The Last One (35 page)

The door beside me creaks open. I look up and feel the sting of my eyes, the pressure in my chest. I feel myself quaking. The physicality of knowing.

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.

Next to the laptop there are several remotes, a PlayStation controller, and the book of baby names we bought before I left. I pick up the book. My knuckles are bloody and my fingers leave bright smudges through dust on the cover. I thumb through dog-eared pages. My mouth tastes sour. Some of the ears are new to me. On one such page
Abigail
is underlined. On another,
Emmitt.

The first time we slept together, I rolled over the morning after and found him looking at me with those dark cocoa eyes. “It’s a little early for chocolate,” I said, “but okay, I’ll have a bite.” And I crammed my face in close to his and nibbled at his lashes. I felt him tense and regret spiked through me—I went too far, I ruined everything—but then he laughed, a Big Bang of laughter, the start of everything, the start of us.

In the hall, Brennan moves into my line of sight. He’s eyeing the wedding collage. I wonder if he can recognize me in the photos, with my hair curled and my face all made up, wearing a clean strapless ivory gown dotted with Swarovski crystals. I flip the book to masculine
B.
Brennan.
It’s Irish in origin, like I thought, but the meaning is unexpected.
Sorrow,
reads the book.
Sadness. Tear.

Laughter cracks from my chest, painful.

Brennan looks over.

I close the book and scan the living room, wishing for a Clue. All I see is our life, abandoned. I take the book to the built-in shelves lining the back wall, and slide it into a gap between
Cooking for Two
and
1984.
When we moved in, we unpacked our books first, haphazardly, promising to institute a system once we were settled. The last box was empty within the month, but by then we’d grown accustomed to having to Where’s Waldo anything we wanted to read. We pretended it was a game we’d chosen to play.

“I’m going upstairs,” I say, and Brennan steps aside.

The third step from the top is going to creak, I think.

The third step from the top creaks.

The second-floor hallway is long and narrow, with two doors on either side. To the right, a bathroom followed by our bedroom. To the left, a guest room and our home gym, which was slated to become the nursery. We planned to move the gym equipment to the basement when it was time. The treadmill and the yoga mats, the mismatched dumbbells we never lifted. The basement is a damp cave, but we’d fix it up. That’s what we said.

The bathroom door is open; I glance inside. Our Antarctic-scene shower curtain is scrunched to one side of the tub, but I know which cartoon penguin is which. Fran is posed mid-waddle. Horatio and Elvis are resting on their iceberg in the folds.

Across from the bathroom, the guest room door is closed. The door to the home gym, our nursery-never-to-be, is also closed.

But our bedroom door is open. I’ve been able to see this since I reached the top of the stairs, and now that I’m only about four feet from the frame, I can see a slice of the room beyond. Our double-wide dresser, the opening of the walk-in closet. I can’t see our bed or the master bath. Those are to the right of the doorway, hidden by the wall.

My head feels fuzzy and tight.

You shouldn’t be here.

There is nowhere else for me to go.

I feel Brennan behind me, close. I brace my left hand against the wall, splaying my blood-dabbled fingers atop ugly yellow floral-print wallpaper—another thing we meant to change but never will. Let me be wrong, I wish. Let him be in there, waiting, holding a bouquet of mixed flowers. He always gets mixed, because he knows that lilies are my favorite, but he forgets which ones are lilies and hates to ask. There’s always a lily in a mixed bouquet, at least the good ones, so it works. I think of how sweet that mixed bouquet will smell. Unless he did ask the florist and got only lilies. Lilies with orange pollen bunched along their stamens, looking beautiful but smelling awful and waiting to stain my fingertips.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been able to smell since cresting the stairway. Lily pollen. Maybe the whole room is filled with lilies, and their rotten pollen stench is filling the air, drifting out to the hall to meet me.

“Lilies,” I say aloud. “It’s lilies.”

But this isn’t what lily pollen smells like.

“Mae?” says Brennan.

“I can’t,” I say. I can’t go back, I can’t go forward. I can’t stand here forever.

“I’ll go in,” he says.

I put out my swollen hand to stop him, but he hasn’t moved.

It takes all my strength to lift my foot.

I recognize our maroon-and-gold comforter. The bedding is rumpled, mounded on the far side. My side. A patch of fuzzy darkness near the head.

Pressure builds behind my eyes. This is my punishment. For the cliff, for the cabin. For leaving.

I can’t look. I can’t see you like this.

A baby. Our baby. A little boy with light blue eyes. I left him, crying. I had to have known. His fingers so chubby and grasping, and I left him there and here you are, gone, and I don’t even know for how long because I was off playing another game.

We met playing a game, Wits and Wagers, and in the final round you bet it all on my answer: 1866. I was one year over; you lost it all and so did I. Three years later, your best man framed the story of our mutual loss as the story of our mutual gain in a toast that had us laughing tears. Afterward we wondered: How many other weddings have referenced assassination?

My eyes flicker toward the window. Sunlight blinds me. It should be raining.

I feel myself hit the floor without experiencing the fall, without feeling my knees give.

You’re gone. Right there, but gone.

Brennan walks past me, toward the bed. I can’t watch him; I can’t
not
watch him. If I blink my skin will rupture. I stare at the nearest leg of the bed frame. Mahogany, bought from a stranger online; we haggled fifty dollars off the price because of a scratch that later buffed right out. Brennan reaches for the covers, doing what I cannot do because I’ve done it before, I’ve seen what lies beneath, and I kneel here willing my heart to stop beating, begging it to—
Please.
A pair of brown slippers, size eleven, at the foot of the bed. A birthday present, from me to you. The practical gift, not the fun, we promised to give at least one of each, always. They’re askew, and I can see you there, kicking them off before crawling under the covers. My side.