I don’t say that to explain where she is. I say it to explain why I am down here, in the dark of the living room, watching the grandfather clock’s pendulum tick away the seconds she no longer marks. I say it because her name—the one she took from me, the one that still sits on our mail—has become a kind of spell. A warning label for the rest of the house.
I sit on the couch. The coffee cup beside me is cold. The novel in my lap hasn’t turned a page in an hour. This is the geography of our marriage now—vertical, stratified. She occupies the altitude of grief, and I occupy the basement of patience. There is a staircase between us. Seventeen steps. Each one a negotiation. my wife is upstairs serena hill
She is not coming down.