yet nothing at all. Numbness. Or is it anger? Is it sadness? There’s no way to tell, but whatever it is, it leaves her in a state of raw and confusing emotion.
She has a couple ideas for what this call could have contained. Maybe it was just to catch up, maybe it even was to apologize, but maybe—the scariest idea of them all—it was to ask for help.
If they want to catch up, they can text. If they want to apologize, they can text or leave a voicemail. If they want help—
“It’s not my job. It’s not my job. It’s not my job,” she continues to mutter as she hastily tidies absolutely nothing in her room and just moves things from one place to another.
Suddenly exhausted, she gingerly picks up her purse and unzips it, taking out the cell phone. Clicking it awake, she sees the singular notification of a missed call, no message, no voicemail or text. Just one call, no follow up. Couldn’t have been that urgent. So it’s not her job to call back.
She powers her phone down, and leaves it on her desk for the remainder of the day. There’s no reason why a stupid, startling call should ruin her Sunday. But to be safe, she thinks keeping the call as far away from her as possible would maybe ease her mind and put distance between her and the idea of calling back, because that’s not her job.
Why not call back? She didn’t call first, so there’s no mystery as to why she would be calling back. Maybe it’s the inconvenience, maybe it’s the anger she still felt, and maybe it’s exactly what she tells herself again and again: it’s not her job.
Whatever the reason, it works to keep her physical distance, but it looms over her mind the whole day, like an itch at the back of her head. A long time ago she probably would have loved to see the call and pick it up in a heartbeat, happy to talk—and maybe deep down a part of her still is. But the suspicion she feels now has clouded that happiness and turned it into dread. She cannot allow this. It’s not her job.
At the end of her day, she returns to her room. She picks up her phone to find a variety of other notifications to attend to, having forgotten those could even exist today. Nothing more from her caller. She places the phone back down, and turns to pull down her sheets to get to sleep. Another singular vibration rings out. Pillow in hand, she picks her phone back up and sees not a message from the caller, but from the caller’s mom.
She sits—no, falls—on the ground, shocked. With the overthinking she had done all day, this message only confirmed the worst. She couldn’t help but wonder, if it’s another job, and it seemingly isn’t anyone else’s, then whose the hell is it?