where is your wife

Dorianne Emmerton

After parking the car, you rush ahead of your son to unlock and get in the house before him. You check the kitchen, living room, bathroom and bedroom, before the eight-year-old slams the front door and kicks his shoes off into the middle of the floor. You’re breathless from running up and down the stairs, and you haven’t found your wife. She isn’t here living and breathing, and she isn’t here as a corpse either.
She is elsewhere, and there’s no way to know if she’s alive or dead. She could have thrown herself off the bridge above the highway. You wish you’d found a place to live farther from the Don Valley Parkway, the sound of traffic all night long a siren song to the suicidal. She could have stepped off the platform in the subway station. It happens all the time—when there’s a delay due to an “incident at track level” everyone knows what that means. You send her a quick text message: We’re home, where are you? Your kid shrugs off his backpack and jacket as he walks through the living room. Along with his shoes, they make a trail between the door and the couch.
“Put away your things,” you call after him, but he glares at you, the whites of his eyes bright with contempt, and it doesn’t feel safe to insist.
Instead, you shower. It’s your third shower today, but it’s August and the humidex has been in the thirties all week. Your under-arm and under-boob and crotch areas are all damp and rank. It’s climate change; it’s the ever-expanding network of condo towers, blocking the lake breeze and eating up green spaces where trees cast shade. Or maybe perimenopause is making you feel the heat more. You gaze at the crane outside your bathroom window, its current project an unfinished structure of concrete and rebar. It’ll be done by autumn. Someone’s tiny balcony will be right there, where they can peer in while you pee.
The shiny new condos have air conditioning, but your townhouse was built in the 1970’s and you’ve never had the money to put in central air. You’re lucky you were able to buy anything at all before real estate skyrocketed, but you’ve been house-poor ever since. A never-ending series of remortgages. By the time you get to the living room, sweat is trickling down your back again. The entire couch is taken up with your son’s body, his Pokémon cards, his video game paraphernalia. He looks bigger, his ankles propped up on one arm rest, his head on the other. He used to fit inside the arms.
“What do you want for dinner?” you ask.
He snarls, not bothering to talk or tear his eyes away from the screen where he’s making an animated armoured figure run and jump and shoot. Maybe you’d have a better relationship if you could spend time with him playing video games. But you’ve tried, and your hand-eye coordination is bad, and he doesn’t let you try anymore. You’re an impediment to his progress, or, as he puts it when he uses words, “You suck. Go away.”
A notification chimes from your phone, and your heartbeat is momentarily erratic, but it’s not your wife. Just spam.
In the kitchen, you grab a fresh dish towel to sop up the sweat underneath your breasts. Throw it over your shoulder, make a mental note not to use it on any dishes.
For a minute, you contemplate the cereal boxes. That would be the easiest solution for dinner. Your son likes cereal; you wouldn’t have to bear his disgust at your cooking. You wouldn’t have to turn on the stove in this weather. It would take no time. But your wife could come home.
The last time you suggested cereal for dinner, she started crying and said, “You’re trying to make me feel guilty for not wanting to cook myself,” so you had to cook then, and you have to cook now. There’s not enough room on the credit card to order in.
Put water on to boil for pasta. Check the living room. Your son is still playing video games, but he’s grown two sizes larger. The hem of his pants is mid-calf, as if he were wearing clam diggers, and his shirt is painfully taut across his chest.
The shiny new condos have air conditioning, but your townhouse was built in the 1970’s and you’ve never had the money to put in central air. You’re lucky you were able to buy anything at all before real estate skyrocketed, but you’ve been house-poor ever since. A never-ending series of remortgages. By the time you get to the living room, sweat is trickling down your back again. The entire couch is taken up with your son’s body, his Pokémon cards, his video game paraphernalia. He looks bigger, his ankles propped up on one arm rest, his head on the other. He used to fit inside the arms.
“What do you want for dinner?” you ask.
He snarls, not bothering to talk or tear his eyes away from the screen where he’s making an animated armoured figure run and jump and shoot. Maybe you’d have a better relationship if you could spend time with him playing video games. But you’ve tried, and your hand-eye coordination is bad, and he doesn’t let you try anymore. You’re an impediment to his progress, or, as he puts it when he uses words, “You suck. Go away.”
A notification chimes from your phone, and your heartbeat is momentarily erratic, but it’s not your wife. Just spam.
In the kitchen, you grab a fresh dish towel to sop up the sweat underneath your breasts. Throw it over your shoulder, make a mental note not to use it on any dishes.
For a minute, you contemplate the cereal boxes. That would be the easiest solution for dinner. Your son likes cereal; you wouldn’t have to bear his disgust at your cooking. You wouldn’t have to turn on the stove in this weather. It would take no time. But your wife could come home.
The last time you suggested cereal for dinner, she started crying and said, “You’re trying to make me feel guilty for not wanting to cook myself,” so you had to cook then, and you have to cook now. There’s not enough room on the credit card to order in.
Put water on to boil for pasta. Check the living room. Your son is still playing video games, but he’s grown two sizes larger. The hem of his pants is mid-calf, as if he were wearing clam diggers, and his shirt is painfully taut across his chest.
“We need to go shopping,” you say, tugging at his pants.
“Don’t touch me!” He slaps your hand and it stings.
There’s a fizzing sound and a burning smell coming from the kitchen, so you run back. The water is boiling over. You turn the heat down so it’s simmering and notice the time on the microwave clock. Your son should have been in bed an hour ago. This happens too often, and no child can excel in school if they are chronically under-slept. If he doesn’t do well in school he won’t go to university, get a job, move out.
You wonder again if your wife is alive, then slap your forehead to push the thought away. You have to make dinner. Children can’t excel in school if they are under-slept, or underfed.
The pasta is in the cupboard above the oven and you’re a short woman, so you need to climb up the step ladder, but just as you’ve grabbed the dry goods container, your phone chimes again, startling you. You drop the jar of pasta into the pot, and boiling water splashes up your torso. The can of cooking spray falls in too, and that might explode, so you reach into the pot to fish the can out.
There’s a split second of calm silence before the pain kicks in.
You stagger backwards off the stepladder, slip in the cooling water on the floor, crack your head on the cupboard. A sharp spike of pain in your skull sings along with the burning of your torso and hand. Wriggling around on the wet floor, you tear the soaked clothing off your scorched body.
“I’m hurt!” you call. “I need help!” But the high-pitched gaming noises from the living room don’t stop, syncopated swing rhythms, a “boing” every time your son hits the button to jump. Large red blisters bloom on your upper body, your hand.
You roll onto your unburned side and manage to get up onto your knees. The phone is what startled you—it could be your wife. Maybe she could help. You paw it down from the counter, clumsily drawing your unlock pattern. A drop of blood runs off your nose onto the tempered glass.
I’m home, the message from your wife says. Making dinner. Where are you?
You turn your head wildly back and forth, scouring the kitchen, as if she might be crouched on top of the refrigerator, or peeking out from a cupboard. No one is there. You stagger out to the living room, holding your right arm in front of you so the damaged skin doesn’t accidentally brush against a wall.
“Have you seen OM?” you ask. ‘OM’ is a cute joke, an acronym for ‘other mother’ so either you or your wife could talk about each other with your son. But it seems ridiculous now; a syllable about meditation, which has become fraught and fearful since her mental health began to spiral. Since you started worrying about what she might do when you weren’t watching.
“No! Where is she?” Your son is fully grown, a patchy beard on his chin, man-spreading across the couch. He tears his face away from the TV to look at you. His eyes are still too bright, the whites showing all the way around the iris. “Oh my god you’re naked! Disgusting!” he howls, and throws a video game controller at you. It lands on the swollen side of your body and the burn blister breaks, pus running down your hip.
A sob erupts from your mouth, and your son yells, “Everything makes you cry! Grow up!”
Was he ever a sweet baby you rocked to sleep at night? Did he ever give you a gap-toothed grin as you caught him at the bottom of a slide? Did you and your wife ever swing him between your clasped hands?
And anyway, where is she?
You hear her singing. Before you had a kid, you used to go with a group to the weekly karaoke night at the local pub. That was back when you had friends, but your friends all stayed childless and now you don’t know them.
“Can you shut her up?” your son calls to you. He doesn’t like singing.
The sound is coming from upstairs. You climb slowly, gripping the banister, dripping tears and snot and blood onto the carpet. Upstairs, the singing reverberates, as if this were a vast music hall, not a cramped hallway in a tiny townhouse.
She’s singing in the bathroom. A bathroom is somewhere people kill themselves, with sharp blades and warm water. She could be in there, floating in a tub of pink liquid, blank eyes staring at the mouldy ceiling.
You hesitate, then take a deep breath, inhaling a drop of blood that had been hanging from your nose. Metallic mucous slides down your throat. You open the door.
Water is flooding over the side of the bathtub, but there’s no one in the room. You turn the faucet off and check why the overflow drain didn’t work. The hole is stuffed with a cloth. You pull it out and recognize the blue and gold pattern; it’s one of your wife’s headscarves. She wore it at your twentieth wedding anniversary party. Your son had just graduated high school and resented your anniversary stealing his spotlight.
Why shouldn’t you both celebrate twenty years of making it work, of sticking together through a series of crises—mental, financial, career—and finding moments of joy. Twenty years of carefully carving out boundaries, talking out conflict, making compromises. Twenty years, eighteen of them focused so much on your son, and not enough on each other.
You remember friends mingling in the rented hall, disco ball flashing as middle-aged people made middle-aged dance moves to decades-old pop songs. You thought your son would be sullen all night but then he made a speech about how your family came through troubled times with love for each other. He said you were both OM, so together you were OMOM, which is momo backward, and on cue, a delivery person from your favourite Tibetan restaurant brought in a party platter of momos, fresh-made, meat and vegetable.
But that was then, and now you’re standing in the bathroom naked and covered in an array of bodily fluids, holding a sodden headscarf. You toss it in the laundry hamper and gently clean yourself with a washcloth. Your burns throb and your head aches. Your son is eight and you’ve been married for ten years. The head wound is making you hallucinate.
Your phone chimes and you pick it up from the back of the toilet and draw your unlock pattern. It’s your wife. Just gave kiddo a bath and put him to bed. Where are you?
In the mirror, your eyes are bruised and your scalp is split. Blood catches in the the wrinkles of your eighty-year-old face. You back away slowly, then flee to the bedroom.
Very carefully, you lower a loose dress over your wounded body. There is a depression in the bed on your wife’s side, as if she is lying there. You walk to the end of the bed, looking up at the human-shaped dent in the duvet. If she were there, maybe you would climb up on your knees, put her thighs over your shoulders, and bend your head with a sly smile.
But she’s not there.
The video game noise from downstairs is deafening, a tinny treble that never heard of bass. It hurts your ears. You should make sure your son’s bed is made; it’ll be time for him to sleep soon. You traverse the hall and put your hand on his bedroom’s doorknob, but it burns as if there were a fire on the other side.
Now both of your hands are wounded.
The video game noise, a simple keyboard refrain compressed through 8-bit computing, gets louder, unbearable. Your skin is on fire, and where is your wife? You scream, harsh and uncontrolled, hurting your throat, and kick the door in.
The room swirls in circles that change direction every second, and every change in direction is a change in decoration. There is a room with posters of dogs in police uniforms and a red toy trunk, and a room with posters of elves with green hats and arrows with a bookshelf of spaceship constructs, and there is a room with posters of scantily clad women and shelves of adventure novels, and there is a room full of garbage and dirty laundry, and there is a room with holes kicked through the walls, and there is a room that is completely empty and smells of dust and decay. The cyclone isn’t just optical, it’s palpable, with a gravitational force pulling at you, sucking you in.
You shut the door with great effort.
The banister is dry when you grip it and your hand is, too—the windstorm of your child’s room dried any residual wetness from washing. Your scorched side and split scalp still cause great pain, but everything is better away from that madness.
Downstairs, your child is gone. On the couch sit two men, boys really, teenagers. You know them; your boyfriend and your wife’s boyfriend in high school. You were dating them when you met. They each look a little like your son does now.
“What are you doing here?” you ask.
Todd, who was your boyfriend, says “Slut!” and throws a video game controller at you. It is grey and has three prongs. You remember him gripping it in his basement in 1997, battling Jason for endless hours, both ignoring their girlfriends, while she and you fell in love.
The controller hits a blister on your hip, which breaks, and pus starts soaking through your dress. You run away from the boys, figments of the past, into the kitchen, where the pasta pot simmers on the back burner. Maybe you could still make dinner and save the day. Surely your wife will be home soon, and she’ll be hungry.
You put a second, smaller pot on low heat and pour in pasta sauce. There isn’t much to do now. You try to wait, but you’ve always been impatient. Curiosity draws you back into the living room.
Todd and Jason are still there. “Fuck me please,” says Todd, tenderly, but you have fucked him before and it was fine, but only just.
“This is your fault!” screams Jason.
The first time your wife, who was not your wife at the time, attempted suicide, it was after Jason found you two kissing, and broke up with her, and told everyone at school that you were lezzies. She had therapy, got better, asked you to be her girlfriend officially. You thought her mind had healed for good, but you were wrong. When your son’s behaviour deteriorated, so did her equanimity.
You run back to the kitchen.
On the counter there is a perfect salad. In a large glass bowl, a mix of fresh greens tenderly hold bright red cherry tomatoes, sumptuous slices of avocado and red onion, and a peppering of pepitas. It is the platonic ideal of a salad. You approach it reverently. This is a salad your wife prepared; you recognize her ingredient choice and the angle of her slices. You raise a fork, but then you’re you’re poked sharply in your side, bursting more burn blisters.
Your son is four years old and poking you with a video game controller. You thought he was too young for a game system, but it was such a relief when you and your wife relented, and then each day, for the hours you allowed it, he ceased demanding things from you, insulting you, taking all his frustration out on you.
But during those few hours of peace the relief gradually transitioned into dread of his reaction when told to turn off the game. You don’t wear tank tops outside the house because his teeth-marks are permanently scarred onto your upper left arm.
That was the second time your wife was suicidal, when your son sat back laughing with a red liquid mouth. She went to the emergency room, not you.
He pokes your side again, sticking your dress against the raw under-flesh of a broken burn blister. “Sweetie, please stop doing that,” you say with false calmness. “Sit at the table, okay? I’m about to bring dinner out.”
“I’m not gonna eat that shit!” he screams. “That’s disgusting!” He spits in the salad. You lose your fake composure and snatch the controller from his hands, smash it on the counter, and it cracks open. He opens his mouth wider and wider, until his face is nothing but one big mouth, glistening teeth and yellow tongue, and he howls so loud you clasp your hands over your ears, stumbling around him and out to the living room.
His shoes are lying in the middle of the floor and you trip and land on your stomach, the wind knocked out of you. He looks down from the couch as you gasp. He’s now fifteen years old, face full of acne and disdain.
“OM’s looking for you,” he says.
“Where is she?” you ask, shrill and panicked.
He shrugs and turns his face back to the screen. “Why don’t you check in hell?” he suggests. The beeping and booping of the game noise is the same pitch as your manic laughter.
You try to get to your feet, but all of your burn blisters are broken and the fabric of your dress is congealing into your ruined skin. Rivulets of sweat add salt to your wounds, and your head is bleeding from two different places now: where you cracked it against the counter and where it was hit with a controller. Your body refuses to rise. Instead, you crawl to the kitchen where the pasta water is boiling over again. The salad has rotted and is covered with flies. Your knee gently bumps something. It’s the canister of cooking spray.
Why not check in hell?
You pick up the canister and toss it into the boiling water.
The ensuing explosion is on the scale of a summer blockbuster, and you don’t quite make it out of the house in time. The flesh on your back chars, a new and different burn, direct flame versus boiling water or hot metal. You fling open the door, leaving the epidermis of your hand on the doorknob. Glancing over your shoulder, you see fire eating through the walls, and the floors are flooding with water from the kitchen and pink water from the bathroom flowing down the stairs.
A person staggers toward you from the direction of the couch. He is a chimera, his face melting and reforming, shrinking and growing. He’s your son at four. Eight. Fifteen. Twenty-two. He’s Todd and he’s Jason. You slam the door before he reaches it and knock over the decorative planter on the stoop to find the hidden key beneath, lock the door. The monster on the other side pounds on it. You back away, lose your footing, tumble down the steps, earth from the upended planter and dirt from the ground grinding into your open sores.
You’re losing consciousness, and not sad about the prospect. You lay back on the ground, and as you do, your gaze moves up the wall of the townhouse. Your eyesight is fading, but the last thing you see is the terrified face of your wife in the bedroom window.
You no longer need to worry about where she is, and if she’s alive or dead. She’s Schrödinger’s wife. She’s in your house and the house on fire.
It’s almost funny, but you don’t have the breath to laugh. You close your useless eyes and let your awareness drift away into darkness.

Dorianne Emmerton grew up in rural Northern Ontario and now lives in Toronto, with loved ones and an ill-tempered black cat. She is on the organizing committees for the Brockton Writers Series and the Bi+ Arts Festival, and has a not-so-bad office job. Her short stories have been published in Luna Station Quarterly; Room Magazine; The Fantasist; Daily Science Fiction; The Bronzeville Bee; The Audient Void; Write Out Publishing; Nevertheless (Tesseracts Twenty-One); and Ink Stains, Volume Seven. She also has a personal essay in the anthology A Family By Any Other Name: Exploring Queer Relationships.