The music did little to cover the silence that hung like a sheet over the room. Small lights flickered and then dimmed, flickered and then dimmed, flickered and then dimmed across the panes of window glass, as if the room was speeding along city streets on a train. Brief, shadowy imprints appeared on walls and then faded as cars turned corners and were swallowed.
He sat with his back to her, legs propped up on the bottom cushion of a worn couch. There was a book open in his lap, and she could almost see the illustrations on the pages from where she sat, arms crossed at the kitchen table. He had two holes in his socks, she knew, one on the heel and the other right below the big toe. The thought of it maddened her. Why, she didn’t know, not exactly. The time she spent, seconds and minutes and hours collecting meaningless jumbles of thoughts, filing them together in her brain as the things that he was, the things she knew she had to know about him. His favorite hat, why he hated to be lost, how he slept with the light on when he was lonely.
A single bulb, suspended on a cord from the ceiling, hung above her, encased in a sheath of white plastic. Its ring of light encircled her and shone down on the top of her head, creating a round shadow on the table. Outside its bounds, the room gradually faded into darkness. She looked up into it for a moment and held her eyes there until her vision turned to spotty red blotches and sunbursts of yellow.
“Hey, will you turn that music down? I’m reading,” he called over his shoulder. She sat and waited. Nothing. A few minutes more. He swiveled his body to face her. “Can you turn that down?” The edge in his voice had risen, and she saw his shoulders pull together as he turned his head to speak. Again, she said nothing. She looked down at her hands resting on the table and realized that they were her hands, not his. This scared her. With a quick movement, she rose from her chair and paced to the counter where the purple flowers in the vase had started to die next to the sink.
She did not want them to be her hands any more than she wanted them to be his. If not his, if not hers…then whose? There were wrinkles on them she had never seen before, spots where the skin turned dry in the winter that never went away. How could she not know these places? They were hers, on her hands, her skin. Her physical body, the marks that only she possessed, like secrets known only to her. She knew the date of his high school graduation and his mother’s maiden name. She knew his social security number. The last time she had spoken to her mother was…she couldn’t remember.
A piece of notebook paper hung on wall next to the phone listing emergency phone numbers, those whom she should contact were anything ever to go wrong. She had walked by it every single day, stared at it without seeing it while talking on the phone, her mind wrapped up in conversing and a thousand other concerns, and just then she realized. They were not, any of them, her numbers. She had always been the one to call his parents when something went wrong, when he was sick, even when she needed to know someone on the other line had stopped what they were doing to listen to her. She was closer to his brother than her own. She had even thought about sleeping with him on a few occasions, just to see what would happen, but stopped herself when she realized how alike the two really looked. What would be the point?
There was nothing in the house that was hers alone. He had picked the wallpaper, the curtains, the carpet, and she had nodded and smiled and whispered that he was a pretty good decorator for a guy who couldn’t match a tie to a shirt. He smiled when she said this, she remembered, a smile that recalled the first time she had seen him, sitting alone at a café table along the street, alone in the way that seems to suggest he was waiting for someone who hadn’t arrived and wasn’t going to. His smile seemed to hide something from her then on that first day, something that she had not been able to find yet. It hid in the house now, in the walls and the tiles and the floorboards. It hid in the wrinkles in her hands.
Busying herself opening drawers in the kitchen, looking inside them and then closing them, she pretended not to hear him when he called.
“What are you doing? Didn’t you hear what I said?”
She saw the muscles in his neck and shoulders shift down and knew he wasn’t reading anymore. She took a step from the counter and balanced on her right foot, arms outstretched. Slowly, she rerouted her pacing in the kitchen to follow the elaborate pattern of tiles on the floor and, with tiny steps, wound her way around the perimeter of the tile. It was a game she had played as a child, to point her toes and step only in the smallest boxes so she could make it safely across the floor. To avoid the cracks. To stay where things were safe. It was what she wanted as she watched her mother quietly working in the kitchen. It was easier then, she thought.
He stood up hastily and, with two quick steps, reached the stereo and turned it off with an angry jab of his fingertip. She watched as he stalked back to the couch and resumed his position. He picked up the book from where it had fallen on the cushion next to him, sprawled open like a discarded bag. She looked down at her toes, white socks dirtied from dust, and felt suddenly safe at seeing her feet there on the floor. They almost didn’t look like her own, rooted there on the tile. There was something secure in looking down and knowing exactly where she was.
The music stopped when he turned the stereo off but she didn’t notice until he called to her again.
“Hey, you’ve been in there for 20 minutes. What’s going on?” He kept the edge to his voice to show her he was still annoyed, but she heard it soften a little. His silence that followed was endearing. She didn’t know why. On her tiptoes, she followed the cracks in the kitchen tile to where it switched to carpet in the living room and sat down next to him.
