The Lovely Shadow (18 page)

“Ok, Gorgeous,” June said as she started away
from my bed, “you sleep tight and I’ll see you in the morning. You
want me to turn off the lamp?”

“No!” I said sharply.

Light was a novelty to me at this point and I
figured that as long as it was in my power to be in the light, I
was never going to step into darkness willingly again.

June smiled and said goodnight and I repeated
her valediction. Then I rolled over and snuggled in. I was already
nearly asleep before June reached the door.

Just as June was starting to close the door
behind her, I bolted upright in bed, suddenly wide awake; my eyes
as wide as my wakefulness.

“JUNE!” I shouted.

June nearly broke herself in half trying to
get her body to twist back towards me and came back through the
door, half stumbling in her urgency to make sure I was ok.

“What is it, Dumplin’?” June asked, speaking
rapidly and breathlessly in her concern.

I felt a moment of guilt, because it was not
really an emergency that caused me to scream out in alarm; a scream
that nearly made June disintegrate in her gusto to get back to me.
But it was important to me so I looked sheepishly at her and said
meekly, “I forgot my dictionary in the car. I’m sorry, but could
you get it for me?”

I had expected to see June’s countenance
change into a looked of eye rolling exasperation, or perhaps to see
her features contort into a mask of thinly veiled anger, but I did
not expect to see what I did see.

June’s expression, which was wide eyed with
concern as she burst into the room and to me bedside, morphed into
a look of radiant beauty and joy. Relief spread across her face
like the rays of the rising sun spreading slowly over the land as
it creeps over the top of distant mountains.

A smile spread rapidly across her face and
she laughed a little as she said, “Jelly Bean, you nearly scared me
half to death! Yeah, you betcha I’ll go get it for ya’. I’ll be
right back.”

With that, June hurried out of the room, and
I listened to her footsteps as they thumped down the hallway, down
the stairs, and out the front door. I waited to hear the car door
off in the distance, but I fell asleep before June made it to the
car.

I awoke the following morning just as the sun
was beginning to peek through the slats in the blind over my
window. As I sat up I found that my dictionary had been placed on
the bed beside me, and it nearly tumbled to the floor when I moved,
but I reached out and caught it with all the skill of a
professional football player making an amazing one handed grab in
the end zone.

I placed the book carefully on the
nightstand, making sure to line up two edges of the book with two
edges of the table, and reached over it to turn out the lamp.

After killing the lamp, the room seemed
pretty dim, so I got up and headed to the dormer window. Finding
the louver adjustment rod for the blind dangling at the left side,
I spun it in my fingers, letting the sunlight shine in and the room
brightened appreciably.

After that I headed for the door. I was eager
to explore my new environs. Halfway across the room I realized that
I was still in my underwear and now that I was in the company of
human beings again, that was not an acceptable dress code for
wandering about publicly.

I went to fetch my clothes from the pile on
the floor beside the bed where I’d abandoned them the previous
night, only to find that they were no longer there.

‘Well, that’s odd,’ I thought to myself. ‘I
know last night is a bit fuzzy, but I distinctly remember leaving
my clothes here. I wonder where they’ve gotten off to. Maybe June
decided that they needed a good washing, though they were fresh
from the drier when I put them on last night.’

Deciding that June had most likely taken them
somewhere and that I could not wander around her house mostly
naked, I decided to peek in the closet in hopes of finding a tee
shirt or something that I could cover my modesty with.

After sliding one of the large wooden doors
off to the side about a foot and a half and poking my head into the
closet, I realized that the closet was like a whole other room all
by itself. It was about four feet deep and ran about ten feet down
the length of the approximately fifteen foot long wall.

It was uncomfortably dark in the closet and I
could not see much except for what was directly in front of me. I
could not bring myself to enter into the darkness. I pulled my head
back out and looked up into the open doorway. The closet ran all
the way to the ceiling, which was about ten feet high.

There were two shelves in the closet, one
about five feet up from the floor, and another about two feet above
that. Both shelves appeared to be empty from what little I could
see of them with only one door slid only partially open.

I pushed the already open door along its
track, opening it up another foot or so and then slid the other
door open the full two and a half feet that the rail allowed. With
both doors opened to their maximum distance, the entryway into the
closet was about five feet wide and let plenty of light into the
large space.

In the fresh light I could see that there was
a pull cord dangling down right in the front of the closet, just
inside the opening. I tugged the cord and the closet lit up,
illuminated by three light fixtures, spread evenly along the entire
length of the closet, that were mounted on the closet wall that
faced the rest of the room, just above the doors. The lights were
cleverly mounted so that the light they generated shone into the
closet, but did not shine in your eyes while you were toiling in
there.

With the light on in the closet, I could
clearly see that the closet was, in fact, empty, apart from my
clothes that had been tossed into the far back corner on the left
side of the closet. I almost didn’t see them at all, and wouldn’t
have if I hadn’t thought I’d heard a faint whisper of sound come
from that direction and decided to walk in a little deeper to
investigate.

There was nothing in the closet that could
have made a noise, and the noise was so slight as to be an
incomprehensible intonation and I did not concern myself with it
for long, deciding that it had probably been my imagination.

I walked over to where my clothes had been
unceremoniously crumpled into a ball and shoved into the corner and
scooped them up and walked back out of the closet to get
dressed.

I yanked the pull string for the light as I
exited, and closed the two doors, still puzzling over why June
would hide my clothes like that while I was sleeping. I pushed
thoughts of malicious intent aside and started shaking the wrinkles
out of my clothes so I could get dressed and go exploring.

As I was shaking my clothes out, I noticed a
faint odor coming from them. It smelled similar to roses, or more
accurately, similar to the rose water that my mother used to leave
in glass bowls around the house before she took leave of her senses
and still concerned herself with the appearance and aroma of her
abode.

I stopped shaking my shirt and held it to my
nose and inhaled deeply. It definitely had a hint of roses
emanating from it. It wasn’t a strong smell, but just a hint of
odor, like a diluted perfume.

I assumed that June probably wore a rose
perfume and some of hit had rubbed off on my clothes as she was
moving them into the closet.

As I got dressed, I looked around the room
more earnestly than I had before. I judged from its clean, tidy,
and inviting design that June was likely obsessed with maintaining
a clean home that could be open to unexpected visitors at any time
without fear of embarrassment, and she’d probably moved my clothes
as a matter of routine; viewing them as a blemish in an otherwise
perfectly clean room.

I glanced at my dictionary that was perfectly
alineated with the straight lines of the tabletop at the lower
corner and smiled. I understood perfectly June’s desire to maintain
order, and decided I would not mention the clothes for fear of
offending her or sounding as if I were accusing her of
treachery.

Once I had my clothes on I realized that I
had never grabbed my shoes from the basement. I hadn’t worn my
shoes since my first night in the basement and had, quite honestly,
not even considered the need for them since taking them off in the
darkness.

‘Well, I won’t need them unless I go
outside,’ I thought. ‘Maybe June will have something I can wear for
awhile, until I can get some new ones.’

I headed out the door into the hallway at the
top of the stairs and was suddenly overcome with the urge to pee. I
stood there for a second, wondering where the washing machine was
kept before realizing that I could actually use a toilet again. I
figured there was likely a bathroom upstairs somewhere and I set
about looking for it.

My bedroom was at the near end of the
hallway, nearest to the stairs that led to the first floor.
Directly across from my bedroom door was another door that was
standing slightly ajar. I peeked into the room adjacent to mine and
saw that it was almost a carbon copy of my room, only with the
dormer facing west rather than east.

Turning to the right, down the length of the
hallway, I saw three more doors. Two at the far end of the hall,
directly across from each other, just like my bedroom and the one
across the hall from it, and one more door in the middle of the
hallway, on the same side as my bedroom.

I decided that the two doors at the end were
most likely more bedrooms and my best bet for a bathroom was the
middle door.

I plodded silently down the hall in my
stockinged feet and found the center door was opened and that my
assumption of the room’s purpose was correct. It was a full
bathroom, complete with a large claw-foot tub, pedestal sink, and
most importantly, a toilet!

I admired the bathroom as I stood there
taking care of business. It was a pleasant room, sparsely decorated
with only two pictures hanging on the wall on either side of the
large oval mirror that hung over the sink.

Both pictures were of landscapes, one showing
a seemingly endless field of grain flowing in the wind, and the
other showing a plowed field with an old rusted tractor sitting
idly in the midst of the dirt sea.

The large claw-foot tub had a shower
installed and a circular railing hung from the ceiling, encircling
the entire circumference of the tub. A shower curtain hung from the
rail and was currently pulled open at the front, to reveal the
spotless interior of the tub.

The shower curtain was not brightly colored
or gaudy, but rather a plain tan curtain with no artwork or
embossed patterns to decorate it.

A pipe ran up from the floor at the head of
the tub, and extended up about 6 feet above the bottom of the tub.
A shower head was affixed to the top of the pipe, and about halfway
up the pipe, a basket was fastened to it. The basket held a
washcloth, bottle of generic shampoo, and a bar of white soap.

The bathroom floor was covered with vinyl
flooring, embossed with tan colored squares that were a nearly
perfect color match to the shower curtain. The squares were about
six inches on all sides and were accentuated by white lines that
gave the appearance of grout around each square.

Aside from the two pictures, there were no
other decorations to distract the busy patron of the room.

The room was painted high gloss white and was
lit from a single bulb light fixture in the ceiling.

The room should have appeared medicinal,
boring, or uninviting, however, with the warm shades of tan against
the white backdrop, and the two homey pictures on the wall, there
was just enough appeal to make it inviting without being too busy
or distracting.

I figured it would be a very relaxing room to
poop in when the time came, and it was most definitely a pleasant
place to pee in; of course some of that appeal may have come from
the fact that this was the first time I’d used an actual toilet in
two weeks.

After finishing my morning pee, I headed out
to explore the rest of the house. I started with the two rooms at
the end of the hall. The first room I looked in was the room on the
opposite side of the house from mine, (the westward facing side of
the house).

The door was opened about three inches so I
didn’t worry too much about poking my head in and finding June
getting dressed or some equally embarrassing predicament. I went
ahead and pushed the door open a few more inches and stuck my head
inside.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. It
was a flowery sort of smell that made me think of the color purple.
It resembled lavender, or perhaps lilac and I thought that it must
be the essence of June. The smell was a manifestation of her clean,
gentle nature; fresh and inviting, with just a hint of mystery, and
full of an honest beauty that needed no cosmetics to make it
appealing.

The room was only barely more decorated than
my own room. It was laid out just like mine with a bed beside a
dormer window and a nightstand beside the bed. The nightstand
beside the bed appeared to be a duplicate of mine and must have
come as part of a pair.

A few paintings of horses adorned the walls,
and a medium sized dresser with a television set on top of it stood
beside the entry door, angled just perfectly to allow comfortable
viewing from the bed.

The closet appeared to be an exact duplicate
of my own closet, and the carpet, woodwork, and window coverings
were exactly like my room.

The main difference between my room and
June’s room was the addition of a door in the wall opposite the
closet, which I assumed led to a private bathroom, which if it had
had a door outside in the hallway, would have been directly across
the hall from the public bath door. I chose not to investigate the
bathroom, since that seemed somehow like a much bigger invasion of
privacy than simply snooping through her bedroom.