Lydia did not vacuum the floors or dust the overloaded bookshelves when the men started returning three years later, in small groups of fifty or five hundred at first. She did not stoop below her daughter’s small white desk, now the centerpiece of the family room, to gather up the tiny construction-paper piles that had formed there like anthills. In the largest bedroom, she didn’t clear out what Simon had considered his side of the dresser top. Scrap notes, pens both working and empty, receipts, and loose earring backs covered the space where, years before—it felt like decades ago now—Simon used to place his wallet and the detritus of both his pockets and that leather bag he cradled daily against his body on the train to and from work.
In the cul-de-sac, Lydia and Simon’s house was sandwiched between the Lima-Espejos and the Greens. It was 2:30. Her Ana María would soon step off the hissing school bus and run to the porch. The little girl would fish her housekey out of the tiny interior pocket of her backpack—she was proud of this and preferred the task over knocking on the door. Angling the key in was difficult for her still, so when Lydia heard faint shuffling on the front steps, she rushed to the door, ready to welcome her only, her beloved child.
Instead, Rebecca Green—flushed, buzzing really—stood at Lydia’s door. “Isn’t this incredible?” she said. Lydia only nodded.
“Listen, I really want to make Greg his favorite watermelon salad, for his first meal at home. I know watermelons have been few and far between.” Now Rebecca’s whole body bobbed along with her eyes, as if Lydia were hiding something, as if Rebecca could secure what she needed just by laying her gaze upon it. “Would you happen to have one? Even just a small one?”
It was true that watermelons had been in short supply, even now in the deepest part of summer when the town itself was damp and thick with the smells of honeysuckle and trash curing in the sun. The labor shortage was steep, with the men gone. All over the country, far enough that Lydia would never see them, great tons of fruit rotted in the fields.
And it was true that Lydia was hiding something, hiding a watermelon and then some. She wanted it for Ana María, who would pick out each glistening seed with her pink polished fingernails after school. The girl would take ambitious, gaping-mouthed bites from each slice, and that pleased Lydia very much. That felt like abundance, how the juice would drip down Ana María’s chin and perfume her palms.
“Not here,” lied Lydia. “I’m sorry.” Isn’t this what the leaving should have done for women like Rebecca, taught her the uselessness of fawning over men? Of anticipating their every need and efficiently, almost invisibly, fulfilling it? There were men all over the world, she knew, who had not the faintest awareness of the time, the effort, the mental coordination and decision-making required for them to live their lives just as they pleased—fed and warm in their houses, clothed in clean denim and cotton, their linen closets stocked with towers of white toilet paper and folded bedsheets. Greg was one such man. Perhaps the leaving had cured him, but likely not. “He’ll just be glad to be home, won’t he?”
“Of course!” Rebecca said, but her smile flattened. Lydia could make out a border of pink skin around Rebecca’s eyebrows. She’d waxed or plucked them, as if Greg could be so discerning.
Rebecca scurried off Lydia’s porch and turned left toward the third house in the cul-de-sac. Dana and Isabel, if they had what Rebecca was looking for, would offer it generously. Even before the men had left, the Lima-Espejos had stepped in to lead the community through the health crisis that threatened nearly all the brothers, the fathers, the sons—anyone with a Y chromosome, man or not. The two women worried after their male friends, their relatives. But Lydia knew that they lay together each night, complete and complementary, not needing any man at all, and from that they derived a strength she did not have. A peace she craved, a peace she hadn’t known in all her years with Simon.
She had been glad to see Simon go, though she’d kept this to herself. He was not a bad man. Neither was he an exceptional one, and like most men she knew, he was versed in how to be loved but not in how to love.
* * *
Lydia resolved to sleep that night but soon grew hot beneath the covers. She threw them off and walked barefoot to the front door. She flicked on the porch light so that when she sat on the front step, she was in a circle of light, its border reaching the ends of her toes.
Now that the threat had passed, after years of strict quarantines and incredible feats of science, the men were being sent home by region, on trains and buses that waited at the station and traveled only at capacity except to the smallest towns. A bus would arrive at dawn tomorrow. Half-full. Simon would be on it. His correspondence over the years, and as recently as last week, told Lydia that he was alive and eager to return. She hadn’t answered him once, though Ana María was old enough to pick out a few sentences on the keyboard, so Lydia allowed her to use the computer once per week to tell her father that she had planted tulips, or stubbed her toe, or had a birthday party. Lydia had nearly erased him from the house. His letters rested on a shelf in Ana María’s room, out of her mother’s sight.
* * *
A light was on next door. Dana came, wordless, and sat beside Lydia quietly for a very long time. After a while Lydia rested her head on Dana’s shoulder. She bore the weight without comment. When the horizon began to change and Lydia could see well beyond her feet, Dana took Lydia’s hand and gave it a nearly imperceptible squeeze before walking home to Isabel. Before the leaving, Lydia had believed, like most, that women were talkative where men were often taciturn. But it wasn’t so. It was women, she’d since decided, who were most likely to sit beside you in silence and give you rest. A kind of rest you could not accomplish alone, without someone to feel the exact temperature of your rage or fear or despair.
Soon, Simon and Greg walked the asphalt together like twin mirages. A hollowness had carved itself into their cheeks, which were shiny with sweat after the long walk from the bus stop.
Rebecca ran, her speed a surprise to all, and Greg held her long and hard, and they walked to their house together and closed the door with a bang that made Lydia jump.
Simon walked to the porch and held steady there. Slender as he had become, Lydia could see that he still stood firm and tall.
Lydia would have said what she was thinking, but for the first time, she believed Simon already knew. It is good that you left. Had Simon never left, Lydia would have. Instead, she had grown, into herself, into a person who could breathe deeply in every room of her own house.
Ana María slept as Lydia and Simon walked into the house, and into Lydia’s room. Simon sat on the bed. For months, Lydia had considered this moment, what Simon would want or need or ask. Then for several months more, she thought instead of what she would want or need or ask.
Now, she searched for a third way. What did the moment require? What did the room, the air, their breath offer them both? They slept for a time.
Ana María awoke and dictated the rest of the day. They obliged her every request—a kiss, a piggyback ride, to hear the stories he had told her in his letters. As Ana María begged for repetition, Lydia examined Simon for difference.
Long after dark, Simon lay on the floor next to Ana María’s bed and held the tiny hand that draped itself over the side of the bed. When he rose, he went to the kitchen, where Lydia worked in the white glow of her computer.
She looked up to see Simon standing near the sink, observing her, inspecting her and the space around her as if the electronic halo were her aura, something he would need to study to understand. She did not move but he did. First, he washed the three glasses they had used at dinner, and their plates. He scrubbed the forks and dried them and nested them on top of one another in the drawer.
He swept the floor, slowly, board by board, each one nearly the width of the broom. He reached underneath the sink and pulled out a clean rag from where Lydia had always kept them. He cleaned the table, working around Lydia, away from her and then toward her until there was nothing left to clean but the space underneath her computer and the spaces below her fluttering hands, her feet, her hips.
Simon went to bed then, and Lydia went to bed when she was ready. She pulled a pin from her hair and went to the dresser and saw that all her things still covered its entirety. Simon had moved nothing, not the paper scraps or the pens, the silver bits of something. Instead, he had found the small empty drawer in the second row and placed his wallet there.
Lydia lifted her half of the quilt, slid into the bed’s unfamiliar warmth. The day had worn her down, and sleep soon relieved her of her thoughts, but tomorrow she would decide if Simon’s love could also feel like rest. Tomorrow.
Cristi Donoso is an Ecuadorian American writer whose work has appeared in The Journal, The Threepenny Review, Lake Effect, Catapult, and others. She was a 2021–2022 PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence and a finalist for the 2022 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Born in Quito, she lives outside Washington, DC.
