Shred of Evidence

There is a dark world you can only get to through love, when you realize you’ve given all you can, and it’s still not enough to hold on to someone. There’s power when you have nothing left to lose.

You think of these things as you walk briskly down the crowded aisles of the store, high heels clicking a warning to those ahead. You pass men, not looking for long enough to catch their eye. You stop a woman who seems to work there and ask her where the ties are kept.

Dark ones. Ties suitable for a funeral.

The clerk’s face shines with compassion. She points, then grabs your arm as if she cannot bear the thought of you wandering the store, searching alone for a tie for such a sad occasion.

“Was it someone close?” she asks, her voice husky, but sure. This is a woman who has lost someone in her life. Only those who’ve swum grief’s waters know how to navigate them for others.

“A lover,” you say and your voice catches. It is affected but effective. The woman does not question; her eyes betray no suspicion. She believes you feel pain.

She does not understand that you also cause it.

“I lost my uncle three years ago. He practically raised me.” She smiles, the sad smile of one survivor to another.

You nod. There is nothing required of you in this situation. Nothing to say to make the pain better for either of you. Her with her old pain, you with your new.

Pain born and pain dealt.

“Were you with him long?” she asks, deftly navigating through some tightly packed racks of coats.

“Not long enough.”

I need to talk to you. About us.

“It never is, is it?” She pushes past a woman with young children. The boy won’t move, and you can tell by the look on the clerk’s face that she does not like children.

You weren’t terribly fond of them, either. Until yours started to grow inside you.

I was with someone.

The clerk stops suddenly and slowly turns, a frown starting. “Who is the tie for?”

“Him.” You look down, as if the question is just too painful.

“Oh. Oh…yes, of course. You have to decide what he’ll…I guess something new just feels right?”

“Something new generally does.”

I love her.

The clerk nods. You notice her hand strays to her belly, lying on top of it as if protecting something inside.

She’s carrying my child.

“Are you pregnant?” you ask the clerk, nodding at the way she is cupping her stomach.

“Oh, God, no.” She blushes. “Just cramps.”

You nod and smile the sympathetic grimace of remembered pain. You know cramps. From your periods and from the time when you should not have bled. When the child you would have given him came out in a mass of blood and tissue. Your body cramping so bad that all you could do was lie on the floor, a sodden towel under you.

And him nowhere to be found.

I just can’t be with you anymore.

He left you alone to bleed.

He left you alone to spew his child on that tile floor while his new woman kept his other child safe.

“I was pregnant,” you tell the clerk. “I miscarried.”

She turns, pity in her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

You nod; you’re sorry, too. “Nothing to remember him by.”

He hadn’t known to warn this woman who carried his child that you might not take it well. Hadn’t done more than just keeping the two of you separate. So she didn’t know what you looked like, didn’t know to be afraid when you struck up a conversation on the train into the city.

She didn’t think it odd when you were always in the car she was in.

Didn’t question whether it was a good idea to start getting coffee—milk for her, of course—with you before work. To start having lunch with you. To become quite so fond of you, fond enough to trust you, to share secret hopes for her future.

You used a different name. You wore a wig and heavier makeup. Glasses that were bookish and dark.

Even he wouldn’t have recognized you. Not from far away.

She invited you to her house one night when he was out of town. She had movies for you to watch. Chick flicks, she said. The kind her boyfriend didn’t like.

Her boyfriend.

Your boyfriend.

Out of town.

You made sure he found her when he got back. Found her halfway down the stairs, popcorn spilled around her, the hand-painted blue bowl she said they’d picked out together lying unhurt at the bottom.

Her neck was at an odd angle. You didn’t put it that way; she just fell so pretty, all on her own. Got dizzy, the paramedics no doubt said. Lost her balance as pregnant women sometimes do.

You were careful not to touch anything you couldn’t wipe off later when you got rid of any trace that you’d been there. You had napkins in your hand when you pushed her.

She didn’t scream when she fell. That was disappointing. You wanted something. Not just a little “Oh!” and then the thud.

But you’d already been taught that you wouldn’t always get what you want, so you let your disappointment go and took what fate offered.

You waited, making sure she wasn’t just hurt—that she was dead. You stared at her belly, wondering if she’d bleed out the brat the way your baby had leaked out. But there was no blood. Her baby died as quietly as she did.

You left through the back door. Walked the three blocks to the subway stop and rode the train home.

You put the wig and the glasses in a box you stuck in the attic. That person was gone. That person who she thought was her friend. She never knew the real you. It’s possible no one but you and the ghost of a baby bled out on a bathroom floor know the real you.

It didn’t surprise you at all that he came to you after he found her the next night. In shock. Eyes red and puffy. He came to you.

Something’s happened.

You didn’t hold him. You stared hard at him, waiting, but no more words came out of him as he stood in the light from the streetlamp and ran his hands through hair that was already mussed.

You walked away from him, down the walkway, back to the door of the house the two of you shared for three years. But just when you thought he was ready to turn and go, you looked back. That kind of look you’ve seen described in books that make words into poetry. The backward glance. The gesture that said, “You’ll always own my heart.”

That you forgave him.

I’m so sorry. I…

You could see his pain. You thought he wasn’t actually sorry for what he’d done to you. He was sorry for her having died. For their baby never getting past those stairs to the basement, with that rough Berber carpeting beneath its mother’s skin and popcorn all around. The butter smell oozing up.

The smell should have made you sick. It didn’t.

You popped some as he paced the kitchen, not talking, just moving, as if he was some kind of heartbroken shark that would die if it stopped. You pretended not to understand why he shied away from the popcorn you offered him. And then you made him sit as you took the opposing chair. It was like old times, only with just you eating. He was looking increasingly sick the more you ate.

What now?

You shrugged. He hadn’t told you what had happened, not really. You owed him no reaction until he did.

He got up slowly, staring at the popcorn as if it had been the thing to kill his woman. You looked up at him, waiting.

I have to go.

But he didn’t go. He stood, playing with his tie. Worrying at it. A bright tie. Wine and turquoise, with patches of yellow. Abstract. Not one you bought for him.

But you’ll buy one for him now.

The clerk is handing you a dark tie. Black with a pattern you can barely see in red with tiny streaks of antique gold. It makes you think of blood and popcorn drowning in a sea of tar.

“It’s perfect,” you say.

She rings it up and takes extra care with wrapping it in tissue paper so it won’t wrinkle or scrunch up in the bag. She’s trying so hard you think she is probably a good person. A person who wouldn’t leave someone lying crumpled on the stairs with a dying baby inside her.

But you can be good. Look at you now, buying him a tie. Not a bright, loud, bought-by-somebody-else tie. But a mournful tie that you’ll take to him.

“For the funeral,” you will say.

And he will look touched. He will look helpless and want to hold you. He’s been by several times since she died. You’ve been sweet to him. You’ve been comforting. As if you can forgive him. As if you love him enough to want to help him when he needs you.

He never knew about your baby, wasn’t there when you needed him, when you cleaned up the mess.

Bleach and scouring powder. That’s what babies smell like to you. You hate those smells, now.

But babies can smell like popcorn, too, and that smell still doesn’t bother you.

You don’t eat popcorn around him, anymore. Not since he told you what happened. After all, you’re a caring person. You wouldn’t want to torture him.

You’ve been so understanding.

“I am sorry.” The clerk hands you the bag. “To lose your lover…”

You nod, give her the saddest look you can. But as you turn and push your way through the aisles, you smile, and you know in what used to be your heart that it is not a pretty expression. “I didn’t say it was my lover.”