I sat at the bay window in the kitchen the next morning, with a blanket around my shoulders and my journal opened in my lap. I hadn’t slept well that night, and I was trying to treat the lingering anxiety from the day before with comforting things like tea and drawings. 

Jack was outside, up on the ladder pulling debris from the gutters, stretching his thin arms and gathering a gloved handful of big maple leaves, tossing them away to let them float down to the ground. The gentle beauty of the falling leaves was nothing in comparison to the way his black fringe fell into his vision constantly. Not like I was watching, or drawing it.

I wasn’t sure who was the stalker anymore. Sure, he literally followed me on multiple occasions without invitation. Perhaps that put him one point ahead, but my curiosity was getting so out of hand I was beginning to consider following him around to satisfy my taste for a bit of knowledge about him. I was always glancing out windows, watching him, wondering. I still had yet to find out how he arrived every day, how he was always around when it was least opportunistic, or how he discovered that tiny damned violet now sitting up in my room. 

I tried to be discreet about my prying, but I wasn’t sure I was acting as well as I hoped. Even through the window, I could tell he knew I was watching him. There was something satisfied in the look on his face, too satisfied for just clearing gutters of muck. I thought to open the window and ask him what was making him so smug. I thought to go out there and grab him by that stupid jacket he’d wrapped around me the afternoon before and…

Something heavy and solid hit the glass of the window I sat by, shaking me hard out of my thoughts and forcing my heart into an angry pound. When I searched out the window again and there was nothing in sight, not even Jack, I untangled myself from the blanket and hurried outside to find the cause of the commotion. 

I found Jack, no longer on the ladder but crouched down outside the window I’d been sitting at. My reaction at first was annoyance, assuming it was him, banging on the glass then hiding to play a prank on me. As I approached though, he reached down into the bushes, retrieving a mass of black. 

“He hit the window. His wing is broken.” 

The crow’s mangled appearance made him barely more than a bunch of tattered feathers, but as I neared I could see its chest, grasped in Jack’s work gloves, moving in and out rapidly as it tried to gather air. The bird struggled, flapping its good wing once, but gave up immediately, not having the energy. He adjusted his hands, folding the bird’s wings down again, both the good and the broken one, so he could hold the whole of the animal’s body securely. 

“Is he ok? Can we help him?” I asked, feeling an unsettling illness roll in my stomach. Jack stood and I inched closer, reaching out for his elbow as I neared, locking a tight grip around the joint. From over his shoulder, I watched the bird, its breathing rapid.

“He’s suffering,” he said, a somber inflection on the words. 

“We can bring him to a shelter. Or a vet. They’d know how to help.” I looked up at him. His gray gaze wasn’t satisfied anymore.

“He’s dying, Violet.” 

The words hurt for some reason. Like a hard punch in the gut. He turned back to the bird he held in his hands, and I watched, swallowing something hard in my throat. 

Jack removed one of his hands from around the bird’s body and placed it on its head instead, covering its black, blinking eyes with his palm. The bird’s rapid breathing calmed down, and I felt a brief second of relief, before the dread fell into the pit of my stomach like a heavy rock as the animal stopped breathing altogether. 

The hyperventilating migrated to my lungs instead. “Did you, did you just—” It didn’t make sense, because he hadn’t suffocated the bird or snapped its neck, yet with one movement of his hand, Jack helped it succumb to death. 

“Violet.” He reached for me but I was already withdrawing away from him and the death he held. I didn't know where I was going or with what purpose, but something had me fleeing. It was the same thing that kept me out of my grandfather’s room and why I was never able to slit open the second wrist. For someone so ready to die, staring it right in its unsightly face was terrifying.

I marched away, until the winter chill seeped into my bones, freezing my muscles and joints. Until a shiver took over me and I had to hold my teeth together to stop their chattering. I’d forgotten a coat again in my anxiety and was paying the price once more.

I stopped, wrapping my arms around myself, and waited for the sound of his heavy boots to catch up with me. He was following me silently the entire time, and it was really only the gentle pace of his steps behind me that helped calm me down at all. As he reached my side, he shrugged off his jacket and held it out for me, just like the day before. The cold that stuck deep under my skin seemed to barely affect him.

I laced my arms into the sleeves of the jacket and wrapped it around me, trying to hold in the last of my body warmth. Surrounded by that woody scent again, my lungs took their first real breath since fleeing, sighing it out along with the tightness in my chest. When the shivers stopped, I finally found the nerve to look at him. 

He smiled, his expression gentle and passive. I shook my head, red embarrassment creeping up my neck, still amazed that even after all this, he was able to stand there and not judge me. Anyone else would have let me leave, left me to deal with my crazy by myself. He was still there though, as if he almost understood, or at least wanted to. As if he wanted to help.

I glanced down at the hand hanging by his side, the now dead bird still tight in his grasp. 

“Violet.” He called my name to get my eyes back up to his. When he caught me in his gaze, he tilted his head to the side a little. “Come with me? I want to show you something.” 

I returned an apprehensive grimace, but he had yet to lead me wrong, so I willed my frozen joints to follow. He took the glove off his free hand, and when I was within reach, grabbed mine in his warm grasp. My numb fingers thawed in his grip.

He brought me back to the woods, starting down the trail I had stumbled along the night after he found me by the water. He quickly diverted from the path though, leading me carefully through overgrowth, pushing aside branches and holding them away as I passed.

I thought to ask where we were going, but I knew he wouldn’t tell me. That wasn’t his style. So I kept my mouth shut and let him lead me deep into the woods, trying to assure myself that if he tried anything funny, I could at least easily defend myself against the spindly boy. My clothes might as well be wearing me, but little more could be said for him.

He stopped finally, waiting for me to crawl over the trunk of a fallen tree and reach his side again. “Stay here,” he said, turning away again and continuing on. I wondered briefly if he was going to ditch me out here, lost in the woods, but he didn’t wander far. I could still see his black hair through the bare trees. 

He leaned down, placing the deceased animal he held onto the ground then turned and started back. Half way, he stopped at a thick tree and beckoned me towards him again.

I followed, my feet crunching through the bed of fallen leaves on the floor of the forest; he put a hand up to halt me. “Slowly,” he said, waving me towards him again. 

I nodded, watching my step and placing them carefully this time. As I neared, he reached out for my hand again, helping me over a tangle of roots until I was settled steady next to him. 

Growing desperate for an explanation, I eyed him expectantly. He offered a tilt of his lips and leaned back against the tree, then nodded his head out towards where he’d discarded the crow’s body. I sighed, slightly annoyed with his crypticness, but followed his gaze and peered out into the forest as directed. 

I was unsure of what I was supposed to be seeing. The forest seemed still as ever. I was almost ready to give up and beg him to explain himself, when there was movement within my vision. I blinked and focused onto where I saw the shifting shrubbery, catching a flash of fire orange disappear behind a tree. 

I shifted onto my toes for a better angle, and caught sight of the orange again, swishing from side to side: a tail. Through a bush and under a tree root, the fox came into full sight, sniffing the ground as it approached the crow.

Once deciding there was no threat, she picked up the bird in her mouth and started back in the direction she came. I noticed her awkward gait as she went though, the way she hopped on one of her back legs to keep weight off the other.

“Her leg is broken. She’d be unable to hunt until it healed, possibly risking starvation. Along with her pups,” Jack explained in a low tone as the fox returned to the forest growth. 

I turned to look at him, dumbfounded. How was it possible, for him to have known about the fox, known to come to this exact spot, even though it was evident that this direction through the woods had been untouched before today? “How did you…?” I didn’t have the words to express my confusion. “Why?”

He smiled, shrugging as he took the other glove off to put them away in his pocket. “I wanted you to see. I felt like maybe you needed to. To understand. Sometimes death is just a small piece of a bigger picture.”

I surveyed the forest again, still and silent yet somehow full of a new life I hadn’t appreciated before, and I knew that what he showed me was somehow just what I needed. I wasn’t sure I completely comprehended its meaning yet, but it was there, planted in the slush of my skull, working out the cold in my bones. 

I leaned back against the tree with him and sighed, pulling his jacket closer. We stood there for a long while as he let me sort through my emotions. Finally, I turned to him and broke the silence. “You’re not going to explain all this to me, are you? How you knew about the fox, or what you did to the crow.”

A shine of sympathy passed his eyes before he glanced away. I knew what that meant. As long as he was silent, he didn’t have to lie to me. Curiosity brewed in the pit of my stomach, but for now I was content in letting him keep his secrets. I still had a few of my own after all.

***

I settled into bed that night next to my violet, with fresh drawings of forest animals riddling the pages of my journal. New entries were added to my list: Feed bread to the birds. See if the fox survived. Fall asleep in the forest and never wake up. 

I buried myself under the blankets, turning the light off and getting comfortable on my pillow. As the quiet night engulfed me, I put my thin, always cold fingers to my lips and tried to remember how warm they were in his grasp. 

Beyond my fantasizing, in the silence of the old house, I heard my grandmother reading to my grandfather again. The sound of her voice was comforting at first, and I let it lull my heart to a resting patter. I realized soon that she wasn’t reading aloud again though. She was talking, a quiet whisper, and when she stopped talking, she was crying. 

The good sleep I almost found evaded me once again.