He lifts two fingers to his nose and smells the child’s mother as his eyes grow wide in the dark of his kitchen. The clock on the oven reads 11:56 p.m. His chest. Everything feels tight. Is he having a heart attack? Is this how a heart attack feels? He must move. He paces the white-oak hardwood and touches things, the lever on the toaster; the stainless-steel handle of the fridge; the softening, fragrant bananas in the fruit bowl. He is looking for familiarity to ground him. To bring him back.
A shower. He should shower. He scales the stairs like a toddler.
He refuses to look at himself in the bathroom mirror.
His skin stings. He scrubs.
He thinks he hears sirens. Are those sirens?
He wrenches the shower handle and listens. Nothing.
Bed, he should be in bed. That’s where he would be if nothing had happened. If this was just another Wednesday night in June.
He dries himself and places the towel on the door’s hook where it always hangs. He fiddles with the way the white terry cloth falls, perfecting the ripple in the fabric like he’s staging a department store display, his hands twitching with an unfamiliar fear.
His phone. He creeps through the dark house looking for where he’s put it—the hallway bench, the kitchen counter, the table near the foot of the stairs. His coat pocket, that’s where it is, on the floor at the back door, where he’d dropped it when he came into the house. He brings the phone upstairs, his legs still feeble, and stops outside their bedroom door.
He can’t be in there.
He’ll sleep in the spare room. He lies down slowly on the double bed, hosting the care with which the linens have been smoothed and tucked, and places the phone beside him. He has an aching urge to call her.
What would he say? That he misses her? That he needs her? It’s too late.
But he stares at the phone anyway, imagining himself hearing the steady march of the ringtone while he waits for her to pick up. And then he closes his eyes and sees the child again.
Sometime later he feels the mattress tremble. Someone has joined him. He waits to be touched. But no, it’s a vibration. And then again. And then again. There’s a streak of tangerine light piercing through the room. He swipes his thumb across the reflection of his bleary face on the phone’s screen to answer.
The pained pitch of her voice. He has heard it before.
“Something terrible happened,” he says.