The longer I watch them, the more I understand them.

Bruce is sad, though he pretends not to be.

Laura doesn’t tell Bruce, but sometimes she smokes around the baby. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night and she can’t stop crying, hating herself for how much she wishes the baby had never been born. Sometimes she doesn’t hold the baby for days, and on those days, she doesn’t smoke.

Laura can’t find the knife.

It should have been in the drawer where she’d left it that morning, but as with anything in that damn house, nothing was where it belonged.

Tommy claimed they had a ghost, happy to blame specters for the dents in the walls while hiding the bandaids on his knuckles. He was fifteen and furious, a liar with the same tell as his father; two teeth that bit into his bottom lip, digging deeper and deeper depending on the severity of the lie.

Once, when the sheriff had dropped Tommy off on their front porch, his pores leaking sweat and vodka, he’d looked her in the eye, words slurred—

“—Joe said come down to the creek bed, so I came down to the creek bed, but I didn’t know anyone else would be there ‘cause it’s a Monday, right? And then Campbell started pulling out bottles, but I didn’t drink nothin’—it spilled all over me, see? Cause you know he’s got shit for brains, Mom, can’t even catch nothin’ out on the field, so he spills it all over me, see?” Oh, Tommy had looked her in the eye all right, a trickle of blood mixing with the sweat pooling down his chin, turning cloudy as it dripped onto his favorite t-shirt, staining it like a salty watercolor.

“See Mom? See?” When Tommy first bought that shirt, he had been fourteen and shy, her sweet boy with bleached hair long enough to brush his shoulders. The day after he turned fifteen, Tommy buzzed his head in the bathroom sink, and Bruce told him that he’d never looked better. Laura told him that he’d never looked more like Bruce.

Every day Tommy was more like Bruce.

Laura can’t hear me, but I talk to her every day. I tell her hello and good morning. I tell her about my dreams. I tell her that I’m scared. I tell Laura that I love her, but she can’t hear me.

Laura doesn’t know it, but she talks to me too. Muttering under her breath, she spills her secrets at the kitchen sink.

Sometimes I rattle the windows so hard the baby screams. Laura stops, stares, water dripping from her pruning fingertips as she waits for the baby to lose its voice. She almost writes condoms on the grocery list, but she and Bruce haven’t had sex since the baby was born, so she scribbles out the half formed letters, the pen trembling in her grip. I don’t know if Laura knows it or not, but she hasn’t eaten all day.

Once, there had been a time when people turned to glance when Laura walked into the room, their gaze holding, appraising the turn of her neck, the curve of her smile, the sway of her hips.

Nowadays, they barely turned to look at all, not unless the baby was crying.

Why was it that people only ever looked at Laura like they wanted her to leave? Like she was stealing the space in the room from someone else, from someone that everyone would prefer, even if that someone was no-one at all?

When had Laura become less than no-one?

This is not my home.

My home is somewhere else; somewhere lost in the space between corridors, in the gaps in the floorboards and the hole in the drywall.

Before I found Laura, I was lonely. How long had I been lost? Drifting through the ever-present darkness, the slow swallowing void of the universe. There were stars once, but they left too, blinking out of existence one by one until there was no way to tell where I had drifted.

Laura spends two hours cooking dinner, fidgets with the silverware on the table, presses the thermostat up and down. Bruce takes a plate to his office. He says— “Hey, bud,” to Tommy and only glances at Laura, a silence stretching the gap between them wider

and wider

and wider

and wider

I work to fill the silence, that empty space where something else used to live. The baby shrieks. The ceiling fan slices through the air. Tommy scrapes the metal twines of his fork against Laura’s nice china.

Laura screams without ever opening her mouth, without ever unknotting the twisted curve of her lips. She shifts the food around her plate, places her silverware down the way her mother taught her; knife and fork spearing the plate neatly through the middle.

Most people don’t know it, but there are ghosts everywhere, hiding in the seams of things. In the pockets of old coats and the lining of ripped dresses. In the photos tucked in Bruce’s wallet, his arm around a woman in a wedding gown.

In the first photo, the woman smiles. In the second, she has no face. In the third, there is only an empty dress, ivory swathes of fabric draped across the floor. “You look as pale as a ghost.” The photographer had said, but Laura had only laughed. She hadn’t eaten all day.