Our Souls at Night

40

As the weather held that fall Louis often walked out at night past her house and looked at the light shining upstairs in her bedroom, her bedside lamp that he knew and the room with its big bed and dark wooden dresser and the bathroom located down the hall, and remembered everything about the room and the nights lying in the dark talking and the closeness of it all. Then one night he noticed her face appear at the window and he stopped, she made no gesture nor any sign that she was looking at him. But when he was home again she called him on the phone. You can’t do that anymore.

Do what?

Walk past my house. I can’t have it.

So it’s come to that now. You’re going to tell me what I can do and can’t do. Even in my own neighborhood.

I can’t have you walking by and my thinking that you are. Or wondering if you are. I can’t be imagining you’re out in front of the house. I have to be physically shut off from you now.

I thought we were.

Not if you walk by the house at night.

So he never passed her familiar house again, in the night. Walking past in the day didn’t matter. And the few times they happened to meet at the grocery store or on the street, they looked at each other and said hello but that was all.