Shadows of Wren Street

The drive back from the city felt like running a hand along the fine seam of a thing I had once owned and never noticed missing. Wren Street uncoiled under afternoon sky like a strip of old film: a row of houses with stoops and small fenced yards, an alder tree hung low with leaves that made restless, close sounds. When I turned onto the narrow lane the same houses leaned toward each other as if to keep watch. The numbers were the same. The paint on the porch railings was older and more reluctant. I thought of Lydia’s last letter, penciled in slanting script that had insisted the house be left as it was, and thought then of how people write instructions for ghosts and expect ghosts to obey.

The house looked smaller from the street than I remembered, not because it had shrunk but because I had allowed distance to make certain rooms larger in my head. Lydia’s front door still bore the chipped brass knob that I had learned to jiggle when I was a child and impatient. It obeyed in the same way it always had, a reluctant click and a sigh of wood. The air inside smelled of old cloth and lemon soap—my aunt’s hands had been clean the way old habits make things clean—and something else I couldn’t name, a sort of blunt quiet that had weight behind it.

Neighbors were polite in the way of people who have lived near one another for too long to surprise themselves into friendship. Mrs. Hargrove at number fourteen nodded at me with a thin kindness and said Lydia had been a good woman. The boy on the stoop across the way—teenager, hair matted under a cap—stared as if he recognized me from a photograph in a drawer that no one had opened for years. He did not speak. His absence of small courtesies was a kind of greeting in itself.

The house kept its own temperature. Rooms were slightly cooler where the walls were thin and carried memory like a shadow. I set my tote on the hall table and found an envelope with Lydia’s handwriting, the edges softened by handling. Inside there was a single line: "Do not throw anything out without looking twice." It felt like both instruction and accusation. My hands obeyed and became busy; that obedience was a consolation.