Tale for Today: Gone

We all seek escape from something at some time in our lives. But seeking is not the same as doing, especially when the stakes are high and the price you'll pay for escape will never be met.

Hungry Heart, Bruce Springsteen

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack

I went out for a ride and I never went back

Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing

I took a wrong turn and I just kept going

The loose floorboard made a rifle crack as he stepped across the landing floor; the balls of his feet being the only part of his body in contact with anything. He stopped. Still as a statue, or a deer in a forest when it hears the snapping of dry twigs that tell her danger is near. He stood there a long time, listening. He heard nothing but the insistent drum of his own blood throbbing through his ears. He swayed, his legs becoming cramped as he stood there, tensed and alert. Finally, he looked down at the floor, trying to identify the betraying board. He raised his left foot off the floor and lowered it tentatively down; hoping that he’d cleared the joist that had always been their ally, warning of the children’s nocturnal straying.

Taking another step found him at the top of the stairs. He put his hand on the bannister and paused, turning his head towards the two doors at the end of the landing. His gaze moved quickly from the door of his bedroom, behind which his wife lay sleeping her deeply innocent and uncomplicated sleep, to the second door. He stared, unblinking, at the door to his children’s bedroom. His eyes saw only the grain of the door’s wooden panels, but still his mind’s eye was tricked into picturing the scene within.

His daughter, half covered by twisted bed clothes, her skinny body contorted into an impossibly torturous shape, with only her beatific face indicating her true state of tranquillity. Her younger brother was a study in stillness, lying exactly as he did when his mother had turned off the light; his round head sunk in the pillow and his face staring up at the ceiling, eyes and mouth firmly closed; a very matter-of-fact kind of sleep.

He looked at that door for a long time, eyes still unblinking but becoming moist and a tightening in his throat forced him to swallow. His foot wavered over the top stair tread, not out of caution for fear of a creak, but out of desperation. Go now, or stay; either way, what was left of his life was now ruined.

A tear blinked free and ran its slow course down his pale cheek. Slowly, he drifted silently down the stairs. As he reached the bottom, he could just make out the yellowing light of the new day’s dawn as it seeped through the frosted glass of the front door. He gently pulled his coat off the coat hooks, revealing the pink and green jackets of his children, now vividly accusing, where before they were comforting.

He turned around quickly and keys jangled in his coat pocket, an everyday sound now amplified into church bells. He thrust his hand into the pocket, muffling the chimes. A thin line of cold sweat trickled down from the nape of his neck and seeped into his collar as he pulled on his coat and quickly moved to the front door.

The hum of an electric motor approached, then, with a start and clinking of milk bottles, suddenly stopped. He was now standing right in front of the glass door with its opaque view of the street outside when it began to darken with an ominous approaching shadow. The milkman’s shoes crunched on the gravel as he neared the house, his outline now becoming clearer as he carried two milk white bottles, serving as headlamps in the foggy frosted glass of the front door.

It occurred to him that if he could see the milkman, then it was probable that the milkman would be able to see him. He stumbled backwards into the still gloomy depths of the hallway. Halting before he fell, he resumed his statue like being. Struggling to breathe, he looked down at his hands, trembling and white as they clenched the silent keys in a deathly grip, he could see his chest heaving in and out, proof that he was still alive.

The milkman’s blur now filled the frame, eclipsing the morning’s weak rays. He stood there for a moment, the two bottles, one in each hand, dangling by his sides. He moved his face towards the glass, stopping only when the tip of his nose touched and flattened against the cold smooth glass. He pulled his face back and stood looking through the glass, another statue, not moving.

The muffled ‘whump’ of a car door closing down the street, followed by the starter motor’s cough, pulled both men out of their shadowy reveries.

Turning his head to find the car, the bottles swung in his hands. Looking down at the milk, he bent at the waist and gently placed them down with a soft musical note. As he straightened, he took one last look through the glass, into the shadowy mouth of the house’s entrance. Satisfied, he turned and walked down the short path to the pavement, his right hand raised to wave at the car as it pulled away.

As the milkman’s dark shadow receded, light swam back into the hallway, filling every fold and crevice in his clothing. He loosened his grip on the keys and felt the blood pump back into his hand, turning the white into pink. He waited, listening for sounds from above, and the hum of the milk float.

Finally, the electric motor clicked into life, and with the loose tinkling of glass bottles in plastic crates, the milkman continued on his round, with his comforting symphony of glassy musical notes to light his way.

The hallway was now beginning to fill with light, and his tired eyes shrunk as they fought against the day’s illumination. The dawn’s coming had ended his hopes for an exit unseen. There would be no hiding now, no chance of disappearing into a night already defeated by the world’s ceaseless turning. He turned the lock, opened the door quickly and stepped through into the light. He pulled the door silently to and his heart crashed deafening waves onto the rocks he had chosen to crash onto.

She turned over, the mummyfying bed clothes following her. The shroud tightened and her discomfortr rescued her from troubled dreams. She had been dreaming a dream of falling; falling backwards and down through a glass skylight. As she opened her eyes she heard the faint tinkling of glass bottles being left on the doorstep, and she drowsily wondered about the dream of breaking glass. The familiar sound of the morning milk’s arrival comforted her and she turned over again, now to his side of the bed. Her eyes widened in their search for him, and, not seeing him there, she reached out with probing fingers and was surprised to feel cold sheets where he should have been.

She heard the front door. Faint, yes. But definitely their front door. Was it being opened? Or closed? She couldn’t be sure, but it was definitely the front door, of that she was certain. She listened again, this time for sounds from the hallway, or perhaps the kitchen. Had he got up to pee? He’d been doing it quite a lot lately, which was unusual for him and for a man of his age; well, that was what he’d said anyway. No sound came from the bathroom, so he wasn’t there. Perhaps he had gone downstairs for a cup of tea; maybe he’d had another terrible night of tossing and turning? But she heard no sounds from downstairs and he would have almost certainly turned the radio on if he had been down there. She listened more attentively now, more keenly. A small seed of anxiety germinating in her mind. She couldn’t hear anything at all now; it was deathly silent.

Calling out his name, softly at first, then again, but with a heightened volume and tone, she felt a trickle of anxiety. There came no response. She sat up quickly and looked to the window. Light was invading the room, breaching the walls of the curtains’ defences. There was nothing to be heard from the street, just the faint whir and chink of the milkman as he made his way down to the end of the street. It hit her suddenly that she must have been lying there and listening for quite a while, as it normally took several minutes for the milkman to make his usual mazy run down the street. Where was he?

Getting out of bed, quickly, but not alarmingly so, she made her way to the window. She pulled the heavy curtains apart and was drowned by the light flooding in. Shielding her eyes from the morning’s glare, she looked down onto the street. It was completely still and deserted. Only the morning dew covered cars gave any indication of life. She noticed the gap in the line of cars, and worked out that her neighbour’s green car was gone. She was an early starter and had already left for work. It was odd that she hadn’t heard her leave. She must have been in a deep sleep, in spite of her bad dreams.

Searching now for their car, she was strangely reassured to find it parked in the same spot she had left it in last night. What was she expecting to find? The car gone? And if it had not been there, what of it? She was troubled by her mind’s line of questioning. Where was he?

She stepped out onto the landing and peered over the banister. Everything looked as it did when she had turned off the lights last night. Her son’s plastic tractor was still lying on its side as it had last night. Bending down to pick it up, she stood on the loose board and winced as it creaked its loud protest. The kids would be up now, and she didn’t want that, not until she knew where he was. But no sound came from the children’s room. Opening the door a fraction, she peered in and saw them in their respective sleeping positions, smiling at their predictability. Pulling the door to, she carefully avoided the troublesome spot on the floor and moved to the top of the stairs. She paused, at exactly the same spot as her husband had done just a few minutes earlier. The house was quiet, as it normally was at this hour, yet this everyday morning stillness was now ringing alarm bells as anxiety and fear began to rise within her.

After some hesitation she descended the stairs and entered the hallway, noticing immediately that his coat was missing from the rack of coat hooks on the side wall. She scanned the collection of jackets, coats and bags assembled there, not yet convinced that her eyes could be trusted. But it wasn’t there, his coat had definitely gone. She stood there perplexed; thinking everything and anything, every possible reason for his absence, and more worryingly, the manner of his leaving.

Sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of sweet tea before her, she tried to rationalise the events of the last ten minutes or so. She had heard the milk bottles being put down on the door step, and she had heard the front door being opened and, presumably, being closed. And he was gone, but had not said goodbye or where he was going. Why not?

The untouched tea was now stone cold, and she had not moved from the kitchen table since sitting down. The sounds of her children waking and leaving their beds stirred her from her daze. She watched the kitchen door, waiting for the first one, probably her daughter, to come stumbling through and ask where Daddy was. Why was she so fearful of this question? And of the answer? She had no idea, nor answer, for either question. All she knew, all she could say with any certainty was that he was gone.

Much later, when she could talk about this part of her life, after her children had grown up to be young people, with normal lives, and normal experiences, and normal expectations for their own happiness, she would say that she had always suspected something like this from him. Not specifically that he would disappear without a trace forever, no, it was more like a feeling, or a sense that she had always had about him. That he was different from other men she had known; that he had been carrying a load, a burden that she could feel, but couldn’t see. He hadn’t been a bad father or a bad husband for that matter. In fact, he’d been quite the opposite; loving, thoughtful and happy when he was with them. There was no other woman, well, none that they knew of, and the police didn’t suspect that either. They had said that it wasn’t unknown for an apparently happy family man to just disappear; yes, it was rare, but nonetheless these things sometimes did happen. She told the police that she knew then, that morning when her tea had gone cold and the children’s questions had remained unanswered, that he had left for good. She knew then that he had gone.