When she looked out the window and waited for his return it seemed as if she would never see him again. The dog knew the sound of his car. When drawn away from the perch of her window seat, canine instincts acted as a fill-in.
Most of the time when she looked out the window it had something to do with him. At night when she couldn’t sleep she would watch the blinking lights of airplanes getting smaller until they burned out.
Her eyes followed and her mind wondered whether or not he was a passenger on the plane and if this may be true she tried with drilling determination to telepathically tell him how much he was missed. Her longing for him and sense of loss when he wasn’t there took over to the extent that when he was present she couldn't stop worrying about when he might leave again.
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During one of her sleepless nights occupying the front window the dog barked and she snapped her head up from her book to look for his car. As usual the street was empty of people, nothing but lamplit pavement strewn with old trash and cars parked two feet off the curb. Not that it mattered here, she thought, in this damn dead-end neighborhood. There were no kids, no dogs but hers, just cold black asphalt and shuttered houses. Only her lights burning, hers and the ones above her winking out endlessly. A lonely beacon at the end of a bleak street. The dog barked again and she hushed it. She heard a car and thought how odd that was, a car that wasn't his coming down her street. She looked again for headlights or some sign of life and as always there was nothing. Still the sound of an engine, quiet in the distance. She thought it might be a plane flying low but they never did that and anyway she'd see the lights if they did. No headlights or his loud diesel, nothing but the hum of an unfamiliar engine. The dog wouldn't shut up. The engine did, though, abruptly cutting off with a loud sort of pop as if something inside it broke. Simultaneous to that noise something broke in her heart. She sat there in the window as she had so many nights and something gave out in her chest, not precisely in her heart but so close as not to matter. The dog barked and barked. Unable to raise her head she turned it to see her street and as she did she heard a door open. The sound was muffled and she couldn't tell if it was the sound of a car door or the door to her home. She shut her eyes and waited a moment for the paralysis to pass but it wouldn't and when she tried to open her eyes again they wouldn't. She told the dog to be quiet but her lips and tongue laid there lifeless. This is it, she said to herself, no more waiting. As she crumpled to the floor her frozen face twitched in such a way that when he came in he thought she had been smiling.
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