Artifact by Arlene Heyman

Author:Arlene Heyman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

After the first week her worry and guilt about Charlie were so intense that she called—no answer, although it was ten thirty at night. She phoned the bowling alley—he’d quit. She phoned the house again at eleven thirty, and at midnight. When George turned off his reading light upstairs and after a few minutes began to snore, Lottie anxiously dialed the taxi company.

The night was warm and black, moonless with a few stars spaced far apart in the long, low-slung sky. There were no other cars, and she had the odd thought as the taxi moved quickly through the quiet, familiar streets that she was riding in a cemetery. She asked the driver to return for her in half an hour. “Don’t forget, you hear?”

Alone she stood still as a stone before the totally dark house. Why should she feel uneasy? She’d lived here, they’d conceived their child here. Afraid she’d fall in the dark, she moved slowly up the walk as if she were an old person, fishing in her pocketbook for the small flashlight she always carried. At the front door she rang several times—her husband was a heavy sleeper—and although she heard the double bell chime unmistakably, she knocked anyhow. After a while, she went down the steps and picked her way over the unmown front lawn around to the back of the house, where she pushed in the kitchen buzzer and held it down—it made that grating noise—until it hurt her finger.

Lottie walked up the gravel driveway, pebbles scattering and crunching under her feet in the still night. She shined her flashlight at the garage window, then cleaned a pane with a tissue: a lawn mower and a shovel were inside, or maybe it was a pitchfork, and also their two old bicycles.

No car.

At least he wasn’t stubbornly pretending not to hear her.

Nor was he dead in the garage, slumped over the steering wheel, the engine running.

Where was the fucker? As she walked back across the front lawn and up the stoop, she bet he wasn’t sleeping on anybody’s living room couch, his crap in suitcases.

She unlocked the front door, smelled the dark dank air. As she felt for the hall light, something moved in the shadows near the slipcovered chair. “Charlie! Charlie!”

The house had developed a panicked echo.

Whatever had scuttled away was small, maybe a mouse. Turning on the lamps in the living room, she kicked a few times at the skirt of the upholstered chair, then returned to the front hall and padded up the carpeted stairs to the silent second floor, the unmade, empty beds. She opened her husband’s bureau drawers—empty, too. Was this an abandoned house? In the bottom drawer she found large knots of unsorted clean socks, and several undershirts and shorts mixed in with unfolded pillowcases and towels.

She went into her daughter’s room and made the bed.

There was old stinking piss in the toilet bowl. She turned on the faucet in the bathtub and the water spasmed out brown.

To warn

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