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“Great, thanks.” He folds the damp dish towel. “Well, I better get going.”
We step out the kitchen door onto the side porch. On this spring-green day, it’s hard to believe that, just a few months ago, the snow was deep enough to swallow me alive.
“Do you still have that solar shower?” Sam asks as we walk around to the front of the house.
“No, I installed a new hot water heater a while back.”
“By yourself?”
“Pretty much.”
Sam opens the door of his pickup. “Damn, Audrey, is there anything you can’t do?”
“Shear a sheep,” I say. “You weren’t around this spring, so I had to hire someone the vet recommended.”
I’m teasing, or trying to, anyway. Sam takes me seriously.
“Call me next time.” He gets in the cab and pulls the door shut. Through the open window, he adds, “I’ll take care of it for you.”
I can take care of myself—that’s what I’d have said if he weren’t already driving away. It’s true, too, and not just because my dad taught me how to fix things. Taking care of myself is the legacy of my mother’s absence. Letting myself be taken care of, though? That’s something I have yet to learn.
I spend the next half hour scanning Hazel’s letters, printing copies as I go, then uploading the images into a shareable drive. When I’m done, I fold each letter back into its corresponding envelope. They’re stacked on my dining room table beside the newspaper clippings and the bullet Hazel expelled from her father’s rifle. In the alternate universe in which that weapon was fired, Sam doesn’t exist. In this one, finding Hazel’s letters brought us back together. No wonder humans are storytelling animals, I think. Our lives are little more than an infinite series of random collisions. We need narrative to corral the shapeless stream of chance into a navigable river.
Chapter 44
September 22, 2015
Schuywich, New York
My darling Evelyn,
You weren’t in bed beside me when I woke up at three o’clock this morning. For a fleeting moment, I stretched my arm across your cold pillow without a worry. You’d always been a night owl, prowling the house at ungodly hours. You were probably at your writing desk, I thought sleepily, or downstairs with a cup of coffee, reading. It used to amaze me that you could fall back to sleep after drinking coffee at midnight. I was falling back to sleep myself when I woke to the reality of our here and now.
Mademoiselle canceled your column back in 1983. The market for the pulp fiction paperbacks you churned out under four different pseudonyms collapsed decades ago. It’s been years since anything you wrote was published.
I bolted upright in a panic.
“Evelyn!” I called into the darkness. “Where are you?”
Silence. I switched on the light, grabbed my robe, got creakily to my feet. I pictured you in a heap of broken bones at the bottom of those deadly back stairs until I remembered I’d hired Junior Burgess to block them off with a gate. I shuffled into your study, but you weren’t in your armchair, dozing over a magazine article. You weren’t at your desk, hands unmoving on the typewriter’s quiet keys as you imagined yourself still able to write. You weren’t on the toilet or in the tub, either, or in the front bedroom we’d always pretended was yours. You weren’t downstairs in the living room sorting through rare books or at the dining room table matting prints. You couldn’t have been percolating a late-night pot of coffee because I’d taken all the knobs off the stove and hidden them from you. I figured you were having a late-night snack at the breakfast table until I switched on the kitchen light to find the cold room empty, the back door flapping on its hinges.
“Evelyn!” I called again, tamping down my fear. It wouldn’t have been the first time you’d gotten out of bed to sneak off to the bookshop, your sense of day and night scrambled lately along with your memories. Then I noticed your jacket still on its hook, your boots on the mat. It’s late September, with temperatures dropping into the forties overnight, far too cold for you to be out in the barn in nothing but your felt slippers and flannel pajamas.
Annoyed, I shoved my feet into boots and pulled a coat on over my nightgown. I grabbed your jacket and a flashlight, too, before stepping outside. A sheen of dew shone like a mirror in the moonlight. My feet left dark prints in the silver carpet as I crossed the lawn. Dread descended as I found the barn door shut, its padlock unopened. Where had you gone this time?
“Evelyn!”
I was hurrying back to the house to call for help when the flashlight’s beam caught a shadowy trail of footprints that weren’t my own. I followed it as eagerly as our old dog Charlie once followed the scent of sheep. The trail disappeared as the carpet of dew gave way to stalks of wilting wildflowers.
“Evelyn!”
My cry was answered by the lonely hoot of an owl. I wavered, unsure what to do. I’m eighty years old now. You’re eighty-six. Neither of us has any business being out in the woods at night. The sensible thing would have been to head home and pick up the phone, but I figured I’d find you faster by pushing on than turning back. I trudged past the pond and out to the pasture, shouting your name until my throat was sore.
There it was, glinting silver through the trees like a strand of Christmas tinsel: the wire you’d strung up to guide me home from Mother’s house. I slid my fingers along its cold length as it led me deeper into the woods.
“Evelyn!”
At last, an answering cry. “Hazel, where are you?”
