She Walks in Shadows (29 page)

He shouted. He wasn’t making any sense. He said Dr. Davis was dead. He started to say something else. Then he screamed.

Then the gibberish started.

He rushed out of the tunnel with his camp knife in his hand. He’d dropped the lantern behind him. He was a shadow, a shadow with a knife, shouting things that made no sense. You heard him. Same things.

I ran. I hid. I hid behind a rock and Bill didn’t find me. What am I supposed to tell you? I was afraid. He was bigger than me. He had a knife. Somebody must have heard all the ruckus. There were houses not that far away. I was hiding when he found you. I was hiding when you made him quiet, when you called out and said that I would be okay.

I will be okay. Right?

“I don’t think you’re telling me everything,” he answers.

“I’m telling you everything I can remember.” Everything I have words for. Everything I care to say.

Everything he can understand.

Other things, I leave out. Because I know the man in the blue suit would find them unimportant, or important in the wrong way.

Like, when I agreed to come along on the expedition, I thought they needed my expertise, my experience. An extra set of hands and eyes, at least. By the time I realized my sole purpose was to be a secretary, we were already underway. And Bill wouldn’t even look at me. And Dr. Davis just turned up the radio when I asked him why he couldn’t have pulled an undergraduate out of class.

(I understand now. He didn’t want to have to answer to somebody’s rich parents. We were both on scholarship. Our parents didn’t matter. If he knew what we were going to find, why did he think he was going to survive it?)

Or that I can’t even remember now why I’d agreed to marry Bill, except that he was the only man who asked me. That I have always suspected the feeling — or lack of feeling — was mutual.

Even so, he didn’t deserve what happened. If only he’d been able to see. To accept.

Or that when I say I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet, I mean it in more ways than one.

•

They let a psychiatrist talk to me. At least, I think she’s a psychiatrist. She doesn’t introduce herself as Doctor. Maybe she is like me: somebody’s girlfriend, a convenient secretary.

She asks me why I’m here. I tell her the same story I tell the man in the blue suit. The only difference is, this time, I feel guilty about the omissions. Maybe this is why they sent her in. Maybe the man in the blue suit thinks I’ll say more interesting things to a woman.

When I’m done, she says, “Bill — you were engaged to be married, yes?”

No ring, no date set. But, “Yes.”

“I’m so sorry.”

There is some ghost feeling inside me that thinks it might feel good to cry, but it won’t come to the surface. Hiding behind rocks, terrified. “Thank you,” I say and wonder if she can tell that I mean it.

“Do you want to tell me about him?”

Yes. But even as I explain how he was different from the rest of the doctoral candidates, he was a veteran, he’d served in Korea, always treated me a little differently, a little more respect, like we were both not quite fitting in — I cannot shake the sense that I am saying all the wrong things, until the words slow, stumble, stop altogether. “I feel like I should be crying or something.”

“You’ve been through a shock.” She looks down at her yellow pad. It’s empty. “A terrible thing. Don’t worry about how you should be reacting.” Then she glances at the door and I know she is thinking of the man in the blue suit. “With me, at least.”

I cannot fully trust her. Not with my story, not with my dreams. Talking to her makes me feel better, nonetheless.

There’s a pattern to my days. Mornings with the suit, afternoons with the maybe-psychiatrist, the rest of the time alone in my room. They do not want me talking to the other patient-inmates. It might not be good for them.

On the third afternoon, they relent. After my session with the psychiatrist, they let me work in the little farmyard they keep for occupational therapy.

As soon as I close the gate, the goats crowd around, nibbling politely at my uniform, staring up with yellow, alien eyes.

Above, from a high window, the man in the blue suit watches. He thinks I do not know he is there.

I choose to feed the chickens.

The next morning, the maybe-psychiatrist and the man in the blue suit argue in the hallway, as though I cannot hear them. She says there is nothing wrong with me other than the trauma I have so recently endured. He wonders how she can be so sure. He asks whether I don’t seem ... unnaturally collected. Just like that, with that meaningful pause.

She asks what happened to Bill, why I’m here, what happened in those woods. He doesn’t tell her. He tells her to just do her job, stop being hysterical.

She storms off in anger. I’m glad I’m not the only one to feel that way.

I think I’d tell her, if I could. Despite the danger. How before Bill came out of the tunnel, there was something else. How before the spill of lantern-light, there was shadow.

And this is why I can’t tell her. Because there are no words in this language to describe what advanced toward me. Everything was contained in those shadows: male, female, both, neither, irrelevant. They filled the world, bent it with the weight of their production. I say ‘they,’ but even that is wrong. Imagine a singular being but an infinite expression —

On the other hand, don’t. That’s what broke Bill. Trying to define.

I didn’t define. I let the presence wash over me, pull me out to sea like a riptide. Never fight a riptide.

I was in awe.

The shadows filled me and they smiled.

And my feet were still on shore.

That was when Bill came rushing out of the tunnel, knife in hand, screaming the name for something he could not understand.

I held up my hand. On my face was a smile that felt cruel and not my own.

“You shame her,” my voice said. “She will not answer you.”

I said
she
only because I knew that was all Bill would recognize.

His knife came down on air. I was already behind the rocks, hiding, shivering. Thinking I should go to him, help him, save him, even though he would probably kill me. Even though I had already run.

You know better.

Why, yes, my lord, my lady. I do. But it hurt so much to leave him. Hurt me then; hurts me now.

Yes.
Tender. Cruel.

Necessary.

Even now, the shadow is a whisper in my soul.

I think I can turn out the lights in my room if I concentrate hard enough.

The lights go out.

Light has its uses, but I prefer the dark.

In the darkness, lights are dancing, ghostlights in the shape of women and of men. They dance together, men with men, women with women, in ways I do not recognize, in ways that would shame me if I still cared about shame.

I do not understand, but then I see. This is the future, a ghost future, a future that still may not be.

My savior is lonely, trapped here in this well-defined world. She misses her children. He longs for his throne.

Tonight,
the voice inside me says and I understand.

That afternoon, the psychiatrist does not come. It is the man in the blue suit instead, as though I cannot tell the difference.

“Under what grounds are you keeping me here?” I ask.

“You’re under observation,” he says.

“And what have you observed?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out.”

“Nothing. You’ve seen nothing.”

“You’d like me to believe that.”

“My parents will be looking for me.”

“Your parents,” he says, not bothering to hide his smirk, “are distraught. You wandered away from your campus with little more than a note. It is thought that your paramour persuaded his advisor to join him in a search for you, a search which seems to have gone tragically awry. It is suspected that the pressures of your studies proved too much.” He leans forward. “They fear your body will never be found.”

I lean back. “Thank you. Now I know where I stand. How long do you intend to keep me here?”

“As long as it takes for you to show your true colors.”

“You think I killed him.”

“No. We know what killed your companions. What we don’t know — what we seek to understand — is why she decided to let you live.”