Burke.Word

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8

Amanda walked down the hall toward the back of the house and stood in front of the only closed door she had encountered during her brief, uninvited tour. She paused, struggling with the urge to knock. No one was home, she knew that. She reached out and turned the beveled glass knob, swung the door open into the room and stepped through after it. Absurdly, Amanda realized, she had been expecting something different, a more decorated space, a minimal concession to comfort, the answer to some question she wasn’t even conscious of having asked. Instead, it looked like all the other rooms in the house, nothing extra, empty of ornament or any evidence whatsoever of sentiment or nostalgia. It was the old man’s bedroom, she was sure; there was no rug, even, just the polished wooden floor, showing the signs of its age but obviously well cared for. The walls were white and bare.

For a moment, Amanda found herself unable to move. The window to her left, looking out over the backyard and the alley behind the house, was raised a few inches. The plain lace curtains drifted out toward her as if offering a small wave, settling down again after the disturbance of her opening the door from the hall.

The silence that had seemed to deepen as she moved farther into the house gave way to the barely perceptible background hum, always present in the city, now just audible through the open window. Directly across from the door, between two windows on the opposite wall, sat a plain dresser, four wide drawers with two smaller ones side by side at the top. A pale blue porcelain bowl rested on the surface of the dresser. There was no mirror. The bed was to her right, along the wall to the other side of the door.

A car horn sounded, and Amanda moved instinctively toward it, crossing the room to the back window. She parted the curtains, looked down into the yard and over the fence into the alley beyond. The tiny backyard was as trim as the rest. A brightly painted metal glider under the single tree, with a neat lawn and a narrow sidewalk running from the backdoor to the gate in the fence along the alley. Amanda turned back to the room. There was a massive trunk on the floor to her right, with a wide, curved top and an old-fashioned padlock on the front. This is ridiculous, she thought. What am I going to do, spit on the floor? Hoist a two hundred pound trunk? I need to get out of here, and just punch Jersey right straight in the face, like he deserves.

Amanda stepped to the foot of the bed for one last moment before going, drawn by an utterly faded but clearly once beautiful quilt carefully folded on top. As she reached down to touch it—the first really beautiful thing of any kind she had come across in the house—she glanced right, to the intimate space of wall behind the door, visible only from the bed itself, or with the door to the room all the way closed. On the wall was a frame, no bigger than a foot square, with a single coin, or medal of some kind, hung in the center. She left the quilt and went to take a closer look at the coin.

***

It was true, Jerzy had been introduced to Amanda a couple of times when his grandson had brought her over for short visits. It was also true, however, that she was not the first girl Jersey had brought around, and, Jerzy had supposed, would be far from the last. He didn’t really remember her, and certainly didn’t recognize the brown-haired young woman in the short leather coat who was walking down the block away from his house that morning as he approached. He had other things on his mind, a meeting in three days time to get ready for. He had a lot of thinking to do. Jerzy would return later to the image of her long smooth strides taking her quickly out of view as she turned the corner at the end of the block, when it was too late, way too late, to make any difference in the way things turned out. He would have stopped her if he could, if he had known what she carried and why, and the price she would pay for holding on. The price they all would pay.

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Losing the Bronze is Copyright ©2009 Nigel Hinshelwood