The Winter We Didn't Speak

The woman sleeping beside me had become a stranger in slow motion, a kind of emotional zombie who still made coffee in the mornings and folded laundry on Sundays, but who hadn't really looked at me in six months. I'd catch her sometimes standing at the kitchen window, staring at nothing with those dead eyes, and I'd wonder which of us was actually haunting this marriage.

Our daughter Madison's baseball glove sat on the mudroom shelf, gathering dust since she'd left for college last fall. That orange leather had absorbed years of sweat and summer and "I love you, Daddy" shouts from the outfield. Now it was just dead skin, like our marriage.

I sat at the kitchen table with Mr. Whiskers, the cat Madison had begged for and abandoned when she moved out. The old tomcat headbutted my hand, demanding affection with the straightforward hunger of an animal who'd never learned to play emotional games. I scratched behind his ears and thought about how the cat received more genuine physical contact in a week than my wife offered me in months.

"You going to that thing tonight?" she asked from the doorway, not meeting my eyes.

"The baseball banquet?" I said. "Madison wants me there."

She nodded once, already turning away. "Have fun."

The orange slice I'd been eating tasted like ash. Outside, the November sky was the color of a bruise, and I realized with sudden clarity that my wife hadn't been sleeping beside me in weeks—she'd been lying next to a space she used to occupy. I was the one haunting this marriage, and neither of us knew how to make the ghost leave.