6. Daniel
Daniel
"The Empty House"
The house does not feel empty in the way of a house where something dramatic has happened. It feels empty in the way of a house where everything is in its place and the person who put it there is gone.
I eat the leftovers from two nights ago.
I eat them standing at the counter because sitting at the table alone seems, for some reason I can't quite articulate, like more than I can manage right now.
The kitchen is clean. The throw blanket on the couch is folded exactly the way Maya folds it, which is with the decorative edge out, and I notice this for the first time — that she folds it a particular way, that this is a choice she makes, that I have been on the receiving end of that choice without noticing it for years.
I call her at 8:30. She doesn't answer. I listen to her voicemail message, which is her voice saying her name and asking me to leave a message in that professional, pleasant tone she uses for people who might not know her, and I hang up without leaving one.
I text instead: I'm here whenever you're ready. Take whatever time you need. I love you.
I mean it as comfort. I mean it as the right thing to say. I am not yet equipped to understand that I'll be here is, in this context, precisely the problem.
I put the wine in the rack. I don't open it.
I go upstairs and I do the things you do before bed — teeth, face, the book I've been reading for four months because I tend to fall asleep after two pages.
I get into bed on my side, which is the left side, which I have always taken, which means the right side is Maya's, and the right side is undisturbed.
She made the bed this morning, which she does every morning, and her side has all the same pillows in the same arrangement, and it looks exactly as it always does, and it has never before occurred to me that this is the first thing I see in the morning and I have been walking past it unseeing for years.
I cannot sleep.
I lie in the dark and I think about the note. Two sentences. I need some time. I'm at Mom's. Not: I hate you. Not: this is your fault. Not even: I want a divorce. Just time. Space. A step back from whatever we have been doing.
I think about the wine in my hand as I read it. I think about the presentation. I think about how for approximately six hours today I was the happiest I've been in months, and I drove home to celebrate, and the house was empty.
At some point I pick up her pillow — the smaller one she puts under the main pillow, the one she tucks her arm around when she sleeps on her side — and I hold it, and I realize that I don't know what shampoo she uses.
I used to know. Early in our marriage I knew everything about her in that specific way of new love, the way you intake another person like oxygen, the smell of their hair and the sound of their specific laugh and the way they hold a coffee cup with both hands even when it isn't cold enough to need both hands.
I knew what she ordered at every restaurant we went to before the menu opened.
I knew what song she'd turn up when it came on the radio.
I knew which side of her face the pillow-crease always appeared on in the morning.
And at some point I stopped knowing, and I told myself this was the natural evolution of a long marriage, that you couldn't maintain that intensity of attention forever, that life was not a romantic comedy.
But lying here now, holding her pillow, I wonder when exactly I stopped paying attention and started just assuming she'd be there when I looked up.
I put the pillow back. Pull the blanket up.
When did I stop knowing her shampoo?
The question follows me down into sleep, unanswered.