How quiet the night. Tom and Freya had spooled in all sound, they sucked it up, hoarding it in their cells. Sound slept with them now, needing its rest, so that in the morning, it might again reverberate with force: singing, arguing, things dropping, breaking, feet always running, questions firing, Mum, Mum, Mummy. Kay could almost feel the pressure of silence upon her ears, like a plane descending. She had her own silence now; she was not pleading or nagging, admonishing. She did not hear her own voice rise with the words, Where are your shoes hurry up we’re late pick up your towel. She did not have to find the way to say Michael that did not accuse or accost or echo.
She tidied away the last of the dishes, wiped down the sink. Two small lights winked in the valley below. The darkness made distance immeasurable, irrelevant. There became here, hills and stars in atomic continuity with the lawn just beyond the window. A plane’s lights blinked overhead, and she imagined Michael, 30,000 feet above the Atlantic. He would have had his meal. He would be working on his laptop in the halo of his overhead light. Barbara was beside him, her arm touching his, the unfussy touch of their intimacy. Or she was waiting for him in Amsterdam or Dublin, wherever his flight hubbed through. She was issuing a flurry of ardent texts. She was shaving her legs.
And Michael was moving away, away. Kay had a strong impression of this separation, of the white house around her and the steel plane around Michael, the movement of the plane, the counter movement of the earth and the house upon it, so that she, too, was moving away from him.
She stood still, observing the kitchen around her, the true house barely visible beneath the chaotic, sticky overlay of her family. The people who lived here lived here impeccably. If things were noise, then they lived silently. In Michael’s absence, she began to notice; for it was as if their marital arguments, both spoken and furiously internalized, had created a white noise, filling the space.
Now she saw the bookless, dustless shelves. The effort to empty the rooms, not just of things but of their selves seemed more than was necessary for a summer rental—though Alice had assured her that the owners lived here year ’round. But how they lived: traceless, immaculate, mute, tidy as white mice, ceaselessly washing their neat pink paws.
For instance, there was no crap drawer of mystery keys, desiccated rubber bands, scratched sunglasses, an odd sock, batteries of indeterminate charge. Nor was there a closet piled with hurriedly folded bedding, nor bags of clothes long intended for Goodwill. The cutlery was arranged, the plates stacked, the towels arrayed. The flashlight had its hook by the door. The aesthetic was of rigid order.
The walls were bare but for a fading photograph thumbtacked above the sink: a cabin by a blue lake in a bowl of green hills; a perfect summer day. And in the back of the hall closet, Kay had found an old phone, dusty as a relic. There was a jack in the wall, but no connection.
She switched off the downstairs light and turned for the stairs. When Michael was here, she’d been the last one up, and she had done this—the turning off of the light. Now she hesitated, considering the lock of the door. She had never locked it. She had liked the feeling of not locking it. They were living where they did not need a lock. They were safe. Safe as houses, safe as unlocked houses. Wasn’t that what country people smugly asserted: we don’t need to lock our doors.
For who would come this way, so far out, along the pitch-dark dirt road to a house with nothing in it. Nothing but warm blood, she thought—she thought as a little joke, like watching Jaws before swimming in the sea, and so she did not lock the door.