The Words I Kept

By the time I reached the station, I had rehearsed the first sentence so often that it no longer sounded like mine.

Vale had set a fresh statement form on the table. He left the chair opposite me empty and put his notebook beside the form. The shadow lay under my shoes, narrow in the overhead light. I sat down without taking off my coat.

“Start wherever you can,” Vale said. “We can put it in order afterward.”

I looked at the blank lines. “I called Auden during the storm and asked him to come to me.”

Vale wrote it down. His pen moved steadily, without the little pauses people used when they wanted you to notice they were being careful.

“I wasn’t in danger,” I said. “I need that clear. I was alone in my flat. I’d had a bad evening, and I wanted him there. I told him I needed him.”

“Did he ask you to call someone else? Or tell you he couldn’t come?”

“No. He said he’d come.”

Vale waited. I could hear a clerk moving folders in the next room. On the table, the corner of the statement lifted in the draft from the heating vent.

“I knew the weather was bad,” I said. “I knew it would be a difficult drive. I still asked. I thought he’d decide for himself whether it was safe.”

“And did you tell him you expected him to drive?”

“I didn’t ask how he’d get here.” I pressed my thumb against the seam of my coat pocket. “I assumed he’d work it out. That’s what I’m ashamed of.”

Vale made a note, then read back what he had written. He had put that I knew Auden would drive. I stopped him there.

“I didn’t know that. I didn’t ask. Write that I assumed he’d work it out.”

He crossed out the line and corrected it. The ink left a dark bar through the first version. I watched until he finished.

“What did you hear in his voice?” he asked.

“He sounded tired.”

“Was there anything else?”

I could have said no. It would have been true in the plainest sense. I had heard nothing that made me think he would die. I had heard nothing that told me to hang up and call back in the morning. But the word tired had become a shelter I kept walking into, and it was too small for the whole conversation.

“He sounded far away,” I said. “I thought it was the connection. The storm was bad. I didn’t ask if he was all right.”

“Did he tell you he was confused?”

“No.” I rubbed the place on my finger where my ring used to sit, though I hadn’t worn it in months. “He said he was coming. I let that answer be enough.”