Batten would stiffen. “I’d be a failure at neighborhood watch if I made you walk.”
But Joanna wasn’t thanking her for the ride. Not entirely, anyway.
Joanna’s house would smell like a vanilla plug-in candle and Tide and something much more primal, a mix of her and Charles’s skin and hair and secretions. There would be clutter on the mantel and cooking apparatus on the kitchen counter. Desks and chairs and beds in the bedrooms, clothes in their closets, piles of mail on the front table, unpacked boxes in the living room. Pausing at a window, she’d see Batten’s master bedroom light go off, a bathroom light snap on. She’d meant what she said in the empty house. People would live in those houses eventually. Nothing would stay the same forever.
She’d approach the piles of boxes, hands on her hips. JOANNA, APARTMENT, they said. They contained only things, knickknacks and lamps and books, nothing more symbolic than that. Things that might have rightful places around this new house, on tables and windowsills and shelves. She would find the yellow box cutter in the drawer in the kitchen and extend the blade. And one by one she would slice open each box, all eight of them. The packing tape would split in two. The cardboard flaps would flop free. Dust would emerge from the boxes, surely collected from her old apartment and the storage unit and the moving truck and this house, too.
It would be enough for the night just to open them and then stand back. And she would think about the invisible dust as it floated into the air, carried by the currents inside the house, exploring every room, joining and combining and spreading and settling somewhere new. And she would realize, standing there, that this thing with her and Charles, this trouble, it was a crack, but it wasn’t a break. Just like everything else, it too would pass.
Chapter Twenty-one
The first few nights after Scott left, Sylvie thought he was just staying with friends in the city. But his mail began to pile up. A UPS box remained on his doorstep until she finally brought it inside and, after enough time, opened it. Inside was a pair of yellow high-top Nikes wrapped in butcher paper. She set them at his place at the table, side by side next to his plate.
When Sylvie dared to enter her son’s empty suite, she was astonished to find it clean. It was as if he’d used a toothbrush to scrape off every bit of grime. Everything was put away. The floors were vacuumed. His bed was made. She ran her finger along the dust-free television, disappointed. She wanted to see it tumultuous and grungy, the way he’d lived. It didn’t even smell like him. It looked like a rental, a hotel room.
Sometimes she sat at the kitchen table and wrote him letters, though she had nowhere to send them. They were mostly filled with platitudes. I hope you’re okay. We’re thinking about you. And, as time went on, Maybe you haven’t heard what happened. You can have your job back, if you want it.
Once, she drank too much red wine and wrote him a letter that said, over and over, how sorry she was, how this was never how she imagined things would turn out, how if she could rewind everything and do it all again, she would. She would do anything for him. She would change what needed changing. The letter remained on the table until the next morning; when she woke up, she found Charles in the kitchen, having stopped over to check on her. Their eyes met, and Charles turned away. He had read it. She didn’t blame him. After that, he and Joanna began coming over more often, mostly for dinners, but sometimes after dinner, just to watch TV.
The house wasn’t the same without him. For years Sylvie had been cringing at the loud booms from the television, the speedy, guttural music from the stereo, the people that showed up in the middle of the night. She’d pressed her fingernails into her palm, hating his puerile ways, certain her neighbors, distant as they were, would hear the sounds and cringe. But now she felt like slapping the silence.
She could hear every breath she took. Every swallow. She hated the noises of her chewing. She heard the mailman’s truck at the bottom of the hill and sometimes even the cows mooing in the pasture a half-mile away. Some sounds scared her—creaks, ghostly footsteps, an anonymous crash whose origin she never identified. One night she tried sleeping with her biggest Wüsthof knife under her pillow, but she worried that she might roll over in the night and inadvertently stab herself.