In a sudden resurgence of his feelings of the previous night, he became achingly aware of her physicality. She was so pale: the marble white of statues or of sun-bleached bones. Her flesh hung loosely on her body, the extra weight suddenly obvious, as though she had no muscle tone remaining at all. Her breasts, her stomach, her unshaven hair: the human frailty of her, the beauty of a lived-in body, which he knew was reflected in his own body, called up a surge of tenderness and sympathy.
“Let’s put some clothes on,” he said, turning away from her.
He helped her step into her underwear, found a bra and hooked her into it. He found some comfortable, loose-fitting clothes for her, things he knew she liked to wear when she had nowhere special to go. It was not until he was fitting her old college reunion t-shirt over her head that he allowed himself to look at her wrist for the first time, and the sight of it made him step back and clasp a hand over his mouth.
Her left arm bore a long incision from wrist to elbow. The flesh puckered like lips, and as she bent her arm into the shirt, he was afforded a glimpse at the awful depth of the wound. It was easily deep enough to affect its purpose, and as bloodless as the belly of a gutted fish.
“Katie,” he said, and brought her wrist to his lips. “What’s happening to you.” He pressed her fingers to her cheek; they were cool, and limp. “Are you okay?” It was the stupidest question of his life. But he didn’t know what else to ask. “Katie?”
She turned her face to him, and after a few moments he could see her eyes begin to focus on him, as though she had to travel a terrible span to find him there. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
“Do you want to lie down?”
“I guess.”
He eased her toward her side of the bed, which was smooth and untroubled: she had slept underwater last night, not here. He laid her there like folded laundry.
He sat beside her as she drifted off. Her eyes remained open but she seemed gone; she seemed truly dead. Maybe, this time, she was.
Does she remember? he thought. Does she remember that I left her?
He stretched himself out beside her and ran his hand through her hair, repetitively, a kind of prayer.
Oh my god, he thought, what have I done? What is happening to me?
Eventually she wanted to go outside. Not at first, because she was scared, and the world did not make any sense to her. The air tasted strange on her tongue, and her body felt heavy and foreign — she felt very much like a thought wrapped in meat. She spent a few days drifting through the house in a lethargic haze, trying to shed the feeling of unease, which she had woken with the morning after her bath and which had stayed rooted in her throat and in her gut the whole time since. Sean came and went to work. He was solicitous and kind; he was always extra attentive after she tried to kill herself, though; and although she welcomed the attention she had learned to distrust it. She knew it would fade, once the nearness of death receded.
She watched the world through the window. It was like a moving picture in a frame; the details did not change, but the wind blew through the grass and the trees and the neighbors came and went in their cars, giving the scene the illusion of reality. Once, in the late afternoon before Sean came home, she was seen. The older man who lived across the street, whose cat she fed when he went out of town and who was a friend to them both, caught sight of her as he stepped out of his car and waved. She only stared back. After a moment, the man turned from her and disappeared into his own house.
The outside world was a dream of another place. She found herself wondering if she would fit better there.
On the evening of the third day, while they were sitting at dinner — something wretched and cooling that Sean had picked up on his way home — she told him.
“I want to go outside.”
Sean kept eating as though he didn’t hear her.
This was not new. He’d been behaving with an almost manic enthusiasm around her, as though he could convince her that their lives were unskewed and smooth through sheer force of will. But he would not look at her face; when he looked at her at all he would focus on her cheek, or her shoulder, or her hairline. He would almost look at her. But not quite.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he said at last. He ate ferociously, forking more into his mouth before he was finished with the last bite.
“Why not?”
He paused, his eyes lifting briefly to the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table. “You still don’t seem … I don’t know. Yourself.”
“And what would that be like?” She had not touched her food, except to prod it the way a child pokes a stick at roadkill. It cooled on the plate in front of her, congealing cheese and oils. It made her sick.
His mood swung abruptly into something more withdrawn and depressed; she could watch his face and see it happen. This made her feel better. This was more like the man she had known for the past several years of their marriage.
“Am I a prisoner here?”
He finally looked at her, shocked and hurt. “What? How could you even say that?”
She said nothing. She just held his gaze.
He looked terrified. “I’m just worried about you, babe. You don’t — you’re not—”
“You mean this?” She raised her left arm and slipped her finger into the open wound. It was as clean and bloodless as rubber.
Sean lowered his face. “Don’t do that.”
“If you’re really worried about me, why don’t you take me to the hospital? Why didn’t you call an ambulance? I’ve been sleeping so much the past few days. But you just go on to work like everything’s fine.”
“Everything is fine.”
“I don’t think so.”
He was looking out the window now. The sun was going down and the light was thick and golden. Their garden was flowering, and a light dusting of pollen coated the left side of their car in the driveway. Sean’s eyes were unblinking and reflective as water. He stared at it all. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said.
Silence filled the space between them as they each sat still in their own thoughts. The refrigerator hummed to life. Katie finally pushed herself away from the table and headed toward the door, scooping up the car keys on her way.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“Where?” His voice was thick with resignation.
“Maybe to the store. Maybe no where. I’ll be back soon.”
He moved to stand. “I’ll come with.”
“No thanks,” she said, and he slumped back into his chair.
Once, she would have felt guilty for that. She would have chastised herself for failing to take into account his wishes or his fears, for failing to protect his fragile ego. He was a delicate man, though he did not know it, and she had long considered it part of her obligation to the marriage to accommodate that frailty of spirit.
But she felt a separation from that now. And from him too, though she remembered loving him once. If anything inspired guilt, it was that she could not seem to find that love anymore. He was a good man, and deserved to be loved. She wondered if the ghost of a feeling could substitute for the feeling itself.
But worse than all of that was the separation she felt from herself. She’d felt like a passenger in her own body the last three days, the pilot of some arcane machine. She watched from a remove as the flesh of her hand tightened around the doorknob and rotated it clockwise, setting into motion the mechanical process that would free the door from its jamb and allow it to swing open, freeing her avenue of escape. The flesh was a mechanism too, a contracting of muscle and ligament, an exertion of pull.