Waiting

Waiting

by KSpeck

It’s Friday or Saturday night. The house is dark and quiet – too quiet. The kids are away and she is alone, so very alone. The computer sits in the dining room and the soft glow on a muted screen calls her as she walks from room to room clockwise through the circle of the house. She vows that this evening she won’t go on. Won’t.

The quiet and the dark close in as the street lights pop on outside. She uses no curtains. She keeps the house dark unless someone else is home. She likes to know what and who is outside. If someone is peering at the windows as before – as before. She skims through the house checking outside and naming the rooms silently as she goes, not looking at the monitor, hoping the quiet will break, the phone will ring, the door will open with a cheery hello. It doesn’t.

Dining room, living room, bedroom, hall, then kitchen - she paces. Each thump of her feet both soothes and pushes her on, faster and faster. The twenty-first or the fifty-third time or maybe the thousandth, she touches the spacebar, the screen hums to life, and she sits. But, just for a second or maybe even a third. The seat has no chance to warm, more of a skim, before she is off again, around and around.

It reels her in slowly, a nice trout on the line. The computer a light bait to a life where someone pretends to know her – to care whether she is sitting there or not. When she finally sits, she pops up again for a glass of water or wine or whiskey or to just stand in the kitchen and try to hold her mind and body still. Twenty more circles and she’s back at the computer. She finds a chatroom where she is known. Currently, the subject is dogs – big or teacup, better or worse than cats. She reads and reads without entering the conversation, not really paying attention but reading every word, the mental version of walking through rooms. Her body dances in the chair to her thumping internal rhythm and her brain is on skip.

Another room is talking about baking, and she is feeling desperate. She just needs an interaction. At the very least someone she can pretend with. Perhaps put on another mask and talk about chocolate chip cookies, their grandmother’s favorite recipe. Should chocolate chips cookie have nuts? She used to prefer Tollhouse, but that is at least two lifetimes ago. She can’t put on the mask of a happy housewife.

In another room now, conversation is slow. Most are on private chats. The people she knows are either not there or they are busy. She needs someone to talk to her. To tell her to do something – eat, drive to the store, even walk around the block. She can’t do it on her own. Her choices have been bad – her daughter gone, on the street. Her son, at his dad’s. If someone would just talk to her, she could go on.

She goes deeper into areas where she’s not as well known. A BDSM room might work. Just someone!

Master of all: private?

Her: Okay

Master of all: Are you local?

Her: Yes

Master of all: Give me your address.

And she did. She did it without a pause, without consideration, without even a frisson of worry. She did exactly what she was told.

Master of all: I will be there in 30 minutes. Be at the front door with nothing on. Turn on all the lights.

Her: Yes, sir.

And he is gone. She has a task and she starts shaking, not from fear, but from the thought of a half hour of waiting - alone. Too much!

In the bedroom, she pulls off her clothes. She’d been wearing them for two days or four – pacing. They are immured with the funk of fear, loss, and failure. A heady combination. She is going on weeks with nothing more than a few minutes of sleep, total. She glimpses herself in the mirror and shies away. A wraith.

A shower. Another break from the pacing? She turns on the water and step in. Lets the cold water run through her hair and feels a small amount of tension in her shoulders release. No soap, no shampoo, the pacing calls. She quickly steps out and towels herself off. Her wet, muddy-brown hair drips across her skin.

Panic starts seeping in. The panic of weeks of no sleep, of a rape with no healing, of loss of children, of loss of a future because none could be seen. She starts in circles again. Drips flying off her hair behind her. After ten or twenty times through the house, she stops, considers the lights and a shirt to cover herself.

A white shirt, unbuttoned, and she circles through the house flicking on all the lights. Ten or maybe a hundred more times and she stops by the front door. She watches out the window and twitches and wiggles and bounces on her toes. She counts backwards by three – 100, 97, 94… Then switches to sevens because it is harder – 150, 143, 136,… Walks to the end of the hall and back and again and again. She starts listing primes – 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, as far as she can go. Then Fibonaccis – 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,…

A non-descript grey car, pulls up in front of the house at 144. She doesn’t know the car. After a moment or two, he steps out. He’s wearing a long dark coat and fedora. She cracks open the door and stares as he walks up the path and mounts the stairs to the porch. He pushes his way in and says, “Turn off the light, take off your shirt, come back her and kneel.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, following his directions exactly. Her mind stills. Her pacing feet stop twitching. Someone is telling her what to do.