Permanence Read Free Page B

longer a familiar staircase. But this is the same staircase Jamie and I climbed once upon a time, before baby left us.
    Once upon a time, Jamie would have asked me this question: “Do we have to take the stairs, Mary? We have a perfectly good elevator.”
    I would continue climbing as if Jamie hadn’t said a word. I knew he considered my fear of elevators a silly fear. My fears, he insisted, made little sense for the wife of an engineer and for a person with a career as a travel agent.
    “But I’m not expected to go anywhere,” I would tell Jamie, laughing. “The beauty of my career is that I can send people away while I stay at home, safe and sound, on the solid ground.”
    “Sometimes you have to trust in fate,” Jamie would tell me, lifting his eyes to an imaginary sky. “I mean, if you can’t trust the control of man-made mechanics, at least trust in destiny. You have to open up, allow destiny to take control. I mean, the probabilities of an airplane losing an engine or an elevator cable failing are millions to one. The people who die because of these accidents are not dying at the hands of bad mechanics. They’re dying at the hands of fate. I mean, the person who enters that one-in-a-million jet plane or that one-in-a-million elevator never to see the light of day again is a person whose fate has been sealed in bad luck.”
    How’s this for luck?
    Now I determine my fate. Not Providence, not technology. Only me, because I am alone. But alone is not the way I planned my life.
    Boxes
    My apartment is as dark as deep night.
    I feel for the light switch against the wall with my fingertips. I find the plastic switch and flip it up. The apartment becomes bright with light. I see the movement of the curtain that covers the open window.
    I go to the window. I see the rain falling steadily against the trees, the orange light from the parking lot lamps reflecting off the leaves. I close the window and stand in the quiet of the night.
    I step away from the window.
    I stumble over the box, but manage to regain my balance by extending my hand to the dining room table. I do not fall. I look down at my feet and at the box. This box is not a small box. Maybe two feet high by two feet wide. The box has been closed with duct tape. The box is marked JAMIE in bold, black Magic Marker letters.
    There are four boxes scattered about this apartment. Each one just like the other. The boxes have been here since Jamie left me over six months ago. The boxes contain the last of Jamie’s things—engineering books, blueprints, sketches, and drafting tools. The boxes also hold the rest of Jamie’s socks and underwear. One box holds his shoes and another houses his cassette tapes and CDs—Steely Dan, Beatles, XTC, Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” and others.
    I make the best of having the boxes around. I have been using them as impromptu tables until a time when Jamie comes home again to get them. I set newspapers, ashtrays, dirty dishes, soiled laundry, and even used wine glasses on them. The boxes are an eyesore. They don’t belong among the furniture. But they have become a part of my life now. My routine. The boxes are a part of what is left of my ex-husband, Jamie.
    I remove my coat. It is soaking. I wrap it around my arm and carry it into the bathroom. I toss the coat over the curtain rod above the bathtub and allow gravity to take over.
    Eventually, the rain falls away from the coat and into the bathtub basin. I stand there in the bathroom, watching the little droplets of water fall out of the coat and into the bathtub, drop by single drop.
    There is the drip, drip, drip.
    The water falls droplet by droplet, collecting in the basin. The water forms a tiny stream that runs downhill to the drain. The water disappears inside the drain. But the water that falls away from my coat also misses the basin altogether. The water falls to the ceramic tile floor and collects inside the spaces between the tiles.
    I do nothing about the