Shadowed

Julia was five years old the first time she remembered receiving a gift from The Shadow Woman. The slatted wooden floorboards outside her bedroom door that creaked heavy whenever her daddy entered were silent as she watched the veiled apparition glide under the doorway and into her bedroom. The Woman stayed for awhile, sitting in the rocking chair in Julia’s room as the girl fell asleep, before fading into the smoky Memphis night. She left behind a small black notebook wrapped in silk, the book covers already soft and worn as if they had been carried by another for some years, the pages inside crisp cream and empty of any thought or reason. Young Julia was beginning to learn to write and was so afraid to cause any damage to the beautiful pages that for years after the gift was bestowed upon her, she only could bend her head into the journal and inhale deeply, imagining all of the different stories it might one day hold.

•

The next time The Shadow Woman visited was on Julia’s eighth birthday. She was huddled under her desk with a blanket over her head, trying with all her might to fade into the very floorboards of her room after hours of listening to the cadence of her parents’ voices crescendo into a scream song. Shattering glass reverberated in her chest like claps of thunder as Julia’s tears melted into the cushioning of her cheeks. The Woman dropped a small stuffed toy into Julia’s lap, a velveteen rabbit with button eyes and soft ears with calico lining. Julia pressed her face into the doll, and when she looked up, The Woman was trailing out of her room.

She stood up and cried out to The Woman, a plea in the darkness for her to turn around and remember that small girl she was leaving behind.

“Wait!”

But just as she heard her own voice realize the air around her, The Woman was gone, the translucent memory of her robed figure sunken into the gray of the night.

•

The Woman visited Julia every few years as she grew, each time bringing with her a parcel wrapped in creamy silk. She joined Julia the morning that her daddy packed up his bags and left their house for the very last time, Julia’s body doubling in half from the weight of the emotion welling over inside her. She came on the nights in Julia’s young adult years that she felt less human and more hollowed husk, almost paralyzed by a drowning void of any emotion at all. Julia kept all of the gifts from The Shadow Woman, transferring them from bookshelf to bookshelf each time she needed to pack up her own life and move on.

The last time The Woman visited was the night before Julia’s wedding to Liam almost eight years ago. That night was the only time The Woman had not brought along any gift for Julia. She drifted into her bedroom and sat in the chair next to Julia’s bed, wordlessly rocking Julia to sleep just as she had when Julia was a small girl. When Julia woke the next morning, her eyes tingling and reticent with champagne bubbles, she felt a heavy tension that she would never see The Woman again.

•

Julia was 34 years old now and could feel her bones draining and weary with the slow drip of each year. She sat outside on her back porch, breathing slowly through her nose, rocking slower in her creaky wooden chair. The swelling in her right eye made it so she could barely see the golden sunset over the Mississippi river. She intermittently touched the bruises that littered her arms and torso, roses that blanched with a cream center when she pressed her index finger just hard enough. After it happened, Liam had stormed out of their apartment, leaving her slumped next to the toilet in the bathroom, crumpled and hollow again.

She was a destitute, sad woman now. Upon looking in the mirror, she hated to recognize the face that stared back at her. Her bottom lip deep purple and too full now, her unruly curls drooped and thinning, the skin around her eyes pulling down into the void of her own emotion. She felt as though the person she once had been, all-consuming sadness and joy and fiery wit, had vacated from her body, and was nothing more than a dream she’d had years ago. Julia had never left Memphis. After struggling through college and barely scraping by with a degree in marketing, she found a job working for an automobile company as an administrative assistant. She’d been with the company for ten years before being laid off, something about “cutting costs” and “downsizing,” but she still harbored that flush of humiliation that she had been the first one out. She applied for work with various companies for a few months after getting fired, never making it any farther than the first round of interviews. Most days now she woke up too numb to imagine any other possible reality than the one she walked.

Most of her marriage felt comfortably erratic, she’d just assumed this was what it meant to love. Her days felt busy and much too full waking up at ten in the morning to halfheartedly putter around their shared apartment, attempting to cook and clean for Liam before regressing to the couch where she sank and languished and dreamed. Julia never could tell what sort of mood Liam would come home in, but she grew less and less careful to not be in his way when he arrived. There were many days that he refused to speak to her or even look at her. The silent times were almost worse than the physical ones.

Their fights felt both like an out of body experience during which she could not recognize the woman whose body she inhabited, and yet at the same time, she felt as though she was finally coming home into herself. He had only ever hit her twice before their fight last night. The first time it happened, she threatened to call the police. The second time it happened, she threatened to leave him, until he was on his knees and pleading to her, begging for forgiveness. That was almost one month ago.

The late afternoon air grew heavy and thick. Julia hummed under the loud chirping of cicadas. Should I stay or should I go?

The golden sunlight grew foggy as a haze obscured Julia’s field of vision. The Shadow Woman was with her once more.

Even after the slow passage of the past eight years, Julia did not startle to see her so near. Something in The Woman’s face stared deep into Julia’s eyes, poring into her brain and examining it for reason. Julia reached out her hand to touch The Woman, and felt her body begin to crumple under her own effort to show strength. Her cries were mournful and pitiful, and the terror and the exhaustion and the love she felt brewing within her began to bubble over. When her throat was raw with pain she looked to The Woman.

“Should I leave him?”

And just as soon as she had appeared, The Woman was fading into the frame of Julia’s back door, leaving in her wake a parcel wrapped in cream silk.

Julia unwrapped the silk to reveal the contents within: a thick stack of money, a clump of salty caramel candies, and an address to somewhere in New York. She quickly sifted through the stack of hundred-dollar bills, whispering as she counted the money out loud. Her eyes began to burn when she reached five thousand dollars, smudging the old, printed faces that stared knowingly up at her. That was not close to the end of it, though. She kept counting, flicking through the bills faster and faster in disbelief: ten thousand, fifteen thousand, eighteen thousand. She had twenty thousand dollars. This was a way to be brave.

Should she stay or should she go?

As the evening dripped onward, all that was left was the smear of the sunset over the Mississippi river, golden and deep crimson like blood, painting thick shadows into the apartments on the riverbank. Minutes opened and closed, stretching into infinity and back again as couples walked their dogs, as children played in the grassy fields stretching next to the river, as lonely spouses waited for their lovers to return home. And as a remembered, and sad, and very hopeful woman drove away from the city for the last time with that bleeding sunset in her rearview mirror, she could only lean her head back and imagine all of the different lives she might one day live.