With the car still on the driveway burning fumes, the father came into the house. He’d thought of something he needed to tell the mother. He’d thought of this thing earlier while staring into the work computer and had meant to write it down but didn’t and now he was thankful it had reappeared, veined in his mind. It was an important thing. It was about the house.
The father could not quite say the thing aloud. The father slunk, eyeing for the mother.
The mother was not in the entry foyer, where in the early years she’d always met him coming in, her face engraved with home expression. As well, there, the father was used to seeing the family’s shoes all taken off and stacked in order, as the mother was always a stickler for unsmushed carpet, but in recent weeks she’d stopped bothering to take hers off and so the son had too. The mother and the son both owned several pairs. The carpet was minced and feathered, brained already here and there with darker clot—some slush, some blood, some body oils, a few bits meant to have been eaten. There were so many kinds of stains it looked like more than just the four of them in there, living. Three. Three of them, not four, the father corrected in his head.
The mother was not in the kitchen raising dinner. The lights were on and the fridge was open, full of light and frigid breathing. The oven had been preheated, though there was nothing in it and nothing sitting wanting to get in. A set of knives was spread out on the table. One of the four long bulbs in the overhead fluorescent lamp was dead.
The mother was not in the hallway that connected the kitchen to the garage, though from the garage the father could see his car up near the glass, its headlamps stunted by the near door and treating the tiny windows with more light. The father moved into the garage cracking his fingers and opened the freezer door and shut it. No mother, but the father found a hammer on the ice. The hammer’s head was cold and solid, a thing that would always be. He touched the hammer to his face.
The father carried the hammer with him back into the family hallway with a set of school-made photos of the son ordered in ascending age on either side, a progression that ended with the most recent photos, which somehow still did not look the same as the son did now.
At a certain spot in the hallway on the carpet the father set the hammer down.
The mother was not in the laundry room where the floor had babbled sick with suds. Underneath the suds, the machine shook. The bubbles blew larger than most soap bubbles. The father stamped the sudding with his boot and heard it crackle like glass pellets.
The mother was not in the TV room, as far as the father could rightly see. There was a smell that curled the air. Some color not a color. The TV lay turned over on its face. The father called the mother’s name several times into several cracks the room had and left his voice wedged there behind him.
The door to the son’s room was closed and locked and inside he could not hear the son up or moving. Asleep, the father assumed, as the son would not answer, not for anything. He tried the knob again, again.
The mother was not in their bedroom. The bed was made and covered all with crumbling crap that’d come down off the ceiling, plaster popcorn. Something had been making the ceiling shudder in the evenings. The father’s feet felt triple-sized. The father sat down to take his shoes off, glowing. The father said the mother’s name some more. He was so tired. He knew that he should find her. He knew he couldn’t just go to sleep, though he felt the feeling flooding through him, weighing his limbs down, thickening his blood.
The father leaned back on his elbows on the mattress, nodding. His head felt wide as nowhere. His head had so much in it.
The father heard someone rummage in the bathroom.
Ah, there she is, the father said, relaxing.