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I don’t say that to explain where she is. I say it to explain why I am down here, in the dark of the living room, watching the grandfather clock’s pendulum tick away the seconds she no longer marks. I say it because her name—the one she took from me, the one that still sits on our mail—has become a kind of spell. A warning label for the rest of the house.
I sit on the couch. The coffee cup beside me is cold. The novel in my lap hasn’t turned a page in an hour. This is the geography of our marriage now—vertical, stratified. She occupies the altitude of grief, and I occupy the basement of patience. There is a staircase between us. Seventeen steps. Each one a negotiation. my wife is upstairs serena hill
My wife is upstairs, Serena Hill.
Upstairs: the soft creak of the floorboard outside the nursery, even though the nursery has been a guest room for three years. Upstairs: the faint scent of the lavender shampoo she stopped using last October, now replaced by something clinical and unscented. Upstairs: the low murmur of a television playing a black-and-white movie she’s already seen a dozen times. She watches the same endings because beginnings have become too unpredictable. I don’t say that to explain where she is
My wife is upstairs, Serena Hill. And I am learning that love is not always a shared room. Sometimes it is the willingness to stay in the house, to keep the heat on, to wait for the sound of her footsteps padding to the bathroom at 2 a.m., knowing they will not come down. A warning label for the rest of the house
She is not coming down.
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