The Shadow Catcher

She could not remember, later, who it was that she’d enlisted to go back into the shop with her — some passerby, some incidental person who had been nearby when the avalanche occurred, on the street, perhaps, clearing snow, himself, with a shovel in his hands. She could not remember, later, what she’d told him but she got him to accompany her inside and then he, or perhaps she, had called for others to join in the effort. She could not remember things in proper order, later, all the things that had happened in the next four weeks except one vivid memory that stood out from all the rest and kept recurring. It was the moment that defined the next four weeks, the next six months — perhaps, even, the rest of her whole life. She’d been standing in the shop and she had reached across the breach where the window had once been and she had touched Amelia’s fingers. And in that instant she had known that she was dead. In that very instant she had watched her mother’s fingers blanch from red to blue to waxen yellow and she had drawn her own hand back as if her flesh, still so alive, was in violation of a trust, as if her own hand was the ghostly one. From that moment forward she’d responded only as a specter, as a stranger passing through her own dreams. Lodz had arrived — unshaven, in a black skullcap — with Hercules in tow, and Clara had succumbed to silence, then, succumbed to shock, allowing Lodz to take command and make decisions. So much to do, so many things — and her not knowing how to do them. Somehow, she had no memory how, they had returned home that afternoon and Lodz had asked where Clara’s father had kept the family’s documents and papers, where he’d kept the bills and the financial records. At some point, perhaps the next day, these things had been found and she remembered sitting with Lodz at the dining table, answering his questions. She remembered Lodz’s housekeeper being there, too, cleaning in the kitchen — and other people, faintly familiar, milling through the house, clutching her hands and saying things she hadn’t wanted to hear, can’t believe it, so very very sorry, dear. There had been a man one morning, standing in the front room with a ledger and a pencil, taking items off the mantelpiece, examining them. My house, he had snapped at Clara when she’d asked him who he was, before Lodz had arrived and forced him out. Six months they owed in rent, the man had shouted, six months, and soon after that Lodz had said she needed to start packing up what few things, what valuables, mementos of her parents, that she and Hercules might want in the future, might want to keep. She had already seen, going through the papers with Lodz, the unanswered letters from St. Paul Women’s Nursing Academy demanding payment, among other such demands, so she’d begun to understand the slippery ground that she and Hercules were on, but she was not prepared to learn how desperate their present situation was until Lodz confided, solemnly though gently, that very likely a constable would be arriving soon to force the sale of all of their belongings and evict them. “Take your mother’s jewelry,” he had said. “Things simple to pack. The furniture, the larger pieces — by law, we’re bound to let them seize them. Take the things that they won’t notice would be missing.” She remembered standing with him on the top floor in her father’s studio and Lodz asking, “Are these paintings worth anything, do you know?” When she hadn’t answered — being unable to — he’d said, “Well, they’re too large for you to take, anyway,” and she’d stepped forward to the easel where a portrait of her mother stood and showed him how to take the canvas off its frame and roll it, and together they had rolled all her father’s paintings into slender cylinders and Lodz had promised he would keep them safe.