When he awoke, it was to an empty home. Dishes piled in the sink, dirty clothes littering the hallways. Even the air itself felt stale, over breathed, and overused. Most of all, it was quiet. Death’s record played through the white rooms and over the kitchen table, where he sat, drinking his coffee. It had been like this for five mornings now.

Last time, his friends had told him that he should let someone know. He shouldn’t be alone in the house, not with everything that had happened. But he had refused to even pick up the telephone. How was he supposed to admit it to someone else?

Of course, five days was quite a stretch over two, and she hadn’t left a note this time. She hadn’t said anything. Livian had just woken up one morning, and his mother had been gone.

He’d gone from room to room, stood on the front steps, and waited for hours. When night came, he threw the contents of the freezer into the microwave and made a feast. He’d sat in front of the TV for company, and pretended that his father was just in the bathroom, his mother just about to get home from work, and they’d both be back really soon.

The next morning he’d sat in bed and called out. He hadn’t expected an answer. Still, he was disappointed when no one responded.

It was on the seventh day that she came home. Battered, bruised, dazed and confused she’d walked through the front door and promptly keeled over on the mat, her long hair covering her face. He’d tried not to be angry as he carried her to the bathroom, tried not to let his rage show itself as he dumped her in the tub, tried not to let his shaking fist spill the water he brought to her bedside.

He hadn’t even shouted when she didn’t drink it, when she didn’t touch it, when she didn’t move. She slept for three days. He couldn’t get her to wake, to eat, to talk. He thought about calling someone, the police, his friends, anyone really. But she only had to tell him once to never ask for help. Only the incapable reached out a hand expecting something. God doesn’t give people hands to ask for things. He gives them hands to take them.

"You’ve been asleep for so long now . . . " He’s taken to talking to her, even though he knows he won’t get an answer back. "I wish you would wake up."

He’s not scared, he tells himself. He’s not scared.

He’s not even scared when she starts getting warm. When she rocks in sleep against the covers making rustling sounds, filling the quiet house with screams and whimpers of pain and something else just as violent, just as terrible.

He locks the door to the bathroom sits in the tub and closes the curtain. He feels like screaming too, he feels like screaming till something cracks, tills something explodes just like he feels he might. His nails scrape against the warm white walls begging them for help, begging them for advice.

She calls for him, but he doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move.

He sleeps there, curled under the faucet and doesn’t wake until a lone droplet spikes his face like a hammer.

He sits up quickly and bumps his forehead on the metal. He gets up again, slowly and walks over to the mirror. He admires the quickly forming red bump. He wants to congratulate himself on his superior clumsiness, make trophies, line the walls with certificates and give himself flowers. The thought alone makes him laugh so hard he cries. Picturing himself standing atop a cardboard box waving a bundle of roses with a gold metal around his neck and a lump the size of a golf ball on his forehead.

It’s only when his snickers have faded away that he realizes how quiet the house is.

How unnaturally quiet.

He runs. He knocks into the walls, bumps over a chair, stubs his toe against the bed as he falls beside it and sees her. She’s four sheets whiter than she was last night, and when he touches her she feels four times colder. He checks her pulse but can’t feel it, can’t take it over the own heavy thumping of his heart. He leans over her form and presses his ear to her chest. He doesn’t hear anything. He doesn’t feel anything.

He stands up, staring at her. "Mom?"

She doesn’t . . . she won’t . . .

"Get up." He says, grinding his foot into the carpet. "Get UP! GET UP MOM!"

But she doesn’t.

He doesn’t know he’s done it until his hand is reeling back in shock. He doesn’t realize until he feels the hot stinging pain in his hand. He’s slapped her.

Words are falling out of his mouth. Words like "liar" and "hypocrite" and "bitch", words like "should have take care of me" and "should have been there" and words like "left me."

And then he’s falling all over her, clutching her dead body against his chest and sobbing and holding her because she never would have let him, were she alive. Just once he wants to feel her winding those long arms around his back and pulling him close, letting the world slip away like he’s seen so many others do. Making the world go away and disappear into the fabric of her night gown.

Its only moments later that he gently releases her, letting her fall back into the mattress.

He has no idea what he’s supposed to do now.

He sits for a few minutes looking at her. He bites his lip so hard it bleeds, and he reaches a hand up to wipe away the blood. He keens for a second, feeling like the world is closing in on him and he suddenly can’t remember what you’re supposed to do when something is bleeding. He can’t remember what steps you take in order to stop it flowing, because it’s not supposed to flow like that. He tilts his head from side to side like a lost puppy, crying.

"Um . . . " He finds himself muttering. "Um."

He starts laughing again, because just listening to himself whimper so piteously, it’s so stupidly depressing. He stumbles out of the room and into the hallway, backing into a wall and for a second he wonders what it would be like to pass out.

Just. Pass. Out.

Would someone come and scoop him up, place him in a bed, bring him water?

He wants to believe someone will. They’ll march through the locked door, the light from the tv reflecting off their armor, and they’d find him.

That was the trouble with her, she always believed someone would find her.

"WHAT GIVES HER THE RIGHT?" He screams suddenly, blood from his lip spattering on the floor. He croons into the wall wailing loudly. He thinks for a split second that this is crazy. He can’t do this. He can’t . . . can’t sit on the floor and cry.

The police will have to come and take her away, and they will ask why she’s cold, and how long it been, and he will have to think of answers for these questions. Why she’s cold. How she got here. Why he hadn’t done anything to help her. He will have to lie through his teeth about how she came in and said nothing was wrong, then fell into bed without a word. He will have to lie and say she was fully conscious and kept saying not to call the police, because a rule she made when he was seven won’t be enough to convince them. They’ll think he’s done something to aide in her death. They’ll try to pin him with this– he looks through the doorway at the mass of sheets and skin in the bed– they’ll think he killed her.

The notion alone makes his stomach burn and he closes his eyes tightly as bile roses in his throat. He’ll be on trial for murder, he’ll spend years in court with a shit lawyer because he’s got no money, no inheritance, and no family. They’ll chuck him in a foster home if he ever gets off free. They’ll shove him in some shit home and give him a trash bag to handle his clothes, and they won’t love him, and they won’t know him . . .

He stands suddenly, his head swarming with half-formed alibis and contacts and ideas. He remembers how to stop the blood, raises a sleeve to the cut and applies pressure to the wound. It’ll heal.

As he makes his way to the kitchen, prepared to gather bottles from the cupboard and place them near her bed and leave her fingers sticky with cold medicine to make it look as if she was trying to take care of herself– he stops. Because it could have happened like that.

He imagines it, sees her topple over the welcome mat into the entrance hall of the house, sees her cry out to no one, sees her crawl to the bedroom and rest till she had willed herself up and stable enough to walk, willed herself to move to survive, willed herself into the kitchen to fumble with the cold medicine, to get her hands sticky with it, to bring it back to the bedroom, to attempt to take it but find it too difficult to swallow. He saw her dying there, alone, just as she did, calling out to an empty home. Only in truth, it wasn’t empty, Livian was in the bath behind the curtain when it happened, but he could just have easily been down the street . . . or at a friend’s house . . . or out looking for her.

He carefully brings the bottles back to the bedroom and leaves them there on the night stand, he twists their tops open and raises her cold damp finger, tracing it along the rim of the bottle. Then he goes back into the kitchen to get some club soda, and some bleach. He rubs at the carpet a lot harder than he really has to, the blood is fresh and it’s barely a pin prick at most. After a few minutes of careful observation it disappears. He sighs in relief and retraces his steps, making sure there’s no more.

He knows he can’t take anything but cash. He digs up his wallet from under his desk and pulls out the $200 he’d been saving. It wasn’t going to be enough, he knew, not to get him by for as long as he needed. He figured he’d be gone a week at the least, the police wouldn’t take longer than that to come once the neighbors realized something was up. Thinking quickly, the sun would be up soon– he needed to leave before then, or else he’d have to wait until tonight and the thought of staying here, with her, made the bile rush up again. He quelled it, storming through the house into her room, fishing through her drawers, pulling out her jewelry box. She’d pawned most of it to pay the bills, the dealers, and who knows who else, but a few pieces of gold and silver, one diamond remained, he stuffed them in his pocket shoving the box back into the drawers and looking as if they’d been untouched.

He didn’t worry about fingerprints, it was his house, he was sure to have touched everything.

Besides, if it was one person, one person dead with no signs of a struggle, it wasn’t a crime scene. It was just another clean up. Well, he wasn’t going to be the one to clean up this mess.

He takes one last look over the house, he can’t turn off the TV now, its already on and if it was shut off while she was dead the electric company might be able to figure it out. You never know how deeply these investigations are followed through with.

He feels lighter, a little less cluttered as he enters her room one last time.

"They’ll come for you." He says, standing stoically beside her. It doesn’t seem fitting for them both to be so stiff, so he kneels, his hand reaching out to stroke her hair. "I had this dream you know. When you were gone. I kept dreaming that you would come home, and when you did you wouldn’t apologize, you would be dressed in this suit, and there would be a car in our driveway, and you’d put your sunglasses down on the counter, see me sitting on the couch. You’d come and sit beside me and we’d watch T.V. together."

He stops.

"It’s not much." He says. "But I think it’s the best dream I’ve ever had."

He closes his eyes, and he can almost see it again. Sitting there watching television, everything simple, everything fine. Not great, not terrible. Just fine.

He starts again. "And maybe I won’t . . . maybe I won’t ever have that with you . . . but I’d like to think I deserve something that . . . that calm."

When she doesn’t move, he gets up to stand by the doorway.

"And . . . I’d like to think you’ll have that too."