Josie and Jack by Kelly Braffet Page B

magazines for me. I didn’t really care about the magazines, but when he brought them to me I always read them, because I was so glad to have him home.
    Once, when he was gone nearly every night for six or seven hours at a stretch, it turned out he’d been working at the record store. After that I paid more attention to his disappearances, to see if they fit into a schedule, but they never did. There was no pattern to them. Sometimes something had happened beforehand that depressed him; sometimes nothing had happened, and he was depressed anyway; sometimes everything seemed fine, and I never suspected a thing until I woke up to an empty house. There was just the vanishing act, and then his return, bearing gifts.
    In the morning it was all right. In the morning I could pretend that the silence was actually peace and sit with my cup of coffee thinking calm, pleasant thoughts about the sheer freedom of getting to do exactly what I wanted. While the coffee brewed, I went upstairs for a book of word puzzles, which were more mind-numbing than any drug I’d taken. I spent two hours bent over the table, filling in little black and white boxes and breaking words apart. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, ate dry toast because we were out of butter, and drank coffee until my heart pounded and my nerves sang. When I’d exhausted the range of comfortable positions that the hard kitchen chair had to offer and the walls started to close in, I jumped up and began to clean: wiping down the counters, scrubbing the stove, cleaning the sink with scouring powder until my hands felt raw and chemical-soaked.
    Then the kitchen had nothing else to offer me. I drifted from room to room, never spending more than a few minutes in any one, touching things, picking them up, putting them back down. From the front porch into the parlor and then into the study, the basement, the downstairs bathroom, the dining room that we never used. I climbed the front staircase, also little-used, and stood in turn in the doorways of the upstairs bathroom, the first spare bedroom (where most of Crazy Mary’s few remaining possessions were kept under a well-picked lock and a badly hidden key), and then Raeburn’s room, with its reek of stale laundry and after-shave. In each new room I felt more and more like an intruder.
    I sat in Jack’s room for a while, perched at the foot of his unmade bed and flipping idly through a science-fiction paperback that I found on the floor, but I couldn’t read. I put on his Coltrane album, but that wasn’t enough to distract me either, so I went back downstairs and did it all over again.
    Then it was almost six o’clock. The sun was starting to set. Jack still wasn’t back. I started to catch odd movements out of the corners of my eyes and feel breezes in still air. Strange voices seemed to be having low conversations in other rooms, out of my range of hearing. The house was full of peculiar odors: unfamiliar cologne, cigarette smoke.
    I didn’t deal well with being alone.
    Eventually I fell asleep on my bed and dreamed that I was in a river, swimming. I didn’t want to be in the river, but I was trying to get somewhere and the river was the only way to get there. The world on the riverbank grew more alien every time I climbed on shore until I couldn’t climb out at all because I knew that nobody would know me, that nobody would even be able to see me.
    By the time I saw the twin beams from Jack’s headlights shine through the front window, sometime close to midnight, I’d finished crying and thrown up twice. I flew down the stairs and was at the door, near tears with relief, when he came in. His face was tired and he was holding a paper bag that smelled like Chinese food.
    “Hi,” I said and threw myself at him.
    He caught me, but only just, and then he pushed me lightly out of his way. His eyes were impatient.
    I brushed at a stray piece of hair that had fallen in my eyes, rubbed my cold cheeks, and tried to look