The Last One(90)

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.