a hundred years

The heat register came to life and groaned in the cold; so did the walls and floors of the house she lived in. Neither woke her; no, that was Jack, who raised up on his elbows at the unfamiliar sounds. "It's nothing," she whispered sleepily, and he slumped back onto the pillow. She refitted her head into the hollow pocket where his shoulder and chest met. "It's like living in a giant stomach," he mumbled, and she smiled to herself. Jack has come home, she thought. Where did he come from this time? She liked to listen to his stories. But she would wait, ask him later. For the moment it was dark and quiet and slowly getting warm, and she would keep it that way.

It had been almost a year since she had seen him. He told her when he arrived that he was afraid she'd have moved, and he wouldn't be able to find her. He said he was always afraid of that happening. She said, "You'd find me. You always do." He'd shook his head at her. "It's not really like that out here. I don't have radar. One day it's going to happen, and it's going to be the worst thing."

The morning came too soon. She woke before him, and left him in the bed. The sun came up; she stood near the window, cracked eggs in a bowl, picked out the pieces of shell that fell in, poured the whole mess out into a skillet. She felt him come into the room, felt the floor give slightly with his foosteps. She didn't look at him yet, but she could tell by the way he leaned in the doorway that he was studying her. Memorizing her. Like he always did when he was leaving.

"Not yet, okay," she said. She meant breakfast. She meant his leaving.

The floor bowed again as he shuffled out of the doorway and back to her bedroom. She heard the scratch of the zipper on his old duffel. The light went out of the window, and Eleanor's morning went gray. The last time he'd left, there had been promises and tears, and then a year had passed. The last time they'd eaten her scrambled eggs and she had happily observed that he was in no hurry to pack. The last time, he'd stayed for almost a week. This time, she had noticed when he came to her door late the night before, Jack seemed older. This time his leaving worried her. What if she was still here, and Jack was the one who never returned? She had never thought about this before -- he could die, she suddenly realized, and she might never know. A hundred years she might wait as this house caved in around her. A hundred years as it digested her.

He was back in the doorway, misshapen in her peripheral vision, his duffel bag a strange growth on his shoulder. She closed her eyes. "Not yet," she said again. "Maybe not so long this time," he said. Her skin seemed to tighten. Not yet, not yet. The floor creaked, and when Eleanor opened her eyes again, he had gone, and curls of smoke rose from the skillet. She wrapped a dish cloth around the handle and put the pan, blackened eggs and all, into the sink, and went to bed again. She pulled her pillow to her chest and, after a long while of staring blankly through the walls and at the empty world beyond, she drifted to sleep.