What Lingers By Bradley Shadows

By Bradley Shadows

Someone was following Mara.

She heard the footsteps when she stopped beneath the broken streetlight. Three more steps, then silence.

She crossed the road. Behind her, shoes scraped the curb.

In the dark window of the bakery, she saw only her own reflection: gray coat, pale face, one hand closed around the key in her pocket. She had left work late again. The last bus had passed her while she was waiting to cross, and she had been too tired to run.

Now she wished she had.

She walked faster.

The footsteps kept pace.

At the corner, she turned suddenly, ready to shout.

Her father stood beside the postbox.

He wore the brown jacket they had buried him in. The left pocket sagged where he used to keep loose change. One of his shoelaces was undone.

For a moment, she felt only irritation.

You’ll trip over that, she almost said.

Then she remembered.

“No.”

He looked embarrassed. It was such a familiar expression that she nearly laughed.

A car turned into the street. Its headlights swept across the postbox, her father, the shuttered florist behind him. He remained exactly where he was.

Mara stepped backward.

Her father lifted one hand.

“Don’t.”

He lowered it.

She turned and walked, fast enough that her bag knocked against her hip. At the next corner, she looked back.

He was following.

Her building’s front door always stuck in wet weather.

She pulled it toward her, turned the key, pushed with her shoulder. Behind her came the soft scrape of her father’s shoes.

“Please,” she said, though she wasn’t sure which of them she was speaking to.

The door opened.

She slipped inside and pulled it shut.

Through the frosted glass, his shape remained at the bottom of the steps.

Mara climbed three flights without switching on the lights. In her flat, she locked the door, fastened the chain, and stood listening.

The refrigerator hummed. A pipe knocked inside the wall.

She waited for footsteps on the stairs.

None came.

In the kitchen, she filled the kettle. She took down a mug, then another, then put the second one back.

Her father had been dead for eleven months.

She had identified him at the hospital. She had chosen the lining of his coffin from a book of samples. She had spent a Saturday emptying his refrigerator, throwing away half a cabbage and six carefully wrapped portions of soup.

She knew he was dead.

When the kettle clicked off, she jumped.

She carried her tea to the living room and sat without drinking it. On the shelf beside the television stood a small cardboard box her sister had brought over after clearing their father’s flat.

Inside were his watch, a photograph, and the little things nobody had known what to do with: spare buttons, a penknife, a key with a yellow plastic cap.

Her sister had written DAD on the lid.

Mara turned the box so the word faced the wall.

At half past one, she looked out of the bedroom window.

Her father was sitting on the front steps.

In the morning, he was still there.

Mara watched him from behind the curtain while she brushed her teeth. People passed on their way to work. A woman with a pushchair went around his outstretched feet without looking down.

That frightened Mara more than if the woman had walked straight through him.

She called in sick.

Then she called her sister.

“Did Dad ever—”

She stopped.

“Did Dad ever what?” Helen asked.

Somewhere behind her, a child was protesting about socks.

“Nothing. I had a dream.”

“Oh.”

“A very clear one.”

Helen was quiet for a moment.

“I had one last month,” she said. “He was fixing my cupboard. The one that never closes properly.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. He kept asking me for a screwdriver, and I couldn’t find one.”

Mara sat on the edge of her bed.

“Did he say anything else?”

“No.” Helen lowered her voice. “I was pleased to see him, though. Even in the dream, I knew.”

Mara looked toward the window.

“I’ve got to go.”

“All right. You sound tired.”

“I am.”

After they hung up, Mara dressed and went downstairs.

Her father stood when she opened the door.

In daylight he looked older than she remembered. There was a small shaving cut beneath his chin. She wondered whether it had been there when he died, whether she had failed to notice it at the hospital.

“Why are you here?”

He watched her.

“Can you talk?”

He opened his mouth, hesitated, then closed it again.

She felt an unreasonable rush of anger.

“Fine.”

She walked to the corner shop. He followed her.

Inside, she took bread, milk, and a packet of biscuits she didn’t want. Through the window, she could see him waiting beside the newspaper rack.

“Anything else?” the cashier asked.

Mara realized she had been standing with her purse open.

“No.”

Back at the flat, she left the front door ajar while she carried her shopping upstairs.

When she returned, he hadn’t moved.

She held the door wider.

He looked past her into the dim hall, then shook his head.

For three days, he waited.

When Mara went out, he followed. When she came home, he settled on the steps.

She tried taking a bus. At the next stop, she saw him standing beside a shelter, breathing hard, as though he had hurried.

She got off.

“This is ridiculous,” she told him.

An elderly man waiting under the shelter glanced at her and moved away.

Her father looked down at his undone shoelace.

“Do that up.”

He bent obediently. His fingers worked slowly at the knot.

She had to look away.

That evening, she took the cardboard box down from the shelf.

The photograph showed her at nine, sitting on her father’s shoulders at the seaside. She had both hands clamped over his eyes. He was laughing, his mouth wide open.

She remembered that day, or thought she did. Sand in a sandwich. A purple bucket. Her father carrying her back to the car because she had cut her foot on a shell.

She couldn’t remember the sound of his laugh.

Mara put the photograph back.

Underneath it lay the key with the yellow cap.

She knew every key he had owned. Front door, back door, garage. After the funeral, she and Helen had tried this one in every lock they could find.

None had opened.

She carried it downstairs.

“Is this what you want?”

Her father looked at the key in her palm.

Then he looked at her.

“Because I don’t know what it’s for.”

He reached out. She held her breath.

His fingers stopped just short of hers.

For the first time since she had seen him beside the postbox, he looked unhappy.

Mara closed her hand.

“I can’t keep doing this.”

The last time she had seen him alive, he had been standing in her kitchen.

He had arrived without calling and brought a bag of tomatoes from his garden. She was trying to finish a report. Her laptop was open on the table, and he had set the bag on a pile of papers.

One tomato split.

She remembered the juice seeping into the corner of a page.

He had asked whether she was eating properly. Then whether she was sleeping. Then whether the job was worth making herself ill over.

She told him he didn’t understand her work.

He said he was trying to understand why she never had time for anything else.

There had been more. She had gone over it so often that certain phrases no longer sounded like words.

At the door, he had said, “You don’t have to speak to me like that.”

She had replied, “Then stop treating me like a child.”

He left.

She let the door slam.

Three hours later, a policeman knocked on it.

A driver hadn’t seen him at a crossing.

For eleven months, Mara had imagined him walking away from her building. Had he been angry? Distracted? Had he stepped into the road while thinking about what she had said?

Nobody could answer those questions. Eventually, people stopped trying.

On the fourth evening, rain began to fall.

Mara watched from her bedroom window as it darkened the shoulders of her father’s jacket.

She went downstairs with an umbrella.

He looked up.

“You’ll get soaked.”

He shifted on the step.

She stood beside him for a while, holding the umbrella over them both. Water dripped from one of its broken spokes.

Then she sat down.

Across the street, someone was washing dishes at a bright kitchen window. A bus passed with two passengers asleep beneath its lights.

“I was still angry when they told me,” Mara said.

Her father watched the road.

“For a second. When the policeman said your name, I thought you’d done something. Got into trouble somehow.”

She tightened her grip on the umbrella.

“I was annoyed that I’d have to deal with it.”

The rain hissed against the parked cars.

“And then I understood.”

Her father turned toward her.

“I don’t know how to make that better.”

He rested his hands on his knees. She could see a pale crescent of soil beneath one thumbnail.

For a long time, neither moved.

Then Mara said, “You were telling me something. Before we argued.”

He waited.

“About your garden.”

His expression changed slightly.

“The tomatoes?”

He smiled.

She could almost hear him beginning: You’ll never guess what I saw.

“Something had eaten them.”

His shoulders lifted.

“A fox?”

He shook his head.

“A squirrel.”

He nodded, delighted.

And she remembered.

A squirrel on the garden fence, carrying a tomato almost as big as its head. Her father had tried to chase it off, but it had merely moved a little farther along and continued eating. He had been acting out the squirrel’s offended stare when she interrupted him to move the leaking bag.

Mara laughed once, unexpectedly.

“You said it looked like your old boss.”

Her father’s mouth opened in a broad, silent laugh.

She remembered the sound.

She bent forward, covering her face with her free hand. He stayed beside her while she cried. Once, she felt his hand settle between her shoulders, light through her coat.

When she could speak again, she told him about work. Then about Helen’s children, and the bathroom tap she had finally fixed herself.

The rain stopped. She lowered the umbrella.

They sat until the kitchen across the street went dark.

Mara woke at dawn with a stiff neck.

She was alone on the steps. The umbrella lay across her knees.

For a while, she stayed where she was.

Then she went upstairs.

In the kitchen, she put the kettle on and opened the curtains. The little box was still on the table. She took out the photograph and propped it against the fruit bowl.

Later, she would call Helen. She would ask about Sunday lunch.

First, she found a sheet of paper and began writing down the squirrel story, including the parts she wasn’t certain of, leaving spaces where she hoped her sister might remember.

Halfway through, the kettle clicked off.

She got up to make her tea, holding her place on the page with the yellow key.