Under the Weight of Your Absence

You had the same exhausted face you’d been wearing since the winter the river froze through. A year? Two years? You packed your green canvas suitcase, the one with the broken brass zipper. You laid your key on the laminate counter. “The silence in this house is crowding me out,” you said. “It’s too heavy to push past anymore.”

Before the walls began to move, the mold came. Greenish fur grew on the kitchen base boards. It went up my nose and made my mouth taste like copper.

I tried to describe the taste to Dr. Harris. I saw him write auditory-tactile synesthesia in his little black book with the silver clip. He likes words with Greek roots; they make him feel like a man holding a sturdy umbrella in a small rain. His patients are the rain. I was the rain. But he didn’t have to live in the house. He didn’t have to sleep in the bedroom where the corners turned from ninety degrees to eighty-five, pinching the air until the oxygen smelled thin and sour, like milk left in a hot car.

"It’s architectural settling," I told myself. "The timber is old. The foundation is clay." I told myself this, even when the hallway outside the bathroom shrank by three inches. I know because my shoulders brushed both walls at the same time when I went to shave. By the third week, I had to walk sideways to get to the stove. The house wasn't settling down. It was settling in, into the space you left.

Dr. Harris came on Tuesday. I’d missed three appointments because the front door had grown so tight in its frame, the deadbolt wouldn’t slide back without a crowbar. He stood on the porch in a wool coat that smelled of damp cedar and peppermint lozenges. He looked at the doorway. He looked at me, leaning against the jamb, my left arm pinned against my ribs because the entry hall had narrowed to the width of a coffin. "Paul," he said, his glasses fogging up in the October river-mist. "You’ve boarded up the front windows."

"The glass was under too much pressure," I told him. "The frames were bowing." I heard the smallness in my voice, a voice compressed by the ceiling that had dropped low enough to touch the cowlick at the crown of my head. You remember my cowlick, Claire? Remember how before that winter, we used to laugh about my cowlick? The way even butter wouldn’t smooth it down?

Dr. Harris stepped through the doorway, turning his hips to fit past the coat rack. "The neighbors say you’ve been hauling river-stones into the cellar at night."

"To balance the weight," I hissed. "The house is tilting west. Toward her mother’s place." Harris stopped where the hallway met the kitchen. Our round pine table was wedged tight between the refrigerator and the pantry door. Its legs had slightly buckled under the strain of shifting walls. The yellow primrose wallpaper—you loved that wallpaper—had rippled into dry blisters, as if the plaster beneath it was trying to bunch itself into a fist.

"Why should I believe you?" Harris asked. I knew it was a question for my sanity. He reached his hand to hover an inch from a bulging primrose, but he didn’t touch it. "I did some checking for you.” He’d been checking on me, more like it. “Every report from the county surveyor says this lot is level. Every structural engineer I called says the joists are sound. The only thing changing in this house, Paul, is the volume of your isolation."

"The engineers don't live here," I said, my teeth clicking together. The copper taste was so strong now it felt like a mouthful of old pennies. "They don't hear the wood supports snapping under the plaster at three in the morning. Claire left her winter coat in the hall closet, Harris. Her heavy wool with the horn buttons. Do you know how much a memory like that weighs? It’s three hundred pounds of wet fleece. It’s pulling the center beam right out of the masonry."

Harris gave me one of his clinical sighs, and from his coat pocket, he pulled a small glass vial filled with white round tablets. "The house isn't shrinking, Paul. Your world is shrinking because you’ve stopped opening the door. Take two of these."

He held out the vial at the same moment the kitchen wall—the one with the spice rack and the calendar—moved. It didn't slide; it hit. A sharp, wooden crack echoed through the floorboards as the plaster lurched four inches toward the sink. The spice rack dropped three jars of cream of tartar, and the white powder exploded across the linoleum like a small, dry frost.

Harris stumbled. His shoulder struck the opposite wall, and his black book and pencil slipped from his fingers, wedging themselves perfectly upright in the narrow crack between the baseboard and floor.

Vindicated. "Did you feel that?" I shouted. "Did you feel the joists go?" Write that in your little black book.

Harris didn't answer. The walls were so close that his wool coat was bunched up around his neck like an oversized scarf. His face was the color of a wet turnip. "Paul," he whispered, his breath coming in short rattling gasps. "Open the back door."

"I can't," I told him. The ceiling was low enough now that I had to crane my neck to the side. "The handle's pinned behind the stove. We’ll have to wait until the house finishes what it started. It’s the coat. I have to give it her coat." Your coat, Claire.

My ribs ached as the refrigerator nudged my breastbone. I dropped to my knees and crawled toward the hallway, leaving a trail through the cream of tartar. The air in the passage was tight. The plaster tore the elbows out of my flannel shirt. I had to squeeze my hips through the frame.

When I got to the closet, the door was jammed shut. I had to hook my fingers into the crack beneath the latch and pull until the wood split. The smell of cedar, lavender, and seven years of stale tobacco poured over my face like soup. And there it was—your green wool coat, hanging on a wire hanger that was bent into a sharp V under the weight of your absence. I grabbed the hem and dragged it into the hallway, bunching the heavy fabric against my chest.

"Take it!” I screamed to the walls. Take your coat. Take the kitchen floor you hated! Take the room we kept locked after the hospital! Take the name we never said out loud!”

I felt the shudder of a sigh from the house. The walls stopped moving. The kitchen walls stayed six feet apart. The ceiling walls stopped their descent; standing on my knees, I had two inches of clearance above my head. There was quiet.

Dr. Harris kicked the remaining shards from the oval-framed window and scrambled like a dog through the opening. He left his black notebook and pigskin shoes in the white dust on the floor.

I didn't follow him, Claire. I sat on the kitchen floor, my knees tucked against my chin, your green wool coat spread across my lap like an old blanket, the copper taste on my tongue replaced by the clean, cold smell of the river-mist coming through the broken window.

Through the gap in the wall where the pantry used to be, I could see the road. It looked very far away, narrow and gray under the autumn sky. A log truck went by, its engine a faint, tinny whine.

I picked up Dr. Harris’s pencil and black book. I cleared the white powder off its cover with my thumb. I turned to the first empty page, and I drew a small, square box. I drew another smaller box inside it. And again and again, until the lines were so close together, they looked like a single, solid block of lead.

The house fits me perfectly now. There isn't room for a table, or a second chair, or the likes of your green canvas suitcase with the broken brass zipper. When I lie down in the hallway with my head against the closet door, I don't wonder where you went, Claire. I feel the space exactly.