Habit
BY DEVON HALLIDAY
Every now and then—once every few weekends or so, but never more than twice a month—Nita sinks into nothingness. It’s a controlled sink, premeditated, and ends about six hours before Seth’s car pulls into the driveway and the garage grinds open and shut. He lifts his suitcase out of the trunk and edges his way through the door and there she is, Nita, smiling in nude lipstick, her hair freshly washed, with dinner on the stove or takeout still boxed up steaming on the island counter. “Hi, hon,” she’ll say, or something like it. “How was your trip?” And Seth will tell her about the ungodly lines at airport security, or the beleaguered mothers and their squalling sticky toddlers in the airport lounge, or the absurd construction blocking one of the big arterial highways that connects their suburb to the nearest city. “And what about you,” he’ll say, “what have you been up to?”
Nita has plenty to report. A grant application she’s been working late on, thanks to some last-minute ask from one of her least favorite clients. Drinks with Katy, a friend of hers that Seth has only met once and doesn’t know by sight. A long walk, if the weather was good. If not, a rewatch of some favorite movie. Work, emails, TV. Nita always has more alibis stored up than Seth ever asks for; they carry forward to the next time they’re needed. “You work too hard,” says Seth, massaging her shoulders, his fingers digging in between her bones. There’s always a moment, whenever he says things like this, that Nita is convinced he knows. But the moment passes, the takeout or homecooked dinner is consumed via forks that are then promptly washed, and they sit on the couch together, on their laptops together, doing things before bed, and then it’s the next day, and Nita wakes from a deep sleep, comprehensively refreshed.
When she thinks of it—which, between occurrences, isn’t often—she thinks of it as her habit. She likes the word habit, the guilty good cheer of it, and how it’s close enough to the word hobby that it feels robust with intent, something to cultivate, consciously, or in which to fondly indulge. Indulge is another good word. Every two weeks or so, when Seth leaves on one of his weekend-long work trips, she indulges in her little habit. She starts by listening closely for the scrape of Seth’s wheels against the outer curb, the final heavy settling of the garage door into its groove, her head cocked, her heart beating just a little faster than normal. She watches the car pull away. Then she waits another thirty minutes. Reads a few pages of something, drips water into an empty glass. There’s always the chance that Seth will dash back in for his chargers, his electric toothbrush, his passport. The page turns, the clock hand drops another tick. She takes a sip from her glass of cool water, full to the brim.
The thirty minutes thus elapsed, she roots around in the freezer, past the bags of frozen corn for chili and frozen berries for smoothies and frozen beef and lamb from the farmer’s market, and shifts out the two rolling bottles of vodka from the very back. These she tucks under her arm, and sometimes she skims the liquor cabinet for another bottle or two of something to take down. The water glass she carries pinched between her index finger and thumb. Her phone is extricated from her back left pocket and deposited faceup on the kitchen counter. Then Nita and her bottles travel down the carpeted stairs to the basement. The feeling at this moment is a cradled one, like a gift she hasn’t all the way unwrapped, some soft heavy rattling thing nestled in tissue paper. In the basement, under the dimmable LEDs, Nita lines up the bottles along the coffee table. She turns on the TV, the video game console that Seth got free from work, the two controllers which she brings to the coffee table too. If it’s winter, she burrows under a tangle of shag blankets. If it’s summer, she takes off her jeans and sometimes her shirt and reclines against the couch’s sticky leather, the AC whooshing down from a vent in the ceiling. The system blinks and blooms onto the screen and the game asks her if she’d like to start where she left off: lost in a forest sliced by shadows and sun, or scaling a turret high up in the cinematic clouds, or standing at the threshold of a woodsy dark-lit tavern, about to barter for something she needs. Nita hits play, and the world surges back to life.
*
Over dinner, Seth says, “You should invite Katy over sometime.”
“Here?”
“Yeah, I’d like to get to know her better. Seems like you two have become close this past year.”
“I guess we have,” Nita says, thinking back now on the things she and Katy have supposedly done together, the memories they’ve supposedly made. Movie matinee, wine tasting, winter hike, brunch. “I’ll ask her,” she says, and Seth nods, seriously, invested in Nita’s life or in her performance of it. “Maybe her husband will come too.”
“What does he do?”
“I honestly can’t remember. Medical research something. Not a doctor but something medical.”
“Hmm,” says Seth. The knife cuts the steak; the water glass thumps the placemat. They are facing each other on the left end of the six-seat table. “I’ve met Katy?”
“Just in passing, I think.”
“I’m glad you’re spending more time with your friends,” he says. “I worried about that, when we first moved here, that you wouldn’t find anyone.”
“I know.”
“Because of your high standards,” he says, his fork pointing at her. “Not because you’re hard to get along with.”
“I do have high standards,” she says, looking up from her plate after a moment to see Seth still considering her with an odd fond expression.
“You’re very easy to get along with, actually,” he says.
“Oh, well,” Nita says, cutting away the edge of fat that rinds her New York strip. “I try.” A bottle of red sits on the island counter, but neither of them has remembered it, seemingly, or risen for wine glasses. It will go back in the cabinet at the end of the night; the kitchen, as they turn off the downstairs lights and climb upstairs to their master bedroom, will be clean. “Did the meeting go all right, by the way? With the new clients?” Nita says, and for the next ten minutes the pressure of Seth’s attention is somewhat lifted, though again before bed he will regard her with that same curious smile, a smile that suggests she’s become a kind of cipher to him, one he’s maybe content not to solve.
*
The habit was, first, a single aberration, isolated and without precedent. Winter at the time, the deep afternoon of another cold snowless day. Outside, the few inveterate dog walkers were nudging their way past the living room window, bundles of scarves and overcoats and wind-whipped faces. Seth had departed earlier that day for some showy kicking-off-the-year conference in Seattle, a four-day absence that Nita historically might have filled with her usual social engagements, but this time she hadn’t bothered and Seth, fretting about flight delays and record-breaking meteorological lows, hadn’t asked. They kissed goodbye at the door, and Seth drove himself to the airport and texted when he got there. The plane took off at the scheduled time. “Going on airplane mode,” Seth added. “Love you, see you on the other side!”
Nita received his text on her phone and on her laptop, as she sat at their kitchen island in one of their swiveling barstools. She felt idle, but in an almost electric way. She had promised nothing to anyone this weekend; Seth, out in Seattle, would be too busy to call her. In their clean conventional home, she felt suddenly unwatched, as if the cameras had turned off. She opened the freezer and popped out an ice cube and set it between her teeth. The freezer that day was full of vodka from a Christmas party at which their guests had drunk more wine and fewer cocktails than expected. She worked on grinding the ice cube into shards and she remembered for some reason the video game Seth had most recently abandoned, a lush enchanted forest game with a gentle looping soundtrack whose motifs had echoed in her head ever since, just below the surface of memory. There was a quest Seth had declined, something about exploring the mountain caves for treasure or vampires or something. She had liked the look of those caves, fathomless and craggy and well-rendered, but Seth said it was a side quest and not important since he already had the whatever blade from the whatever forge. Nita had shrugged, gone back to her laptop. She never played, only watched.
It took her a while to connect it all properly, the console, the controller, the TV, the speakers, but after about ten minutes she was settled on the couch with blankets across her lap and a screwdriver on the coffee table, its ice cubes cracking quietly. The enchanted forest game prompted her to start over with a new character. Her phone was upstairs charging. As long as it stayed up there and she stayed down here, she could not be held accountable for anything.
That first afternoon, which bled into the night and then the morning and then the entirety of the weekend, felt deliciously wild and unrepeatable, an anomaly she could not square with anything she knew about herself. As Seth flew the five and a half hours to Seattle, mingled with his tech contemporaries at various open bars, and finally crashed in his hotel room at 3am (6am her time), Nita played the enchanted forest game for thirteen hours straight. She’d made her way via screwdrivers through the rest of their open carton of orange juice, and with that gone it made sense to likewise finish off the vodka. She brought an extra bottle downstairs so that she wouldn’t have to walk past her phone again. She drank steadily, enjoying how as the game got easier (she grew familiar with the controls, she learned how to spot the hidden doorways) it also got harder (the camera swam pleasantly, the buttons on the controller bumped together under her thumb). She accepted all sorts of quests. She had no idea what time it was; the finished basement had only one window, an inset rectangle tucked on the far wall above the washing machine, and it faced the upslope of a hill, so that her only clue to the passage of time was the slight color differentials in the shade of the unmelted snow past the window’s frame, white to gray to blue, and it was difficult to gauge these variations anyway because of how dull they seemed in contrast to the TV screen’s saturated glow.
Around midnight, though she would have guessed it was 3am at least, she fell asleep on the couch, the game not even paused, the camera panning idly around the greens and pinks of a mysterious glen as the game’s sun fell and rose and fell, and all the while that ghostly cheerful music played, soft piano notes and raindrop taps and the whistle of wind.
Nita woke with chapped lips. It was night onscreen, a few streaks of stars visible through the trees, and she could not have guessed within even six hours what time it was in her world. Her phone wasn’t there when she reached for it. Her character breathed back and forth within sight of the camera, a crossbow slung across her back. Nita’s headache was present but not obliterating, more of a marvel than an impediment. She retrieved her phone upstairs and returned Seth’s text, and the text of a friend who asked if she was free for lunch on Sunday, to whom she said she was not. Today turned out to be Saturday, 10:46am. She microwaved some week-old pasta leftovers, filled a thermos with filtered water, and brought both downstairs. Onscreen, her character stretched, rotated her muscled shoulders, hair fluttering slightly every twenty seconds or so, an animation that to Nita’s bleary eyes was briefly mesmerizing. There was still half a bottle of vodka upright on the coffee table. Nita pressed the controller stick forward, and the character walked.
In the two years since, her routine has not strayed far from this original model, though it has grown more efficient, honed to perfection. The eve of Seth’s departure, she prepares some large vat of a meal for them both and separates the leftovers into single-serving tupperwares. She brings last time’s empty bottles out to the curb for recycling, Friday morning, early dawn, just before the truck lurches its way up their hill. She has learned that it takes about three hours to restore the house to its default settings. Two hours to clear up the basement coffee table and vacuum the couch and wash and dry all the dishes she’s left in the sink; the last hour is for a long shower, and the reapplication of her basic makeup, and a final twenty minutes spent calmly scrolling her laptop and concocting alibis. Conservatively, she likes to give herself a six-hour window, the first three hours of which she usually spends sobering up.
Whether Seth suspects, she can’t decide. Certainly he asks with attentive care for the play-by-play of her entire missed weekend. She tells him whatever stories she’s prepared, and he listens thoughtfully and asks how she’s feeling on the whole, and she slices the outer edge off the truth and gives it to him: she’s feeling tired, or optimistic, or overwhelmed. And then she asks about the conference, and Seth tells her how the pitches went for whatever product his company has lately assigned him to proselytize, and which promising contact he strategically chance-encountered at the meet-and-greet, and what fresh development is rattling the tech world these days. He’s feeling good, or stressed, or excited. For all Nita knows, his side of the story is just as spurious as hers, two imaginary weekends traded back and forth. The elaborate tongue-in-cheek dance of their marriage. She tries to imagine what it is that Seth would lie to her about; the fact that she can’t think of anything means either that she knows him too well, or she doesn’t know him at all. She hands him the wet washed dishes and he dries them, and she wonders what conversation they’re actually having, underneath the one they keep acting out night after night.
*
In the weeks between Seth’s work trips, Nita carries out her usual life. She works from home, ghostwriting grant applications for various nonprofits, for-profits, and philanthropically minded corporate offshoots that can’t afford a full-time in-house grant writer, but that can afford the ad hoc short-notice services that Nita’s company provides. She receives a small retaining salary from the company plus a small fee per grant application completed, plus, occasionally and months after the fact, a discreet but hefty commission for the applications that successfully result in awarded grants. This is the kind of job about which no one has follow-up questions. At dinner with strangers she is met with comprehending nods, no matter how little she volunteers. This used to irritate Nita, but has since come to seem like a blessing. She sometimes looks around a roomful of people and feels, with a kind of spooked contempt, that not one of them knows the first thing about her.
The frequency of Seth’s trips decides the occasions of her habit. This, to Nita, seems like a reliably external limitation to what could otherwise be construed as an addictive pattern. Sometimes it’s three weeks between work trips and not two. She waits her twenty-eight minutes and descends into the screen, where there is always something left undone, some branching cavern she hadn’t fully explored, some thread she hadn’t fully tugged and unraveled. She forgets sometimes about quests she already completed, tries to complete them again. She likes to imagine that her character is the one drinking to confusion, entering the same tavern and asking the same question as last time, to the indifference of the barkeep, who sells the same enchanted cloak as her character already carries three of in her inventory. She stumbles into the forest’s misty daylight, regroups, pawns the cloak for coins. She returns to the vampire crypt to find that the vampires have scattered, some late-stage quest development she almost remembers forgetting. She battles past the cave skeletons, emerges at the mountain’s jagged feet, tries to remember which lake it is she’s supposed to search the shores of for someone’s lost treasure she promised to return—
And then it’s six hours to clean, to flush the vodka fumes out of her skin, to answer the emails she’s all weekend ignored, to line the empty bottles up in their neat invisible row behind the washing machine. Six hours is more than enough. Five is better, and comes with the thrill of a close call, her skin buzzing with urgency through all the usual checklist steps, vegetables chop chop chop and dinner on the stove. She’s not always sober when Seth comes home—she’s just back from drinks with Katy or the book club girls, one too many cocktails, hard to say no. She doesn’t drink much when they’re together, and he’s often hungover from the conference anyway. Really it’s only three hours she absolutely needs. Enough to strip back the basement, order takeout, wash all the tupperwares, and lengthily shower, settling herself on the couch just minutes before the garage door’s opening vibrates through the house. “How was it?” she says, standing up, kissing him on the cheek, holding in her exhale until they’re again a few feet apart. They go to bed early and all night the forest streaks her dreams, her perspective always hovering slightly above and to the right, things in the leaves she needs to look closely at, clues. The music turns shrill and persistent and she wakes up to find the bed empty, and the birds chattering in the nearby trees.
A whole month goes by with not a single trip—research and development, Seth says, the team preparing their pitches for the fall—and when finally he is called away it’s for only two days, a Thursday-Friday trip to meet with the New York team. Beforehand Nita decides it’s not worth it, not enough time to properly sink down into the sludge of herself and then climb back out again, but it’s fifteen minutes past the disappearance of Seth’s car down the hill when she’s rounding up her equipment and descending, booting up the console before she even deposits the bottles across the clean coffee table, because all month she’s had the treasure weighing heavy in her pocket, ready to be reclaimed by whoever sent her chasing after it in the first place. The screen blinks and there she is, breathing in and out, hair fluttering in the quiet dawn, like she’s been there patient all this time, not even feeling the weight of the crossbow where it hangs across her back, just waiting, like the days haven’t passed at all.
Nita plays gravely, focused, and when she resurfaces to check her phone it’s the customary three hours out from Seth’s arrival. But there is one loop left to close in the game, one secret passageway she needs to double back to down in the castle’s cellar, and so she plays a little while longer as the minutes stack high, becoming hours, two hours to arrival, one hour, until finally with thirty minutes to go she powers off the system and quickly trashes the evidence strewn across the coffee table and rinses the bulk of the dishes in the sink, and she’s still in the shower when Seth pulls into the garage. Looking for herself in the fogged-up mirror, Nita feels an acute dismay, not because of the close call, which wasn’t anyway the first of its kind, but because there was a moment, right before she stopped playing, when she hadn’t known for sure that she would.
*
“You’ve been busy lately!” Katy texts, but agrees to meet her at their old favorite coffee shop on Morris. Katy hasn’t reached out in months, and when Nita scrolls back in their text thread she sees scattered throughout her own concocted excuses, Katy’s invitations growing shorter and more perfunctory the more they’re declined. Standing up from her chosen table by the window, Katy is friendly, a little guarded. “We’ve missed you at yoga,” Katy says, and Nita is knocked off guard, having forgotten so completely about their shared yoga class that the regret she feels is fresh, unsublimated.
“I think I’ve just been letting it take over,” Nita says about work, her excuse to Katy for her long dissolve from their friendship. “You know how it is with remote work, you’re never really offline, if you’re not careful you end up spending the whole evening still answering emails. It always feels like if you can just check one more thing off your list…”
Katy prescribes work-home boundaries, a dedicated office space, enforcing a clock-in and -out time, a morning “commute”. Katy seems to take Nita at face value, which is disappointing. “But besides work,” Katy says, “how are you? How have you been?”
Nita has always found this to be an unfair question, massive in scope, obscurely intended. To questions like this she gives bite-sized answers, waits for her interlocutor to display real convincing interest, which they rarely do. To Katy she says, “I’ve been low-energy, honestly. Not that I’m unhappy, just that I’m not up for some of the socializing I used to do. I’d rather be home.”
“You’ve been working yourself too hard,” Katy says, sympathetic.
“Must be,” Nita says. This weekend is a convention in Philadelphia; today is information-gathering, so that, on Seth’s return Sunday night, she’ll have some news of Katy to report. “But what about you?” she says, and the hours pass easily enough.
*
But then Seth, the day before his Philadelphia flight, develops a fever. “Do you have any other symptoms?” Nita asks, solicitous, finding the Tylenol and the backup tissue boxes and the zinc cough drops. “The flight’s at 3pm tomorrow,” says Seth. “If I’m feeling better tomorrow morning, I think I’ll just go.” But all that night he shakes with chills, Nita wrapping her arms close around him to provide some slender heat, and he’s worse the next morning, and calls in sick to the company, cancels his flight. Nita drives to the grocery store for chicken stock and nearly slams into a car coming the opposite way, the elderly driver throwing up her veiny hands, enraged, like Nita is the worst person she’s ever come across in all her years of life. Nita offers a cold stare and an apologetic wave, but feels a low trembling in her mind’s back corners. She makes the soup and sits with her laptop as Seth plays some new game downstairs, another of the beta-testing ones he gets free from work, tries out for a few days, and then discards. Nita stares unseeing at her word document and thinks how she almost convinced him to go, how if he’d gone to the conference she would be playing her game right now, not listening to him play his.
The callousness of this thought, of wishing her husband was sick in another city instead of sick here at home, stuns her slightly, and then she thinks inside herself and tries to determine whether it’s the game or the drinking that she’s bitter about missing out on. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to be here, in this clean living room, on her laptop, inside her own mind. She doesn’t want to keep herself company. She doesn’t want to keep Seth company either. If she wants anything with any particular intensity it’s to disappear perfectly, tracelessly into the endless tunnel of the game, where no one can ask too much of her and nothing ever stops being fun.
She brings the soup downstairs and sets it on the coffee table. Seth is entombed in blankets, his nose raw and a trash can beside him piled with tissues. He has paused the game to thank her. “Do you have a lot more to do?” he asks, meaning for work.
“I could wrap things up in half an hour or so.”
“You should. I want you to try this game, I think you’d like it.”
“I don’t really…”
“I know, but I’m sick. You have to humor me.”
“That’s right, I do,” Nita says, kissing his forehead, which is warm. “I’ll bring my laptop down here.”
“Good. You work too hard.”
Nita wonders if hearing everyone say this is her punishment for not working very hard at all. She brings down a bowl for herself too, and her laptop, and a charger, and sits watching the screen with Seth, who every now and then reaches a hand across to rub her shoulder like she’s the one convalescing. She keeps her laptop open, and every fifteen or twenty minutes adds another line to the email she’s drafting.
“You should play for a while,” Seth says, handing her the controller. He’s slumped further against the couch, almost horizontal.
“We can just turn it off, let you sleep.”
“I like the distraction,” he says. So Nita dutifully takes the controller, learns the basic commands, works to solve the level Seth’s left off halfway through. When she looks over she can tell he’s most of the way asleep, though every now and then he will offer some mumbled supportive comment or heavily sigh. She plays for two hours, then shuts everything off, including the lights, and takes their bowls upstairs. She feels strange, like she has fallen out of one life and into another, both of them equally plausible candidates for reality, impossible to disprove. She is not sure what to do with herself, upstairs. She washes their dishes and then stands in the living room, idle, taskless, and for a moment this feels acceptably peaceful, before the long empty shadow of the weekend begins to loom.
*
Seth’s trip to Philadelphia is rescheduled: he’s missed the convention, but there are still a few contacts to grab lunch with, hands to shake, faces to put to names. He’ll be gone Wednesday through Saturday. “You should get dinner with Jen or Katy while I’m gone,” says Seth.
“Maybe,” says Nita, “we’ll see. I’m not feeling all that social. I might just stay in, watch a movie or two.”
Seth unfolds a t-shirt out of his suitcase, tucks it in his drawer, replaces it with another identical t-shirt. “I just worry about you,” he says, “all that time alone, staring at screens.”
“I know,” says Nita. “I’ll be all right. I’ll go hiking maybe.”
They kiss goodbye after coffee. The day is brisk, October sun fracturing the cloud cover, the neighbors’ kids bundled into scarves and set loose on the cul-de-sac. Nita is standing at the kitchen island, cleaning up a few spilled drops from the French press. The washing machine downstairs is making its usual flooding thumping sounds. Seth is on the road, fifteen minutes gone and seventeen minutes from the airport. As long as his flight leaves as scheduled, he’ll make it in time for his 1:30pm lunch with the communications director of a newly fledged VR company. Nita fills a glass of water from the Britta filter. She looks again at her dark phone. She has already read the reviews of the new Italian restaurant downtown, in case she decides to have gone there Friday night. She must remember this time to bring up the empty bottles in time for Friday morning pickup. She wonders what the recycling men must think of them and then decides she doesn’t care.
“Making good time?” she texts Seth. Her water glass has left a ring on the island’s clean marble. She wipes it away and then hears a familiar chime from upstairs. As she climbs the stairs to their bedroom she feels a fond exasperation, and also a kind of relief at her own precautionary measures, the fact that she’s upright and sober still and able to deal with this minor crisis. The phone isn’t immediately visible, but then it chimes again and she follows the sound to Seth’s closed nightstand drawer. Any second now she will hear the garage door opening, and she will hurry downstairs to present his forgotten phone and kiss his cheek and usher him back out the door, hopefully still in time for his flight.
She clicks on his phone and sees her own text, “Making good time?”, and below it a text from someone named Zoe, “Can’t wait.” She tries to remember whether he’s mentioned anyone named Zoe, and knows he hasn’t. It takes her a few tries to unlock his phone, she’s seen him input the pattern enough times, left right right left, and then she’s scrolling through his text history with Zoe, which goes and goes and goes, sixteen texts exchanged yesterday alone. It’s damning almost immediately: “I told her the flight leaves Wednesday,” Seth says, and “I can’t come over tonight after all—tomorrow?” and “Miss you Z.” What gives Nita pause, standing head bent forward thumb rapidly flicking through what appear to be months’ worth of conversations, is not these texts but the other ones, the boring conventional ones, where Zoe says “How was work today?” and Seth answers at length. For a bemused second she is impressed with the thoughtfulness of Zoe’s responses, earnest deep-dives into the same anecdotes that Nita had nodded absently through, though they are no more scintillating in text form, the anecdotes. She scrolls another two months back and then sits on the side of the bed, noticing that her breathing has gone shallow, but she feels fine, actually.
When Seth’s car swings around the cul-de-sac to park askew just past their mailbox, Nita is sitting at the kitchen island, filling out the second page of a grant application. He unlocks their door, steps hastily inside, as Nita looks up and across the room at him.
“I think I left my—”
“Found it,” Nita says, holding out the phone for him to take.
“Where was it?”
“In your nightstand.”
“Why the hell would I have left it there,” says Seth, a little out of breath, embarrassed and relieved, slipping the phone into his usual pocket. “What time is it?”
“It’s 9:41,” Nita says, even though they can both see the oven clock from here. “You got a text.”
“Oh?”
“From Delta. Your flight got pushed back an hour. So you should still be able to make it, barring any other forgotten items.”
“I think I should have everything this time,” Seth says. As Nita spoke, he’d given her a sharp wondering look, but now as she looks up from her laptop he’s watching her with a slow almost playful smile. He kisses the side of her head, squeezes her shoulder. “I should probably still head out, just to be safe,” he says.
“License? Chargers? Wallet?”
“Got them all. Ninety-nine percent sure.”
“All right,” says Nita, leaning into his side for just a moment. “Drive safe.”
“Will do. Oh, Nita, one thing I keep forgetting to mention.”
“What’s that?” she says. He’s standing by the door, zipping his jacket back up, keys clinking in his hand. Her eyes keep drifting down to her laptop screen and then back up to him, her expression relaxed, a little distracted, fond.
“They’ve switched our pickup day on trash and recycling. Saturday morning instead of Friday.”
“That’s strange.”
“I think it’s the whole street. I noticed a couple weeks back when everything was still out there Friday night. Called to check and I guess they’ve switched us over. Anyway: recycling on Saturday.”
“I’ll remember,” says Nita, calmly, and Seth touches his hand to his lips and waves from the door, and then his car is driving away down the hill, music very faintly blasting. She closes her laptop, though for a moment she is motionless. Downstairs the laundry has stopped thumping in the dryer and needs to be taken upstairs and folded. The freezer is full of ice cubes, frozen vegetables, frozen soup, frozen fruit, three cold bottles lolling at the back. She remembers exactly where she left off playing, the dark haunted waters and the sunken shipwreck and the blue-green blooms of fungi that glowed when she got too close. She already completed the quest that had her scavenge the ocean floor for pieces of a broken locket, which led her to the shipwreck and the final piece of the puzzle. But the shipwreck is still there, looming and beautiful. It was beautiful, actually. Everything rippled, blue and unstable and mottled with shadows. In the water her hair flowed sideways and her crossbow changed to a spear. Crabs scuttled back and forth along the ship’s rim, unbothered by her presence, programmed to scuttle the same three steps forward and back in a thirty-second loop. She had to swim up to the surface periodically for air. Then dive deep down to the creaking rotting ship and its mists of silver fish in their darting shifting clouds and the broken-off planks floating eerily silently in the white-dark water, everything drifting in some endless inscrutable circle, and herself there drifting through, staying down too long until the screen’s edges blackened and bore inward and swallowed her down in darkness, and she’d wake up again on the shore, perfectly dry, and it would be sometime of day.
