Living Room

He sits on the other side of the thick pane of glass. Biting his nails. Using his crooked teeth to dig the dirt out from under the brittle things. Tear the skin, spit it out. He piles the bits of nail onto the table in front of him. Arranged in a neat row, as always.

“What do you want?” He’s cold.

Her fingers twitch, unable to stop for as long as she can remember. The skin at the base of her thumb us raw, scraped of life, from her index finger’s constant clawing.

“Why are you here?”

Her mouth hangs open. She wants to answer, but doesn’t want to lie. She doesn’t know why she’s here. Why did she come? He’ll sit there, smug and distant. She’ll sit here, nerves on edge, twitching. This can’t go any other way.  

Looking at him is like looking at herself. Dark hair, dark brows, dark eyes, emptiness written clear and tight across the skin. The pile of fingernail remnants is growing. He’s started tapping his foot. Even through the wall, through the barrier, she can hear it. Always.

She holds the phone to her ear, the plastic cold and pressed into the jutting bones of her head. He’s propped, elbow on the table, the phone resting leisurely close to his ear but not touching.

“Are you going to say anything?”

What could she say?

Tap tap tap

The gurney wheels rolled, dropping down the three steps from the porch—her porch—onto the sidewalk. Her hand was trembling against her lips; it felt cold and dead.  Tap tap tap. Her sister’s hand climbed around her shoulder. Let’s go,  she thinks her sister said. Everything sounded like she was hearing it from under water.

“Hello?”

“I’m sorry, I—“ she isn’t sure. Nor was she sorry. She hadn’t wanted to lie.

“You haven’t been here since August.”

He was right. Her legs had clung to the plastic seat so fiercely she thought her sweat was turning to glue underneath her. Sweat beaded up along his brow bone. She noticed it because the last time she saw him before that, in March, his face was still swollen and round with youth. Under the hot, sticky tongue of August, her boy had developed bones and harsh angles. She thought, for a breath, that she could smell him through the glass.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. Her finger is bleeding

He laughs. It’s dry and cold. “Six months of silence and that’s all you’ve got?”

When she’s washing her hands at night, after the dishes are done, the food is sealed into Tupperware and she thinks there’s a possibility that her husband is tucked into the soft cotton sheets with a tattered crime novel he’s read too many times, she thinks there’s still blood on them. She’ll stand there, the window letting in enough of a glare from the streetlamp to see the red cutting through the valleys in her hands. The creaks shine red, so she takes the steel wool and grinds it into her tender skin until everything is red and her hands are pulsing. Once she can’t see the blood anymore, she’ll shut off the water, dry her hands, and curl into her empty bed.

She doesn’t say anything.

After he went away, she and her sister spent a whole day getting the chair, rug, and shattered coffee table out of the living room. The red was all over it, and she thought even if she had the chair cleaned she wouldn’t ever be able to look at it right again. She loved that chair, and obviously despised him for soiling it.

The carpet in the living room needed to be taken up as well—the red had soaked through her ornamental rug and into the carpet. The chair was easily replaced once she’d gotten over the initial shock of having it ruined, and after the affair of having the carpet redone all over the empty house, she got a new chair and sat for three days in the chair and admired the silence. She had started to hate him less.  

“I can see you still, in the living room.” When he speaks, he’s looking at his hands. Lost in the memories that wash over him. “The TV is on, the only light in the house. Dad’s not there, of course. There’s a half bottle of Merlot—the five-dollar bottle from the liquor store on the corner—on the coffee table, and the cup beside it is stained red.” He smiles. “You watch the same shows, don’t you? Heat up the leftover pizza from two nights ago. Stare at the screen until the wine and the monotonous drone of the TV lulls you to sleep. Rinse, repeat.”

“What do you want me to say?” she asks.

The blood runs down her bony wrist, drops onto her thigh. She follows the feeling, around the curve of her thigh, tingling the skin. She can hear when it drops off onto the plastic under her. Her finger doesn’t stop twitching against her thumb. She doesn’t stop digging.

“What do you want to say?” he asks.

Nothing. She wants to go back—back home to her new carpet and the new chair. She ordered a headboard and new sheets for the bedroom—now that it’s only hers she can finally have pink sheets—and they’re probably waiting for her, on the doorstep.

“Whatever you need to hear,” she lies.

He tap tap taps on the table. The nail shards go wild.

“You want to know why, don’t you?” he asks.

“I won’t ask you.” It won’t change anything. Her hands are red now. She dreams, in this moment, of soap and hot water and her clump of steel wool piled on the edge of the kitchen sink waiting back home. Without her husband there or her son there, she has so much time to clean her hands.

“But you want to know?” His nails are nibbled down to gnarly stubs. He chews and chews, maybe when he reaches the cuticle he’ll stop moving.

“It doesn’t matter,” she tells him.  “Do you know what today is?”

He shakes his head. She shakes hers. She’s not sure which is true.

“One year,” is all she says. She can see the fact register on his face. The truth of it settles in the hollows of his cheeks, the crease by his lips, and the wrinkles by his eyes. Those are her eyes. She watches him, watches his face settle, watches time pass. No one says anything, because neither have anything to say. She’s not sure why she came but knows that she needed to. She’s here, staring at this boy-turned-man in front of her. This is the second time she’s looked at him through the thick glass, and it’ll be the last.

“You don’t look happy,” she says.

“I’m not,” he tells her.

She smiles. She rises from her seat. Blood dribbles onto the linoleum, mirroring the blood she still can’t scrape from the floors in the living room. She had to get a bigger rug to cover it. Her heels click, tap tap tap. He’s screaming when she walks away, guards holding him back.