And sure enough, Darren’s wife is gone. Somehow he knew she would be. He has a pretty good idea where she has gone. And with whom. Her car is gone. Her dresser drawers are empty. Half the cutlery is gone. Exactly half the dishes. Half the glasses and pots and pans. He finds this precision surprising. Out of character. His laundry has been done. Folded and put away. (This he finds truly shocking. In over twenty-five years of marriage, this has never happened.) She has left the stereo and all the records, thank God, but has taken the big console TV. There is a deep rectangular outline in the rug where it used to sit, looming over the living room. She must have had help with that.
Darren puts Steve Miller Band on the turntable, lowers the needle, and adjusts the volume. He stares at the soaring white horse with rainbow wings on the cover and smiles. Book of Dreams. He sits on the couch in the dark, the streetlight shining in through the bay window, and wonders how to feel. More accurately, he wonders if he should wonder how to feel. Or if he should just accept this beautiful, gradual deflation he feels inside his chest. This rolling back of the dark clouds in his head.
It has been clear to him for a long time now that it is possible to love somebody and at the same time know that if this person just, say, evaporated one day, just disappeared into thin air, your life would be thousands of times better. That was the simple truth. He doesn’t think it is quite the same as wishing someone dead. That would be too complicated. Too fraught. He had, however, wished her gone. And now she was.
He takes his clothes off slowly. They are grass-stained from the yard, clammy from the hospital, and cold from the walk home. It is a relief to have them off. He leaves them there on the carpet in a pile, underwear on top, and heads down the hallway to the kitchen. He stands naked at the sink and looks out the window at the dimpled yard. His handiwork. The sun is coming up, tinting the air all rosy gold. It is a new pink day, thinks Darren as the sun angles in through the window and his tears splash noisily, one by one, into the stainless-steel sink. They sound like this when they fall:
Pink! Pink! Pink! Pink!