The Shape of His Silence

I left every light in the flat on.

The shadow stayed by the door while I moved through the rooms, turning on lamps, opening cupboards, checking the locks twice. It did not behave like a stain or a trick of the electricity. It followed me from the hall to the kitchen, stretched thin beneath the table, then gathered again when I crossed into the sitting room.

At last I stood in the middle of the flat with Auden’s key in one hand and his scarf in the other.

“If you’re him,” I said, “do something I would know.”

The shadow lay at my feet.

I hated myself for how badly I wanted an answer. Not proof for a doctor, or a priest, or anyone who might look at me with pity and say grief had made me see what I needed to see. I wanted proof for myself. Something no stranger could explain away. Something that would let me stop calling him dead for five minutes.

I put the key on the floor.

The shadow did not move.

I placed the scarf beside it, still carrying the cold smell of the cemetery and the faintest trace of cedar soap. The dark shape drew toward the wool. Not quickly. It seemed to drag itself across the floor, gathering at the scarf’s fringe.

Then it curled around the end of it.

Auden had done that with everything he touched. Sleeves. Blankets. The corner of a newspaper. He used to wind the tassel of my gloves around his finger while he read, absent-mindedly trapping me beside him. I had teased him that he needed to keep one hand occupied so it wouldn’t reach for another cup of coffee.

He had said, “I need both hands for coffee.”

I sat down hard on the edge of the sofa.

“That’s not enough,” I whispered.

The shadow loosened from the scarf.

I went to the bookshelf and pulled down the small blue notebook Auden had kept in his coat pocket. I had found it at his flat on the morning after the accident, wedged between the cushions of his chair. The pages held shopping lists, half-finished sentences, a drawing of a bird that looked more like a badly folded umbrella. On the last page, he had written the name he used for me.

Moth.

He had started calling me that because I always leaned toward the light, even when I was trying to disappear. I had pretended to hate it. He had pretended to believe me.

I placed the notebook on the floor.

“Moth,” I said.

The shadow did not move.

My throat tightened. I tried again, softer. “Auden used to call me Moth.”

Still nothing.

The flat seemed to contract around me. The refrigerator clicked in the kitchen. Pipes knocked somewhere inside the walls. Outside, a bus passed through the wet street, its headlights sliding across the ceiling like pale water.

I picked up the notebook and held it against my chest.

“You know that,” I said. “You have to know that.”

The shadow shifted, but not toward me. One narrow edge lifted and fell. It looked less like a gesture than a failure of the light.

I closed my eyes.

Perhaps it had never been Auden. Perhaps the thing in the alley had been some hungry piece of winter that had learned the shape of my grief. Perhaps it had curled around the scarf because the scarf was dark, because the air moved, because I wanted it to.

“Auden,” I said.

This time, the shadow stretched toward me.

Only a little. Its edge crossed the rug and touched the toe of my boot.

I opened my eyes.

The relief was so fierce it became pain.

I made tea because there was nothing else to do. My hands shook while I filled the kettle. When it boiled, I poured too quickly and spilled water over the counter. The shadow waited beneath the table, its shape drawn out by the light above the sink.

I carried the mug to the sofa and sat with both hands around it. The heat seeped into my fingers. I looked down at the dark shape beside my foot.

“You protected me,” I said. “In the alley.”

It remained still.

“Did it hurt?”

No answer. Of course there was no answer.

I took a drink. The tea had gone bitter from the bag being left in too long.

“Are you trapped here because of me?”

The shadow pulled itself closer.

That frightened me more than if it had fled.

I set the mug down. “You need to go.”

It stopped.

The words had been waiting behind my teeth since the alley. I had not wanted to say them because saying them made me responsible for what came next. If it left, I would lose the impossible thing. If it stayed, then Auden’s death had not ended. He would be here because of me, unable to speak, unable to touch me, unable even to remember the name he had given me.

“I can’t keep you like this,” I said. “I can’t be the reason you’re suffering.”

At the window, the latch lifted.

I heard the small metallic click and looked up.

The window was shut when I came in. Now its lower edge had opened by an inch, letting in a blade of snow-cold air. The curtain stirred. Beyond the glass, the fire escape climbed into the darkness, slick with rain.

I stood.

The shadow moved faster than I did.

It surged across the floor and rose up the wall beside the window. For an instant it became the outline of a man, shoulders broad, one arm flung out between me and the glass.

The window shattered.

The sound tore through the room. I screamed and threw up my hands as shards flew inward. None struck me. They hung for the briefest moment in the air, glittering in the lamplight, then fell around the shadow’s raised arm.

The cold vanished.

The glass lay across the rug and sofa cushions. A stone, wrapped in a strip of black cloth, rolled to a stop near my knee.

Someone had thrown it from the fire escape.

I could see the shape of a handprint on the wet outer sill. The fingers were too long, the palm pressed hard enough to leave a clear mark in the condensation.

The shadow collapsed from the wall.

It fell soundlessly to the floor, smaller than before.

I ran to it and dropped beside the scattered glass. My hands hovered over the dark shape, useless. I could not lift it. I could not gather it up or hold it together. All I could do was kneel close enough to feel the faint warmth coming from it.

“Auden.”

The warmth flickered.

I pressed his scarf against the floor beside the shadow. “Please. Don’t do that again.”

The dark shape gathered around the wool, but its edges had begun to break apart. Little threads of blackness thinned into the pale rug and disappeared.

I thought of the alley. The arm raised against the stranger. The heat in my palm. I thought of the way the shadow had answered his name and failed to answer mine.

“What did it cost you?” I asked.

The shape trembled.

I knew then that whatever remained of Auden could protect me, but protection was not the same as staying. Each time he placed himself between me and harm, something in him went with the danger. A memory, perhaps. A voice. The private name he had made for me.

I touched the scarf instead of him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I called you that night. I’m sorry you came.”

The shadow drew close to my hand.

For a moment, warmth pressed against my knuckles. Not touch. Never touch. Only the suggestion of it, the ghost of a hand held near mine without meeting it.

I stayed there until the room stopped spinning.

Then I picked up the phone and called the emergency glazier. I told him the window had broken from the outside. I did not tell him why no shard had cut me, or why the black shape beneath the sofa seemed to be keeping watch over the door.

Before I left to wait in the hall, I turned off every light except the lamp beside the sofa.

The shadow remained beneath it.

“Auden,” I said once more. “I’m not going to pretend you aren’t here.”

It did not answer. But when I stepped into the corridor, it followed me over the threshold, thin and wavering, carrying what little warmth it had left.