Closing the Empty Holes

When Ellen got home from the county courthouse, she brought a kitchen stool into her bedroom to take a duffel bag down from the top of her closet. It still had the American Airlines tag on it from their trip to the Grand Caymans—Richard and Ellen Christensen, Flight 452, Grand Cayman Islands. They had gone scuba diving, but Richard didn’t like the thermoclines. When the water temperature dropped fifteen degrees around thirty feet, he ascended. She finished the dive by herself, even though the scuba training manual text echoed in her mind: “Divers should never dive solo. Use the buddy system in case of equipment failure or medical problems.”

She tore the tag off and left it where it fell on the wood floor. She stuffed jeans and t-shirts into the bag, some underwear, a few pairs of socks. Then she looked around the room; the bag was only halfway full. The queen-sized bed was unmade, the blue comforter pooling at the foot of the bed. The window was open, and the latest Tom Clancy novel lay on the nightstand with Richard’s glasses marking his place.

Her sewing machine was still on from the night before. When Ellen was upset, she liked to sew, stomping the foot pedal, watching the needle jerk up and down until it ran out of fabric. Last night she didn’t get any sleep, and she hoped that the hum of the sewing machine kept Richard up all night too, even though he was sleeping in the living room recliner.

The night she got the subpoena in the mail, he moved out of their bedroom. He left the TV on all night and fell asleep watching perpetual reruns of Leave It to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show. When she got up hours later to use the bathroom, he was asleep, his head lolling to one side of the headrest. The infomercials flashed different colors on his face in the dark room. He’d kept her up, so it was only fair for her to sew all night.

Several articles of Richard’s clothing hung over her sewing chair: a business shirt with a missing button, a pair of pants with the cuff hem ripped out, a polo shirt with a tear in the shoulder seam. She sat down and took the clothes into her lap. With gold thread, she sewed the sleeves and collars and bottoms of his shirts closed, and on the pants she even sewed the fly shut.

She got up, pulled a dresser drawer out so forcefully that the whole drawer came out of the dresser, spilling Richard’s socks and underwear. She scooped up an armful of them and dropped them onto the sewing table. She sewed his underwear shut the same way, then sewed socks to each other until she had a chain of them, navy next to white next to gray next to red with yellow toes and so on. The needle bobbed up and down over and over again until Ellen was almost smiling.

She folded his underwear, piled them back in the drawer, and slid the drawer back into place. Then she picked up the chain of socks, wrapping it around her body several times like a pathetic Miss America sash. In the living room, she draped on his easy chair, stretched it across the couch and over the TV screen.

Then Ellen zipped her half-empty duffel bag, lifted the strap onto her shoulder, and left.