“Oh look, another love letter from the shadow realm asking to date my shadow. They do realize that my shadow isn’t sentient like they are, right?”
I was speaking to the patch of floor beneath my chair. An envelope was working its way out of it, corner first. It emerged with a little shudder and lay on the kitchen tiles, addressed to THE LADY OF THE WEST STEPS.
I had explained this to the floor before. The floor was not improving.
This was the sixth letter. One admirer had praised my shadow's majestic height. Another had written three pages about its lovely, unwavering silence. I hoped those two would find each other. They would have a great deal not to discuss.
The fifth had enclosed a lock of darkness. It was still in the envelope. I wasn't putting that down the sink.
I lifted the new arrival into the light. Like the others, it had no stamp or postal address, only a little drawing of my outline on the back. The paper was black, the writing silver, and the seal was a little cut-out beast with too many antlers to get through a respectable doorway.
Inside was a single sheet.
To the lady of the west steps,
Last Thursday I saw you become very tall to help a stranger. He had fallen from his wheeled contrivance; you bent nearly double, yet contrived to keep your extraordinary hat upon your head.
I admired your kindness and, afterward, your dancing. If you would care to walk with me at the west steps, I should be glad to make your acquaintance. If you would not, I shall trouble you no further.
Nadrel
This was an improvement on unwavering silence.
The wheeled contrivance had been a bicycle. The extraordinary hat had been a shopping bag caught on my wrist. As for the dancing, I had discovered a beetle inside my collar just after helping the cyclist up.
There was a narrow dark arch beneath the west steps in the park. You sometimes saw movement there that didn't correspond to anybody on this side. I'd thought it was foxes.
Apparently it was an audience.
I took a sheet of writing paper out of the drawer where I'd been keeping it for important correspondence, such as cancelling a gym membership. On the reverse of Nadrel's envelope were instructions for returning an answer: lay it in the shadow of the intended recipient's seal and wait.
I put his letter beneath my kitchen lamp, propped the envelope upright, and wrote.
Dear Nadrel,
The lady of the west steps is my shadow. It is what happens when light cannot get through me. It cannot accept an invitation, as it cannot think, read, speak, or go anywhere independently. It has been doing exactly what I do for thirty-four years and has never once made a useful suggestion.
The kindness was mine. So were the shopping bag and the beetle.
You are corresponding with a woman in slippers, not a mysterious duchess.
Odette
I folded the page, tucked it into the little antlered shadow, and watched it slide through the table.
Then I went to work, wondering whether I ought to have specified that I was also responsible for my own dancing.
The reply arrived while I was eating dinner.
Dear Odette,
Then I withdraw my invitation to the lady of the west steps. Please accept my apologies for the mistake, and my admiration for your kindness to the fallen rider.
I confess that I do not entirely understand the arrangement. Does the figure change shape because you instruct it, or because the light instructs it? We have nothing quite like it here.
I would not have mentioned your slippers, except that you appear to consider them a disqualification.
Nadrel
Beneath his signature was a neat drawing of two slippers with extravagantly pointed toes. Small arrows indicated FORMAL TASSELS.
I laughed with a mouthful of peas. It was undignified and unexpectedly difficult to stop.
My slippers had sheep on them. I drew one in the margin of my answer. I did not label the sheep. He could work for some of his information.
Over the next few days we established that light gave no instructions, that my shadow did not require feeding, and that the beetle had survived. Nadrel asked about that last point twice, because in my first answer I had become distracted by explaining shopping bags.
He sent a drawing of the sort of beetle they had at home. I immediately forgave him for his concern. It was the size of a breakfast plate and appeared to have ambitions.
I put his letters in a different drawer from the others.
That did not mean anything in particular. One drawer contained a lock of darkness, and I had reservations about introducing it to the beetle.
When I asked whether he knew the other writers, he said they belonged to the same walking party. They gathered on their side of the west steps to enjoy the shapes passing overhead. Nadrel was thirty-nine, the youngest member, and beginning to feel that he had joined prematurely.
The gentleman who admired your silence is regrettably talkative, he wrote. I fear he was imagining a restful household.
I wrote back that the proposed household would have been especially restful at noon.
Then I offered to demonstrate.
There was a bandstand near the steps, with a white wooden back wall, a floor raised a foot above the grass, and a roof that would keep the evening sky from washing out my torch beams. I suggested Friday at sunset.
This is an explanation, I added, rather than a date. I would be grateful if you could explain it to your walking party afterward. I should like the letters to stop.
I crossed out the last sentence, rewrote it, and left it there.
Nadrel said he would come, and pass on whatever he learned.
I arrived with two battery torches, the unwanted letters, a pen, and a cardigan. It was an excessive amount of luggage for a woman meeting an optical misconception.
Nadrel came out of the gap beneath the bandstand.
He spread across the paving like a spill, then drew himself into the shape of a tall man in a narrow coat. Fine pale lines marked his cuffs and lapels. Two bright eyes looked up at me from near my feet.
The slippers were unmistakable.
“The tassels,” I said. “You weren't exaggerating.”
“I was anxious not to misrepresent myself.”
His voice came from the place where his mouth was drawn. I had to bend to hear him over a passing bus.
He moved a little closer, turned toward the long shape extending from my shoes, and said, “Good evening.”
“You've done it again.”
“So I have.” His eyes turned up toward me. “I had rehearsed that.”
“To be fair, it was a very good evening.”
“I have several others prepared. There is a particularly elaborate one for rain.”
He had brought flowers. They were flat and dark and lay beside him on the paving, their pointed petals edged in pale lines.
“For the trouble,” he said. “They grow best on stone. May I put them somewhere?”
I indicated the bandstand wall. He crossed the paving, folded over the edge of the wooden floor without a break in his outline, and climbed the wall. The flowers went with him. He arranged them beside the notice banning ball games.
On the wall, he was taller than I was. I straightened up gratefully.
“Is that better?” he asked.
“Much. I wasn't sure how long my knees would last.”
“I should have thought of it.”
“You wouldn't have much occasion to think about knees.”
He lifted one of his. It looked entirely convincing, if you overlooked the fact that it occupied the same piece of wall as his coat.
“Forgive me,” I said. “I meant troublesome knees.”
“Ah. No. Mine are very obliging.”
While there was still direct sunlight on the paving, I showed him the simple version. I stood at the bandstand's edge. My shadow reached toward the steps.
“Now watch.”
I turned sideways. The shape narrowed.
“That used to look like a rather cold reception,” he admitted.
“I was probably checking for traffic.”
I lifted one hand beside my head and made a goose with my fingers. A long beak opened beside my cheek on the paving.
Nadrel came down the wall and stopped a cautious distance from it.
“Is that the beetle?”
“It's a goose.”
“Of course. I thought you were remarkably calm.”
I made it peck his sleeve. He darted away so quickly that I laughed and dropped my hand. The goose vanished; my shadow lowered an ordinary arm.
“You did that deliberately,” he said.
“I did.”
“I'm beginning to understand.”
He asked me to do it once more, slowly. I showed him my fingers as well as the shape they made. He moved between them, inspecting the arrangement. I was used to people asking how a trick worked and being disappointed when you told them. Nadrel looked more interested with every answer.
When the sun went behind the beech trees, we moved under the roof for the torches.
I pulled on my cardigan and set the torches a yard apart on the front ledge, aiming them toward the back wall. Nadrel stood well to one side of the beams while I took my place between the lights and the boards.
Two gray Odettes appeared on the wall. They overlapped at the elbows, but their heads were quite separate.
“Now,” I said, “which one has been receiving your letters?”
He looked from one to the other.
“Neither seems inclined to volunteer.”
I switched off the left torch. One figure disappeared; the other grew darker.
Nadrel's hand moved. He stopped it before he reached the blank boards.
“I haven't hurt anything,” I said.
“I can see that.” He looked at me, then back at the wall. “I needed to see that.”
I turned both beams on again. Nadrel came closer. He passed one hand through the gray place where the two shadows overlapped. His fingers remained distinctly his own. Mine stayed down by my side.
“And with both lights off?” he asked.
I showed him. We stood in the dusk, with only the pale outline of his eyes to distinguish him from the wall.
“Still here,” I said.
“Yes.”
I switched a torch back on. My outline returned to the boards.
Nadrel was quiet for a moment. Then he looked down at my shopping bag.
“May I see the extraordinary hat?”
I hung it on my wrist and raised my arm. Its handles made enormous loops beside my head.
“Oh,” he said.
“I know.”
“I spent some time considering what to wear.”
I looked at his slippers, then showed him the sheep on mine. I'd brought them in the bottom of the bag. I hadn't intended to put them on, but there seemed no reason to leave him in the minority. I changed out of my shoes.
“I'd like to send these back,” I said, taking out the unwanted letters.
Nadrel looked over the signatures. The author of the silence letter was apparently his uncle.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“You can't be responsible for your uncle.”
“You haven't met him. He makes it surprisingly difficult.”
I wrote a short note explaining that the figure at the west steps was a cast shadow and asking the whole walking party not to send me any more courtship letters on its behalf.
At Nadrel's direction, I folded the note around the letters and laid the packet against the seam between floor and wall. He pressed a hand to the lowest board. A black edge lifted, and I pushed the packet beneath it until someone on the other side took it.
“They'll all have heard by morning,” he said. “I'll see to it.”
I put the pen away.
“Well,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Thank you for showing me.”
He went toward the flowers. I thought he meant to collect them and leave. Instead he stopped beside the torch on the ledge.
“Would you move that a little to your right?”
I did. My shadow slid across the back wall.
“And hold up your hand?”
“We're going to find an alarming new animal, aren't we?”
“I hope not. This has already taken a certain amount of courage.”
He stood beside the projected hand and offered his own, palm up. Then he looked directly at me.
“Odette. Would the woman in the slippers care to dance?”
I had to look from him to the wall and back again.
“You understand that's still only my shadow.”
“Yes. It seems a useful way to reach you.”
I lifted my arm a little farther. On the wall, my dark hand settled into his.
His fingers closed around the outline. I couldn't feel them, but I could see the care he took. When he bowed, waiting, I found myself smiling much more than I had intended.
“There isn't any music,” I said.
He hummed a few tentative notes.
“I don't know that one.”
“Neither do I. Shall we choose something you know?”
I tried a tune. He picked it up, missing the same difficult bit that I did, and we started again.
For three steps it went beautifully.
Then I moved toward the torch. My projected partner grew much larger than Nadrel and put her foot through his coat.
“Sorry.”
“An impressive stride.”
I stepped back. My hand shrank out of his grasp.
We had to stop humming while we laughed.
“Stay the same distance from the light,” he suggested.
“You have picked this up inconveniently quickly.”
I began to move sideways instead. He followed the outline along the wall, drawing it into a turn, and I turned on the floor to keep my hand in his. It worked. There was room for perhaps four such steps before I reached the edge of the beam, so we went back again.
An elderly man walking a terrier paused on the path beside the bandstand. From there, he could see a woman in sheep slippers edging backward and forward with one arm in the air. Nadrel was hidden by the angle of the wall.
“You all right?” the man asked.
“Very well, thank you.”
The terrier looked unconvinced. They went on.
Nadrel waited until they were out of earshot.
“Was that the beetle?”
I laughed so hard I lost his hand again.
We danced until the bandstand was dark outside the circle of the torch. I had to take my cardigan off. He undid the pale line of his top button. When I made the goose kiss him goodnight, he held very still and then asked whether it might be possible to arrange a second meeting without the bird.
“I can make no promises about wildlife,” I said. “You know that.”
“May I write?”
“To me.”
“To you.”
I gave him the spelling of my name, although he already knew it.
The letters stopped.
For three mornings I had breakfast without anything extruding from the floor. I checked beneath the chair on the third morning. Only once, but there was no reason I should have checked at all.
On the fourth, an envelope appeared under my slipper.
ODETTE, it said.
The seal was familiar. The little drawing on the back showed a sheep.
Dear Odette,
My uncle would like to apologize for the silence letter. I have advised him to demonstrate his sincerity by not writing one.
Are you free on Friday? I have found the rest of our tune.
Nadrel
I put the kettle on and fetched the good writing paper. Then I went back to the drawer for my pencil.
He had drawn the sheep with six legs. We would have to discuss that.