Straitjacket

Chapter II

No.

I open the mahogany bedroom door, expecting to see Claire’s alluring sleeping figure underneath our white linen sheets. Instead, I find it empty. Vacated. I check the baby’s room, finding only an empty and forlorn looking crib. I check the drawers, hoping against hope to find something, anything left of her and the family we had built together. Not even a single sock of baby Alex Jr.’s remained.

I check my own room, four doors further down the hallway. All that was left was my stuff.

I take my time to walk downstairs, back to the dining room table, where Claire left her tear-stained letter saying she’s sorry and she’s leaving with our baby.

I feel strangely empty.

I take a sweeping look at the kitchen behind me, which Claire never used for she’s a terrible cook. The sink where dishes kept piling up because I refused to do them. The bathroom, complete with an artificial, mini, open-air hotspring, where I used to fantasize her and me taking a bath together. I walk past the overstuffed couches in the living room where I’d pick her up and baby Alex as they slept through a movie and take them to the bedroom. I retrace my steps to Claire’s bedroom - the bedroom which Claire and I painted together when she first moved in two years ago. The bed filled with memories of frustrated teenage make out sessions, for Claire has never been quite ready to give herself to me.

The phone by the counter rings. I pay it no attention. I’m too detached, too unfeeling to care about such a mundane thing as a phone call. The caller didn’t leave a message.

I look out of the front yard, with the freshly-mown grass, seeing how Claire used to go nuts trying to keep me and Ozzy off it - Ozzy, our humongous fawn-furred chow chow, which I bought for Claire on our first anniversary of being together. We were never married, of course, but still, I believed that such things were worth celebrating, even if there were actually no rings and ceremonies involved. I believed that it wasn’t the rings nor the marriage contract that binds a family together – it’s just plain, and honest commitment.

But apparently, even that wasn’t enough.

I turn around and look at my house. The 4.6 million dollar infrastructure before me doesn’t seem to be a home anymore. It looks strangely foreign. Uninviting.

I imagine a family of three, silly silhouettes inside the house, happily passing the years by together. Soon, the youngest silhouette would get his own girlfriend, and someday, take her home to introduce her to his parents. The parents would approve of the girl, happy that their son has found the perfect partner in life, as they have in each other. The family of silhouettes would expand, the parents becoming grandparents, and the son, soon, a parent, himself.

It was the simplest and the dearest of my dreams. But the family I could have had was gone, even before it began.

I feel a pang in my chest.

I will sell the house.

I decide this upon realizing that I cannot live by myself in such a huge place. I pack a few things, and book a flight online to Korea, planning to spend a few days to take my mind off things at my vacation house at Seoul. I take Claire’s last letter and stash it along with my more valuable belongings. Without so much as looking back, I lock the front doors and stalk off towards my car, parked outside our black, iron-wrought gates.

I call for Ozzy along the way.

“Ozzy!” The fat, lazy dog. He never responds unless it’s Claire calling him.