This isn't weird.

As I Live and Breathe

Rebecca was not amused by Noah's stubborn refusal to put down that goddamn typewriter, but she wouldn't argue with him in front of the kids, so there was little she could do about it. He carried it around like their youngest carried her favorite stuffed rabbit, only relinquishing it when strictly necessary, and never letting it out of arm's reach. He held it with one arm as he picked at his dinner. He slept with it on his chest. In the car, even when he took a shift driving, it stayed on his lap.

"Have you gone insane?" she asked in a hushed voice, after both children had nodded off in the back seat.

Noah shrugged.

"Are you drinking again?"

Noah shrugged.

"For god's sake, Noah, would you please just say something?"

He wouldn't. The sullen silence was even more maddening than his newfound obsession with the typewriter. This sudden stepchange in mood couldn't have come at a worse time.

"Could you please pick a more convenient moment to have a psychotic break? You can't do this in front of my parents. They're having guests. People are going to talk."

Noah shrugged.

"You're impossible. Ugh. I should have thrown that thing out years ago."

"If you touch it, I'll kill you." His voice was low and flat, and the likelihood of its sincerity was just high enough to convince her to drop the subject. They didn't speak to one another again for the rest of the drive.

As they were settling into her parents' home (settling being, perhaps, a less than accurate word, as his behavior had everyone thoroughly unsettled), his typewriter was the antique elephant in the room that nobody would acknowledge. There were no handshakes, or obligatory greeting hugs. He responded to their greetings and small talk with noncommittal grunts and shrugs. For the children's sake, he managed not to scowl, but the eerily blank expression he adopted in lieu of contempt proved far more unnerving for the adults.

"You'll have to forgive him," Rebecca said with a forced smile. "He's exhausted. He hasn't had a full night's sleep in weeks. Work has just been so busy. Why don't you have a short nap, dear?"

Noah shrugged, and she put her hand on his back and ushered him up the stairs, pretending not to hear the whispers that began the moment they had turned away. Her teeth were clenched as she pushed him into the guest room and closed the door behind them.

"You need to stop this," she hissed. "You're embarrassing me!"

Noah shrugged. It took everything she had not to scream.

"Fine. Have your tantrum, or whatever this is. Just get it out of your system now, before the guests start arriving for dinner."

Noah shrugged. Rebecca growled and stalked out of the room, valiantly suppressing the impulse to slam the door behind her. For two hours, he sat alone on the edge of the bed, staring ahead at the wall without making a sound. When Rebecca finally returned to check on him, her face was set into her sweetest smile. She sat down beside him and touched his hand.

"Bitsy's gotten a little restless," she said. Bitsy. Rebecca had always hated the pet name he had given their youngest daughter. She must have been truly desperate. "I think it might calm her down if you read her a story. Why don't you pop down to the bookstore and pick something out for her? There's one down the street with a rare books collection, you know."

The ploy was obvious. Noah loved bookstores right down to his very soul. A brief spell wandering the aisles and leafing through yellowed old novels, she hoped, might snap him out of this strange funk. He wanted to refuse, purely for the sake of being petulant, but not as much as he wanted an excuse to be out of this house, away from these people.