At the Seams

Chapter 2: Day 1 - 8:17 am

The knob turns with token resistance in Sam's hand and the door stutters inward. The foyer is bright with morning sun and tastefully decorated in oak and baby blue. The décor is his doing; Mary has declared herself on a number of occasions to be aesthetically stunted. Sam absently sets the paper and mail on the small oak table near the front door, uncharacteristically ignoring the few pieces that slip off and tumble across the blue entry runner. He smells no coffee or cardamom, but had not actually expected that he would. If Mary had made it, she would have been at the door with it.

Sam glances into the living room to the left, quickly surmising from the sleeping laptop on the corner of Mary’s desk in her office that she had not yet been in here. He pulls his head out of the living room and looks to the right, through the arch that leads to the kitchen and dining room. He takes a step or two through the doorway, just to be thorough, and calls, "Ree? Where are ya, babe?"

The kitchen and dining room are orderly but empty, and Sam returns to the front hallway. He stands with his back to the front door, facing the bathroom door and the stairs up to the second floor. He walks to the base of the stairs, calling again. "Ree? Babe, are you home?" He cannot imagine where she would go this early in the morning but cannot otherwise explain why the house should be this quiet, this unnervingly still.

Again, deep fright strikes Sam’s body, his muscles and ears thrumming. Foreboding like a frozen burp lodges in his throat. As he calls again to his wife, his voice sounds tinny and tight. A sudden understanding strikes Sam, and the breath that had been catching in his diaphragm rushes out in a relieved whoosh. "She's taken Jay for a potty break, that's all," he says aloud in a breathy alto, the tone of which almost makes him nervous all over again. Then, certain to the bottom of his soul that he will get no response, Sam calls out to the dog. "Jay, where are you boy?"

A whine from upstairs, quiet but distinct.

Sam's heart thrusts into his throat, acid nearly gagging him as his gorge rises, then plummets into his guts, where it thuds spasmodically. The voice of reason, his buddy, his mainstay, is silent for the first time since Sam was eight, when his mother was brutally murdered by some desperately hallucinating psychopath. Rationality had offered no explanation then, either.

Sam gathers his emotions into a sticky little ball and, as he is wont to do in times of distress, tucks it away for what he abstractly labels "later consideration." Coldness—not fear, but steel defense—coats his insides as he begins to climb the stairs toward the whine, Jay, and a very silent Ree.

Sam reaches the top step and pauses, trying to remain calm. He glances around the upstairs apartment, a space Mary lovingly calls her Rabbit Hole, quickly noting its quiet emptiness. He shakes himself, refocuses. He needs to find Jay, who is at least responsive, and thereby, hopefully, Mary, who is not.

Sam takes a trembling breath, his body all but jumping out of his skin-suit, and forces his knees to unlock. He can hear them creak in the absolute stillness. He calls to Mary, mostly to reassert his position in a foreign, quiet reality. "Ree?" His voice is little more than a whisper, but he gets a response all the same, from Jay—another whine, a long one that tapers into a quiet, insistent howl.

This sound, unlike any noise Sam has ever heard emanate from Jay (who is nearly mute, it seems, which only adds to that air of human intellect that clings like pipe smoke to the dog’s bristly hide), finally forces Sam forward. Even with urgency scrambling like a thousand tiny spiders through his muscles, the twenty or so paces to the bedroom doorway stretch before Sam like the most brutal, endless span of road he has ever tried to run. He crosses the expanse deliberately, each step sending waves of twitching insects from his ice-cold feet to his testicles, now cool little acorns smashed up against his intestines. He finally reaches the bedroom doorway and peers in, bracing himself against the door frame with both hands when his legs threaten to give at the horrific and unutterable scene playing out before him.

Sam perceives it all in a flash, but his brain plods in its processing. The unmistakable, acrid smell of urea hits him first, assaulting his overworking nostrils. Sam’s first thought, his brain's first understandable attempt at a normal explanation, is that Jay is sick, that he peed, and that is what has tied Mary up—but Sam can’t make this interpretation of events fit the evidence. For one thing, Jay had moved when Sam had entered, but Mary had not. Jay is on the bed, something he never does. Mary's hand drapes limply on the Dobie's neck, her bones and skin appearing bizarrely translucent against Jay's bistre coat. Jay's head is up, his keen brown eyes boring into Sam's frightened blue ones. Jay whines again, low and quick. "Come on, already," his wordless beg implies. "Do something."

But for the hand on Jay's neck, which the dog could easily have arranged, Mary's form remains unchanged from when Sam left her earlier this morning. Even through the shadows thrown by the verticals as they swing in the breeze, Sam can see the screaming red and violet pit of gore that was once Mary’s left eye. Her right eye, uninjured but unblinking, stares into space. When he notices the right eye, good but sightless, Sam reckons his good wife, enigmatic and magnetic Mary, his sweet and silly Ree, is dead.

Before he can stop it, a sob escapes his clenched throat. He slaps a hand over his mouth hard enough to cut his lip, as if the very sound of his grief could breathe life into his morbid certainty. Sam moves toward Mary's still form on the bed, whispering his love's name through numb lips, his legs heavy and unreliable. He stumbles when he reaches the bed and nearly falls on top of her, managing to catch himself with a hand on either side of her. This close, Sam can see in painfully clear detail the horror of Mary's left eye. With the lids a deep blackish purple and shiny with distention, the left half of her face resembles an eggplant. Through a small opening in the bruised lids, the screaming red of Mary’s bloodstained sclera throws Sam for a loop. Her eye floating off-center and rolling back within the socket, in a bath of bloody tears, throws Sam right off a bridge.  He expects to see the iris and pupil—eyeballs should correspond, after all, and the right eye stares sightlessly forward. Sam is no doctor, but it doesn't take one to understand that the eye is ruined, just a useless marble in a nest of gore.

Sam notices the steady rise and fall of Mary's chest and knows that his wife still lives. He wonders, though, with her obvious incapacity, whether death might be a more gracious state for Mary. This first time, the thought barely crosses his mind before he imagines hammering himself in the gob.

Sam sits on the edge of the bed, next to Mary, and brushes her clear cheek softly with his hand. When he goes to speak, he realizes he is still whispering her nickname, his raspy exhalations like the calls of one of Mary’s finches in the throes of death. Sam places his hand on her brow, as he does when she is distraught, and clears his throat.

"Mary," he says, quietly at first. Her right eye blinks slowly, but she doesn’t move otherwise. "Mary!" Louder this time. Mary's right eye rolls slowly beneath its eyelids and stops, staring directly at him. Sam leans in close, almost touching Mary's nose with his own, gazing into that still eye. "Mary?" Sam glimpses a flash, like fire briefly reflected in her brown orb, as if someone had lifted a torch behind his shoulder, then it is gone. Desperate to interact, Sam grabs Mary's shoulders. He shakes her, harder than he intends, yelling her name. Mary’s shoulders lift clear off the bed, her head bobbling madly on her shoulders as if she were a newborn infant. In his horror, Sam releases her weight as he would a hot potato, his hands open and held up near his face. Mary's head drops backward grotesquely, as gravity pulls her roughly to the bed, then settles forward into a more natural position when it reaches the pillow. Mary's right eye rolls terribly, wildly. The sight of it fills Sam with unspeakable dread.

Fed up with discovering new details of the nightmare, Sam dashes around the bed and grabs his cell phone. He dials 911, speaking with all the evenness he can muster while describing his wife, his love, Ree-that-was, as unresponsive, unmoving, seemingly unconscious, and maybe seizing. Sam holds his head as he talks, cannot bring himself to turn around and look at her form. If that strength had existed in his heart, he would have turned to find Mary's good right eye fixed on his back, following him as paced around the room.