Brennan sits down and leans wordlessly against me. I feel him trembling too.
The night passes. The next two days are uneventful, painfully sluggish. I watch Brennan closely and try to identify birdcalls as we walk; anything not to think of my husband, because every time I do I think I might collapse. But it’s his impression of a Canada goose I hear in the sky, and when vague movement ahead of us is revealed by song as a cluster of chickadees, all I can see is my husband spilling birdseed as he refills the backyard feeder. In my dreams I’m always walking, and alone. Awake, Brennan’s at my side and the desolation all around no longer seems remarkable, not even when we enter streets I know. I leave my lens in my pocket. I don’t want to see what’s become of my home.
We’re less than three miles from my house when the sun sets. I’m so stiff. Everything hurts. My hand isn’t any better. Brennan breaks the window of a small house and helps me inside. I whisper an apology as I cross the threshold. This homeowner may be a stranger, and gone, but he or she was also my neighbor.
Between the physical pain and being so close to home, I can’t sleep. I stretch out on a rug and watch the speckled blue-gray blur to which my vision has reduced the ceiling. Brennan snores all night. I’d thought his night terrors might return after the supermarket, but he seems fine. Or, better than I expected. Better than me, though maybe it only seems that way because I can hear only my own thoughts, dream my own dreams. I’m holding our blue-eyed baby, shielding him from a storming crowd, and then a blade whose hand I never see pierces me from behind and skewers us both.
In the morning I can barely stand, and it takes about an hour of walking for my muscles to loosen. By then, we’re close. We pass what was once my favorite café and a curiosity shop that operated on an unpredictable schedule. An elderly neighbor once told me about a time the store surprised her by being open Christmas Day. She found a china tea set identical to one she remembered her mother owning, but which had been lost in a fire. “Five dollars,” she said to me. “A Christmas miracle.” Her mother had never let her use the tea set, and owning it now, she told me, made her almost unbearably happy. I asked her if she used it daily to make up for lost time, and she looked at me like I was the devil. “I don’t use it,” she said.
I squint through the store’s windows as we pass. There’s a dusty display of old cookbooks and vintage kitchenware: a blender, a utensil holder painted with daisies and sprouting a single plastic spatula, a blue cast-iron pot.
Half an hour later, we reach my street. Windblown trash skitters across the asphalt. I pause. Brennan walks a few steps farther before noticing. “Mae?” he asks, turning.
Four driveways down on the left: my mailbox.
It’s there, really there. But I can’t see the house. A monstrous Tudor obstructs my view. Inside the Tudor, a tea set isn’t being used.
As we walk down the block, I feel my nerves constricting, resisting each step. We pass the Tudor and my house comes into view on its little sloped lawn. Pale yellow siding, front door framed by a pair of leafy shrubs. A gutter that was loose when I left now hangs unabashedly from the roof. The lawn is long and yellowing and dotted with white clover flowers.
“Where are we?” asks Brennan.
I’m shaking as I walk up the stone steps. I peer toward the living room windows, but it’s dark inside and I can’t see beyond the glass. A plastic-wrapped newspaper rests by the path. Grass has grown around it as though it were a rock. I step over the paper. I’m listening as I walk, but I don’t hear anything from inside. Just my breath, my steps, blood pounding through my temples. Brennan behind me, and the autumn breeze teasing the long grass. A distant wind chime, maybe.
Sunlight glints off the doorknob, and I stand still for a moment before finding the courage to wrap my hand around it. The knob is cold, as I envisioned, but also locked. A burst of anger courses through me: After everything else, they’re going to make me break into my own house.
But there is no they, not anymore.
I take a step back. Something feels off. Something specific. I glance around, and then I see it—the welcome mat is missing. My husband’s name and mine, playfully intertwined, gone.
This isn’t my house.
I can’t breathe, I can’t stop trying to suck in air.
“Mae, what’s wrong?”
I close my eyes, bend over, and put my hands on my knees.
This is my house.
This is my house.
I look up again. I know that chipped paint on the window frame. I know the striped curtains barely visible through the living room window. This is my house. The mat isn’t here, but that’s just superficial. A legal issue. They didn’t want his name in the shot.
If only there were a they.
I wave away Brennan’s barks of concern and wait for my breath to settle. I refuse to break my own front door, so I walk around to the back. My defeated vegetable garden languishes beside an overgrown flowerbed, and there it is, curled over a bench—the welcome mat. An unraveled hose trails between it and the spigot on the side of the house.
The screen door leading to the back porch isn’t latched. I enter, passing a small concrete statue of a meditating frog—one dollar, from the curiosity shop. I hear Brennan following me. A citronella candle sits centered on our glass-top table.
I check the back door. It’s also locked, but it has windows, nine stately rectangles. I walk past Brennan and pick up the meditating frog. It’s compact and heavy. I use it to smash the glass panel nearest the doorknob. Shattering glass pricks my fingers. I reach through and unlock the door.
The door leads into the kitchen. The first thing I notice as I enter is the smell. Stale, musty. I move slowly through the kitchen, squinting. There are dishes in the sink, a few bowls and a glass. I think the glass has a straw coming out of it. I walk past the refrigerator, toward the hall. My foot catches something, metal clatters, and I hop back, startled.
A dog dish. For a moment, I can’t reconcile its presence, and then I realize he must have been preparing for me to come home. A pet for a child. An absurd compromise, no wonder we never acknowledged it as such. I push the bowl back against the fridge with my foot and enter the hall. There’s a half bath across from me and the living room is just ahead through an archway to the left.
As I walk toward the living room, my gaze catches on our framed wedding collage, which hangs at the base of the stairs. There we are, eight different freeze-frames of happily-ever-after. My favorite is of just him in his light gray suit and moss-green tie. He’s waiting for me to come down the aisle—an outdoor aisle framed with friends and trees and flowers and carpeted with clover. He looks serious. He means business. But the corner of his mouth is pinching toward a grin.
I turn toward the archway. There could still be a banner. He could still be there, waiting.
On our first real date, he compared my eyes to a bottle of Pellegrino. A full bottle, he said—because they sparkle. I laughed and teased him for his cheesiness, belittling the sentiment even as I tucked it away.
The living room slides into view. He’s not there. There is no banner. It’s just me here in this empty, gently cluttered room. But there are signs of him: a few videogame cases on the floor by the entertainment center, his laptop closed on the coffee table. A pile of laundry on the couch, waiting to be folded. I sit on the couch, recognizing a pair of red boxers decorated with different types of knots. A blue T-shirt from a half marathon we ran together.