Come Back to Me

Chapter One

She was awake before the house was.

Five thirty, same as always. No alarm. Just her eyes opening in the dark and the immediate, pressing knowledge that sleep was finished with her, even if she was not finished with it. She lay still for a moment and listened. Michael was on his side with his back to her, breathing the long, slow breath of a man with nothing pulling him out of his dreams. She watched the ceiling. A crack ran along the far corner where the wall met the plaster, thin as a hair, and she had been meaning to say something about it for two years.

She got up carefully, the way she always got up, her side of the bed trained into silence.

There was a time she had not been careful about this. There was a time she had not needed to be, when rolling over and pressing herself against the warm length of him at five in the morning was something she did without thinking, the way you reach for a glass of water in the dark because you know exactly where it is. She did not do that anymore. She did not do it because something had shifted between them over the years, not all at once, nothing so clear as that, just a slow and quiet rearranging of the space until the distance between them in the bed had its own shape, its own weather. She had started sleeping on her edge. He had started sleeping on his. And neither of them had said a word about it because there was nothing to say that would not require them to look directly at the thing.

She took her robe from the hook on the back of the door and went downstairs.

The kitchen in the early morning was hers alone. This was the one thing she had kept. Before the children and the house and the fifteen years of ordinary life pressing itself into her days, before all of it, she had been a woman who liked her own company. She had lived alone in an apartment on the east side of the city for three years before she met Michael, a small apartment with one good window, a secondhand couch, and a notebook on the coffee table that she wrote in on Sunday mornings. She had liked that life. She had not understood, when she was inside it, that it would feel like a country she had visited once and could not find again on any map.

She started the coffee.

The carafe was filled, and she stood at the counter, listening to it. The refrigerator hummed. The heat kicked on and flowed through the wall vents. Outside the window above the sink, the backyard was still dark, the maple tree a shape against a sky the color of old pewter. Michael had planted that tree the spring they moved in, on a Saturday, in his good jeans, and she had stood on the back steps watching him and thinking I chose this man. She remembered the clarity of that thought. I chose this man, and I would choose him again.

She poured her coffee and sat down at the kitchen table.

The table was round, which had been her idea. She had wanted a round table because she had read somewhere that round tables made families talk more, no one at the head, no one at the foot, everyone equal. She had believed things like that once. She had cut articles out of magazines and taped them inside cabinet doors, little pieces of advice about marriage and children and how to keep a life from going ordinary on you. She could not remember when she had stopped doing that. She could not remember when she had stopped believing there was a way to keep the ordinary at bay.

She drank her coffee.

Above her the house began to wake. First Lily, the heavy certain footsteps that had belonged to her daughter since she first learned to walk and never changed. Then the sound of the shower. Then, from their bedroom, the creak of Michael's side of the bed as he sat up, and the twelve-second silence that she had come to understand meant he was sitting on the edge of the mattress, elbows on his knees, collecting himself before he stood. She had learned the sounds of him the way you learn a language you were never formally taught. She knew everything about how he moved through a morning. She just could not remember the last time she had told him so.

By the time Noah came downstairs the kitchen was in full motion.

He arrived the way he always arrived, all at once, one shoe on and one in his hand, his backpack half-open and shedding a worksheet onto the floor behind him. He was eleven years old and the most physically optimistic person she had ever met. He moved through the world as though it had been arranged for his convenience and was only occasionally disappointed to find otherwise.

"Mom." He dropped his backpack on the chair. "We're out of the good cereal."

"There's oatmeal."

He looked at her the way she imagined a man looks at a doctor who has given him very bad news.

She handed him a banana and pointed at the chair. He sat down and put on his other shoe while she made his lunch. Turkey and Swiss, crusts on. An apple. A bag of pretzels. She took the notepad from the junk drawer and wrote three words on it and folded it in half and put it between the sandwich and the fruit without him seeing. She had done this every school day since first grade. He never mentioned the notes. She did not know if he read them. She kept writing them anyway, the same way she kept making his lunch with the crusts on, because letting go of the small things felt like letting go of something she could not name.

"Permission slip," she said.

He froze.

"On the table. Next to the fruit bowl."

He grabbed it and shoved it into his backpack and looked at her with the naked relief of a child who has been spared a consequence he fully deserved. She zipped his lunch bag and set it in front of him.

"Eat the banana," she said.

Michael came downstairs at seven fifteen. She heard him before she saw him, the coffee mug from the cabinet, the refrigerator opening and closing, and then he was in the kitchen doorway in his work clothes, his hair still damp, and he looked at her across the room the way he looked at her in the mornings now, which was the same way she looked at him. Familiar. Correct. Like checking that a piece of furniture was still where you left it.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning."

"Sleep okay?"

"Fine."

He nodded and poured his coffee and looked at his phone. Noah announced that he could not find his library book. The morning moved forward the way it always moved, and Claire moved with it, and somewhere underneath all of it, the way a river runs under ice, was the thing she could not say. That she was tired in a way sleep did not touch. That she missed something she was standing right in the middle of. That she had not been able to say this out loud to the man drinking his coffee ten feet away from her because the distance had grown so gradually that she no longer knew how to cross it without the crossing feeling like a declaration, a confession, something that would require them both to admit they had watched it happen.

Noah found his library book under the couch cushion. Michael rinsed his mug. He kissed Claire on the cheek, a quick familiar press of his mouth to her face, and she felt it the way you feel the sun through a window in winter, warm but unable to reach you.

"Have a good day," he said.

"You too."

The door closed. The house held the particular silence of a morning after everyone has left and before the day begins to ask anything of you. Claire stood at the sink and ran water over the breakfast dishes. Lily appeared at the top of the stairs in her coat, her hair still dark from the shower, her backpack over one shoulder.

"Bye, Mom."

"Have a good day, bug."

Lily paused. Just for a second, one hand on the railing. She looked at her mother in the kitchen, the way a person looks at something they have been carrying for a long time and are deciding whether or not to put down. Then she said bye again and the door opened and closed and Claire was alone.

She dried her hands.

Her bag was on the chair, her keys inside it. She was already going to be five minutes late, which was fine, which was how it always went. She gathered her bag and her phone and crossed the kitchen to take the dish towel from the oven handle and lay it on the table the way she always did before she left, folded in thirds, ready for the next morning.

She lifted the dish towel she had laid out the morning before and underneath it was a piece of paper.

She picked it up thinking it was the permission slip. The permission slip was already in Noah's backpack. She looked down at the paper in her hand.

At the top, in Lily's careful print:

I Miss My Parents

By Lily Anne Harmon

Grade 10 English, Period 3 Claire set her bag down.

She read it standing up, the dish towel still in one hand, the paper in the other. She read it the way you read something that reaches through the page and takes hold of you.

My parents are in the next room right now. My father is watching television and my mother is on her laptop doing something for work. If I walked in there, they would look up. They would ask how I was. They would mean it. So I want to be careful to say this right: I am not writing about parents who do not love their children. I am writing about something harder than that to explain.

I miss them.

I miss my father's laugh. He used to laugh at his own jokes before he finished telling them, which was embarrassing in public, but I would give a great deal to hear it now. I miss my mother singing in the kitchen. She sang along to the radio while she made dinner, not well, but that was never the point. The point was that she did it, that she was happy enough or free enough or present enough to just open her mouth and sing in front of us. She does not do that anymore. I cannot say exactly when she stopped. I just know the kitchen is quiet now in a way that has a weight to it.

When I was small, my parents used to look at each other in a way I did not understand but that made me feel safe. I know what it was now. It was the look of two people who saw each other. Not just as the other adult in the house, not just as the person responsible for the other half of the list. They saw each other. They do not look at each other that way much anymore. They look past each other the way you look past something that has always been there. Like a piece of furniture. Like a crack in the ceiling you have been meaning to fix.

Dinner used to be loud. My brother still tries. He tells his terrible jokes and laughs at them himself while the rest of us smile and reach for the bread and the television runs in the background because nobody turned it off, and then we clear the plates and my parents go to separate rooms and the evening closes up around us like a hand.

I watch them and I wonder what it must feel like to love someone so long that you forget to say it. I wonder if they know how it looks from where I sit, at the dinner table, in the back seat of the car on the way to school, in the hallway outside their room at night when the house is quiet and all I can hear is the television through the wall. They look like two people who used to know everything about each other and have let that knowing go quiet. I do not know if they can feel the space that has grown up between them. I feel it. I feel it all the time. It lives in this house the way cold lives in a house with bad windows. You stop noticing it and you are still cold.

I am sixteen. I know I am not supposed to understand what I understand. But I know that tired is not the same as peaceful. I know that two people can be in the same room and be nowhere near each other. I know what it sounds like when a house holds its breath.

I have one memory that I keep coming back to. I was maybe seven or eight. A song came on the radio in the kitchen, something old, something neither of my parents said the name of. My father held out his hand and my mother looked at him for a second and then she took it, and they danced. Right there in the kitchen, between the table and the counter, for maybe half a minute. My brother and I watched from our chairs and nobody said anything. It was not a remarkable thing. That is what I keep thinking about. It was not remarkable at all. It was just two people who loved each other, saying so, on a Tuesday night.

I miss my parents. I hope they find their way back to each other.

I hope they do it soon.

Claire read the last line and then she read it again.

She stood in her kitchen for a long time. The clock above the stove moved. Somewhere outside a car started and pulled away from the curb and the street went quiet again. She was going to be late for work. She was going to be late and she could not move and she did not try to.

Her daughter was sixteen years old.

Her daughter had sat down and found the words for the thing that lived in this house, the thing Claire had been walking past for years the way you walk past a crack in the ceiling you have been meaning to fix. Lily had found the words and written them out in her careful print and then she had put the paper on the kitchen table under the dish towel that Claire moved every single morning of her life.

Not in a backpack. Not in a folder. Not slipped under a bedroom door.

Here. On the kitchen table. Under the dish towel.

Claire thought about the way her daughter had paused at the top of the stairs twenty minutes ago, one hand on the railing, looking at her mother standing at the sink. She thought about the look on Lily's face. She had taken it for the ordinary look of a teenager in the morning, a little distant, a little somewhere else. She understood it now for what it actually was: a girl watching a door she had just knocked on, waiting to hear whether anyone was home.

She folded the paper along the crease Lily had made and put it in her bag. Not in the outer pocket. In the deep center, where she put the things she needed to keep.

She picked up her keys. She stood for one more moment in the kitchen where her family had eaten a thousand meals, where her husband had kissed her on the cheek an hour ago with the practiced ease of a man kissing someone he expected to always be there. She looked at the table. She looked at the maple tree through the window, the one Michael planted in his good jeans on a Saturday in April fifteen years ago when they still believed they were people who planted trees and watched them grow.

The tree was enormous now.

She had not been looking.