Psychological horror · 3 min read ·
The Second Pair of Shoes
Three weeks after the funeral I find my husband's brown shoes by the back door, polished, laced, and set side by side the way he always left them, and I have not touched them.
- perspective: first
I want to be clear that I did not move them. I have been over this many times in my head, the way you go over a bill that you know is correct but cannot quite believe. Dennis's brown shoes, the ones with the leather soles he had resoled twice, were in the wardrobe in the spare room on the Friday of the funeral. I know because I put them there. I had packed his things into bin bags for the charity shop, and I left the shoes until last, because I could not decide what to do with them, and then I put them in the wardrobe and shut the door.
On the third Thursday after he died I came down to make tea and found them at the back door. Side by side, toes to the wall, the laces tucked in at the sides the way he tucked them, a neat little cross of brown leather on the mat. They had been polished. Not recently, I thought, touching one. The shine was even and deep, the kind you get from a good cloth and a lot of patience, the kind he used to give them every Sunday night in front of the telly.
I stood there for some time with the kettle in my hand.
The next morning they had moved. Not much. They were a foot to the left, on the corner of the rug, and their laces had been loosened, so that the tongues sat open like the mouths of two sleepy animals. I did not put them back. I told myself I was tidying, and I went to work, and when I came home that evening they had gone back to the wardrobe in the spare room and the door was closed.
I did not tell my sister. She has been very kind, and she has a way of looking at me across the table that makes me feel like a patient. I did not tell the doctor either. I know what they would say, and I am not ready to hear it in those words.
What I have done instead is leave the shoes alone. Each evening I come in, and before I take my coat off I look at the back door, and sometimes they are there and sometimes they are not. When they are there, I walk past them. When they are not, I stand in the hall and listen to the house, and I say, very quietly, that I know he is still in the wardrobe, or the garage, or the back bedroom where the boxes are, and that it is all right to be there. I do not expect an answer.
Last night, though, I found a note in the left shoe. It was folded very small and pushed right down to the toe, where I would only find it if I took the shoe up and looked. The handwriting was his, careful and slightly slanted, the way he wrote the shopping lists and the notes on the fridge.
It said: *Tell the telly it's not on.*
I laughed out loud, alone in the kitchen. Dennis had a standing joke about the telly, which he switched on every morning at six and never watched, and which he said had to be kept warm or it sulked. Nobody else knows that joke. I did not even know he remembered it.
I have put the note on the fridge, under the magnet from Whitby, where his lists used to go. I have put the shoes back by the door. I have stopped tidying them. This morning they were still there, side by side, laces loose, and the telly, when I switched it on to hear the weather, had gone quite dark and cold, the way it does in a house where somebody has finally stopped waiting up.