Homebodies

by Cheryl Loudermelt

  “Yeah.” She heard him mutter. As she climbed the stairs with Red beside her, she heard Todd put in another DVD.

  9

  That night, she dreamed about the girl again. The memory wasn’t that much different from a dream. It was the same girl with the same long, wavy hair. She had the same laugh, and the same smile that made her eyes crinkle at the edges. Her eyes were speckled hazel. That much, Emily hadn’t noticed before. But there was one new piece, the feel of their warm cheeks pressed together, smiling, and a flash.

  She woke up before Todd went to work but pretended to be sleeping as he got ready to leave. She didn’t want her face to betray that she remembered something more, and whatever she had with the woman she remembered, it was something that had then been all their own. Todd would never understand it. He would only call her crazy for having any emotion at all. Emily refused to share this, to share her, with him anymore; she didn’t belong to him.

  Sometime in the night’s restlessness, she’d developed a plan, and it was present in her mind as she listened to Todd mill about that morning. If she remembered taking a photograph with the woman in her dream, then photographic evidence might exist somewhere to prove that she was sane. If she could only find something, she might have more to go on than a fragment of glass floating in water.

  When Todd finally left, she opened her eyes and looked around the walls. There were no pictures in the bedroom except art she’d purchased to match the décor, which was a pale sage with silver accents. The art was abstract, and she’d never seen it as being as particularly useless as it seemed. She couldn’t remember herself as the woman who thought some sage smudges on canvas was a worthwhile purchase. There was little reality to it; the walls felt alien, like they belonged in some other house on a different planet.

  She climbed out of bed, and Red followed her out the bedroom door. There were no pictures in the upstairs hallway. This she’d covered with the same cream color as the downstairs, and though there was a framed still life of yellow daisies, there was nothing personal about them, except that she enjoyed the color of the flower. She ran her hand along bare paint and plaster, and at first everything seemed as empty as she remembered.

  But then, by chance, she found a few small, unpatched nail holes that might once have had hanging pictures. It was difficult to tell. She stepped back from the wall and stared at it resolutely. Slowly, she made out the shape of the frame. The picture might have been gone, but there was a slight difference in color where the frame had protected the wall from dirt. She couldn’t remember what had been hanging there. She couldn’t remember hanging anything at all, but the house was new when they bought it. It wasn’t something someone else had left behind.

  She drifted down the stairs, feeling and looked around for more conclusive evidence. The formal room felt the same as their bedroom, cold and foreign. From the extra lock on the door, to the boarded window, to a shelf filled with curios of abstract glass and fake potted plants, there was not a single personal memento.

  But there were more holes in the walls. Once she thought to look for them they seemed to jump out in every bare space. Even before she cut through the kitchen and in to the family room, she knew it would be the same. There was her collection of cows in the kitchen, which she had, at that moment, developed a seething hatred of, but there was nothing personal. In the family room, a table set for four, with a wicker basket filled with glass balls in a bright blue, the sofa, the television, Todd’s ridiculous DVD collection that took up nearly an entire wall, and a painting of a sunny beach that seemed positively frigid.

  She pushed both hands through her hair and pulled in disbelief, seeing the house she lived in for what felt like the first time. It was her, but it wasn’t. She remembered putting that cut out of a wooden cow just over the stove and arranging the balls in the basket with more care than that task probably called for, but this wasn’t the house she made or remembered.

  She would have hung up a photo of their wedding, something from their honeymoon, pictures of friends, or family, or . . .

  She would never have left the house so barren and cold. In a rush of certainty, she came to the only conclusion available, she hadn’t. If not pictures on the wall, she would have kept albums, at least, but there wasn’t a single album in any cabinet or drawer. She lived in a house of nothing.

  It felt like a cave or a cage that she’d disguised as a house to distract from what it was, and without a single photograph, she felt she’d never find the key to let herself out again. She stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at the bare carpet and naked walls to the white door at the top of the stairs.

  Todd said it was storage, but he always seemed dishonest. Maybe he lied about that door too, though she couldn’t imagine why he’d want to keep her away from it.

  She hesitated, one foot on the bottom stair, half thinking that she should leap them two at a time and throw open that door to see what was inside. The other half, was rooted to the floor, trying to convince her that none of this was true. Todd was the only one who could have taken away the pictures, and he never went in the upstairs rooms either. Like her, he always walked by without really seeing those doors. How much, and for how long, had she been this blind?

  Red scratched at the back door, interrupting her internal argument. He probably just wanted to crap, but he helped her all the same. Todd had boxes in the shed. Except for retrieving the garden tools, she never went inside. There were always spiders lurking in the back corners and she was perpetually paranoid that they would find her hair a fantastic place to land. She was pretty sure some of them were venomous, but since they never really went back there it seemed easiest just to live and let web.

  She slid open the back door and followed Red who burst out into the yard. She hesitated again at the door of the shed. It was like she was looking at a black hole and stretching slowly into spaghetti, but she took a deep breath and pulled the door open to let in the light. There were more boxes than she remembered being there, but she couldn’t trust her memory. They had always been there, she just never paid attention. But now that she was seeing more clearly, even the boxes didn’t make sense. Even if she couldn’t remember what was in them, why would Todd have put them out in the shed with the spiders if they had so many rooms for storage upstairs. Most of the boxes had Todd’s name scrawled in his childish handwriting across the sides and top.

  It only took ten minutes of spider dodging and box shuffling to find what she wanted. At the back of the shed, in a large, warped, and weather stained box near the bottom, she found what remained of their lives. There were loose photographs and four photo albums yellowing from exposure to the temperatures and warping from the moisture outside. There was another box of framed photographs, which she assumed she had once hung in the house. Todd hadn’t even taken care to keep them whole before he threw them in the shed, and many of the frames were broken and the pictures scratched from shards of glass.

  The sight of everything so withered and broken was too much like the feeling that permeated her chest; as much as those pictures had represented her life before, they did even more so now in their deterioration. She sat crying in the grass, running her fingers over album covers, broken glass, and curling picture edges.

  Slowly she spread everything out on the grass and tried to draw it into herself all at once, but she only created a sea of faces to get lost in. Strangers remained strangers, and even those pictures with her in them, arm in arm or leaning in, were unbelievably unreal, like she was a voyeur of someone else’s life. She swiped the photographs into a wave with her forearm and reached for the photo albums. Page by page, she studied every face, and each new page added to the crushing weight of the unfamiliar.

  There were pictures of hiking trips to at least three different countries, piles of parties, and stacks of girls squashing together to fit in the frame. She thought for so long that she lived a life so ordinary as to forget it all, that she remembered nothing because nothing was worth rememb
ering, but all the evidence ink and paper could provide proved she had once been adventurous, popular, and loved. She suffocated in the open air, barely drawing breath.

  There were no pictures of the girl anywhere, not even in the background, and she might have been shattered by disappointment if she hadn’t noticed that there were no pictures of Todd either. There were still no wedding photos, and it was impossible that they had never once found a reason to be photographed together. Those other pictures had to still exist. Even Todd, with his callousness and indifference would never go so far as to destroy such important pieces of their lives.

  Emily dried her eyes with her hands, which smelled like salt and grass. Once again, she braved the shed and dug through every box and cobweb, but there were no more pictures to be found. Instead, she found boxes of junk that might as well have been carted off to the dump. Sadness became desperation, and desperation, like most of her other emotions, shifted quickly into lividity.

  But anger was a blessing. Todd might have taken all the pictures away, but no matter how much he tried to erase, he couldn’t take away her brain. She still had her mind, and justice was that her memories of him could serve as the foundation for others.

  He at least was not a stranger, even when she felt she didn’t know him. She remembered marrying him. She remembered his tuxedo and his cornflower blue tie. She remembered walking toward him down the aisle and saying all those meaningful words, and her bouquet, soft blue and white hydrangea tied with a ribbon that she’d handed off to hold on to Todd.

  Emily closed her eyes and drifted down the aisle in her mind. She saw everything but Todd through smoke. The whole room whirled with fog, but even a clouded image was better than nothing at all. She could see the groomsmen, their bowties the same color as the blue flowers in her bouquet, and the bridesmaid’s dresses, simple but beautiful, with lovely clips that sparkled in their hair. Her maid of honor, with her beautiful long brown hair swept up behind her head.

  Like the wind had come at last, she saw the girl’s face, her hazel eyes, the same mischief living at the corners of them.

  Danny. Emily struggled, no. Danielle, but she’d always been Danny since high school, because there were four other girls in their class named Danielle. Danny wanted to be unique, and she was. She didn’t need to change her name. She was loyal, spontaneous, hilarious. Every boy had chased after Danny, but Danny didn’t care for any of them, because she liked girls, but didn’t say so until college, when she first introduced Emily to her girlfriend.

  Danny had called Emily her other girlfriend, and said they were soul mates and nothing would come between them. The other girl had been jealous, but it was never that way, because Emily and Danny were like sisters, they shared something deeper than blood. Emily choked on sorrow and guilt. How could she have forgotten so much love?

  Red stopped his frolic and came to see what the matter with her was. She tried to push him away, but he was determined. He put a paw on her shoulder to steady himself on his hind legs and forcibly licked her face. The weight of him forced her back into the grass, where she was at the mercy of his disgusting breath and wet tongue. But it was at least a fraction of love again. She wrapped her arms around his neck and sobbed into his yellow fur, he rested against her, content to be her pillow and her tissue and to let her soak his fur.

  She might have been content to lay there all day and let unhappiness march over her and sweep her away, but it couldn’t last. From the yard next door, Mr. Johnson moaned.

  Emily sat up, scowling at the block wall between the yards, and angrily wiped her eyes. “Everything’s okay Mr. Johnson.” She had to force happiness into her at mental gunpoint.

  Mr. Johnson only moaned in disbelief.

  “Really, there’s nothing wrong. I’ll be fine.” She swept the pictures up into her arms and hurried inside the house before he interrupted her misery again.

  10

  She made Todd dinner that day but wasn’t sure if she’d let him eat it or throw the whole plate in his face. She had to try to restrain herself though, because in between sorting through pictures and cooking, in the empty hours of her day, she’d had too much time to think. What she needed was not just to be angry at Todd, she needed to figure out his game. Except for plain cruelty she couldn’t think of a single reason why he’d go out of his way to erase her life after she’d lost her memory, but he’d done it. If she threw a plate at his forehead the minute he came through the door, she’d probably never find out the truth. She needed to be patient, to let him lie.

  When she heard the front door click, she moved to stand in the passage between the kitchen and the family room. Todd looked like he’d had a busy day. There were dark stains on his trousers, but no part of her was willing to wait for him to rest up or even settle in. She damn well wasn’t going to wait for a good day; there would never be one.

  As usual, Todd had no sense of when he was dangling a foot in the lion’s cage, and he bent down to kiss her as though she’d been standing there waiting for that purpose. She let him kiss her but was barely able to tolerate him in the sanctity of her personal space. When she spoke, her voice sounded like she’d been using her vocal chords to grate cheese. “How was your day?”

  “The usual. Kind of slow.”

  She nodded and stepped away, eager to put space between them and avoid being so close he could read the thoughts behind her face. “My day was slow too.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t you always have slow days?”

  “Yes. I was just making conversation. Dinner is ready, if you’re hungry.”

  “Great.”

  She handed him a plate. She had already fed Red, but she made nothing for herself. “I did do one thing today.”

  He held the plate with both hands, like a child who’d been told not to spill.

  “I thought of something.”

  “You’ve got too much time to think.”

  “It was only a small thing.” She watched him. On the surface, he seemed completely relaxed, and she might have believed it was true except that she had his devoted attention, which he wouldn’t have given her if he wasn’t worried about what she would say. He said nothing, undoubtedly trying to avoid asking her what it was she thought of, which only made her want to tell him more. “You remember that girl I asked about?”

  “Yeah. I still don’t know her.”

  “I didn’t say you did, but I remembered more. I remembered her name.”

  “Is that all?” Todd was so casual, but he stared at the dinner plate in his hands like the gravy was going to spring up and suck on his face.

  “Danny.” She watched to see if the word shook him. If he felt anything at all, she couldn’t tell. “The girl I was thinking of. Her name is Danny.”

  Todd shuffled his weight from one foot to the other, but it seemed more like impatience than guilt. “Okay.”

  “You don’t remember her?”

  He glowered. “I told you no.”

  She wanted to bore into him and pull the truth out with both hands, but she had more restraint than she expected. “I thought you might now that I remembered her name.” She shrugged, like the thing that mattered most to her in the world at that moment didn’t matter at all.

  The action seemed to disarm him. He wasn’t on edge anymore. “Still no. I was never close with your friends. That was always your thing. Maybe I met her once, but I don’t remember. I don’t know what else to tell you. What’s for dinner?”

  He was lying. He was doing a good job of hiding it, but she was sure. “It’s. . . beef stew.” He wasn’t even going to let that much of his game go by unplayed.

  “Sounds great.” He held the plate with one hand; its contents slid slowly to the edge. “I got some new movies.”

  She noticed for the first time he had a plastic bag tucked under one arm. “I’d rather not. I’m tired of movies. It seems like all we ever do.”

  She felt him trying to peel up her layers and look inside. It was uncomfortable, but
this time, he’d never reach the center and find out that she knew more than she let on. She turned her back to him under the pretense of cleaning, unsure how much longer she could suppress her rage without showing him it was there, but her voice came out singsong and overtly pleasant, despite the lines of effort dug into her face. “Do you remember our wedding, Todd?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “You guess so?” She scoffed, but to her relief, it sounded more playful than scornful. “I hope that’s not a thing you’d just forget.”

  “It’s been a while.”

  She hated the simplicity of his answer, the total nonchalance where he seemed to live most days. He had no idea how much it hurt her, how the lies were so much worse when it seemed effortless for him. “It feels like a lifetime.”

  Todd cleared his throat. “I thought that was kind of the point.”

  Humor too, it was funny to him not to tell the truth. She did her best to force a bit of laughter from her throat. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “What got you thinking about that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It was just a thought.”

  She heard him set the stew plate down on the counter. “I remember your dress was like, fluffy on the bottom, and sleeveless. It was pretty on you.”

  “Thanks.” She managed through grinding teeth while she scrubbed the counter with excessive force.

  “You were mad about the frosting. It was the wrong shade of blue. You were tromping around the hotel complaining that the cake decorator didn’t know the difference between cornflower and periwinkle, and it was funny. I thought, no one on the planet knows the difference between those two colors except for you. We danced to that song you liked, even though the DJ only had the crappy country version instead of rock.”

  So much detail. He thought he was appeasing her with these pleasant memories, and some deep part of her was gratified that he remembered so many stupid little things. But that same comfort made his efforts to hide the larger things seem much worse. If he could remember something as useless as cornflower and periwinkle, he must have remembered bigger things too. She turned to look at him again. He was standing with his hands in his pockets. “Anything else?”