My gut clenched. How could he possibly leave her alone? Sickly sweet, I suggested that tomorrow might be better for that, and that he maybe just needed an afternoon watching a film or two on the sofa. But I suppose the pressure of not writing was too much, and he remained adamant that going out was what he needed. We played message tennis, my coy and pleading messages becoming longer and longer while Art’s became shorter and shorter, until he stopped replying entirely. At first I thought he’d taken a break to just do the rounds with Nut but the silence endured for minute after minute after minute, until it’d been nearly half an hour and I still hadn’t heard back. For the first time in months I felt utterly alone. What had I done? Had I pushed him too hard, pushed him away already?
No, it was me that needed to get perspective here. It was nearly 2.30pm, he was probably eating lunch. It was long after the time I usually ate it too. I’d normally stay in my cubicle, idly scrolling through articles I didn’t read on my phone, but I’d done enough phone watching already today.
I picked up my bag and made my way to the shared cafeteria, a square and windowless room painted in buttercup and crammed with plastic tables. Each table had four silver seats, but because the tables were so small the chairs couldn’t be parked beneath and so stuck out in the aisles. I hardly ever went in there; the yellow gave me a headache and the sound of metal chair legs screeching across the tile floor made my skin itch.
Looking around, every table had at least three or four people already sitting there. Most were pale and scowling into their plates, crushed too close to each other to look up without awkwardness. Some tables were so packed with drinks and plates and laptops that the cut flowers in vases had been relegated to the floor. Several had been knocked over by unseeing ankles, and leaked puddles of milky water around sneakers and stilettos.
Sitting at an allocated six inches of grubby plastic wouldn’t help, so I returned to my cubicle and opened up a joyless bag of granola. I couldn’t bear to look at my phone again for Art’s non-existent message, so I worked through lunch, punching at the keyboard one-handed in a far more forceful way than I expect I normally did.
“You should get some fresh air, it’s bright outside. All the snow’s melting.”
My mouth crammed with oats, I looked up into the face of a man I recognised from three cubicles along. Jerry, Joey, Joseph? He smiled down at me and patted the edge of my cubicle before disappearing again behind the waves of wall. Even if my mouth hadn’t been packed with nuts, I don’t know what I’d have said. He was the first person to have spoken to me all day. He seemed nice. Maybe he didn’t know what I was part of, or maybe he didn’t care. Some people didn’t, but their voices were always quieter than those who objected.
When the day finally ended, I drove home grasping the steering wheel and battling the distant thrum of a migraine. When a man dressed in a tattered jacket and camo pants staggered across the street in front of me with a placard I almost didn’t brake quick enough. I skidded to a stop and he bounced softly off the bumper into the middle of the road. He didn’t even look, just stood there, stunned, somehow still holding his painted sign aloft;
When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.
– Psalm 104:30
After a few seconds he jerked his body and continued to stumble across the road, all the while mumbling something that I couldn’t make out, his eyes on my eyes through the windshield. He moved like his legs were wood.
It didn’t mean anything. How could he know?
I swallowed the lump in my throat and gripped the steering wheel until horns on every side of me were blaring. I shook myself off and started the car, squinting against the too-bright-light. I needed to go. I needed to get back to Art. Would he worry, if I didn’t come home one day after work? Would he call the hospitals and rush to my side, or would he assume I was a liability? Sick too soon. Dead weight. I hadn’t heard from him since morning. Would he even notice? Perhaps I should bring him something. Should I be apologising? What if I’d ruined things already? What if this was a side of me he didn’t like?
As I turned the corner onto our street I couldn’t decide if I wanted Art to be there or not. Who would I be for him today? I approached the house, sensing for the heartbeat that had carried me through the morning but the pulse was slow, dull. The door opened without any obstructions, and there – at the end of the hallway – I spotted the point of Art’s elbow beneath a rolled-up green sleeve, and the clatter of a plate being washed.
Normal. Normal.
Not even a whiff of atmosphere. It could have been the day before today, or the day before that, a day when we hadn’t fought or clawed away each other’s skin. The relief. He mustn’t have heard me come in, as he didn’t turn or alter his dance of splash-rubrotate-dunk-splash-clatter.
I had to make sure everything was alright.
I dropped my bag by the stairs, flung off my boots, leapt the stairs two at a time, and scaled the ladder like a spider up wallpaper. I stopped with my head through the hatch and she was right there, sitting behind the baby gate, this fluffy and perfect grey lump – no taller than the stretch of my hand. Her eyes were a marshland,
