This is still VERY raw. Feel free to critique the crap out of it!
-Sarah
I arrive home from work, quietly hanging my keys in the kitchen and padding quietly down the tile hall towards the bedroom. If she has fallen asleep, I don’t want to wake her. I turn the doorknob, very unsuccessful at remaining quiet, and I see the light of the streetlamp falling soft and yellow into the room. It doesn’t illuminate the bed, only a strip of the off white carpet and the lonely desk in the corner, where I can see a white porcelain coffee cup and saucer sitting untouched. I don’t look at the window, I can’t make myself. I head straight for the bed. It is lost in the darkness. I reach out my hand slowly and it falls as gently as I can manage onto the unmade sheets, searching for her slender form. My other hand makes its way into the folds of the sheets, and I am praying that I find her there. I am searching, searching with my hands, my eyes focused on the bed, the darkness lifting and its shape coming into focus. I feel frantic and shut my eyes. She is not there.
I pause, my hands are still now, but they remain lost in the bedding. I breathe slowly, slowly, trying to persuade myself to be calm. I look up and she is still there, staring out the window, past the streetlight that stands directly outside and into the dark alley behind our apartment building.
We have been married for fifteen months, and she has been staring out that window for fifteen hours.
I don’t know what she’s looking at, or if she sees anything at all. We have an infestation of mice in that alley. They’ve gotten into the building, and we’ve had to pay extra for the landlord to afford an exterminator. Maybe she sees them out there with her keen vision, and she’s watching them go on with their lives, stealing people’s food and storing it. Maybe she’s found out that they have been part of a scientific experiment and have created a Rats-of-Nimh-like society down there.
I don’t know what she sees.
I woke up this morning completely unaware that my wife was not lying beside me, on her back with her arms thrown above her head as usual. I was cold and thinking that maybe she was, too, and so I rolled over, ready to throw some of the blankets that I had stolen during the night over her head, maybe wake her up playfully and have a fun but quick go with her before we started getting ready for work. The sheets were lying nearly untouched, almost like they were made on her side of the bed but not mine.
“Kitty, baby?” I asked, directing my voice towards the bathroom, which is where I figured she was. There was no answer, and I felt a butterfly of fear flutter in my stomach, though it really seemed unfounded. I threw off the sheets in more panic than the situation warranted, and raced to the bathroom, which was dark and empty. I came out of it, and stopped suddenly, sighing with relief when I saw her sitting at the window.
“Kitty,” I tried again, but she didn’t turn around. I was glad she wasn’t missing, or hadn’t gone off somewhere this morning alone into the city. “Kitty…” I stopped, halfway between the bathroom door and her motionless body. Then I realized that she wasn’t just standing there, watching the early morning sun dance across the paved alley or a pair of redbirds flirting in the air. She had moved the wooden chair of the desk to the window and sat in it. She wasn’t listening to me.
I approached her gently, panic rising quickly inside of me. “Kitty?” I tried one more time, resting my hand softly on her hair. She looked up at me with her big brown eyes and long, dark lashes, and gave me a half-hearted smile. “Are you alright?” I asked. She nodded.
“Yeah, baby, I’m fine. I’m just looking outside, that’s all. It’s a pretty day.”
I looked out the window. The sky was white with clouds, the lighting bland. It wasn’t a pretty day.
“Why don’t you come into the kitchen and I’ll fix you some breakfast, okay?” I don’t think I’ve ever fixed her breakfast in the two and a half years we’ve been together, but it was a desperate attempt to pull her out of whatever this was that she was in.
“No, no thank you. I know you can’t cook. I’ll be in there in a little while to get some coffee. Just go on without me.” She tried smiling again, but she seemed so sad that she suddenly stopped and turned her attention to the alley again.
I’m not sure why I left for work instead of staying with her. I called the little girl that works for her at the bookstore she inherited from her father and told her Kitty was sick and in bed, and would she be okay by herself? She gave a timid yes, and I said that she could call me at work if she had any problems, but to please leave Kitty alone.
Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir.
Then I just showered and got dressed like normal, making stops by the window to talk idly to Kitty between getting my tie and then putting on my belt and socks and shoes. I brought her a cup of coffee, fixed with cream and one spoonful of sugar, but she wouldn’t take it, and so I set it on the desk in the corner.
And I kissed her on her forehead like her father would, and ran out the door because I was already late.
***
I could think of nothing but work. I had to. Sitting at my desk everything was ink and paper and the tap, tap, tap, tap of my keyboard. In between each “Kane Michael, can I help you?” and “You have a good afternoon,” came visions of a waterfall of dark brown hair, the soft curve of her nose and lips and chin, and the smoke white day behind her, framing her silhouette. This is where the tapping came. I had to make my thoughts about numbers, about the way the market was rising and then falling downward, spiraling into another black Tuesday. Only today was Thursday, and so it would spiral into an abyss of inflation and crazed selling sprees and a flood of phone calls threatening lawsuits, a black Friday.
It seemed that the hands on my clock, the ones that usually moved through molasses, were moving along at double speed, so that when I next looked up at it, it was half past five.
I knew that when I went home and opened my door she would be stretched out on the couch, watching her nighttime soaps or making toast and eggs for us because we both love breakfast for dinner. I knew, and yet, I didn’t. There was still a consistent sense of unrest in the pit of my stomach. I kept waiting for the peace to come, for our interconnectedness of sex and marriage to suddenly become a sort of telepathy where I would know for certain that her trance had broken. But this never came. No matter how hard I thought, Kitty come out of this, it’s me, Kane, c’mon baby…I didn’t know for certain whether she had or not.
The fear that had become a heavy, unmoving rock in the pit of my stomach kept my feet on the floor and my eyes glued to the clock. Even constantly staring at it, the hands still moved fast and I counted down five minutes without even blinking. But thinking of her just sitting there, if that’s indeed where she was, in some need of me, or in need of anything, made me push my chair away from my desk.
***
And so I am back here again, in the pitch black room, staring at her dark silhouette. She is unresponsive this time, until I walk up to her, fighting the knot in my throat, the saltwater tears that sting my eyes, and take her by the elbow. “Katherine,” I say, and my voice is so low I can barely hear it in my own ears. “Katherine, it’s time to go to bed.” She turns to me, doesn’t smile, but searches my face for an answer I don’t have. One I can’t have. Then she follows me to bed. I tuck her in, pulling the sheets to her chin and kiss her on the lips. She doesn’t kiss me back, but I didn’t expect her to. I just wanted to feel her lips against mine.
She falls asleep very quickly, I can tell by the rhythm of her breathing. I don’t, though. I just lie in bed and listen, my mind racing. I see black and white pictures, a lot of them. Mainly of her, wearing her big floppy hat to the company picnic, standing on her tiptoes to get a glass down from the cabinet, her shapely leg muscles stretching and relaxing.
Crazy runs in her family, she told me this when she knew I was going to propose to her. I tried to be romantic and surprise her, but everyone knew it was coming. Everyone knew I was head over heels for this little girl. Her great-grandmother had been put into an asylum for postpartum. Her grandfather, on her father’s side, took a machete after her uncle because he had stolen a cookie from the cookie jar. He broke down right after, crying all of the time all over the place. He couldn’t keep a job and eventually her father’s family was kicked out onto the streets, where they flitted from homeless shelter to homeless shelter until his mother took the children and ran off with another man. He killed himself shortly after. I don’t know how he did it, her grandmother never told her father and so she never knew.
I was unaffected by this. I trusted her. Kitty was the most sane girl I’d ever known. In fact, she’s twice as sane as I’ll ever be. She’s had a job since she was fourteen years old and at the age of twenty-three was managing the family business. When I am in a fit about something she will be the first to grab my face and tell me I’m being ridiculous.
Maybe she’s too sane, I think, but then physically shake my head to get that kind of thought out of my head. She’s not too sane, she’s not insane, she’s just had an off day. Maybe work is stressing her out and this is her way of dealing with it. Maybe a friend died and she didn’t tell me about it –why wouldn’t she tell me about something like that?
My thoughts still race. Everything still races. The room and the black and white pictures, some of them are colored now, and some of them are silent movies. Most of them are still of her, holding her firstborn niece, baking in the kitchen with flour on her nose, singing to me softly, softly when she thought I was asleep. The images are becoming fuzzier, a little less defined, and soon she is not the only one in them. I am in some of them, which is strange because I definitely don’t remember myself in these situations. I’m holding her sunhat for her while she plays volleyball with the secretaries and other brokers’ wives, I’m holding her hand while she holds the baby and dusting the flour off her nose. These lucid images fold and unfold until they are nothing more than darkness is my mind, and I hear my alarm going off.
When I open my eyes I immediately look towards the window. There she stands again. I did not expect anything different. Sometime during the night I felt her move, I felt her heart beating through my sleep, and I knew she would be there when I woke up. I walk to the window and look straight into her face. She does not look back at me and I am again taken aback by the way her eyes wander like she does not know who I am. This time, however, instead of talking to her like a child and brazing her forehead with my lips, I take her around the waist and press her frail body tight against mine. She folds into me softly, her hair smells slightly sour, and I can soon feel her body shaking with sobs.
“Kitty, Kitty,” I whisper, not because I don’t know what to say but because I find myself unable to speak anything else. Each cry reverberates deep inside of me, wrenched from my own soul and not simply hers, and whatever it is that haunts her, we will fight it together. We will break through it.
