Salt #3
I drifted through the hallway, my bare soles memorizing the exact freezing temperature of the hardwood.
In the living room, I touched the corner of the mantelpiece where the dust has collected behind the brass clock.
I moved to the mudroom. My father’s coat was hanging from the third peg from the left; the wool felt stiff, keeping the shape of his shoulders.
I pressed my face into the sleeve. It did not smell like him.
It smelled like an object that survived him.
I am the one moving things. I moved a box of matches from the mantle to the side table.
I picked up a silver paperweight on his drafting desk, held its cold weight against my collarbone for forty seconds, and set it down three inches to the left of its original imprint.
I was casting no sound. The house did not protest my weight because I was not taking up any space.
I was just a draft passing through the corridors.
By 5:30 AM, the light through the kitchen window was the color of a wet slate shingle. The hummingbird feeder was down even further below the rim. The line of air was a clear block at the top of the cylinder.
Zane was awake before the birds. He did not stretch or yawn; his eyes simply opened in the light, tracking at once to where I was standing by the glass.
He left and came back, his boots already laced, his jacket already zipped to the throat.
He had his car keys in his right hand. They made a small, metallic click against his palm as he walked toward the counter.
He stopped at the edge of the island, six feet away.
The space between us was an entire ocean of things we cannot say without breaking the glass.
“I’m going to my parents’ house,” he said. His voice was raw. “Seren, I don’t want to leave you. I want to stay here with you, but I understand. If you want me to come back, call. Please.”
“Okay,” I said. My eyes were on the face-down phone. My mind kept reminding me it now has no owner. It is abandoned.
Zane just stood there. The silence stretched until it felt like a wire being pulled from both ends, tight with tension.
He looked at my hair, my shoulders, the way the plaid blanket is dragging on the tile.
He loved me so much it was visible in every movement of his face.
He wanted to throw his arms around me, he wanted to drag me back from the edge of the cliff, he wanted to be the floor that I kept collapsing onto.
But he knew if he touched me, he would pin me to the ground where the grief is waiting to crush me.
He reached out and set a fresh cup of coffee on the granite, exactly three inches from my father’s phone. The steam rose between the two pieces of plastic and stone like a tiny signal fire.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. He hesitated, his thumb rubbing the ring of his key fob. “Austin is at his parents. He’s working but if you need him, call him.”
“I don’t need him right now, Zane.”
He looked at me, his eyes busy with a devastating kind of torture. He knew he must let me stumble alone in the dark, and he knew he must resist pointing his flashlight in my direction, so I did not suffocate under his eyes.
“I know you don’t.” His words were soft. He took one slow step backward toward the door, his eyes never leaving my face. “But I have to tell you anyway, Seren. You’re not alone, I don’t want you to forget that. While I’m breathing, you’re never alone.”
He waited for three seconds, hoping for a phrase, a look, a single inch of movement that says stay.
I looked at the coffee steam. The front door clicked shut behind him at 6:02 AM.
The sound of his car engine starting in the driveway vibrated through the soles of my feet and then died away into the morning traffic.
He was gone. The house was completely mine.
I wanted to be a little girl again.
I wanted to be small enough to fit in the backyard swing my father never once pushed, the one that had hung from the same oak branch for as long as I could remember, rusted now, the chains gone the color of old pennies.
I wanted a version of this house where a hand on my back meant forward, not away.
I wanted to see snow before there were wolves fighting in it.
I wanted the version of myself that existed before I understood what the quiet in any of these rooms had cost.
I only have this version of me now. The one with all the old wounds still open, still raw at the edges, the ones I had spent years learning to leave alone.
They had been quiet for a while. They were not quiet anymore.
They sat underneath my skin and they screamed, and I did not know, even now, what they were screaming for.
Were they asking me to finally close them, to sit down and thread the needle and do the unbearable work of healing something that deep?
Or were they only screaming because screaming was the only thing they knew how to do, the only way they had left to remind me they existed, to make me pick at them until they bled all over again, fresh, the way they used to.
Maybe they just wanted to be remembered. Maybe that’s all a wound ever really wants, someone to sit with it instead of bandaging it shut and walking away. I did not want to sit with it. I wanted the swing. I wanted the version of me who never had to learn what a gash feels like in the first place.
But that version of me does not live in this house. She has not lived here in a very long time. She lives somewhere I can’t drive to; in a childhood I built out of what I wished had happened instead of what actually did. This house around me, his house, every room of it, held nothing of her at all.