N° 13 - Untitled
The problem with a house this big is that you can never find her.
Try as you may, she always finds a novel place to hide. Last you went looking for her, hours had gone by before you found her in the children's playroom. You never suspected she would be there. The children are not children anymore after all. You stopped to take in the photos of the children hanging on the wall, their toothy smiles filling your heart with pride and a feeling that threatened to nearly have it burst right there inside your chest. Just then, she rose from her hiding place in the playpen behind you. “Boo,” she said softly as she parted the bed of multicolored balls she had just laid underneath, gasping for air–just a little. She flashes a toothy smile, same as theirs and you breathe a sigh of relief.
The next time she vanishes, you find her nestled behind the banquette in the sunroom. She mistook a piece of lint for a spider and has been on the floor ever since, she tells you, in a brown study, looking out the adjacent window at the expanse of green and the shrubbery and the trees.
She seldom comes looking for you. Seldom moves heaven and earth to find you in this big house. Sometimes, she'll exit the office, and ask the children absent-mindedly, “Have you seen your father?” The children will blurt out that you are in a room she will invariably not find you in, and she gives up looking as soon as she realizes the children have led her astray.
The day is gusty and windy and she has gone hiding again. You have tried the solarium, the dining room as well as the study. She is nowhere to be found. You try something new: you stop looking. Busy yourself with dinner. Chopping and slicing onions and garlic. Watching the stew bubbling on the stove, and before long, she follows the scent wafting in the air like a trail of pebbles through a deep, dark forest, finding her way back to hearth and home. She flashes a wide smile, wraps her arms around the children though they swiftly wiggle out of her embrace, and you feel your heart fill with happiness.
You do not begrudge these long absences. You do not begrudge the distance between you and her. To have her is to never quite know where it is she goes off to for hours on end. Even whilst the house is empty. Even as she sits next to you. In a daze.
This time, you find her quicker than you ever have. She sits on the floor to the bedroom you share, rifling through old photographs. “Remember the weekend we spent up at Lee's cabin?” she says as she holds up a picture of the two of you on the dock before a glinty body of water. Two faces young as the day is long. You had found her easily then. She had been hiding in plain sight. – KJP














