The jade plant was gone.
If she was a random passerby on the street, she would think nothing of it. But she wasn't a random passerby; far from it. She was his wife.
With trembling fingers, she fished her keys out of her bag and unlocked the door, sprinting up the three flights of stairs to #42 C with her heart in her throat. Her breaths came quick and shallow as she searched for the key to her apartment - Mark's apartment. Fitting the key into the lock, her mind was racing.
He can't have left.
I'm probably overreacting.
It's probably all just a big misunderstanding.
He'll be right here when I open the door.
Open the door.
The door.
The lock flicked open, and her frenetic movements stopped as though the click she had heard was a gun being cocked. Bile rose in her throat, adrenaline coursed through her veins, and time seemed to stop.
Stop.
She needed to think this through. After all, it was just a plant. It wouldn't mean much if he had moved it.
She felt herself collapse against the door, letting out a breath she didn't know she had been holding. Try though she might, she couldn't convince herself that it didn't mean what every fibre in her being told her it meant.
He was gone.
He must be.
That was the only explanation.
He would never move that plant for anything else. His mother had given it to him the day before she died unexpectedly in her sleep three years ago. Nobody had seen it coming, least of all Mark. The day she gave him the jade plant, she had seemed as healthy as ever. Then a heart attack had claimed her in the wee hours of the morning, leaving Mark depressed and numb for weeks after.
He had placed the jade plant in the windowsill the day of his mother's death, and refused to move it or transplant it since. He watered it daily, fertilized it monthly, and trimmed it yearly. The pains he went to to keep it looking the way it did the day he received it were almost obsessive, but it kept him sane, so Lillian didn't question it.
It seemed to take Herculean strength to pick herself up off the floor and face the peeling black paint of her apartment door. She dragged a gravelly breath into her lungs, paused, and opened the door.
YOU ARE READING
Drowning
General FictionLillian Irving, an average Irish woman, struggles to maintain a relationship with the fickle man she loves. Some days he is caring and loving, and other days he acts as if she isn't there. Then, one morning, he is suddenly gone, leaving no evidence...
