Shadows At The Window

“Lilly?” He looked at me.

I was shredding the paper napkin in my lap. I said, “I’m not sick. I lied to you about that. I’m just so unsure of things, Greg. I mean about us. I’m just—I don’t know where to begin. I had a pretty rough life before I came to Boston. There are so many things I hid from you, so many things about my past. I’m just thinking that, maybe, I don’t know…” I ran my finger down the length of my spoon. Then I placed it beside my coffee. At a big square table beside us, a business meeting was forming. I heard cheerful hellos, saw hearty handshakes. People in suits. People with computers. People drinking coffee. I looked at the short, stocky man who seemed to be leading it. He reminded me of an actor whose name I couldn’t place.

“I know there’s more to your story, Lilly. And I wait and wait for you to feel comfortable enough to share it with me, but that time never comes. I know you’re dealing with a lot of issues, but are these issues insurmountable?”

“I don’t know, Greg.” They’re bigger than you could ever imagine, I thought, looking past him. “With what I’ve been through, it’s going to take time.”

Our bouncy waitress plunked sandwiches down in front of us. I looked at my chicken panini. The sight of it made me feel slightly nauseated. She left after assuring us that she’d be back, and saying if there was anything we wanted, just give her a holler. How about a new life? I thought.

“I was just wondering,” I said, playing with my spoon again, “if we could just be friends for a while.”

“Friends?” Greg pushed his own plate away, reached forward, put my spoon on the table and took my hand. “Lilly, what are you saying?”

“I guess—” I swallowed “—I don’t want to break up. That’s not what I’m saying.”

“But you want us to be just friends,” he said.

I nodded. I kept my gaze on my chicken sandwich, memorizing the way it looked on the plate, with the edges curled. It didn’t look like food to me.

“There’s so much about me you don’t know,” I said.

“I know.” He kept his gaze steady. “Lilly, we’ve shared a lot with each other these past few months. I know all about the relationship you were in with an incredibly abusive boyfriend, and then how you escaped, how you managed to find your way up here, how you came to faith and how faith in God changed you. I know you’ve come from a hard place. I probably know more about you than you do, in some ways.”

I doubted that, but I let it slide.

“And whatever it is,” he continued, “you can trust me. You need to trust me. I love you. I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

I looked across the table and saw the pain in his eyes. I looked down into my coffee. The silence between us lengthened. Someone at the meeting table laughed out loud. I still didn’t say anything.

“So,” he said. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

I shook my head. How do I tell him that knowing more about me could put him in danger?

“I can’t,” I said. “I thought I could but I can’t. I’m not ready. Could we just—um, be friends?”

Now it was his turn to shake his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I really don’t think so.”

We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

I didn’t want it to be like this. I wanted us to be engaged and meeting for lunch to plan our spring wedding. I’d told him a lot, yes, but never once had I mentioned the name Mudd to him. Nor had I told him anything about Moira.

FOUR

Days went by. First one. Then the next. When after the third day, I hadn’t received a follow-up e-mail, I dared myself to believe that God had answered my prayer. Maybe whoever sent the e-mail did get their laptop stolen at Starbucks. Maybe their hard drive crashed. And maybe, just maybe, Mudd was really dead, like I’d always believed. And then I had another thought. Could the e-mail have come from Moira herself? Was Moira simply wanting to reconnect?

Maybe there had been an accompanying cheery e-mail and Moira, who was never very computer savvy, had lost it, or it just hadn’t come through. I was working up all sorts of scenarios in my mind, but the fact was, after four days with no follow up, I was beginning to allow myself to relax. Just a bit. Maybe.

“I think I’m ready to commit to Greg,” I told Bridget on the evening of the fifth day. “I think I’m ready to say yes now.”

“Well, it’s about time, hon! I think that’s great.”

I put two individual pizzas into the microwave, plugged in the kettle and cut up an apple. “You want a pizza? I’ve got two here.”

Bridget looked up from her knitting. “Lilly, you should eat better. I could make you something nutritious.”

“Chicken soup?”

“Don’t knock it.”

I grinned at her. “Oh, Bridget, you are such a mother.”

“Well, I worry about you is all.” She went back to her knitting.

I stood at the window and looked down into the darkened backyards and said, “I don’t think I’m afraid anymore. It was just all the stuff from before I came here. When I thought of commitment, it all started coming down on me like a landslide. Plus, I had this scare. I thought someone from my former life was trying to contact me.”

“What happened?” She talked without missing a stitch. “You thought you saw someone?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t see anyone. I got a weird e-mail. But it was nothing.”

As I looked out the window, I noticed that someone had been gardening at the ground-level apartment directly behind ours. The flowers that had been there all summer had been dug up and laid to the side. I knew that whoever lived there was a fastidious gardener. I often looked down at the flowers neatly arranged around the small bricked-in area. Perhaps they were putting in a new deck.

The microwave dinged. Despite the fact that Bridget didn’t think microwave pizza was very nutritious, I put one on a plate for her. She ate it quite happily while we watched the news.

On the morning of the sixth day with no more strange e-mails, I decided to let Greg back in. I came up with a plan. I called Neil for help.

“Can you do this for me?”

“For you, Lilly, of course. I may even get Tiff to help. She’d be good at that.”

I said, “I’ve got all the songs on my flash drive. I can drive that over to you.”

“No need,” he said. “They’re on my hard drive.”

I phoned Primo’s and made reservations for Greg and me for the following evening. I told them it was special.

“We were so sorry when you had to cancel last week.” I recognized Maria’s voice. She and her husband, Peter, ran Primo’s.

“Consider this the official reschedule,” I said.

“But,” she paused, “I don’t know.” She seemed hesitant and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why—unless they were booked solid, but that seemed unlikely. She went on, “This was going to be a surprise for you, no?”

Ah, so my theory was right. Greg had been planning on proposing. “Not anymore. Now the very same surprise is for him.”

That was my second mistake. My first was thinking that nothing had changed since last week.

I went to the church with coffees for everyone. I was nervous. I hadn’t seen Greg since Griffi’s. I’d walked out ahead of him and when I’d turned to say goodbye, he was gone.

I had to walk through yet another detour, down another dingy hallway, and through the basement which was, I saw, piled high with all kinds of workmen’s tools and boards and Sheetrock. And then it was back up the stairs and into the office, but at least I knew my way now. Several workmen greeted me with hellos as I went past.

When I finally got to Greg’s office, after dropping off coffees for Brenda and Dave, I saw that it was even in more disarray than a week ago. The wall that used to contain his bookshelves had been entirely removed, and through the gaping hole, I could see a couple of guys hammering. Despite the fact that we were on display, I put the coffees on the desk, kissed him quickly on the cheek and said, “Keep tomorrow open.”

“Tomorrow?” he said.

I playfully put my fingers to my lips and said, “Shh, it’s a surprise.”

Here was my plan: I was going to let Greg propose to me. I had a feeling he would bring the ring. And if he didn’t get around to proposing to me? I’d propose to him. I’m a perfectly modern woman and pefectly modern women are well within their rights to make the marriage proposal these days. I could picture us twenty-five years from now, Greg telling people, “And when she asked me to marry her? How could I say no?” And then I’d laugh and say, “I only asked him because I knew he was going to ask me the week before.”

“Any hints as to where we’re going?” he asked, looking doubtful.

I grinned and batted my eyelashes theatrically at him. “It’s a total, one-hundred-percent surprise.”

Greg frowned slightly, and rubbed his cheek where I’d kissed him. “Lilly?” The expression on his face was part hurt, part confusion and part hope. “What’s this all about?”

I grinned. “Can’t I come up with a surprise for you? A secret?”

“Your eyes,” he said.

“What?” I put my hand to my face, wondering if my mascara was running.

“You don’t seem like yourself.” He frowned and looked over to where two workmen were mixing paint and chatting. They couldn’t hear us.

“What about my eyes?”

“Right now—I don’t know—your eyes seem too bright or something.”

“Too bright?” This wasn’t going entirely as planned. Why wasn’t he more enthusiastic? Maybe because the last time we’d seen each other we had a fight? “Okay, here’s the deal, Greg. Just erase this past week. It never existed. Rewind the video. Tomorrow night, everything will be changed. You’ll see. I’ll pick you up at six-thirty. Be ready, okay?”

“It’s really not so easy to erase an entire week from a person’s mind.”

“I made a mistake, Greg. I was scared. I shouldn’t have cancelled our original night out. But now I want to make amends. I have seen the error of my ways…” I batted my eyelashes at him again. And then I quickly stopped, remembering what he’d just said about my eyes. “Greg, what I’m trying to say is this. I want to make it up to you. I’ve changed my mind about our relationship. I want to pick up where we left off a week ago.”

“If you say so.”

Greg said nothing.

“Well then, I’ll see you,” I said. I was standing close enough for him to kiss me. If he wanted to.

He reached down and picked up a piece of paper from his desk and studied it. “Yeah,” he said, without looking at me.

My next stop was the college cafeteria where I was meeting Neil. I couldn’t dwell on Greg’s less than enthusiastic response. It would all be fixed soon. Tomorrow night, we would be engaged and then this whole dreadful week would be history.

I should have realized, however, that Greg’s lack of enthusiasm was merely a shadow of things to come.

My equivalent of an engagement ring for him was going to be a CD of my own compositions. Over the past six months, I’d written three love songs for Greg, songs he’d never heard; I’d been saving them for the precisely right moment. And this was it. I had recorded them with the help of Neil and Tiff and converted them to MP3s on my computer. When I’d recorded the first one, Neil’s eyes had widened behind his thick glasses and his mouth formed itself into an O making him look like an owl.

“That one—” he’d raised his hands excitedly “—that one would be good with some cello behind it.”

“Yeah,” Tiff had said. “As subtle undertones, like a drone, almost.”

Neil was a perfectionist and an expert at mastering. When I asked him yesterday if there was any way he could possibly find the time to take these three songs, remaster them, maybe add some strings, cello or piano perhaps, he said, “No problem.” It would be an honor, he told me. And he was sure that Tiff could help. Tiff has a good ear, he added. I agreed.

I was sitting in the cafeteria, waiting for him to show up with my brand-new engagement CD and planning my night—what to wear, what to say, how to act, how to do my hair, how to erase the past week from the universe. I was browsing through a wedding planning Web site when I looked up.

Neil stood there, his hair perfectly combed, wearing a brown jacket that looked like it belonged to someone’s father. He was holding out the CD and smiling broadly.

“Hey, hello,” I said, closing the lid of my computer.

He placed the CD down on the table in front of me. “I was up until two in the morning,” he said, “but I got it done. And I think you’re going to like it. I even recorded a bit of me on cello. Tiff had some good suggestions. We both worked on it.”

I picked it up. I was on the cover, sitting on a piano stool and holding my guitar. “Where’d the picture come from?” I asked.

“It was on your church Web site.”

“Really?” I hadn’t realized there were so many pictures of me on the Web site. I felt a fuzzy unease, a touch of chill in my spine, but quickly dismissed it. The e-mail meant nothing. It was a week ago. Everything was fine now.

I opened the case and examined the CD. He’d printed a label for it with “All My Love” and a place for me to sign. “This is cool, Neil. You are such a great person to do this for me.”

“We want you to be happy.”

There were even liner notes. I pulled them out and flattened them on the table. He’d spent a lot of time on this. He pointed at the words of the three songs surrounded by flowers and hearts. “That was Tiff’s idea. She did the artwork. She’s good at that.”

I turned the notes over. “It’s beautiful. You guys did a great job. Thank you!”

“I knew you wanted it to be special.”

I looked up at him, at the innocent earnestness in those brown eyes. “You’re a romantic, Neil,” I said. Neil wasn’t every girl’s cup of tea. He was a little too studious looking, his hair was usually a bit too precisely combed and he wasn’t much of a dresser. “What you need,” I found myself saying, “is a nice young woman of your own who you can regale with flowers and music on a regular basis.”

“I do have a nice young woman that I’m in love with, but she doesn’t know I exist, at least not in that way,” he said.

Tiff, I bet it’s Tiff, I thought, as she waved at us from across the cafeteria. His eyes brightened as he said goodbye and took off toward her. They left the cafeteria together.

It started to rain and big dollops hit the large plate-glass windows. I watched some students scurrying for cover. Others were oblivious, it seemed. I saw Tiff and Neil scamper into the nearest building.

In my mind, I went back to a place where a lost girl sat in the backseat of a Greyhound bus in the middle of a downpour. She held a dirty backpack tightly.

She ignored the people coming and going to the cubicle washroom behind her: mothers with small children, old people, teens. And when anyone tried to make casual conversation with her, she turned her face away toward the rain-smeared windows, the backpack clutched even more fiercely to her.

She was heading north. She didn’t know where. But the one thing she did know was that she could never go back. Not now. Not ever. She realized this while streaks of rain ran like rivers on the window beside her…

I opened up my computer again. I don’t know why, but I clicked on the picture of the girl. I guess I needed to see her one more time before I deleted her. She was singing. I knew the song, I knew every song she sang, because I’d written all of them.

FIVE

I’m a jeans and boots and sweater sort of person. For my big date with Greg, I decided to wear a brand-new pair of jeans with my nicest black boots. Instead of my usual sweater, I chose a long-sleeved, black cashmere top with glittery bits scattered across the front. My mother had given it to me for Christmas. It was beautiful, but I seldom wore it—it was too sparkly for church, and I would never wear something so New Year’s Eve-y to school or work. But it seemed just about perfect for tonight. And it would look quite nice set off with a glinting diamond ring on my left hand.

Bridget wasn’t home and wouldn’t be until later, so she didn’t get to listen to the CD with me. I was impressed with what Neil had done. He’d made my three songs sound beautiful—and professional—with the perfect arrangement of strings, cello and percussion.

It was cool and windy as I drove through the Boston traffic to Greg’s apartment. The CD was wrapped up with a big red bow and tucked in my bag. As soon as Greg asked me to marry him—as I was sure he would—as soon as he brought out the ring—as I was sure he would—I would put up my hand as if to say “wait,” whereupon I would reach into my bag, grab the CD and while I said a huge “yes,” I would lay it down in front of him. It would be one of those romantic and touching moments, and I planned to try very hard to record it in my head, so when I got home, I could write it all down.

And if perchance he didn’t ask me, I would ask him.

It didn’t work out that way.

As I drove to Greg’s house, it occurred to me again that maybe I should tell him my entire story—Moira, the money I took and the murder. Maybe I should be completely honest with the man I intended to spend the rest of my life with. Or maybe not. Maybe I’d tell him after we married. But that didn’t seem right either.

I saw Greg before he saw me. He was standing in front of his house leaning against a lamppost, hands stuffed into his pockets. He wore khakis, a blue windbreaker and a pensive look on his face, something I could see even from this distance. He seemed nervous as he stood there, eyes darting this way and that. He hadn’t seen me yet.

I slowed in front of him, and he gave me an uncertain smile. I’d seen that smile before, when he was unsure about something or had heard a joke that he didn’t think was funny. I stopped the car and he slid into the passenger seat, bringing the cold in with him.

“Hi,” he said.

I greeted him with a wide smile and pulled away from the curb. “Hey,” he said. His voice was quiet, gentle. I looked briefly at his amazing blue eyes, at the crinkles around them. He saw me looking at him and quickly moved his gaze away from me. Why wouldn’t he look at me?

“Greg?” I said.

“Yeah?” he answered, looking out the window.

“You want to know where we’re going?” I grinned mischievously at him.

Silence. A moment passed.

He shrugged. “If you want to tell me.”

“So, you want it to be a surprise, then?” I asked.

“Whatever you want.”

“How come you’re not being more cooperative?” I said, trying to tease him. I glanced over and he still wasn’t smiling.

“Cooperative about what?”

“You’re just not your usual self.” And he wasn’t. He was usually so chatty that I never had to carry the conversation.

I thought he said, “Maybe I’m a bit confused,” but I couldn’t be sure, he spoke so quietly.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Maybe I’m a bit tired.’”

I nodded. More silence. Maybe the renovation of his office was getting to him. And having to reorganize everything. That would do it to anyone, wouldn’t it? That’s what it was. And as soon as that was all over with, things would all be right again.

And we’d be engaged.

We were in Primo’s parking lot before I knew it, and I pulled into a space right in front.

“Oh, wow,” I said, forcing myself to be cheerful. “Look, a perfect parking spot. That must be a good omen.”

“Primo’s,” he said. “We were going to come here last week.”

“Yep, Primo’s,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. “We’re a week late, but I don’t think they’ll mind!”

Greg said nothing as he got out of the car.

We didn’t hold hands when we walked together into the restaurant. Things were not going as planned, and I didn’t quite know why.

The staff at Primo’s was awaiting our arrival. The owner’s daughter Lucia, who worked as a waitress, greeted us. In a floor-length dress of lavender satin, with her dark hair piled on top of her head in an array of big brown curls, I wondered if she was on her way to the prom. I was about to ask her when I realized that all the waiters, waitresses and kitchen staff were formally clad. The guys wore tuxes and the girls were in gowns. And they were grinning at us.

I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed his arm and said, “Greg! Is this what you planned for last week?”

He stood for several seconds and ran his hand over his face. He looked like he would rather be anywhere but at Primo’s. I tried again, “This is so nice, Greg! You are so romantic! I had no idea.”

Lucia led us to the table in the corner by the window. It was not our regular Primo’s table with gouges in the wood and a flimsy metal napkin dispenser. It had been covered with a dazzling white tablecloth and a tall white candle sat in the center. I kept watching Greg’s face. Why wasn’t he smiling?

He took off his jacket and placed it on the back of his chair. Underneath, he wore a crisp blue shirt which made his eyes even bluer than usual. Someone had moved a couple of floor plants close to the table, giving us more privacy. Lucia sat us down and, with great flourish, unfolded cloth napkins, placing them in our laps.

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