Conversations Without Her

"The worst part of the dark isn't what you can't see. It's what your mind decides to show you instead."

The lamp in the corner was the only light left.

Everything else had been swallowed—the kitchen, the hallway, the rooms I'd walked through hours ago when walking still felt like something I was choosing to do. Now there was just this circle of yellow falling across the arm of the couch, the edge of the coffee table, my hands when I held them in front of my face.

I was on the couch. Or I had been on the couch. I thought I'd been pacing—the balls of my feet ached in that particular way they did after too long on floorboards, and there was a path worn into the carpet between the window and the hallway door that seemed more defined than it had been this morning. But I was sitting now. The cushion beneath me held my weight with a familiar give, and the fabric was warm, which meant I'd been here for a while.

Unless I'd just been here a moment ago and got up and sat back down.

Unless I'd been doing that all night—rising, pacing, returning—caught in some kind of loop I couldn't remember entering.

The clock on the wall said something. I could see its face from here, pale and round in the darkness beyond the lamp's reach, but the numbers wouldn't resolve into meaning. They were just shapes. Just marks on a surface that used to tell me something important about where I was in the day and didn't anymore.

My phone was in my hand. It was always in my hand now. I couldn't remember the last time I'd set it down and left it somewhere—the kitchen bench, the coffee table, anywhere that wasn't my palm or my pocket or pressed against my thigh like a compress against a wound. The screen was dark. I could wake it. I could check again, call again, send another message into the void that had swallowed my husband.

I didn't.

Not yet.

The house creaked around me, settling into its night sounds. I'd heard these sounds for years—the particular groan of the beam above the kitchen, the click of the hot water system cycling off, the way the windows rattled slightly when the wind came from the west. They used to be comforting. Evidence of shelter. Proof that I lived somewhere solid, somewhere that held together through darkness and weather and all the small disasters of ordinary life.

Now they sounded like something else.

Now they sounded like the house talking to itself. Whispering in a language I almost understood, sharing secrets about the woman sitting alone on the couch at—whatever time it was. Past midnight. That much I knew. The quality of the darkness had changed, had thickened into that particular density that only came in the hours when everyone else was sleeping and you were the only person left awake in the world.

I should go to bed.

The thought surfaced and I examined it like something found at the bottom of a drawer. Bed. The room where Paul's pillow still smelled like him. The sheets I hadn't changed because changing them would mean admitting he wasn't coming back to dirty them again. The mattress with its two distinct hollows, his and mine, worn into the foam by years of sleeping in the same positions, side by side, night after night.

I couldn't.

The couch was safer. The couch was neutral territory—a place where I'd sometimes napped on Sunday afternoons, where the children watched television, where no one ever slept through the night because it wasn't meant for that. If I stayed here, I wasn't really going to bed. Wasn't really ending the day. Wasn't really admitting that another night had passed without him calling, without him coming home, without anything changing at all.

I pulled my feet up onto the cushion. Drew my knees toward my chest. Made myself small in the circle of lamplight, a woman curled into the smallest possible shape, as if reducing my surface area might somehow reduce the size of what I was feeling.

The phone pressed against my thigh.

The house breathed around me.

I waited for something I couldn't name.

And then the thoughts came without warning.

One moment I was staring at the lamp, watching the way its glow caught the dust motes suspended in the air. The next, Gertrude's face was floating in front of me—that expression she'd worn at the fence, the careful arrangement of concern that hadn't quite hidden the avidity underneath. The way her eyes had moved over me, cataloguing every detail. The way she'd said difficult times like she was tasting something she enjoyed.

She knows.

The certainty landed in my chest with a physical weight. Gertrude had seen something. Maybe not everything—maybe not the window, the bag, the exact sequence of events—but something. Enough to know that Paul was gone. Enough to know that I was falling apart. Enough to file away in that mental cabinet where she kept all the neighbourhood's secrets, ready to be retrieved and shared at the next afternoon tea.

Did you hear about Claire Smith?

I could hear her voice so clearly. That particular tone she used when delivering gossip—sympathetic on the surface, satisfied underneath. The voice of a woman who had spent her entire life watching other people's marriages crumble and had been waiting for mine to join the collection.

Husband climbed out the window, apparently. Can you imagine? Right out the window, like a thief. And she didn't even know he was planning to leave.

My stomach turned.

But Gertrude wasn't alone in the scene forming behind my eyes. Now there was another face floating up from the darkness—Denise, at the café, the way she'd looked when Jan had appeared with those takeaway cups. The relief that had flooded her features. The speed with which she'd gathered her things and fled.

She hadn't been waiting for Jan.

The realisation arrived with the force of something that had been true all along, something I'd seen without letting myself understand. Jan had come to rescue her. The coffees, the invented meeting, the urgent departure—all of it orchestrated to extract Denise from a conversation she hadn't known how to escape.

Because Denise hadn't wanted to talk to me.

Because Denise had been looking for a way out from the moment I'd sat down.

Because—

Because they all are.

The thought was too large to look at directly. I circled around its edges, feeling its shape without examining its details. The women in the corner booth. I'd noticed them looking. Had told myself it didn't matter, had told myself I was imagining things, had told myself that people looked at each other in cafés all the time and it didn't mean anything.

But they'd been watching me. I was certain of it now. Watching and whispering and drawing conclusions about the woman sitting alone with someone else's half-eaten vanilla slice, talking too much, trying too hard, pretending everything was fine when obviously, obviously, nothing was fine at all.

Everyone saw.

The words echoed in the dark space of the lounge room, though I hadn't spoken them aloud. Everyone saw. Everyone knew. The whole town had been watching me unravel, had been tracking my decline with the same avid interest they brought to every local drama, every failing marriage, every woman who thought she was keeping her secrets when really she was performing them for an audience she couldn't see.

What were they saying right now? In their kitchens, their bedrooms, their late-night phone calls to friends who would pretend to be shocked but really were delighted to have something new to discuss?

Did you see Claire Smith at the café today? God, she looked awful. And the way she cornered poor Denise about those dance fees—

I heard Paul left her. Climbed right out the window.

Well, can you blame him? You know what she's like.

I always thought there was something off about her.

Too intense.

Too much.

You know what they say about the dance teachers. All that control, all that discipline—something's got to give eventually.

I pressed my palms against my eyes. The pressure created sparks, bright points of light that danced across the inside of my eyelids, temporarily replacing the parade of faces with something abstract and meaningless. But I could still hear them. Still feel the weight of their judgment pressing down on me, suffocating me, making it impossible to draw a full breath.

They knew.

They all knew.

And they were glad.

Where was he right now?

The question arrived like a splinter working its way toward the surface of my skin—something I'd been carrying for hours, for days, that was only now making itself fully felt. I'd been circling around it all night, calling and calling and calling, but I hadn't let myself actually think it. Hadn't let myself picture the answer.

Now I couldn't stop.

My mind constructed the scene with terrible precision. Adelaide. It had to be Adelaide—where else would he go? His mother's house in Craigmore, that modest brick place with the carefully tended garden and the lemon tree in the backyard. I'd only been there twice, both times feeling like an intruder, both times acutely aware that Greta was watching me, measuring me, finding me wanting.

He was there now.

I could see it so clearly. The lounge room with its faded couch, the one Greta had owned since the children were small. The watercolour on the wall—something Greta had painted years ago, a landscape that was technically competent but somehow lifeless. Paul sitting in the chair by the window, his hands wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate because Greta always made hot chocolate, always believed that hot chocolate could solve anything.

And he was talking.

His mouth was moving, shaping words I couldn't hear but could feel. Words about me. About our marriage. About all the things that had gone wrong, all the ways I'd failed, all the reasons he'd had to climb out a window like a man escaping a burning building.

"You have no idea what she's like."

His voice filled my head—not the cheerful recording from his voicemail but something rawer, more bitter, the voice he used when we fought. When he thought I wasn't listening. When he talked to his mother on the phone and didn't know I could hear him through the bedroom wall.

"You have no idea, Mum. The way she gets. The things she says. I can't—I couldn't stay there another minute."

Greta would be nodding. That tight, restrained nod she did when she was trying not to say I told you so. Her lips pressed thin. Her eyes full of that particular satisfaction she got when reality confirmed what she'd always believed—that her son had married beneath him, that Claire wasn't good enough, that this disaster had been inevitable from the start.

"I always knew," Greta would say. "From the very beginning. Something about her eyes. The way she looked at you. Like she wanted to consume you."

And Paul would agree. Would finally be free to say all the things he'd been holding back for years, all the complaints and criticisms and accumulated resentments that he'd swallowed for the sake of peace. He'd tell her about the arguments. About my jealousy, my insecurity, my need to know where he was at every moment. He'd make it sound like madness. He'd make it sound like he'd been living with a stranger who wore his wife's face.

"The things she accused me of, Mum. You wouldn't believe it. Affairs. Lies. Like I was some kind of criminal instead of just a man trying to go to work and come home and live a normal life."

He'd shake his head. Run his hand through his hair the way he did when he was frustrated, when he was done, when he'd reached the end of whatever patience he'd been rationing out. And Greta would reach across and pat his arm, would tell him he'd done the right thing, would say that the children would be better off, that everyone would be better off, that he should have left years ago.

"What about Claire?" someone would ask. Noah, maybe, speaking up from his corner, trying to be fair in the way he always tried to be fair. "What's going to happen to her?"

And Paul would laugh.

That particular laugh he did when something wasn't actually funny—short, humourless, more like a cough than an expression of amusement. He'd look at his father with an expression I knew well, the one that said you don't understand, you'll never understand, so why am I bothering to explain?

"Claire will be fine," he'd say. "Claire is always fine. She'll make sure everyone knows she's the victim, she'll get sympathy from anyone who'll listen, and then she'll find someone else to torture. That's how she works. That's what she does."

That's what she does.

The words reverberated through me, hollow and endless, bouncing off the inside of my skull like a sound trapped in a room with no windows. Was that what he thought of me? Was that how he'd describe me to someone who'd never met me, someone who only knew the version of Claire that Paul chose to present?

I could see the scene continuing without me. The three of them in that lounge room, drinking hot chocolate, speaking in low voices, constructing a narrative in which I was the villain, the madwoman, the wife who had driven her husband to climb out a window just to get away from her.

"You should have seen her at the end," Paul would say. "The way she looked at me. Like she wanted to—"

He'd stop. Shake his head again. Leave the sentence unfinished, letting their imaginations complete it in whatever direction suited them best.

"I had to get out," he'd say. "I had to. Before something happened that we couldn't come back from."

And Greta would nod, and Noah would clear his throat uncomfortably, and somewhere in Broken Hill a woman would sit alone in the dark and know, with absolute certainty, that her husband was describing her as a monster to the only people whose opinion he'd ever cared about.

The phone was in my hand again.

I didn't remember picking it up.

I called him anyway.