What He Kept of Her
The first woman’s voice came from a bottle marked Summer, 1987.
It said, “Take your hand off me.”
Then it screamed.
Clara dropped the bottle.
The man beside her caught it before it reached the floor.
He moved quickly for someone who had spent the morning complaining about his knees.
“Careful,” he said.
Clara stared at him.
He set the bottle back into its velvet-lined box. It was small enough to hold perfume. Beneath the handwritten label, a pale sediment moved through the glass.
“That was a woman.”
“Yes.”
“She sounded frightened.”
“She was furious.”
Clara looked at the rows of boxes covering her dead husband’s study.
“How many?”
The man glanced toward the shelves.
“I haven’t counted yet.”
His name was Elias Venn, and the solicitor had recommended him for the unusual items.
Until that morning, Clara had assumed this meant the ivory chess set and the enormous bird skeleton in the hall.
Elias had arrived wearing a brown overcoat, carrying a leather case repaired with several colors of thread. Rain had flattened his hair on one side. He had apologized for being late, although he wasn’t, and asked whether she wanted him to take his shoes off.
He looked like a man who repaired clocks.
Only when he smiled had she noticed the pale scar running from the corner of his mouth beneath his collar.
Her husband had died nine days earlier.
At the funeral, three people told Clara she had been good for him.
Not one asked whether he had been good for her.
Now Elias stood in the study holding a bottle that contained a woman’s scream, and Clara was beginning to feel she had misunderstood the phrase unusual items.
“Where did he get them?”
“Some were purchased. Some exchanged.”
“And the others?”
Elias didn’t answer immediately.
Clara knew that pause. She had spent twenty-four years learning to fill it with something easier.
She waited.
“The others,” he said, “he collected himself.”
There were forty-six bottles in the first cabinet.
One contained a laugh so loud and helpless that Clara smiled before she could stop herself.
Another held a woman saying, “I’m leaving.”
A third made no sound when Elias loosened the stopper, but every light in the study dimmed.
He closed that one quickly.
“What was it?”
“Something she never said.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
“Because your husband labeled it Difficult Customer.”
Clara looked toward the empty chair behind the desk.
Richard had sold antiques. People had brought him things their families could no longer afford to keep. She remembered women waiting in the hall with wrapped pictures on their knees. She had made tea for them.
Sometimes they had arrived crying.
Usually they had left quiet.
Elias examined the wax around another stopper.
“Did he give you anything to drink when you were upset?”
Clara felt the question settle unpleasantly beneath her ribs.
“He made tea.”
“What kind?”
“Whatever was in the kitchen.”
“Did he bring it to you?”
She looked at the cabinet.
“Yes.”
Elias found her name in the third drawer.
He tried to close it before she saw.
Clara put her hand on the wood.
“Don’t.”
“There are things we should discuss first.”
“Then discuss them with the drawer open.”
He stepped aside.
Seven bottles lay in a narrow case lined with blue silk.
Each label carried her name and a date.
Clara recognized the first date immediately.
The morning after their honeymoon.
The last was from six weeks ago.
She lifted that bottle.
Richard’s handwriting had remained elegant even when his hands began to shake.
Clara. Again.
Inside, something dark moved against the glass.
“What does it mean, again?”
Elias watched her fingers around the stopper.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I wasn’t there.”
She pulled out the cork.
Her own voice filled the study.
“I want the room at the front. I want my paints out of the attic. I don’t care what your friends think it looks like.”
A pause.
Then Richard, distant and patient.
“Listen to yourself.”
Clara’s hand began to tremble.
She remembered that afternoon. Or she remembered the evening after it: Richard making her toast, the terrible headache, her embarrassment at having caused another unpleasant scene.
She did not remember asking for her paints.
The bottle spoke again.
“I am listening.”
Then something struck the table.
Clara flinched.
The dark substance rose from the neck of the bottle and entered her mouth.
It tasted of black tea and pennies.
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
Then she remembered everything.
The cupboard she had measured. The dust on her easel. Richard standing in the doorway while she explained that the front room had better light.
The pleasure of knowing what she wanted.
His expression when she refused to apologize for it.
Clara set the empty bottle down very carefully.
“That bastard.”
Elias took one step away from the desk.
It was a sensible decision.
She broke the second bottle against the fireplace.
Elias said her name, but the sound had already escaped.
A younger Clara shouted, “You do not get to decide whether I see my sister.”
The windows rattled.
Something hit her chest with enough force to bend her over.
Elias caught her elbow.
She shoved him away.
“Don’t touch me.”
He released her at once.
Pain traveled up her jaw. She remembered a railway ticket. A packed bag. Richard explaining that her sister enjoyed making trouble between them.
Then tea.
Then the shame of having been so dramatic.
Her sister had stopped calling three years later.
Clara picked up another bottle.
“Wait,” Elias said.
“No.”
“You’re bleeding.”
She looked down. Glass had cut the base of her thumb.
He took a handkerchief from his pocket and placed it on the desk within reach.
“You can open them all,” he said. “But you need time between them.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know how much he took.”
“Then we’ll find out.”
“Yes,” Elias said. “We will.”
They worked until the room went dark.
Clara opened the bottles herself.
Elias moved the furniture away from the fireplace and covered the mirror with his coat after the third one cracked it.
There was grief in one bottle. Real grief, full of an animal noise Clara had not known she could make.
There was desire in another.
That one made her sit down.
For several minutes, she stared at her hands while Elias found somewhere else to look.
Richard had told her she had never been particularly passionate.
She began to laugh.
It hurt badly enough that she kept laughing.
The bottle from the morning after the honeymoon was the smallest.
Clara held it beneath the lamp.
“What if I don’t like who I was?”
Elias sat opposite her. Without his coat, he seemed thinner.
“You might not.”
“What if I was cruel?”
“Were you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Then you’ll have to meet her.”
Clara turned the bottle between her fingers.
Inside, a young woman drew breath to speak.
The voice said, “That hurt.”
Nothing more.
Clara sat very still.
She remembered the hotel curtains. A breakfast tray outside the door. Richard fastening his watch while she tried to tell him something he did not want to hear.
She had been twenty-three.
She remembered how relieved she felt when he said he would make her tea.
The bottle emptied into her so gently that she barely felt it.
Elias waited while she cried.
He did not tell her she was safe now.
She was grateful for that.
At half past eight, somebody knocked from inside the wall.
Clara lifted her head.
Three measured taps.
She knew that sound.
Richard had knocked on her bedroom door that way when she had been quiet too long.
Elias stood.
The knocking came again.
“Clara.”
Her husband’s voice emerged from the empty chair.
It was faint, but unmistakable.
She looked at Elias.
“You said he was dead.”
“He is.”
“Clara,” Richard repeated. “What have you done?”
The chair creaked.
A depression formed in the leather.
Elias reached for his case.
Richard sighed.
Even now, that sigh worked on her. Clara felt the familiar impulse to explain, to make him understand that she hadn’t meant to upset anything.
Then she saw the empty bottles.
“No,” she said.
The study door slammed.
Every full bottle in the cabinets shivered.
Elias took a length of black thread from his case.
“What is that supposed to do?”
“Give him something else to occupy.”
He looped it around the arms of the chair.
Richard laughed.
“Still doing errands, Venn?”
Elias’s hands stopped.
Clara looked from him to the chair.
“You knew him.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t say.”
“No.”
The voice grew stronger.
“He was quite useful once. Before he became sentimental.”
Elias pulled the thread tight.
The chair jerked beneath his hands.
His scar opened.
No blood came out.
Instead, a woman began sobbing somewhere inside his throat.
Clara backed into the desk.
Elias pressed a hand over the scar. The sobbing stopped.
For the first time that day, he looked frightened.
Not of the chair.
Of her.
“What are you?”
Richard answered.
“Hungry.”
Elias kept one hand against his neck.
“I used to sell what your husband bought.”
The thread strained around the chair.
Clara could see Richard now, faintly: the shape of his head, the shine of his shoes beneath the desk.
“Used to?”
“Yes.”
“What changed?”
Elias looked toward the cabinets.
“I opened one.”
A whisper escaped between his fingers.
Then another.
“You drank it.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
Clara stared at the handkerchief around her palm.
“How convenient that the solicitor sent you.”
“I asked him to.”
Richard smiled from his chair.
There was enough of him now to do that.
“You see, darling? There is always something somebody wants.”
Elias’s face tightened, but he didn’t dispute it.
Clara looked at the bottles.
“Are they alive in there?”
“Most of the women are still alive,” Elias said. “What he took belongs to them.”
“And if you swallow it?”
“I feel it.”
“For how long?”
His hand lowered from his throat.
“All the time.”
For a moment, the room was crowded with breathing.
Clara understood why he had been so careful with the bottles.
She also understood that care and hunger could occupy the same pair of hands.
Richard was reaching for the thread.
“Untie this, Clara.”
She looked at him.
“You sound like yourself.”
“Of course I do.”
“I was wondering whether death might improve you.”
Elias made a small, startled sound.
Richard turned toward him.
The windows shook.
“Don’t encourage her.”
Clara felt something hot and unfamiliar move through her.
She had recovered her anger hours ago.
Using it would take practice.
“What’s keeping him here?” she asked.
Elias watched the chair.
“The collection. He invested too much of himself in it.”
“Then we return it.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
“It never is when someone wants to keep something.”
Elias looked at her.
She held his gaze.
“Can they have it back?”
“Yes.”
“What do we need?”
“The names. The bottles need to be opened with the owners’ names.”
“And if the women are dead?”
“We open those too.”
“What happens?”
Elias glanced at Richard.
“We should be outside by then.”
Richard had kept records.
Of course he had.
Clara found the ledger in the drawer where he used to keep the household accounts.
Names. Dates. Prices.
Brief descriptions in the same tidy hand.
Excessive mourning.
Marital resistance.
Unmanageable appetite.
Clara ran her finger down the page.
“Here,” she said.
Elias stood beside the first cabinet.
“Dorothy May Bell.”
He opened a bottle.
Something rushed past Clara, warm and smelling of oranges.
Richard’s left hand disappeared.
“Stop this.”
Clara read the next name.
Then the next.
The house began to fill with voices.
Some screamed. Some laughed. One said, with such exhausted relief that Clara had to grip the desk, “I knew I wasn’t imagining it.”
Elias’s hands shook as he worked.
Once, he brought an open bottle too close to his face.
Clara caught his wrist.
He closed his eyes.
“Look at me,” she said.
He did.
She waited until his grip loosened.
Then she took the bottle and read the woman’s name again.
Whatever it contained passed between them and was gone.
They carried the last case onto the front lawn.
Behind them, Richard shouted from every room.
He called her foolish. Ungrateful.
Then he began to bargain.
Elias set the case on the wet grass.
Inside were twelve bottles whose owners would never receive them.
Clara read their names beneath the porch light.
As the last stopper came free, the study window darkened.
Richard stood behind the glass.
For an instant, he looked exactly as he had on the day they married.
“Clara.”
She waited.
“Who will put up with you now?”
It was almost a relief.
Even at the end, he could not think of anything else to offer.
The window split from corner to corner.
Behind it, the women arrived.
Elias turned Clara gently toward the road.
This time, she let him.
By morning, the house was quiet.
Clara found Elias in the kitchen, sitting with his hands flat on the table.
He looked ill.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He nodded.
She put a cup in front of him.
“Coffee,” she said.
“I can smell it.”
“I wanted to be clear.”
His mouth moved, almost a smile.
For a while, she stood at the counter and watched daylight reach the garden.
Then she said, “You let me think you were just a man.”
“You needed help.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No.”
He looked down at the cup.
“I thought you might refuse mine.”
“I might have.”
“Yes.”
She sat opposite him.
Beneath his collar, something whispered.
“Are you hungry now?”
He didn’t answer quickly enough.
Clara’s skin tightened.
“Yes,” he said.
“For me?”
His hands remained flat against the table.
“Yes.”
She let herself hear it.
The room was quiet. Nobody hurried to soften the word.
“And what are you going to do about that?”
“Finish the coffee, if you’ll let me.”
“And then?”
“Leave.”
Clara studied him.
He had wanted something from her. He still did.
He had also spent the night helping her take it back.
She wasn’t ready to decide what that made him.
“My paints are in the attic,” she said.
Elias glanced toward the ceiling.
“I’ll bring them down before I go.”
“They’re heavy.”
“So you’ve mentioned.”
“I haven’t.”
“No,” he admitted. “But I was hoping you might laugh.”
She did.
The sound startled her. Full, untidy, much louder than she expected.
Elias gripped the edge of the table.
Clara stopped.
“Does that hurt too?”
He looked at her with an expression she could not yet afford to trust.
“A little.”
She picked up her coffee.
“You’ll have to get used to it.”
Three days later, Clara painted the front room yellow.
Her sister came on Saturday.
There were difficult conversations. Clara cried, became angry, apologized for things that were hers, and tried not to apologize for the rest.
On Sunday, Elias returned with a box of secondhand brushes.
He knocked once and waited.
Clara opened the door with paint on her cheek.
Before she stepped aside, she looked at his empty hands.
“No bottles.”
“No bottles.”
“And if you’re hungry?”
“I tell you.”
She considered him for a moment longer.
Then she let him in.
While she painted, he sat beside the open window and asked questions about the work. Sometimes she answered. Sometimes she told him she needed quiet.
He was learning.
So was she.
Once, when she laughed, she saw him close his eyes.
She kept laughing anyway.