The Clairvoyants(60)

Del didn’t make a move to leave. I rinsed the blood from the cloth, my hand cold in the water.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

I sat back on my heels. “I mean I have no idea where he went. He left.”

“He couldn’t have taken his motorcycle,” she said.

“Yes, we’re snowed in. No, he couldn’t have taken his motorcycle.”

She had her arms folded tight across her chest. “So he just left? Did anyone pick him up?”

“Why do you care?” I said. I threw the cloth into the bowl and I stood. “Why do you care what happened to my husband?”

She bit her lip and looked away from me. “That sounds funny,” she said, softly.

“I know,” I said. I was so tired I began to laugh, and then Del was laughing. It was, suddenly, the strangest of things to have married him.

“It does look like a crime scene,” Del said.

“Whatever,” I said. “It’s not.”

She shrank back from my glare and slipped down the stairs to her apartment.

“Don’t forget to lock up,” she said before she closed the door.

Del had become vigilant about locking doors. Each night she moved about the house, checking them all. She’d climb the stairs and I’d see my own knob turn.

“Go to bed,” I’d say.

It was almost like when we were young, but then we shared a room, and I couldn’t put a door between us. Her sleeplessness had always made me anxious. It seemed wrong, somehow, to remain awake while others slept. Sleeping was a rule you couldn’t break—like refusing food or water. Yet Del slept very little during the night. And I was now experiencing the same wakefulness.

I went back to cleaning. I had to change the soapy water in the bowl, and by the time I reached the bottom step I felt drained. William still hadn’t returned. I climbed the polished stair treads to my apartment, and inside I discovered the television on, its screen flickering a jumbled static; the stove burner brightening under the teakettle; the lamp’s yellow circle illuminating William’s papers and notes spread out on the table. The power had come back on.

The domestic scene comprised of our disorder now seemed almost comforting, and my anger wavered. Had I been wrong to look through his things? Had I “broken his trust,” as he’d said? Was I no better than Del had been when as children she’d gone through my things? Then I fingered the sore place on my breast, replayed the night in his office, the sex. Hadn’t he broken my trust? He would need to prepare for his upcoming classes. He’d have to return for his notes, his slides. Maybe the weather had kept him away, but the streetlights had come back on; electricity hummed along the wires overhead.

I undressed and got into bed, hoping to finally sleep. William would be moving along the sidewalk beneath the elm, slipping in through the front door and climbing the stairs to me. I would play his dutiful wife, waiting for him. I remained awake and watchful, but he didn’t return. Rather than try to sleep, I began straightening up the room, putting the clean pot under the sink, stuffing laundry into a basket in the closet. Through the window the elm’s branches shifted, brittle with ice. I opened the apartment door. Below me in the vestibule a door’s latch clicked. Del’s door opened, quietly, carefully, as if the person knew the way the hinges groaned. I stepped back into my doorway and listened as whoever it was stepped into the vestibule and moved stealthily to the front door. I peered, careful not to be seen, but just missed whoever it had been. The front door closed and footsteps crunched the snow on the porch.

On the landing I felt the cold creeping under the front door and reminded myself of Geoff the time we’d caught him standing there in his robe. I moved down the stairway to Del’s door, light-headed with fear, but slowed. Had it been William? He couldn’t have gone into her apartment the same way he’d once come into mine—not with Del so adamant about locking doors. I tried her door and found it locked. Had Del let in whoever it was and let the person out? I felt a wave of doubt. I opened the front door and looked down the sidewalk, but there were only the piles of snow, the cold house fronts, their windows black, and no sign of anyone. Maybe it had been Randy, his car parked around the corner. But there were no cars out on the roads. I returned to my apartment and quietly closed the door.

Outside the snow still fell. The streets echoed with the passing snowplows. I sat on the bed. I could go down to Del’s and ask her if William had been there. But what if she denied anyone had been there at all? Was this what I’d done to her all those years in the guise of being a custodian? Established the parameters of what was real and what wasn’t?

I finished organizing the apartment—numbly folding and sorting the clothing, returning each item to its place, washing the dishes and putting them away. I piled William’s things—those he’d left behind—neatly on his desktop.

Things were shifting, becoming not as they had seemed.

I climbed into bed and slept all day until evening, lulled by the sound of the snowplows, the settling and contracting of the old house’s bones. When I awoke my mother’s little travel clock read six thirty. The windows were dark, but the streetlights shone in. I sat up and turned on the lamp. The apartment wasn’t as I’d left it. The drawers had been gone through, and not closed all the way. The cabinets were open, the closet door—things I’d purposely closed hours before.