Midnight Counts to Nothing

"You can choreograph a perfect arabesque but you can't choreograph yourself through insomnia."

The house was dark when I pulled into the driveway.

I sat there for a moment with the engine idling, staring at the shape of it through the windscreen. Our house. My house. The place I'd lived for twelve years, raised two children, built a life I'd thought was solid. It looked different now—smaller somehow, and more fragile, as if a strong wind could knock it down.

No lights on inside. I'd left the kitchen light on when I'd gone to the studio, but at some point I must have turned it off. Or had I? The evening had become a blur of movement and emotion, one moment bleeding into the next until I couldn't quite reconstruct the sequence. Studio. Kitchen. Car. Mum's yellow walls. The drive home through empty streets.

I turned off the engine.

The silence that followed was absolute. No traffic at this hour, no neighbours, no sound except the tick of cooling metal and my own breathing. Broken Hill at—I checked the dashboard clock—just after midnight. The town was asleep, sensible people in their sensible beds, and here I was sitting in my driveway like a stranger arriving at someone else's home.

I made myself get out. Made myself walk to the front door, key in hand, feet moving through the motions of a routine I'd performed thousands of times. The lock turned. The door opened. The hallway stretched out before me, dark and still.

"Paul?"

The word escaped before I could stop it, a reflex, a hope I hadn't meant to voice. It hung in the air for a moment, then dissolved into nothing.

Of course he wasn't here. His car wasn't in the driveway. The house had that particular quality of emptiness that you could feel before you'd even checked the rooms—a hollowness in the air, an absence that pressed against the skin.

I turned on the hallway light. Then the kitchen light. Then the lounge room light, moving through the house like someone performing a ritual, banishing shadows as if darkness itself were the enemy. The brightness felt aggressive, almost violent, but I couldn't bear the alternative. Couldn't bear to stand in the dark and feel how empty everything was.

The kitchen looked exactly as I'd left it. The kettle on the bench. The post still scattered across the table where Paul had abandoned it. Evidence of a life interrupted, a moment frozen in time while everything else kept moving.

I put my keys on the bench. Put my phone beside them. Stood there in the too-bright kitchen and tried to think what to do next.

My phone.

I picked it up, checked the screen. The motion was automatic now, a compulsion that bypassed conscious thought entirely. Unlock. Check. Nothing. Lock. Set down. Wait. Repeat.

Nothing.

He hadn't called. Hadn't texted. Hadn't done anything to indicate that he knew or cared that I'd been trying to reach him for hours, that I'd driven to my mother's house in the middle of the night because I couldn't bear to be alone, that I was standing in our kitchen at midnight wondering if my marriage was over.

I should eat something. The thought arrived from somewhere practical, somewhere that still remembered how bodies worked. I hadn't eaten since—when? Lunch? Before the argument? I couldn't remember. The hours had blurred together, hunger becoming just another sensation lost in the noise of everything else.

I opened the refrigerator. Stared at the contents without seeing them. Closed it again.

The house hummed around me. Refrigerator. Heating system clicking off for the night. The small electronic sounds of a home running on autopilot, indifferent to the humans who were supposed to inhabit it.

Something pressed against my leg.

I looked down. Charlie was there, leaning into me the way she did when she wanted attention, her tail wagging in that hopeful, uncertain way. I hadn't noticed her following me from the lounge room, hadn't registered her presence until her weight was against my calf, warm and insistent.

"Out," I said.

She looked up at me, head tilted.

I walked to the back door and opened it. The night air rushed in, cold and sharp, carrying the smell of dust and eucalyptus and the particular mineral scent of Broken Hill after dark. Charlie hesitated in the doorway, confused by this break from routine.

Paul always wanted her inside at night. He worried about her in the cold, worried about snakes in summer, worried about all the things that could happen to a dog left alone in an outback backyard. He'd insisted on her sleeping inside, the blanket in winter, the attention to her comfort that he extended to this animal more readily than he'd ever extended it to me.

But Paul wasn't here.

"Out," I said again, and pointed.

Charlie slunk past me, her body low, tail tucked. She paused on the back step and looked over her shoulder—one last appeal—but I was already closing the door, already turning away.

She'd be fine. Dogs were meant to be outside. That's where they belonged—in the yard, in the fresh air, not cluttering up the house with their beds and their bowls and their constant needy presence. Paul had anthropomorphised her, had treated her like a child rather than an animal, and I'd gone along with it because that was easier than fighting. But I didn't have to go along with it anymore.

The thought was satisfying in a way I didn't want to examine too closely.

I went back to the kitchen. Checked my phone. Nothing.

The clock on the wall said twelve-seventeen. The night stretched ahead of me, vast and formless, and I had no idea how to fill it.

I tried to sleep.

The bedroom was cold—I'd closed the window earlier but the chill had settled into the walls, the bedding, the air itself. I changed into pyjamas, moving mechanically through the routine of preparing for bed. Teeth brushed. Face washed. Moisturiser applied.

The bed felt wrong when I climbed into it. Too big. Too empty. Paul's side stretched out beside me, the sheets smooth and undisturbed, his pillow still bearing the faint indent of his head from the night before.

Had it only been last night? It felt like weeks had passed since we'd lain here together, since I'd felt his weight shifting on the mattress, heard his breathing slow into sleep. We hadn't touched—we rarely touched anymore—but his presence had been there, solid and real, taking up space in the darkness.

Now there was just absence. The particular emptiness of a bed that should hold two people but only held one.

I pulled the covers up to my chin. Closed my eyes. Tried to make my mind go quiet.

It wouldn't.

The thoughts came in waves, each one crashing over me before I could catch my breath. The argument. The window. The roses. Paul driving away without looking back. The hours of silence. Mum's yellow kitchen and her careful eyes. The children sleeping in the sewing room, not knowing their father had disappeared through a window like a thief in the night.

What was he doing right now? Was he in a hotel somewhere, watching television, deliberately not checking his phone? Was he at a mate's house, drinking beer and complaining about his difficult wife? Was he driving, still driving, putting miles between us because distance was easier than conversation?

Or was something wrong? The thought crept in despite my efforts to keep it out. What if he'd been in an accident? What if his car had broken down on some empty stretch of highway? What if he was hurt, or lost, or—

No. He was fine. He was just being Paul—retreating, punishing, making me wait and worry because that was easier than facing things directly. This was a pattern, not a crisis. This was what he did.

But he'd never climbed out a window before.

I turned onto my side. Then my back. Then my other side. The sheets tangled around my legs, and the pillow was somehow too flat and too thick at the same time, and the darkness pressed against my eyes like a weight.

My phone was on the bedside table. I could see its shape in the darkness, a small rectangle of potential that might at any moment light up with his name, his voice, some sign that he remembered I existed.

I reached for it. Checked the screen. The brightness was blinding in the dark room, making me squint.

Nothing.

Twelve forty-three.

I put the phone down. Closed my eyes. Counted backwards from one hundred, the way I'd taught my students to do before performances when nerves made everything too fast and too loud.

At seventy-two, I checked my phone again.

Nothing.

At fifty-eight, I gave up on counting.

I got out of bed sometime after one.

Sleep wasn't coming. My body was exhausted—I could feel it in my muscles, my bones, the heaviness behind my eyes—but my mind wouldn't stop, kept circling the same thoughts like a dog chasing its tail, around and around until the thoughts stopped meaning anything but the motion continued anyway.

The house was cold. I pulled on a cardigan over my pyjamas and walked through the rooms without turning on lights, letting my feet find their own way through the familiar geography. Hallway. Lounge room. Kitchen. The same circuit I'd walked earlier, but different now—slower, heavier, weighted with the accumulated hours of waiting.

The window over the kitchen sink showed nothing but darkness and my own reflection, ghostly and distorted in the glass. I looked away.

I made tea without wanting it. Filled the kettle, boiled the water, dropped a teabag into a cup, poured, stirred, removed the bag. The routine was soothing in its mindlessness, each step following the last without requiring thought or decision. I wrapped my hands around the cup and felt the warmth seep into my palms.

The tea went cold while I sat at the table, staring at Paul's empty chair.

What had he been thinking, sitting there yesterday, pretending to sort through the post? Had he already packed his bag by then? Had he already decided to leave, already mapped out his escape route through the bedroom window, already written me off as someone not worth talking to?

The anger rose again, hot and familiar, but it was tired now. Worn thin by hours of cycling through the same emotions, the same questions, the same circular thoughts that led nowhere and resolved nothing. I was exhausted by my own rage, and beneath it something else was growing—something colder and more frightening that I didn't want to name.

My phone sat on the table where I'd left it. The screen was dark. I made myself not reach for it.

One minute. I would wait one minute without checking.

The clock on the wall ticked. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, somewhere in the yard, Charlie barked once—a short, sharp sound that cut through the silence and then stopped.

Forty-five seconds.

I thought about the children, asleep at Mum's. Rose with her tangled hair and her stuffed rabbit. Mack with his serious face and his too-old eyes. They didn't know. They’s think their father was away for work, think everything was normal, think the world was still the solid, reliable place they needed it to be.

Thirty seconds.

What would I tell them? What could I tell them? The truth was too sharp, too adult, too full of things children shouldn't have to carry. But lies had a way of unravelling, of growing into bigger lies that eventually collapsed under their own weight.

Fifteen seconds.

Paul should be here. Paul should be dealing with this with me, deciding together what to tell our children, facing the mess we'd made of our marriage as partners instead of—

The minute was up.

I reached for the phone.

Nothing.

One fifty-seven.

The numbers blurred as I stared at them, trying to make them mean something other than what they meant. Nearly two in the morning, and my husband hadn't called. Hadn't texted. Hadn't shown any sign that he was thinking about me, worrying about me, regretting the way he'd left.

My thumb found his contact before I'd decided to call. The phone was ringing before I could stop myself.

One ring. Two. Three.

"Hi, you've reached Paul Smith—"

I waited for the beep. Waited, and felt the words building in my throat, all the things I wanted to say—the anger, the fear, the desperate need for him to just answer, just talk to me, just acknowledge that I was here and that I mattered and that you didn't just climb out a window and disappear on someone you'd promised to love for the rest of your life—

The beep sounded.

"Paul." My voice cracked on his name. "Paul, please. It's two in the morning. I don't know where you are. I don't know if you're okay. Just—please call me. Please. I need to know you're—I need—"

I stopped. Listened to the silence of the recording. Felt the hot prick of tears behind my eyes and hated myself for them.

"Just call me," I said, quieter now. "Please."

I hung up.

The phone felt heavy in my hand, heavier than it had any right to be. I set it down on the table and stared at it, willing it to light up, to ring, to do something other than sit there in its silent accusation.

It didn't.

The tears came then, finally, after hours of holding them back. Not the dramatic sobbing I might have expected, not the cathartic release that films promised. Just a slow leak, tears sliding down my cheeks and dripping off my chin, my breath hitching in my chest, my body finally admitting what my mind had been refusing to accept.

He wasn't coming back tonight.