The sounds of the office surrounded them: clicking keyboards, humming printers, and the steady background drone of people speaking on phones. It was a gray world, with gray walls and gray carpet. Even the fluorescent light seemed flaccid and dull.
“Yes,” Doug said. “I was wondering... Well, I was thinking...” He didn’t realize this would be so hard. “I was thinking, if it’s all right with you, that — that I’d like to take a leave of absence. Unpaid, of course.”
Gabe had watery blue eyes, the kind of eyes that used to get him laid all the time back in college, or so he said, but they looked purple through the glasses. He narrowed them. “You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“How much time we talking about here?”
“Um... I don’t know. A month?”
Gabe sighed and stepped around into the cubicle. He reached for a door, but there was no door, so he turned and sat on Doug’s metal desk. Gabe’s tie-dyed socks had the same swirl of colors as his tie. When Gabe spoke, he lowered his voice to just above a whisper.
“I talked to Autumn,” he said.
Doug didn’t understand where he was going with this. “Yeah?”
“She’s worried about you, man.”
“Worried about me?”
“That’s right. She said you’ve been acting strange.”
Doug felt the cubicle walls collapsing in on him, the same feeling he had back at Locomotion Pizza, but this time it only lasted a second before it was replaced with his rising anger. He felt his jaw grow tight. “She said I’m acting strange? What about her? She’s the one going through some weird, delayed version of postpartum depression.”
“Doug—”
“If anybody’s acting strange, it’s her. She... she should see someone. Get some help. It’s ruining our family, what she’s doing. She—”
Gabe placed his hand on Doug’s shoulder, silencing him. “She is, man. She is seeing someone.”
The comment derailed Doug. “What?”
Gabe looked at Doug for a long time with sad eyes, the way someone looks at an old family dog who’s started snapping at invisible squirrels. Did he know about Rosie’s world? Doug hadn’t told anyone yet, not even Autumn.
Finally, Gabe sighed and headed out of the cubicle. When he’d reached the hall, he glanced over his shoulder.
“Take all the time you need, Doug,” he said. “But you guys should talk. Really.”
On the way home, moving from one stoplight to another in a slow waltz with hundreds of other cars, Doug thought about what Gabe had said. He knew he needed to talk to Autumn, that their marriage was disintegrating in a barrage of silent moments, but he just couldn’t bring himself to care about that now. He wanted to spend more time with Rosie. He wanted smiling purple bears and magic-carpet rides, not therapists who talked in monotones and loud arguments about how neither of them knew what the other was feeling. He wanted a world of soft edges and primary colors, not one with sharp corners and a little gray in everything.
Then, as he was turning onto their street, one lined with pin oaks and leafy maples, the most amazing thing happened. The world changed. It changed, and Rosie wasn’t even with him. The cars parked on the street became green and yellow tugboats, the road a bright blue river twisting through banks lined with palm trees. He turned where their house should be, but it wasn’t a house; it was a white spaceship shaped like a half-inflated beach ball. A door opened in the ship, a ramp extended, and he motored his boat inside. But it wasn’t a boat. It was a motorcycle. It was a horse. It was a leather-bound book with feathered white wings.
The doors whisked open and he walked into an igloo, the walls made not of ice, but white shiny blocks. Passing the dining room, he saw a sparkling beach and six monkeys in pink dresses having tea around a picnic table. He heard Rosie’s music coming from her room, and her singing along with it. He was turning toward the hall, now a rope bridge across a deep canyon, when Autumn called out to him.
“Doug,” she said.
Her voice sounded as if it was coming from the living room. He turned in that direction and he was walking along the deck of a sailboat. The sails fluttered, and he smelled salt water on the breeze. He knew Rosie’s world was becoming more real to him, and he was exhilarated by it. But then he saw Autumn, head bowed, waiting for him at the aft of the ship, and the world around her was the old world, fuzzy at the edges. She sat on their old burgundy couch, piles of unfolded laundry on either side of her. He saw the scratches and the smudges in the off-white walls. He saw the lint and dirt in the taupe carpet at her feet. Autumn — dressed in a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, holes in the knees — looked up at him and frowned.
He stopped a few paces away, afraid to go closer. “Something amazing is happening to me,” he said.
Sighing, Autumn closed her eyes and brought her hands up to her face as if to pray. She breathed deeply for a moment, then stood. When she looked at him, he saw that the shadows under her eyes were so deep they could have been carved with a knife.
“This has to end, Doug,” she said.
“What has to end?”
“This! This... thing you’re doing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m changing, Autumn. I’m changing and I like what’s happening. I’m — I’m seeing what Rosie sees.”
She bit down on her lower lip, the perfect imitation of her daughter, and closed her eyes again. She tucked her arms around herself in a tight hug. When she opened her eyes, there was moisture in them, and when she spoke, her voice was so strained it didn’t sound like her own.
“Doug,” she said. “Doug... I let you pretend. I thought it would help you. But it’s got to stop now. It’s been six months.”
The fuzzy edges of the grungy living room pushed outward, enveloping a few more feet of the sailboat and the ocean. Doug felt a clamp tightening on his chest, and he took a step backward.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“Doug, listen to me—”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I want you—”
“Can’t you let me be happy? I’m happy. I’m—”
“Stop!” she cried. More burgundy couch appeared, more dirty carpet. “Just stop! Christ, don’t you remember what happened at the pizza place? For God’s sake, it was in the paper... It happened so fast, you said, just turned around a second... just a second...” Her voice choked on the words. The scuffed walls extended, and he saw crooked paintings and cobwebs in the corner. “Don’t you remember the trial, Doug? Don’t you remember how you screamed at him? Jesus, don’t you remember the funeral?!”
The boat faded and flickered and then he was just standing in a dim living room, the curtains half open, the weak light cutting across the easy chair and the carpet like a wall between them. And the harsh memories started to return, like unwanted house-guests, and he tried to close the doors of his mind.
“She’s... she’s not...” he began.
“She is!” she said fiercely.
“But she can’t... I’ve seen...”
“Doug,” she said, with a little more gentleness. “Doug, I know it’s been hard. Especially for you. But — but we can’t... We can’t go on like this. You’ve got to face what happened, Doug. You’ve got to accept it. You’ve got to. You’ve... You’ve...”
But the rest was lost in a fit of sobbing. She turned away from him, and he stared helplessly, watching the way her shoulders shook. In a daze, he turned away from her, heading back through the living room to the dark hall. Rosie. He had to see Rosie. He saw the flaking paint along the trim, the dead fly inside the opaque light fixture. The walls closed in on him, tightening, squeezing the air out of his lungs. He stumbled, sliding against the wall and knocking off a framed picture of Rosie. When it struck the carpet, the glass cracked. His temple throbbed, pain flaring behind his eyes, but he pushed on, staggering into her room.