4338.204 · July 23, 2018 AD
Small Absences
The bedroom window is still open, winter air pouring through curtains that billow like something breathing. Claire closes it and turns to face the room — and that's when the small absences start to register. A missing charger. An empty shelf. The overnight bag that was there last week and isn't anymore. The house has things to tell her, if she's willing to walk its rooms and listen. Some doors she opens. One, she doesn't.
The bedroom is freezing. The window has been open for hours, curtains shifting in the dark, and the cold has seeped into everything — the carpet, the bedding, the walls themselves. Claire crosses the room and looks down at the rose bushes below, branches broken and splayed where Paul landed. She pulls the window shut and the curtains fall still.
Then the room starts talking.
His phone charger is gone from the bedside table, a dust-free rectangle marking where it always sat. His wallet and keys are missing from the dresser. The overnight bag — the black duffel that lived on the top shelf behind a stack of jumpers — is no longer there. He packed before the argument. Before any of it. The confrontation she'd been building the courage to have was never going to change anything. He already had one foot out the door.
Claire searches his bedside drawer, under the pillow, between the mattress and the frame — looking for something she can't name but would recognise if she found it. There's nothing. Just the ordinary debris of a life she thought she knew.
She can't stay in the bedroom, so she moves. Mack's room, with its half-built Lego and cracked-spine chapter books and the silence where a nine-year-old boy should be. Rose's room, with its pale pink walls and stuffed animals arranged in order, belonging to a six-year-old who has already learnt to read the weather between her parents. The lounge room, where the piano sits against the far wall and Claire keeps her eyes on the floor. Paul's study at the end of the hall, its door closed the way it always is — and Claire's hand hovering over the handle before dropping to her side. Not yet. Opening that door means admitting this is serious.
Charlie trails her from room to room, a silent black shadow, patient and watchful. Eventually the dog stations herself by her food bowl with the careful look of a creature running out of patience. Claire feeds her. Paul's dog, Paul's idea, Paul's responsibility that somehow became hers — like everything else.
The clock reads eight thirty-seven. He'll be home soon. Any minute now.
