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Because by morning, Monday morning, the morning he left, he’d gone to the opposite extreme, to something self-controlled and cold. We got ready for work in silence, saying nothing to each other, just glaring at one another and giving each other a wide berth. The only words he spoke to me were as he left. I spoke first, as he pulled open the door to leave. I said, “Have a good day,” and to be honest, I don’t know if they were sincere.
Jake froze with his back to me in the open door. He turned slowly back, gazing over a shoulder, his face unsmiling and unkind. He was silent at first, regarding me, his eyes moving up my body to my face to the point of making me uncomfortable and self-conscious. I wasn’t sure that he was going to say anything at all, but then he did. He practically huffed, and he said, “Don’t wait up,” not giving me a chance to reply as he turned and walked away from me, slamming the door so vehemently that the dishes in the kitchen cabinet shook.
When the house was built, Jake and I put so much thought into our bedroom’s design. It wasn’t just a place for us to sleep, but to spend time. Ours is a Savoir bed, which for some people, costs more than their car. It always felt insulting and overindulgent to sleep in a thirty-thousand-dollar bed, but Jake worked hard for his money and he had an inheritance. He believed that if he wanted a Savoir bed, he should have a Savoir bed. He didn’t like me to remind him of all the other more practical things we could do with that type of money.
When I come to it, the bedroom door is only partly open. I don’t know whether I left it like that or not, not that it matters because Martha would have been the last one in the room. I reach into the bedroom with a hand, through the open door, holding my breath, being quiet.
As I enter the room, the smell of perfume overwhelms me, piercing my nasal passages.
The light switch is located just inside the door, to the right of it. I run my hands over the wall. I find and flip on the light switch, expecting the room to fill with light, but it doesn’t. Nothing happens. The room stays dark.
And then I remember turning the lamp off last night at the base, which is on an end table beside the bed. I have to walk across the dark room to get to it. I stand in the doorway, working up the courage to step further into the room, picturing this accent chair and ottoman we have in the corner of the room. The chair and the ottoman are velvet. They’re the color of marigolds. The chair has a low profile and a deep seat and, for all intents and purposes, is Jake’s chair because it’s where he likes to sit when he’s in the bedroom but not on the bed. He sits back in the chair, kicks his feet up on the ottoman and in the mornings when he’s home or at night when I slip into my pajamas, I feel his eyes on me, watching me, following me from his chair.
“Jake,” I whisper, practically breathless, out into the darkness, imagining him keeping hidden in his marigold chair, waiting for me to come home. The perfume is mine. I have many bottles of perfume, but this is one I wear all the time. It’s Chanel. I’d recognize the scent anywhere. Jake gave the bottle to me. “Are you here? Jake?”
My words are met with silence. It means nothing. It doesn’t mean that he isn’t here.
I practically have to force myself into the room.
As I cross the room for the lamp, my feet step on something wet and sticky that makes me think of blood.
With the next step, I come down on something sharp. It pierces my feet and I cry out, clamping my hands against my mouth to quiet the sound. I move through total darkness, walking on the edges of my feet where it hurts less, anticipating what it would feel like for someone’s hands to come down on me, to touch me, to grab me by the feet.
I come to the lamp. I fumble for the switch. I turn on the light. Light floods the room. I spin around, looking in all the dark corners of the bedroom and bath.
Jake’s chair is empty. There is no one in the bedroom but me.
On the floor beside the dresser is a bottle of broken perfume. Perfume runs along the wooden floors, getting absorbed by a wool rug when the flow of perfume reaches it.
I reach down to collect the glass in my hand.
I see movement peripherally. My head spins in the direction of it.
Shaking, I drop to my knees and look under the bed. The cat is there now, hiding under the bed with its back arched and its tail tucked between its legs, looking scared.
“Did you do that?” I ask, of the broken bottle and the spilled perfume. The cat doesn’t answer back. Maybe it did. And maybe it didn’t.
I get back up on my feet. Still shaking, I hobble down the stairs with the largest shards of glass in my hand, what I was able to collect. “What happened, Nina? What is it?” my mother asks, cleaning up the picture frame glass in the foyer.
“Nothing. Just the cat.”
Cautiously, I search the rest of the house while my mother looks on. I turn on all the lights. I find nothing and no one.
Later, as I sit on the edge of the bathtub, my mother helping me to pick glass out of the soles of my feet, I think how the cat might have knocked the perfume off the dresser either intentionally or by mistake. She does that. She has a tendency to knock things over to get attention or food, or to get a rise out of me.
But the cat didn’t leave that dirty shoe print by the door.
CHRISTIAN
Lily likes to feed the birds outside our house. She has two feeders in the backyard, which she hangs from hooks close to the trees and fills with seeds. She loves to stand at the back window and watch them. Even in the dead of winter, when the birds should have flown somewhere south, where it’s warm, I wake up to the sound of birdsong. The birds come in droves, and because of it, despite Lily’s best efforts, she can’t always keep up with feeding them. Eventually the feeders go dry and the birds disappear, and then the backyard becomes quiet and still. Days pass without seeing a bird so that you’d think they were long gone.
Lily goes to the store. She gets more seed. She trudges outside, sometimes in the cold, sometimes through a foot of snow, to fill the feeders.
No sooner does she come back inside than the birds reappear, emerging from the deepest parts of the trees.
We couldn’t see them. We were sure they were gone, that they’d moved on to someone else’s feeder. But no. All the while they were there, lurking just out of sight, watching Lily, waiting on their next meal.
It makes me think of Jake. It makes me wonder if there is any possibility no matter how remote that he’s there, hidden in the background somewhere, camouflaged like the birds in the trees.
