Free Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee Page A

and a half, he just sat there in the living room like a paralyzed man, the light slowly rising across his body. I asked him, “Rezvan, what does rila mean?” He told me that it meant “well lit,” as in a room.
    Two days later, as I walked up our driveway in my housecoat, the mail in my hand, I glanced through the letters and noticed a thick letter from Rilia Balescu. Rila was Rilia, a person, a relative. When I walked in the door, Rezvan was standing in his striped pajamas drinking coffee, smoking, scratching his head. As I handed him the letter, I tried to read his face, but saw nothing. So I said, “Who is Rilia?”
    “She is my sister, my baby sister. Gavrilia.”
    Does an extra beat pass before one tells a lie? This is what I had always believed, but Rezvan answered immediately. Perhaps he had been waiting for the question.
    “I didn’t know you had a sister.”
    “I don’t like to talk about her. We disowned each other long ago. She follows Ceaus’escu still; she has pictures of him and his son on her wall as if they were rock stars. I am trying to bring her over, but she is stubborn. She would rather go to the Black Sea and vacation with her boys than come here and live with me.”
    “So why have you never told me about her?”
    “Because it is not wise to speak aloud the one thing you want more than anything. You know that.”
    “No, I don’t know that.”
    “It’s true. Romanians have a word for it: ghinion. It means don’t speak aloud what you want most. Otherwise it will not happen. You must have a word for this in English?”
    “Jinx.”
    “Okay. I did not tell you about my sister because of jinx.”
    “Why did you tell me her name meant ‘well lit’?”
    “Pardon?”
    “The other day I asked you, and you said that ‘Rilia’ was the word for ‘well lit.’ ”
    “No, no. Rila is the word for ‘well lit.’ Rilia is my sister.” He smiled and kissed my face. “We will have to work on your accent.”
    Over the next month we settled into a routine. When Rezvan finished writing his letters in the night, he padded down the driveway, set the letters in the mailbox, and lifted the tiny, stiff red flag so that our mailman would stop in the morning. And then, after Rezvan was asleep, I would rise out of bed and go to the mailbox myself, pick out the ones to Rilia, and slip them into the pocket of my housecoat. I did the same thing with the letters she sent him. I collected those in the morning.
    At first it didn’t feel like a strategy. I was desperate to know if Rilia really was his sister or his wife—as if her handwriting would tell me. Rezvan left for work an hour before I did, and I opened the letters then. I sat on our bed, laying the pages in front of me, cross-referencing. Some of her passages were blacked out by censors. I found many names, but mostly two, Gheorghe and Florian, again and again. Gheorghe and Florian, Gheorghe and Florian, Gheorghe and Florian. I began to realize, very slowly, that these were probably their children.
    On one of these mornings my mother showed up at my door to drop off a skirt she had sewed for me. “Good,” she said, bustling in, “you’re home. I wanted to drop this off.” Already, as she said this, she was rapidly moving through the rooms of our apartment. My mother liked to do this, to catch me off guard and check all my rooms immediately for anything I might hide if given the time. “What is this?” she said, reaching the bedroom, where all the pages were strewn across the bed.
    “Oh, that’s just some stuff I’m reading for Rezvan. Proofreading.”
    She picked up a sheet. “Oh, so now you proofread in Romanian?”
    I smiled weakly. She didn’t pry, but for once I wished she would. What I wanted to do was tell her that this was my life spread across the bed, thin as paper, written in a language I could not understand, dotted with four names—Rezvan, Gavrilia, Gheorghe, Florian—but never my own. I wanted to ask her how she felt when