Late
She was gone till late, till the sun was down, and after that as well till the last of its light had vanished, leaving only a smattering of stars in the sky. There was a moon somewhere but a cloud that seemed both as solid and as permanent as a mountain blotted out its light.
He remained sitting on the couch, watching the front door, waiting for something to happen, biding his time by cleaning the lens of his glasses with a set of wipes designed for that specific purpose which she had bought him last year for his birthday.
When she had not returned by eleven he gave up on the notion she would just walk cheerfully in the door still, laughing about some adventure or another and maybe (or maybe not) apologizing for having lost track of the time. He began to imagine the worst: car wrecks; muggings, her lying splayed out and dying in some dark alley, the victim of a crime too grisly to even imagine, to even approach imagining, to even pretend to imagine.
He considered calling the police and maybe would have in another fifteen minutes or so, but then the door did open and there she was, alive and relatively unmauled, though there was a small tear in the sleeve of her blouse, one of her galoshes was missing and her hair seemed to be sprinkled with a sparkling green powder.
She smiled sheepishly and he asked her where she had been and she told him she had been around the bend of hell and back in a birch bark canoe and how about him. He told her he had just been sitting on the couch the whole night waiting to find out how exactly she had died.
She made a face that was neither a frown nor a smile, walked passed him without another word and a few minutes later he heard the shower running and her singing something at the top of her voice. The song she was singing seemed to be about a fox that had lost its tail but he had never heard it before and wasn’t sure she was not making it up as she went along. It seemed vaguely familiar. Had he read a story about a tailless fox before, or was it a something she had told him before about some favorite book when she was a child? They had been together long enough now that he could not always keep straight which memories were his and which were hers.
She did not come back out to the living room after she had showered but instead went directly to the bedroom without even saying goodnight. He found her there in silk pajamas he had never seen before, downing the last of her daily regiment of prescriptions pills. On any given day, during any given illness, there were a dozen or so multi-colored multi-shaped pills she was instructed to take with water or with meals or before bedtime. Pharmaceutical trail mix he liked to call it and she had laughed the first few or dozen times he had said it but no longer laughed about it anymore.
He had not seen the pajamas she was wearing before and he wondered when she had managed to purchase them and with what money. Nice pajamas, he told her and she looked at him for a moment, then down at what she was wearing before saying: aren’t they swanky?
The pajamas had a pattern of moons, and cows and cowboys pitching tents with sheep sitting by a campfire and something else that could have been a puma playing a violin or possibly a cello. They were quite possibly the busiest pajamas he had ever seen, with the notable exception of the ones she had once bought him with a pattern of all the major highways of
North America on them.
Where were you? he asked, but she was busy setting the alarm on the clock now even though the clock was his domain as she never had to wake up on time for anything ever.
~~
Grant Bailie is the author of two novels—Cloud 8, and Mortarville. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife and usually not very far away from his children.