Chapter 29 of 29·6 min read·One week later, late afternoon
The First Page
The bookshop was narrower than I remembered, or the shelves had grown in the week since I’d agreed to meet Perrin there. They crowded the front windows and left a crooked aisle between the travel books and a stand of notebooks. Outside, the afternoon light fell flat and pale across Lorne Street. Inside, it caught on the glass counter and made the floor difficult to read.
Perrin was by the door when I arrived, holding it open for a woman with a wheeled shopping basket. He waited until she’d gone through before he looked at me.
“You made it,” he said.
“I said I would.”
“I know.” He tucked his hands into his coat pockets. “I’m glad.”
I nearly asked how long he’d been waiting. It was a habit I’d picked up around people who offered to meet me: making the smallest kindness into something I might have inconvenienced them with. Instead I said, “You found it.”
“Hard to miss once you’re on the right street.” He glanced at the shop window. “I passed it twice.”
That sounded like Perrin. I smiled, and he smiled back, without trying to make anything of it.
We went in. A bell over the door rang once, then settled. The shop smelled of dust, paper, and the wool coats drying on people’s backs. I felt the old urge to look down and find the shadow at my feet. In the bright strip by the window, every shape seemed broken up by reflected shelves and passing legs. I kept my eyes on the books.
Perrin wandered toward the local history section. I took the narrow aisle to the notebooks. There were too many. Black covers, brown covers, blue ones with elastic bands. A stack of small ones had been placed beside a basket of pencils. I picked one up, turned it over, and set it back down.
The last notebook I’d bought had become a record of things I could prove: dates, names, statements, the findings from the road. I had used it because writing them down made the facts stay still. I didn’t want another book that would ask me to keep the accident alive by filling every page with what I could not know.
A green notebook sat at the bottom of the stack. Its cover was plain, the shade of old glass, and the paper inside had a faint texture. I opened it. The first page lay clean and empty.
“What are you going to write?” Perrin asked from behind me.
I hadn’t heard him come back. “I don’t know.”
He looked at the notebook in my hands. “That’s allowed.”
“I was hoping it would come with instructions.”
“They never do. Not the useful ones.”
Next
Tamsin has made the first entry in her notebook and agreed to go to the arcade with Perrin; next she must find out whether ordinary pleasure can make room for grief without becoming another way to measure the shadow.
He picked up a red notebook from the basket and examined the cover. “This one says it’s for important thoughts.”
“Does it?”
“No. I made that up.”
I laughed. It came out easily enough that I surprised myself. Perrin returned the red notebook to its place. I kept holding the green one, then shut it before I could decide that choosing it meant I had to know what it was for.
At the counter, I paid for it with the coins and notes in my purse. The bookseller wrapped it in brown paper, though I told her I didn’t need wrapping. She did it anyway, folding the paper with practiced thumbs. I watched the small neat corners rather than the floor.
The shadow was not visible when I glanced down. My body noticed before my thoughts could interfere: a pinch under my ribs, a sudden cold at the back of my neck. I started to turn toward the window, then stopped. A customer had stepped between me and the light. There were a dozen ordinary reasons I couldn’t see it. None of them told me anything about what it remembered.
Perrin took the parcel from the counter while I put my change away.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Want me to carry it?”
“I can manage a notebook.”
“I figured.” He handed it over.
The paper was warm from the bookseller’s hands. I held it under my arm as we left. The bell rang behind us, and the cold outside found the skin at my cheeks. I looked toward the pavement. My shadow stretched beside Perrin’s, thin where the light struck it and broken at the curb. I didn’t stop to sort out which edge belonged to whom.
“Coffee?” Perrin asked.
“Tea, if they have it.”
“They have tea.”
The café on the corner had empty tables near the window. We took one, and Perrin ordered two teas while I found a place for the notebook on my lap. A bus went by, rattling the glass. On the pavement outside, the shadows of its passengers slid past and disappeared.
“I thought this would feel easier,” I said.
Perrin set his cup down. “What part?”
“Going somewhere because I wanted to. Not because there was evidence to find or something I had to ask.” I traced one thumb over the fold in the paper. “I thought I’d know when I’d stopped turning everything into a question.”
“Maybe there isn’t a point where you stop all at once.”
“That’s not very satisfying.”
“No.” He stirred his tea. “But it’s what I’ve got.”
I watched the spoon circle once more and then go still. “I couldn’t see the shadow in the shop.”
His expression changed, careful but not alarmed. “Did you want to?”
“I wanted to know it was there. Then I realized I was doing it again.”
“Checking.”
“Checking. I don’t know what would count as enough. I don’t know what it means when I can’t see it.”
Perrin looked through the window at the wet street. “I don’t either.”
I had expected him to say something kind and easy, something that would let me rest for a minute. He didn’t. His silence was harder to lean on, but I trusted it more.
“I miss him,” I said.
“Me too.”
Perrin rubbed the side of his cup with his thumb. He didn’t say Auden would have wanted me to enjoy the day. He didn’t pretend that our missing him was the same. That mattered more than I could explain without making it smaller.
“I’m glad you came,” I told him. “Not because you’re keeping an eye on me. I like being with you.”
He went quiet. I worried at the paper around the notebook, finding the edge of a fold and pressing it flat.
“I like being with you too,” he said. “And I’m not keeping an eye on you.”
“I know.”
“I mean, I notice things. You can tell me to stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop noticing. I just don’t want every walk to be an appointment with my grief.”
“All right.” He took a drink of tea. “Then next time we can do something stupid.”
“Like what?”
“Go to the arcade. Lose money at the claw machines.”
“You hate claw machines.”
“I hate losing to them. There’s a difference.”
I could picture him standing in front of one, studying the controls as though the machine might respond to good reasoning. The thought made me smile again. “Next week?”
“If you want.”
“I do.”
We finished our tea and walked back toward the bookshop’s corner. The light had shifted; shadows stretched longer beneath the parked cars. Mine was there when I looked, close to my shoes. It didn’t reach for me. I didn’t ask it to.
At the crossing, Perrin stopped beside me. “You’ve got a whole notebook and no instructions.”
“I’ll manage.”
“First entry can be the arcade.”
“I’m not recording an itinerary.”
“Then what is it for?”
I looked down at the green parcel tucked under my arm. “I don’t know yet. Maybe that’s the point.”
He nodded, and the light changed. We crossed with the people around us, keeping to our own pace. At the corner where we’d met, Perrin turned toward his car and I toward home.
The shadow came with me. I could see it in the long gray stretch of pavement, and I let that be all it was: a shape beside my feet while I walked home with something I’d chosen for myself.
At my flat, I unwrapped the notebook at the kitchen table. I opened it to the first page and left it blank while I made tea. When I came back, I wrote the date at the top. Below it, I wrote: Go to the arcade with Perrin.