Who Remains

Who Remains

"Will you have another?"

I know that question better than the bottle on the shelf behind the bar. In the two-second pause before I answer someone who's asked me twice, there's only the other sentence — the one I've said alone, in cars, in the shower, until it doesn't feel like a thought anymore. It feels like the weather. Something that happens to me, not something I do.

Tonight it happens to me in a restaurant I used to like.

She's at a corner table with a man I don't recognize and immediately do. Same haircut, more or less. Same way of leaning in to her when she talks, like her sentences are heavier than everyone else's and require the whole body to receive them. He's laughing at something she said. I know the laugh. I gave that laugh, once, to the same joke, or close enough that the difference doesn't matter.

I don't go over. I sit at the bar with my back half-turned, watching them in the mirror between the bottles, which is its own kind of confession — I'd rather see her reflected than risk the chance of her seeing me directly.

For a while there's only pieces of her, cut into strips by glass and label. Then the bartender reaches up for something on the top shelf and pulls one bottle down, and the gap opens all at once — her, him, and me, small in the corner of the glass, all three of us caught in the same rectangle of light.

Are you still—

I don't finish it.

Here's what I believed, back when I still had the right to believe things about her:

I believed that if everything she told me was true — the plans, the certainty, the I've never felt this before — then there was no surviving after losing her. That kind of truth doesn't let go of a person. If she meant it, all of it, then grief was a life sentence and I'd already signed for it.

That belief did a lot of work for me. It explained the month I couldn't eat right. It explained the two nights I drove past her building for no reason I could defend to anyone, including myself. If everything she said was true, of course I couldn't get over her. The math worked. The devastation was proportional to the honesty.

I don't know anymore which parts were true. I'm not sure that's a question with an answer, or even one I'm owed. I only know the belief is still standing exactly where I left it, like furniture in a house I don't live in anymore.

I still know that lamp. The blue one, by her window — cheap enough that the switch never caught on the first try. You had to click it, wait, click it again, a stutter she complained about for a year and never once replaced. I know which side of the mattress dips lower. None of this is useful to me now. I have no reason to be carrying it. I carry it anyway.

She pays, or he does. They stand. She says something to the hostess on the way out that makes them both laugh, and the door closes, and the bell above it rings once.

I don't remember deciding to leave. I don't remember most of the drive either — just a traffic light two blocks out, where there's nothing to look at for a second but my own eyes in the mirror above the wheel, longer than I mean to. I catch myself saying it out loud at the light, the same sentence I always say, and stop, embarrassed in front of no one. It isn't dignified and it isn't a decision so much as a thing my car does on its own, the way water finds the same low place in a yard every time it rains.

Her building is four blocks from the restaurant. I park across the street, engine off, the way I've done before, more times than I've told anyone. I know how this looks. I'm not going to pretend I don't.

Her bedroom light is on. Third floor, second window from the left. I can see the shape of her moving through the room — a lamp, a shadow crossing it, the outline of someone taking off a coat. Then his shadow too, larger, slower, following hers across the same wall.

Are you still there?

I don't know if I'm asking her. The window is far enough away that I couldn't hear an answer even if the question were spoken out loud and not just held behind my teeth. But the shape of the room says yes. The lamp says yes. As long as that light is on, she is exactly where I can see her.

His shadow moves closer to hers. Overlaps it. For a second the two shapes on the wall are one shape.

Are you still there?

This time I don't know who I mean. Him, maybe — some half-formed warning I have no right to give a man I've never spoken to, who's done nothing to me except exist in a window I shouldn't be watching. Or her, still, asking through the glass whether the version of her I used to know is in that room at all, or whether she left with the rest of it, the plans, the certainty, the things I built a whole grief on top of.

The lamp flickers before it actually goes — one click that catches nothing, then the room goes dark on the second. I know that stutter. I've always known it. Knowing it from here doesn't count for anything, but I know it anyway.

The room goes dark. The car goes dark with it. In the glass beside me, there's only the shape of what's looking back.

I don't do anything dramatic. I don't say anything out loud.

The street is quiet. The light stays off.

Are you still there?

I don't know who I mean.