Waxing
I’ve been numbing with reruns of Cheers every night. I hate Sam and Diane. They wasted so much time not being together. It’s not that thinking of him makes me sad, it’s that feeling his absence leaves me sore, at my temples, in my sides, in the lining of my intestines. Even the bacteria in my gut microbiome are dysbiotic, sensing my heart’s heaviness and following suit.
Bacteria know.
I stand on the fading wood of what was once our porch, but now it’s just my porch.
Michael’s boots taunt me next to the front door. The ones with his initials on the back. I should move them. Maybe put them in storage or at his mom’s house. She’s been collecting his things to fill his empty childhood room. His room with faded spaceships drawn onto the vanilla walls.
My right hand swims through the cavernous depths of my purse past my wallet until it touches the thumb-sized blue-painted clog at the end of my keychain that Michael brought back for me from Amsterdam before we started dating, back in college.
I pull the house key up by the clog, push the brass blade into the keyhole, and press open the front door. My left hand navigates through the emptiness for the light switch on the wall to the left of the door but before I can reach it, I feel something cold at the back of my neck and a gloved, warm hand cups over my mouth.
“Shhh…don’t move, ” the voice says into my right ear. I feel his unwanted breath make the hair on my neck uncomfortable. He sounds tired, as if he’d prefer not to be here. I now have suspicions that the cold at the top of my spine is a gun. I feel every ounce of Rosati’s oily marinara sauce moving backwards up through my intestines. I hear two men talking to each other in the other room.
“It’s in the left wall of the bathroom, ” one of them says. He sounds young, maybe eighteen. The man behind me pushes me forward from my shoulder blade and says, “I’ll check it, take her to the bedroom.” He sounds older, maybe 30. What’s in my bathroom wall?
My knees feel like jelly and my belly is in my neck. My toes are numb from the cold or the fear or both. The part of my back that he touched feels hot. I want to turn the lights on. I want to have my house to myself and yet I want Michael here too. I want none of this.
They move me to the bedroom. One is fumbling with his pants zipper. He can’t get it down. In frustration or laziness, he sulks out of the room, closing the door behind him. The young one is left. The door clicks shut and I’m left sitting on the carpet at the base of the bed facing a man, or a boy, or something in between, who is guarding the door with a gun in his hand. He’s probably my brother’s age. I wonder if he’s used a gun before.
I stare at the carpet that Michael picked out when we were arguing about whether or not to buy wood floors. I voted yes to wood, but then I had picked the fridge. So he got to choose the flooring, and he chose carpet. I still hate it. Even now. He said he wanted it because of the price and because his feet were always cold. Wear socks, I said. You wear socks, he said.
I stare at the ugly carpet and wonder what my mother will say at my funeral.
“Fast fashion made her nauseous as did unreturned shopping carts left astray in the parking lot. She loved Maya Angelou, Joni Mitchell, and Anthony Bourdain. She continued to be hopeful about bangs, until she realized, at age 21, that they made her look like a monolingual Dora the Explorer. She started dating Michael when she was 25. They surfed four mornings a week, three in the winter, and cooked most evenings. Michael died when he was 33 from lung cancer but then he had been dying for a while. Ina joked that because he was kind and into carpentry, that he was ‘basically Jesus’. Then he went and died at age 33, as if to prove her point.
She died four months later when masked men robbed her house. She was unprepared. But then she usually was.”
The man at the door is shaking. I can see his knees quivering. Is he nervous? Maybe he’s just cold. Michael always said I kept the house too cold. “Ina, it’s 66 degrees in the kitchen in November, ” he would laugh as he rubbed his palms against his jeans. Maybe I was too cold for him.
The light from the hallway bleeds underneath the door that the young man is standing in front of. It illuminates his shoes. My head feels hot and stretched, like pulled pork. My stomach churns in on itself for a third time tonight. I bought Michael those shoes five years ago at Christmas. When my kid brother, Ben, saw him open the box by the tree, his eyes got big. He was thirteen and Michael saw his eyes too. Michael looked at me and I nodded. He gave Ben the shoes. It’s too dark to make out his eyes or facial features, and he’s wearing a mask anyway. The moon is a waning crescent otherwise it could elucidate his face.
In the silence, I say his name. Just to see. “Benji?” I ask to the air.
The man at the door lifts his head. “Hi Ina, ” he lets out a rushed breath. He drops his head, then shakes it slow, like he did when he was six and his turtle, Danger, died.
“What’s going on, Ben? Why are—” I’m interrupted by the older one opening the door. “We got it,” the man looks at me, my knees glued over each other by sweat.
Ben nods and stutters, “Okay, give me a —give me a second.”
The man looks at Ben, then to me, and he nods. “One minute.” He walks out.
Ben’s quiet. The silence causes a pressure to build in me like unwanted water pressure against my lungs.
“Did—” I begin.
“He—” he offers.
We start in unison. I shake my head, “You go.” “He wasn’t staying home last year, ” he says.
I scoff, “He was sick, Ben. I was here every day with him except on—” He cuts me off, “Tuesdays?”
I nod. “Right…” I trail off and leave it, unsure if I want to know more. Let Michael stay clean in my memory, holy and unblemished, a sacrificial lamb to cancer’s crucifixion.
“He was with me on Tuesdays, ” he says into the molding silence of the room. He hangs his head again, as if to apologize for his presence in a place he was uninvited to.
I stare towards his silhouette and let the quiet saturate my confusion. If I’m quiet long enough, maybe it will all go away and Michael will come back. Maybe the grief won’t find me, like the seekers never could when I was quiet long enough during hide-and-seek. I was behind the door the whole time.
“Mike was opening—” Ben starts but is interrupted by the older one who pushes open the door again.
“Come on, man, we need to go.”
Ben looks at me, his brow tense, tiny valleys forming on his forehead. He sighs big. He nods and as he leaves, drops a piece of paper on the ugly carpet.
When I hear the click of the front door I press my hands against my temples and the base of my neck, trying to massage away the anxiety and confusion and trauma forming in real time. It doesn’t work. I crawl over to the piece of paper Ben dropped and unfold it. One. Two. Three folds. I press my left hand across my forehead, the sweat sticking my skin together. I stare at the words on the paper.
He’s still here, it reads.
I look at the moon out the window as I breathe in small inhales. I was wrong. The moon isn’t a waning crescent. It’s a waxing crescent. The moon isn’t getting smaller, it’s getting bigger.