February 2021: Secrets and Shutters - Susan Hutton

 Someone has broken into the house next door. Prised the boards from the side windows, pulled the creeper off the front door and kicked it open. I watched through my veranda shutters, conjuring up Silvia’s strong voice, riding back up the hallway on the light that would have flooded in.

Silvia died two years ago. Her son found the body on the kitchen floor, dressed in a blue cardigan over a brightly coloured silk dress. No shoes, she would never wear shoes in the house. He didn't utter a word until seated in my kitchen drinking the tea I offered him after the ambulance drove away.

‘She’s in a cardigan in the middle of summer, with the fucking oven on.’ He pushed the half empty cup across the table towards me asking if I had a cold beer. I said no, wanting him to go, hand in hand with the awkward cloud of unspoken words he’d dragged in with him.

An hour passed before the woman stole back down the splintering steps and over to the red Corolla she’d rammed under the low branches of the old mango tree. After gathering up a doona and pillow from the back seat she fumbled her way through the long grass back into the house, returning later to carefully close the door. She was well fed if not well dressed, hair long and lank, expensive running shoes though.

Now and then I hear a kettle boiling. Silvia borrowed the kettle. Knowing she wouldn't be in a hurry to return it, after a few days I bought another one. I feel her staring at me sometimes from behind the dirty windowpanes, as she did in those last months, mouth rigid, head slanted to one side.

I haven't been back inside Silvia’s house since the day she died. All the things she borrowed over the years are still in there, waiting.

It’s over a week now that this woman has been dossing in the house. She leaves at daybreak on foot, hauling a bulging shoulder bag, returning only after dark. Each day that goes by a flock of anxieties gather, growing in number flapping and snapping inside my head.

I have to go back into that house sometime; today is the day, overcast, and the street is empty. If not now, when. I climb over the back fence, slip through the back door and gather up the things that belong to me into a striped plastic bag.

The blue cardigan went with Silvia to the mortuary. She borrowed that cardigan from our clothesline knowing it was a present from my wife. That morning. After she’d taken the scones from the oven and shaken them into a tea towel, I asked her politely to give it back, but she refused and clamped it around her body daring me to take it off her.

No one will ever know what she held over me.

February’s #RightLeftWrite prompt was If not now, when?