The Shadow Catcher

Her instinct was to kiss him, press her breasts against his chest and press her body to him, but when she tilted her face to meet his lips he rolled her over, rolled her to her side, her back once more to him and then he pushed her top leg forward and she felt his sex pushing at her, felt him fumble himself forward through the narrow place between her thighs and then she felt the pain of his insertion. She made a small knob of the sheet inside her fist and bit down on it as he pressed forward, deeper, into her. He began to rock against her as she closed her eyes and then in a juttering spasm he fell still, his ragged breath against her back. She had thought that love would be an open confrontation, face to face, that love would be between the eyes, not like this, the way two animals would do it. She didn’t speak, although she wanted to, she didn’t move, she merely breathed and waited for some gentle sign from him. After a while she felt that part of him that was inside her diminish, then she felt a bath of liquid on her legs and Edward rolled from her onto his back. She raised herself onto her elbows and looked at him. His arm was crooked across his forehead, casting his eyes in shadow, hiding them from her. She said his name. “Sleep,” he told her, and she put the lantern out.

She thought she heard him rise while it was still dark and she thought she’d said his name again and that he’d told her to go back to sleep again, but she may have only dreamed it. When she woke gray light filtered through the only window, shadowing the outlines of the pictures on the walls and at the instant that she started to remember where she was and what had happened she knew at once that he was gone. She sat up and listened. There was no sign of him. His walking stick was nowhere in the room.

She stood up and was immediately leveled to her knees by pain, clutching at the bed for balance. Somewhere deep inside her pelvis was a thorn that made it hard to stand and as she knelt, trying to overcome it, she saw that she had bled across the sheet during the night. Her thighs were caked with blood and as she rose she reached for her black poplin skirt to dress in and to hide her stain. Over the skirt she pulled her shift and then she walked, one stiff step at a time, to the door.

He was not in the kitchen.

Nor was he in the yard.

She hesitated briefly, deciding whether to draw water to make coffee for their breakfast or to go and find him in the barn.

But his room was empty. His knapsack was not there. Neither was the camera in the other room and in the barn a single stall door stood ajar where the mule had been set free. Through the fresh ash on the ground outside the barn she could see the mule’s tracks leading toward the yard, a line of round depressions from the walking stick beside them. She followed their trace down the rutted track until it met the road. One direction led to the sawmill and the other to the inner coastline and the ferry and she stood and watched the tracks turn sharply toward the route to water where they disappeared to a single vanishing point in the distance. However far away the two edges of the road might seem to converge into the illusion of disappearance, Edward was beyond that point by now, she knew, outside the picture. How far could he go in his condition? He could not walk far — for a day, she told herself — perhaps only for the morning — so her best mode of conduct would be to carry on, prepare for his return as if nothing out of the ordinary had transpired. Except that something out of the ordinary had transpired and she was both confused and disappointed by it and ashamed of her compliance. If he had kissed her, if he had said good-bye, if he had ever said her name — she started turning over ifs as she sat at the kitchen table, waiting. In a rash of energy she stripped the bed and washed herself despite the pain from a basin of cold water and dressed herself to follow in his tracks but then had second thoughts. What would she say to him? He had left her on the morning after what was reputed to be love, reputed to be sacred between a married couple, between a husband and a wife.

She sat through the dwindling light and lit only a single lantern turned down low when she realized it had grown too dark to see her hands. At the moonrise she brought blankets and a pillow to the porch and made a basic pallet on the boards, but didn’t sleep. The moon, gibbous, was the color of her blood.