Lady in the Closet, by Thomas Cooper

Who knew how long she’d been there, the woman living in our bedroom closet. She was so small and quiet it seemed a crime to throw her out in the streets, especially in the middle of winter. My wife would have seen matters another way and called the police after telling me that I’d lost my mind, which is why I didn’t tell her about the lady in the closet and planned on keeping it that way.

There she was one day while I was picking out a suit before work, her pale, delicately boned face peering out of the coats and jackets. I expected an apology, at very least a “Well, I’ll be going now,” but she stayed quiet, as if it were her god-given right to be there. As if I, in fact, were the trespassing party.

“Where are you from?” I finally asked, meaning, “How did you get here, and how long have you been living in my house?”

But she only said, “Confidential.” Her tone suggested I better not pursue the matter any further.

The decision to let the closet lady stay took less than a minute. I think it was my wife’s recent sickness that helped me decide, how the house was sometimes so horribly silent and still.

Of course, in the beginning I panicked about what my wife would do if she ever found out about the lady in the closet. Not that I had any real reason to worry. The lady in the closet was nothing if not fastidious and polite, hardly like having another person in the house at all. She never left a trace of herself behind, never a hair, footstep, or handprint.

On the mornings my wife left early for work, the closet lady and I had Turkish coffee and wheat toast at the sunny kitchen nook table. I started telling the closet lady everything, more than I ever told my wife or brother or psychiatrist.

One morning, I told the closet lady, “Look, I don’t know who you are, or what you are, but I want you to go away with me. Maybe out of the country.” It was so ridiculously simple, loving this woman whose name I didn’t even know, this woman who did nothing but listen and who was in the bloom of almost offensively perfect health.

She folded her fingers against her palm, stared at her French-manicured fingernails.

“I mean eventually,” I said. “Alright, forget I said that. Just don’t leave, please.”

That was around when my wife started getting fainting and coughing spells again, and when the closet lady started disappearing for days at a time. The curled indentation of her body would be on the carpet beneath the hanging coats and jackets, but no closet lady. I searched high and low for some trapdoor or secret compartment, sliding my hand along the walls and probing with my fingers.

She always returned after a day or two, smelling briny, her pomegranate lipstick smeared around her mouth.

“And where have you been?” I would ask. Nonchalantly, snapping my newspaper.

She sighed and said, “Look, you need to relax.” This was as much as she’d ever said to me, whoever this woman was who’d been living under my roof for over a year, maybe even since the last presidential administration.

“I’ll relax,” I told her. “Just don’t leave. I really need you now.”

Soon after that, around Christmas, my wife’s cancer came back, metastasized to the brain. So began the long and horrible days of radiation therapy, the interminable nights of vigil as she retched fluorescent slime into a plastic bucket. One night I shaved her head as she sat on the bathroom toilet. We wept together, seeing all that fox-colored hair in curlicues on the tile floor. I held her hand, so paper-dry, so brittle-fingered, and it seemed to me that everything about her was a fraction smaller than it had once been.

“You’re distancing yourself lately, Edward,” she told me. “Please stop.” Even her voice sounded smaller.

There were times when I felt that I was betraying my wife, being with the lady in the closet. Now it felt like the other way around. I promised her I’d stop.

She died on a Sunday afternoon in February, between Clover Street and Main when we were driving home from the farmer’s market. She gasped and I looked over, saw her drawn mouth and pale face, her stricken eyes, the inhaler cupped in her hand.

Between the funeral arrangements and the coming and going of relatives, I neglected the lady in the closet. For a long time I thought she’d left for good. But when spring came I cleaned my wife’s things out of the closet and looked through a hatbox where, apparently, she had been hiding all this time, curled like a possum, shivering and naked and bald. As if shaving her head like that wasn’t sick and cruel enough, the lady in the closet didn’t even look like herself anymore. She had thinned her eyebrows and shaded her lips and eyelids just like my wife’s.

I ran away in a panic and hid behind the living room couch.

When the lady in the closet got sick and started coughing, I forgave her. At night she kept me awake with her coughing and retching, and every now and then I got up from bed and flicked on the closet light. The lady in the closet, who looked more like my wife every day, was always smaller than before, until by summer she was so small curled up in her hatbox that she seemed on the edge of disappearing. Just when I thought she couldn’t get smaller, she would shrink more, and then more, until she was pin-sized, until she was smaller than that, and then so small I couldn’t tell if I was looking at someone real or imaginary, or just the size of memory.