Chapter 28 of 28·6 min read·The day after Tamsin visits the crash site
Room to Walk
The next morning, I made two cups of tea.
I had the second one in my hand before I noticed. The cup was the chipped blue one Auden used to take from the back of the cupboard, though he always claimed the chip caught his lip. I’d bought it before we met. He liked it because it annoyed me when he used it.
I stood with it over the counter, watching the steam lift from both cups. The shadow lay under the table, narrow and faint in the gray light. It had not moved toward the blue cup. It did not move at all.
I poured the second tea down the sink. The sound of it hitting the steel basin was too loud in the small kitchen. Then I put the cup back in the cupboard, beside the others, and carried mine to the table.
The shadow stayed.
For months I had treated every ordinary choice like a question I could ask him. Would he want me to keep the scarf? Would he come with me if I left? Was the shadow closer because it wanted to be, or because the light had shifted? I had stopped using his name to make it answer, but I could still turn a day into a series of tests without saying a word.
I drank the tea while it was hot. When I finished, I washed the cup and left the scarf where it was, looped over the chair. I did not put a place for someone else at the table, and I did not move the chair to hide the empty space.
Perrin called around noon. I nearly let the phone ring out. I had spent so long making a study of whether I could stand a day alone that the thought of company felt like another examination.
“Do you want to get out for a bit?” he asked when I answered. “Not the road. Just a walk. We can get lunch after.”
I watched the shadow beneath the kitchen chair. “Where?”
“Down by the old canal path. If it’s too cold, we’ll turn back.”
“Give me half an hour.”
“All right.” He paused. “No pressure.”
“I know.”
I put on my coat and wound Auden’s scarf once around my neck. The loose end caught on the coat button. I freed it carefully, one thread at a time. In the hall, I checked that I had my keys, then caught myself glancing down to see if the shadow had followed.
It had.
Outside, clouds hung low over the roofs. I walked to the corner instead of waiting at home for Perrin to collect me. He was already there, leaning against his car with his hands in his pockets. When he saw me, he opened his mouth as if to ask something and changed his mind.
“Cold?” he said.
“Not yet.”
Next
Tamsin has made a small plan with Perrin for next week; she will have to discover whether she can keep choosing ordinary life without needing the shadow to answer her.
We left the car and took the path along the canal. The water moved beneath a skin of wind, dark and uneven between the banks. A cyclist passed us, his tires whispering over the wet pavement. The shadow held close to my feet. In the open light it looked thinner than it did in my flat, with the edges broken by the stones underfoot.
I kept looking down. Perrin noticed after the third time.
“You don’t have to watch it every second,” he said.
“I know.”
“I don’t mean you should ignore it. Just—” He stopped and rubbed his hands together. “You looked like you were waiting for something to happen.”
I wanted to say that I had been waiting for something to happen since the accident. I had been doing it in rooms, at crossings, in the spaces between one breath and the next. Instead, I said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.”
“Do you have to know today?”
“No.” I pulled the scarf closer under my chin. “But if I keep it beside me, I’m afraid I’ll make everything about keeping it. Like I can’t go somewhere unless I know what it wants.”
Perrin walked a few steps before answering. “You can’t know what it wants.”
“I know.”
“And you can’t know whether it’s still—” He glanced at the pavement, where the shadow ran alongside mine. “Whether it’s still him in any way you can recognize.”
The words landed hard because I had been trying not to give them a shape. “No,” I said. “I can’t.”
Perrin’s expression tightened. He looked older than he had at the crash site, or perhaps I had only just noticed how tired he was. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want you to make it easier for me by telling me what it is.”
“I won’t.”
We reached a narrow footbridge. A gust lifted the scarf’s end, and I caught it before it whipped against my face. Across the canal, someone had left a paper bag beside a bench. Its top had come open, and the wind had spread two apples into the wet grass. I started to step toward them, then stopped when I saw how slick the bank was.
Perrin followed my look. “They’ll be fine.”
“I know.”
We kept walking. My instinct was to say something about Auden, to make the outing worth the effort by carrying the subject into it. The thought came and passed. There were no words I needed to deliver to him through the shadow. There was only the pavement under my shoes, Perrin’s uneven pace, and the cold beginning to find the gaps at my wrists.
At the next street, Perrin asked if I wanted lunch. We went into a small café with fogged windows and a radiator that clicked whenever the door opened. He ordered soup. I chose a cheese roll and a pot of tea. Under the table, the shadow gathered close to my boots, nearly swallowed by the overlapping chair legs.
I did not shift my chair to clear a space for it. I did not look down to see whether it would follow the movement. When the tea came, I wrapped both hands around the cup and let the heat pass into my fingers.
Perrin tore a piece of bread and dipped it in his soup. “You said you were ready to go from the road.”
“I was.”
“Do you feel like you left something there?”
I thought about the bend, the water-marked grass, and the report folded in my coat pocket. “I left the road there.”
He nodded, as if he could tell that was all I had. “Good.”
The word wasn’t an answer to the larger thing. It didn’t try to be. I ate my roll. We talked about the weather changing again and the bad heating in his building. Perrin told me the plumber had charged him for an hour to point out a leak he’d already found. I laughed once, surprised by the sound, and it did not make the room feel disloyal.
When we came out, the afternoon had brightened. For a few steps, the shadow was difficult to see on the pale pavement. My stomach drew tight. I slowed, then made myself continue. The dark shape sharpened again when we passed beneath a row of bare trees.
I didn’t know if it had been there the whole time. I couldn’t make that uncertainty useful. I walked beside Perrin until we reached his car.
“Same time next week?” he asked. “We could try the bookshop on Lorne Street. You said you needed a new notebook.”
I had said that weeks ago, before the notebook on my table became a place where I wrote down dates, statements, and questions. I could still buy one for something else. “Yes,” I said. “Let’s do that.”
He didn’t ask me to promise I’d be all right. I didn’t promise it.
At home, the kitchen was exactly as I had left it. The blue cup stayed in the cupboard. The shadow rested under the chair. I hung my coat on its hook and took off Auden’s scarf, smoothing the loose fringe before I set it back over the chair.
“I went out,” I said. “I’m going again next week.”
The shadow did not change.
“I don’t know what you remember. I won’t keep asking you to show me.” My throat tightened, but I finished. “You can stay. I’m going to keep going too.”
I could not tell if the words reached anyone. I had not said them to get an answer.
I put water on for tea, and this time I took down one cup.