Epilogue: Another Return

The street was dark, but not in the way she remembered. Curtains muted the light in the windows the way clouds veiled the daylight that afternoon—or the way drizzle and mist dissipated that day’s warmth, the first after two months when it seemed winter would never end.

She walked alone. Shadows skittered in the curtains like images in a silent movie. The tapping of her heels strummed echoes off steep stone stairs. The dark, heavy doors—smooth but not shiny—intensified the darkness that ended on a wide avenue with small shops that would remain open for another hour or two.

Her black wool jacket covered her to her hips, where it overlapped the black watch plaid skirt that sheathed her thighs down to her knees. Under it, black tights encased her legs. She was rather rawboned but, because she was taller than nearly all of the women who were shopping for bread, onions and yarn, she looked slender next to them. Also, her hair, waves in a hue between copper and brass, made her seem younger than they, in their brown and black wigs, though in fact some of their mothers were younger than her. Still, no one seemed to notice her. She felt relief for that.

She crossed the avenue to another street lined with rowhouses like the ones she’d just passed. It was Ash Wednesday, the first night of Lent. When she was a child, she and her classmates would go to church early in the morning, then cross the street to go to school with the charcoal-dust mark on their foreheads. But none of the women shopping on the avenue—or in in the neighborhood that night, in fact—had that mark. She hadn’t thought about it, or that season, in years, in decades. Seven weeks until Easter: a holiday on which, in years past, she and her family attended mass and, afterward, sat down to a meal that stretched through the afternoon and evening. After she’d left, after everyone else left or died—she might have lunch or dinner with friends on that day, though it meant no more to them, or her, than it did to the women on the avenue.