Routine

Horacio comes in the night and takes David away. I don’t ask where they’re going. Don’t let them know I’m awake. Staying quiet in the cold sheets, my back turned to the men who try in vain to remain quiet while gathering shoes, belts, a thick bag from the floor of David’s closet--this has become easy for me. David vanishing in the night, Horacio at the door, I’m used to these things.

When the morning light wakes me again, streaming through the balcony doors, I try not to wonder where he’s gone. Brush my hair, my teeth, the back of the stray cat that wandered in two weeks ago. The cobbled street is already warming in the sun. I don’t wear shoes, so the stones arm the soles of my feet. I take the twists and turns of the street, meandering between stucco houses with curved-tile roofs. Window baskets with marigolds and poppies perfume the street. The houses are etched into the rock, but the cliffside to my right provides no shade as the morning sun drifts higher and higher over the coast. The bay stretches out until it blurs into the sky and gulls swoop into the waves, scooping up silver fish. Slowly, the buildings become more frequent around me until the village swallows me up.

It’s early and the shops are quiet. A few people, dressed in loose linen and wearing sunhats, wade into a shop and then back out onto the street where they gaze up at the decaying structures. The village is old and outsiders seem struck by its age. Bells chime as I walk into the fish shop, the butchers, the flower shop with the best view of the bay. In the bakery, Denis asks, “Haven’t seen David around in a bit. He alright?” when he passes me a loaf of sourdough.

I say, “Oh, he’s fine. Just busy with work,” because I don’t like to lie.

The wicker basket in the crook of my arm grows heavier and my feet grow hotter. I sit for too long at the cafe near the edge of the village. It’s small, one room, and one wall is entirely made up of doors that open onto a veranda overlooking the coast. While I wait for my espresso, I watch the gulls swooping down and soaring back up. There are no clouds and I can track their bright bodies, their flight, against the too-blue sky until they become pin pokes in the vastness. After, I buy new sheets and towels, a fresh bar of white soap.

The basket weighs me down on the way back up the cobbled road to the apartment, but I still take notice of the sweet scent of wildflowers growing hot on the hillside. If I took the dirt path up the cliffside, through the tall grass, the hills would roll out into a valley. The grass is speckled with the flowers, like freckles that perfume the hills.

David likes to take walks through the tall grass. On cool summer nights, he’ll shove his hands deep in his pockets and waits by the front door until I look up from my book, realize he’s ready; he’ll walk just the same, hands in his pockets. David will look around, watch the scenery as it goes by like it’s the first time he’s seen it. Like every movement, every jostling flower or shaking blade of grass, every bird that flitted past, was astonishing.

Without realizing, my feet guide me down that path and I let my arms and neck grow tan, swooping into the grass, scooping up orange flowers.

The doors to the balcony are open and the ocean is roaring against the cliffs below. The sound echoes off the tiled floors. I put the basket down in the kitchen, lay sheets and towels on the foot of our bed, and tidy-up David’s side of the vanity in the bathroom. Water the flowers and put them on the table in the foyer; they’re already mixing with the briny sea air and making my head spin with fragrance. As I tie my hair back up, my eyes graze down the calendar on the kitchen wall. On it, I mark the date and time. I’ve started keeping track of the days David is gone. Marking the hours, counting minutes, and biting my nails between seconds. Count them out to beats of my feet while pacing the apartment, walking to the village, roaming the hills, scooping shells from the oat-colored sand.

The last time lasted five days six hours eleven minutes and forty-two second. When David came home, he stripped off his clothes and crawled into bed beside me, and fell asleep. This is how it is. When he woke the next morning, like all other mornings when he’s home, I cooked him eggs and coffee with warm cream and no sugar.

When David comes home, he doesn’t speak of the time passed. Doesn’t acknowledge the gap.

We continue as planned. I make eggs.

He was only home for two days after that, two mornings. Four eggs, three cups of coffee. Forty-nine hours eight minutes some seconds. He’s usually home for a longer, but the time between has been growing steadily shorter. I have enough eggs to last the week.

In the bedroom, I find his discarded clothes half shoved under the bed. Concealed by the drape of fallen bedsheets, they are wrinkled and smell of sweat and dirt. The jeans are damp and cold, stained with mud and other dark matter around the hems. The shirt smells and has the pallor of old skin.

I scrub them with soap and hot water, using steel wool to get the stains out. Wash them in the machine. Wash them again. Make the bed and wash the sheets. Scrub the tiles and the sinks. Feed the stray and try not to wonder where David is. Hang the clothes to dry on the thick cord above the balcony.

The sunsets are beautiful here.  On the balcony, under the drying clothes that snap in the breeze, I drink red wine and listen to a quartet playing in the village below. The music echoes off the cliffs and lands gently around me. He’s been gone fifteen hours twenty-eight minutes five seconds. If I drink much more, I won’t be able to keep myself from wondering. Where he’s gone, what he’s doing. I don’t like to.

Maybe I’ll replay conversations, looking for clues. Maybe I’ll go through his things; the few personal things he possess are kept in a box in the floor of his closet, next to the thick black bag. Maybe I’ll imagine him with guns or girls in his hands.

Sometimes David smells of gunpowder. Sometimes he doesn’t crawl into bed beside me when he gets home; instead, he stays up cleaning out the cabinets in the kitchen, his eyes wired open and streaked red. Twice he’s woken up screaming from nightmares.  

I look over my shoulder, eyes woozy from the wine; I can see the wildflowers sitting by the door across the apartment. A lamp casts the room in gold. For a moment, I’m sure David is about to walk through the door. Sure I hear the knob jiggling, a key turning gears.

I’ll say, “Would you like wine?”

David will say, “Yeah--sure.” He’ll smile, sheepishly, and won’t come close. He’ll change, shower, possibly go to bed without his wine.

But the door stays closed.

I finish the glass of wine. Spray myself with perfume and slip into a long blue dress. I pace the apartment, counting each footfall. Put in a cassette of David playing the cello.

David got rid of his cello years ago and hadn’t touched for the decade before that. Still miraculous, the music swirls around in the apartment. If he were here, he’d sit close to me on the couch and whisper things to me. Talk to me about making the song, performing the song, how it felt. Before he started his job and started driving away in Horacio’s silver car. He’d keep the volume low, both the music and his voice, and I’d savor each second and try not to count them.

+ + +

I wake up and it’s there, sitting in a chair in the middle of the living room. Dining chairs are tipped over, magazines scattered. I’m holding the wine glass in my hand, the bottle in the other, and my feet are bare on the tile patio.

For too long I don’t know what to do but look.

Stare at the bruises, cuts, the blackness swelling around bone, looking like mold blooms on the wall of a motel. The slumping, messy human tied to the chair. My fingers itch to touch the form. To poke the tender spots I see through rips in clothing.

My heart hammers in my ears and bile rises in my throat. A slamming cabinet door in the kitchen startles me, but not the man tied to the chair. He’s motionless.

The glass drops from my hand and scatters around my feet like spilled salt.

Horacio comes through the doorway into the apartment and stands beside the man in the chair. He smiles at me and sets a glass of water on the table; goes to the kitchen and gets the broom. Sweeps the floor around my feet, brushing shards of the thin glass into a dust pan.

I say, “What’s happening?” and put the half-empty bottle of wine on the floor. Slump against the doorframe, trying to let the sea breeze cool my neck.

The longer I look at the man tied to the chair, the more I smell sweat and mud and metal, the hotter my skin gets.

“What’re you doing?” I say.

Horacio smiles. “Bit of a hiccup,” he says.

David comes into the room, sweating. The fabric under his arms had darkened, the powder blue button-down turned navy. His eyes are wild, his thick brows arching into his hairline. David’s mouth hangs open as if he’s about to say something.

“David,” I say.

He locks eyes with me, for a moment. They’re huge, his eyes, pleading.

David shakes his dead, just slightly. He says, “Get the bleach.”

Holding bile in my throat, my feet carry me to the bathroom, arms groping out in the dark apartment for walls and doorways. Anything to root myself. My fingers are shaking. My limbs feel electrified and stunned, at once, and I don’t know if I want to lie down or run. I change clothes, shedding the wrinkled navy dress, and close my eyes as I walk back to the living room.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

Opening my mouth feels dangerous.

“Shut those doors,” David says, his arm reaching out in the direction of the patio.

I kick back the linen drapes, swatting against the midnight wind, and lock the two double doors. The apartment is darker with the doors closed. The only light comes from the kitchen, the weak light above the stove, which casts long, ugly shadows across the tiled floor.

David’s face is so dark I have to strain to see his eyes. Horacio is leaning against the opposite wall, by the front door; he pulls a cigarette from his pocket and light it, blowing smoke into the stagnant air. Once David tears a final piece of duct tape and stumbles backward, slumping against the wall by the kitchen, the room is too still.

The three of us stare at the man on the chair. We say nothing. Carefully, I lift my eyes to look at Horacio, then David, then back again. If I move I’m afraid the apartment will erupt in sound, like I’ll trip a wire no one has told me about.

For a moment, I think, I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to know.

In the next moment, I think, Finally.

“David,” I whisper after the silence begins to crush my eardrums. “What--is--this?”

Nails dig into the wood molding around the balcony doors. Lungs flutter, barely working. Horacio keeps inhaling, exhaling, inhaling--

“David!” I scream, this time, without meaning to.

“Quiet,” Horacio snips.

“Let me think,” David whisper-yells. His eyes light with fire.

My eyes adjust and I see more, taking it in and wanting to hide under the bed. The man on the chair is not moving.

Or is he.

Maybe is chest is moving up and down, I can’t tell. He makes no noise; his head slumped back at a wrong angle, hand taped behind the chair, ankles bandaged to the legs. His face is a non-face, the remnants of a face. Beaten and busted, blood drying and crusting.

Horacio and David have just said something to each other. Not with words, but when David looked up and Horacio snuffed his cigarette out on the key dish and David stood and walked into the kitchen. The rip of a zipper tears through the quiet.

Metal clicks and snaps.

David walks in holding a gun. He’s twisting a thin cylinder onto the end of the barrel. I say his name, pathetically, then cover my mouth with my hands because a scream or a half-bottle of wine was about to come out.

The silencer helps, but the gunshot still leaps off the walls and back against me. David looks like a painting, lit up in the split second by the explosion. His face cast in odd light, eyes sunken. It burns in my eyes. I cover my ears too late. Realize I’m on the ground a second later. The man on the chair is also on the ground, feet away from me; I stare at his back, stare at the trail of blood dribbling from the hole in the back of his head.

It runs in grout lines between tiles.

Horacio grabs me, lifts me up so I’m standing on two feet again.

He says, “Grab a coat,” and shoves me into the bedroom again.

“Horacio, please--” I see David slip back into the kitchen before Horacio shuts the door. Bracing myself against the bed, I try to breathe through my nose like I was taught to do. Steady my breathing.

A coat. Grab a coat.

I grab a zip-up from the closet and walk back into the living room. Horacio is shoving the man once tied to the chair into a double-garbage bag; two more are used in the opposite direction. In the now-dark kitchen, the green light of the stove clock glares across the apartment: 2:23 AM. I go back thirty minutes: he was gone twenty-two hours eight minutes. The seconds keep getting lost.

I wish he was still gone.

David wraps duct tape around the man in the bag and I feel like I drank four bottles of wine; my head is fuzzy and scattered. The scene in front of me makes no sense.

And it makes perfect sense.

I think, Yes, this makes sense.

The thought sends waves of excitement through me until my gaze wanders down to my feet, to the toppled chair and the stain forming on the floor.

The scent of gunpowder fills my nose. The snap of drying clothes breaks through the balcony doors. David’s hands are dirty, with mud, with blood, with worse things. Remember his fingers brushing wildflower petals in the fields. I think about them on my hips, on my arms, curled around the neck of his cello.

Horacio lights another cigarette.

“I’ll start the car,” he says. He wiggles into a light-tan leather jacket and leaves David and me alone.

I chew on my lip instead of talking while David sorts his things in the kitchen. I keep my eyes trained on his back, moving in the darkness, to keep my gaze off the heap at my feet. A thought that turns my stomach: shove it with your foot

“It won’t take long,” David says.

I want to laugh.

Instead, I nod.

“Okay,” I say, remembering the darkness.

David, a statue, arm outstretched with fire exploding in his palm. Like a god or a demon.

“Didn’t want to bring this here.” David sighs. “We didn’t have another option,” he says quietly. Slams his fist into the counter, making the cutlery sing.

He flicks on the kitchen light; David peels off his button-down and his white undershirt is transparent. There’s a gash on his side, but I don’t move to him. Don’t flinch at the site. Don’t seek to fix. Just stare at the wound, the red staining his shirt and skin.

I say, “It’s okay. It’s fine,” but the voice doesn’t sound like me and David can tell.

Horacio returns and helps David carry the bag-body down two flights of stairs, narrow and smelling of sea water. My feet feel like they’re walking on dreams, on slipping memory. The air is cool outside, loud with the roar of the bay and things moving in the brush along the hillside. The men slide the bag-body into the trunk of Horacio’s silver car, next to the shovel and a similar black bag to David’s.

Horacio hands me a silver flashlight and I hold it between my legs. We drive in silence until sunrise, my head bumping against the window; I don’t dare drift off. We cross the north border and twist up mountain roads past Lavant. The night is so dark, the woods so dense, I can’t distinguish form outside the windows. It’s inky and moving. Only the road ahead, cast in the bright beams of Horacio’s sedan.

Horacio guides the car along a dirt road that trails into the woods. We walk on foot up an embankment, my hands shakily holding the flashlight to illuminate our path in the weakening darkness. When we reach a small clearing, David grunts and Horacio lights a cigarette.

David points to the ground, and I take aim with the beam of light.

I hold the flashlight while Horacio and David take turns digging and smoking. Even while the sun is rising, painting the sky pink and orange, awakening the woods around us, I told the flashlight in both hands. Tears slip from my lashes, but I make no sound. I try to focus on the sunrise, the jagged picture I can make out through tree branches, and imagine there’s a cup of coffee in my hands. I’m sitting on my balcony, if I close my eyes.

Try not to think of the body going sour in the trunk. Try not to wonder how long David will be home.

The air smells thick with pine; I inhale deeply so the tang burns my nose.

Before we leave, Horacio already settled into the driver’s seat, window down and puffing deeply, David leans in close to me, almost hugging but not quite touching me. He smells like an animal, like dirt and sweat. His breath shakes against my ear and I want to peel my skin off. He kisses my temple and I force myself not to flinch.

H