I’m leaving you. I hope you understand. Fridge is stocked and the window is fixed upstairs.

I cleaned up the kitchen in the other house. I don’t think I will come back but who knows. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.

Goodbye now.

Love, Helen

I let my empty mug clatter into the sink. Though it was the middle of the night, I went outside in my pajamas and half walked, half ran to the main house, the wound in my middle hurting every step of the way. Outside, the world was quiet. My house shoes were soaked with dew. I turned on all the lights when I arrived, and moved toward the smaller kitchen at the back of the house.

Nothing seemed disturbed. On the floor a long, thin stain led to the back door. It had a smeared look to it, as if something had been dragged out. It didn’t look big enough for what I’d done. I remembered her blood gushing over my hands, the heat of it. I closed my eyes.

I went to the door, which was unlocked and ajar, the screen door unlatched, lazily billowing in the breeze.

The night was as dark as a well. I switched on the back porch light. At the tree line, a small white form stood looking at me, meeting my eyes, before it limped away.

Life without Rita was strange. For one, I thought of her as Rita, not Helen. Which troubled me. And I missed her.

The other thing that troubled me, and something I had not expected, was being afraid. Fear was the price of love. I had come to rely on her help, and her sturdy presence had bolstered me. Now that she was gone, her absence glared at me from every second, every surface, and I became fearful of something breaking down, of a random catastrophe. Ever since the storm I had been on edge, which Rita’s presence mitigated. Now my paranoia returned with a vengeance. Once the worst became possible, disaster lurked everywhere, shrouding my mind. Before, my dream had been a paradise, a playground, a place where minor things went wrong all the time in a reassuring, everyday manner that kept larger calamities at bay. Now I lived in a wonderland of failing machines and fragile buildings, just waiting for their moment to die.

And I was no exception. My body was also a machine, and after Rita left I found myself susceptible to illness, suffering from random headaches and the occasional cold, fits of diarrhea and nausea that would come over me without warning, no matter how much I watched my diet or exercised. My joints ached. My back hurt even after I took several aspirin, washing them down with a beer. I started to wonder if Mr. Roper was somehow manifesting himself in a corporeal way, my aging process accelerated to that of a late-middle-aged man’s.

Still, I soldiered on. I double-checked the upstairs window like a good landlord, oiling the stiff casement lock Rita had overlooked in her window repair. I sorted out the furniture pieces piled against the door, fixing what was broken before returning them to their proper places. Apartment 201 went back to its old self. Each day I returned to the rooms downstairs and moped over my lousy life, flipping through Plumber’s Digest and dozing off, or morosely studying girlie magazines, full of desire and sadness. My only saviors from complete despair were Name That Tune and The Gong Show, which shepherded me through the end of each passing day, and Charlie’s Angels, which sent me into an erotic reverie that made my loins ache with grief.