The Emptiest Room

by Kyle Lang
 

Keir still hadn't gotten the chill out of his system; the heater was blasting full and hot, but for some reason Keir couldn't shake the icy quiver that ran down his back. He was dreading going home. Tonight was going to be another one of those silent masquerades between him and Emily and he knew it. Sometimes he just wanted to scream at her, shake her, but he could just tell how successful that would be.

Get up, Emily! That's enough of this, he would say. She would peer at him from under that blue plaid blanket with a cold stare like an icy Montana wind.

I mean it, Em, get up! We are going to talk about this for once!

There is nothing to talk about, she would finally offer, speaking to him directly.

Yes, there is! Now, for the love of God, can you at least sit up and look at me?

You want me to look at you? To look…at you? You really want to do this, huh, Keir, the master of cheerful silence wants to talk? Well, here I am Keir…talk! Tossing back the blanket Emily sits upright and Keir can see that she is still wearing the same pajamas.

We can't go on like this Emily. We can't just sit in this house and not talk to each other and not have lives and never come to grips with what happened.

What happened, Keir, huh, what happened? Can you say it? Can you? I've never once heard you say a word about it, so I'm REAL interested in what you have to say. You weren't there, Keir. Once again, when everything goes down, you weren't there for me, for…

How can you say that? I was next to you every step of the way, you were never alone.

That's not what I'm talking about Keir. That's not what I AM FUCKING TALKING ABOUT!!! You didn't say a word to me. You never told me things were going to be ok. You never said you loved me and would continue to love me, even after…

How in the hell was I supposed to say anything, the only thing you ever did was cry when you looked at me. I felt like this whole thing was my fault! Do you know that? Do you know that you make me feel like a fucking villain, or a thief, in my own house, in my marriage? Huh?

Fuck you! Why does it always have to be about you? You have no idea what I am feeling. I'm stuck, Keir. I'm stuck here, paralyzed, not breathing, wishing that something will change and it never does. I'm going to feel like this for the rest of my life. I will never be ok, and…and…I can't look at you. Just get out. Get away from me.

Like all confrontations with Emily, Keir would just be shuffled out of her presence. Banished to the barn, he would sit alone. He never cried, but he came close a couple of times. Every time he would feel the swelling of tears in his eyes, he would feel his stomach cramp down and his teeth grind. He wouldn't surrender. Until the very end, he would not break.

Keir shook the thought out of his head as he pulled into the long gravel driveway and over the bridge above the creek; that black body of water moved with such velvety quickness. A deception to the eye, the creek embodied his country life dreams of family, land and space, but beneath its surface it flowed angry.

Kier parked in the driveway and noticed the hay loft door swinging in the wind, occasionally banging up against the side of the barn. As he cut the lights on his Ford Ranger, the driveway was consumed in darkness.

Kier collected a few things from the passenger side of the truck in the dim light of the overhead before opening the door to the frigid December air. He kept glancing up at the hatch leading to the hay loft. With cell phone and cigarettes tucked gently in his coat pockets, he ventured out into the waiting cold and stood for just a moment, puzzled, watching for anything unusual from the black void that lie behind that aperture in the barn wall.

The property was an isolated piece of country surrounded by ritzy suburban neighborhoods and the barn hadn't been a working barn for decades. The riding lawn mower had been abandoned for months now and was huddling under a thin, green tarp as if insulating itself from the cold. The workbench was covered with wire and clasps from a fencing project Kier never finished. The creek still stood as an open hazard to unwitting animals and small children.

The path to the house was frozen and the dirt walkway felt harder than concrete as Kier passed into range of the motion detector; he was greeted with a face full of halogen light. He squinted past the light and made his way up onto the covered porch. The rain had been light this year, but still there was green moss poking up on his roof. He could see the small tendrils reaching and grasping as they worked to spread across the shingles, but now they lay dormant, jacketed in silver from the freezing weather. Kier shook his head and sighed. He had moved into this house for a couple of months because the rent was so cheap, but a couple of months had turned into a year, and then two, and now he was coming up on his third birthday within these constricting walls.

Kier walked to the far side of the porch to the rusty file cabinet on the other side. He opened the second drawer down and found its normal contents: a pair of old Columbia sneakers for working in the yard and the key to the house. He picked up the leather keychain and palmed it as his fingers searched for the one acrobatic key. It was cold against his finger tips.

As he approached the door, he saw where the door and the jamb had divorced themselves from each other. A half-inch sliver of light could be seen through the crack. As he looked at the light pouring out, Kier imagined the light as heat and was thankful that he didn't have to pay utilities in this place. The key made a soft click that he knew Emily was listening for with dread.

He cracked the door just a bit and walked back to the rusty file cabinet and looked for a moment through the trees and into the streetlight glow of suburbia in the distance. It was a cold, oppressive silence that made him shiver for a moment before he dropped the key back into place and shut the file drawer.

The cold bit a little less as he passed the threshold of the door, but the first thing to catch his eye was a small hole in the ceiling about halfway down the hall. Kier knew there had been a small leak sometime earlier in the year and was distressed to find that it must have been worse than he guessed. We have to move!

"Hey, baby," Kier said as he hung his jacket on the coat rack on the dining room wall. It was a multipurpose great room; the only division between the living room and the dining room was the line where the parquet flooring met the purple carpet worn thin and cold as paper.

"hey."

"How was your day," Kier asked trying to infuse each word with cheerfulness.

"fine."

"Yeah, anything exciting happen today?"

"hey kier, I was just getting to sleep…i have a headache, can you give me a couple of minutes."

"Yeah, sure, I'll just, uh, entertain myself for a little while." Emily hadn't even raised her head from the couch to speak to him. It was like a voice out of the abyss since he couldn't see her through the back of the sofa.

He knew on the blue corduroy sofa would be a lump of plaid wool. Emily would be buried underneath the blanket with it pulled up to her face, a crown of blonde-brown hair cresting out the top. This had been going on for a year now.

Keir crossed the room and leaned over the back of the couch to give Emily a kiss. Nothing, no movement, no turning to face him, even for a moment, she resisted even this small gesture.

Keir raised his head from kissing her hair and saw the scattershot of tissue on the coffee table and the floor around it. He crossed around the couch to the bathroom and retrieved the garbage can. Quietly, he began to pick up the moist, blue tissues and placed them one by one into the garbage can.

"keir," Emily placed her hand on his forearm, "just leave it. please, they're mine, i can handle it." For a moment, Keir got her eyes, just for a moment, they were there. Her eyes flashed gold, grey steel from underneath the blanket, but they were gone before anything was shared between them.

"Yeah, I know. I'm just… I'm just going to go outside for a little bit and take care of some stuff. Holler if you need me." Kier hung his head as he grabbed his coat off the rack on his way out the door. He passed out the front door and began crossing the frozen expanse of the front yard towards the barn.

Kier entered the barn and reached for the light switch. The barn instantly snapped into focus with the white light of the overhead fluorescents. Kier could see his breath as he stood there and the sterile light didn't lend any warmth. He could see the small piles of rusted nails and fencing brackets lying abandoned on the floor. Too late now.

Kier crossed to the small, green refrigerator and quickly removed a beer from inside. The door was covered with Magnetic Poetry that had been a gift from Emily when they first met. The door was filled with partial phrases like received the ripe summer fruit and flowering curiosity made spoil.

A long, breathless swig of his Amstel Light and Kier found himself casting around the barn looking for something to distract him from the inevitable barrage of questions that insinuated on his day-to-day life. Another pull off the small brown bottle. He needed to get up the ladder and into the hayloft so he could close that door. One more open throat gulp from the bottle and he was finished. He placed it in a white five gallon bucket with the rest of his empty barn beers.

There were two ways up to the second level hay loft: the ladder against the far wall and the moss-slick, shallow wooden stairs outside that weren't even outfitted with the luxury of a handrail.

The ladder to the hay loft ascended through a hole in the ceiling. Kier gripped the first 2x4 rung of the ladder and began his hand-over-hand ascent into the impending shadow.

The light switch lay across the loft on the far wall, near the exterior entrance to the stairs, and Kier made ready for his progression across the room with one forward, questioning foot. He eked his way across the room in this manner until he jammed his reaching right hand against the far wall. He only brushed strange objects out of his path twice, which seemed irregular for the state this room was in the last time he had bothered to look.

Once again, the room came blazing into focus from the overhead fluorescents as he flicked the switch on the wall. Kier stood blinking for a couple of seconds and then his breath left him. Kier was dumbfounded by the state of the loft.

Kier panned the loft in amazement. Pale blue furniture against the side wall, a mobile of pale felt animals hanging above the crib, and a diaper pail set just left of the changing table.

The crib was set up with amazing care. The sheets were Winnie-the-Pooh, the illustrations from the book, not the Disney representation. They were so soft, but cold up here. Keir ran a trembling hand over Christopher Robin and Pooh overlooking the Hundred Acre Wood. He could almost see a father and a son in them, watching the sunset in the distance and talking of unimportant things while really sharing things that were.

The mobile hung from the sloping roof beam of the barn. Keir barely cranked the key and it played a slow chiming of notes, like icicles being struck. Keir handled each of the colorful felt animals with a tender caress from his right hand. He took them in his cupped hands as if to offer some warmth and relief from this relentless exposed air.

Powder blue, the blanket draped the rail of the crib in equidistant angles. There was a small tear near the satin-like edging of the blanket. It was the size of a car door latch, where carelessness had allowed it to be snagged. It was clean now. Pristine. Even the wrinkles were gone from the suckling corners. The changing table was placed just a foot away from where Kier had stood when he first entered the loft. One searching hand would have found it easily from where he had stood.

Kier softly picked up the cotton blue blanket draping the crib rail and pressed it to his face. The hot flush of anguish rose like a tide inside of him. The blanket smelled freshly laundered. There was a hint of baby powder as well. His knuckles were white from the cold and the pressure of his crushing grip on the blanket. His shoulders shook from the silent sobs escaping him now. She didn't even wait for me, Kier thought.

Kier descended the ladder without bothering to turn the light off in the hay loft or closing the barn hatch. He paused at the base of the ladder tired and weak. He tried to compose himself.

Kier reached inside the fridge and took another Amstel Light from inside. He opened it with the lighter lying on the tool bench and then reached up to the top shelf of the workbench and pulled down an old coffee can. Inside, amongst all the mismatched nuts and bolts, was a pack of Camel Lights.

He lit the cigarette with a trembling hand and inhaled deeply. He exhaled and took another frantic deep inhale. Only after half the cigarette was gone did he finally allow his hand to drop away from his mouth.

The beer left a metallic, bitter taste in his mouth and he abandoned the half-empty bottle on the workbench. Kier dropped the cigarette onto the packed earth of the barn floor and ground it out with the sole of his shoe. Only a small issuance of dust moved in the night air. His hands were beginning to ache from the bitter cold of the beer bottle and the night air. He rubbed them together.

Across the yard in the large picture window of the house, the drapes were pulled aside and Emily stood watching him. She was slumped on top of herself as if her joints no longer aligned from all her time on the couch. She looked like she was suspended by a power that was not her own. Her shoulders hung low and caved her chest inwards, so it appeared hollow.

Their eyes met across the frosted distance of the yard and rested for a moment there. Kier wondered if Emily could see the remnants of his tears in the light from across the driveway. He stood there cold and shaken, waiting for some kind of sign from her. Keir remained frozen; amazed that, finally, she would look at him. Across the hazardous distance of the frosted yard, a moment was shared, however brief time actually was in the measure of a clock was irrelevant, for it seemed to Keir that this look, across time and distance, told him so much he had never known about his own wife.

Then, Emily turned and let the drape fall to cover the window. Kier could see her shadowy figure turn away from him and settle back on the couch.

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