I walked down the greenway to the other side of the village, all the way to Miho’s house. It usually took less than ten minutes to walk to her place from mine. I didn’t see anyone else, but smoke rose from John’s chimney, and I could hear Misha singing in her house at the edge of the village, her voice far-off and melancholy. I thought I recognized the tune.
Miho’s place was the last house in the village before the greenway ended. The town’s expansive garden stretched out behind her house, out into the plains. Her house was also the closest to the large oak at the edge of town with its massive, spreading branches that reached up into the now-clear sky.
I knocked on Miho’s door but didn’t wait for a response before walking in. Her place was bright on the inside, partially because of the fire always burning in the fireplace, but also because she kept her windows wide open and curtains pulled back. Her wood floors shone, a much lighter color than mine. I closed the door quietly behind me, still pondering the memory Miss B had shared, but I soon realized I wasn’t the only one there.
There were three of them sitting at the dining room table that was partially covered in baskets of different sizes, all holding vegetables. Abe, Miho, and Mary St. Clair. I remembered again greeting Mary when she’d come over the mountain. She had moved into a house tucked in the second row off the greenway. In those days, she had a few neighbors, but now the houses in that part of town were empty. And she was leaving us. Sadness filled me again, and this time it wasn’t a selfish sadness, the kind that came when I considered being left alone. No, this sadness came from knowing how much we would all miss her. Our village would be less without her. There would be only eight.
“Hi,” I said quietly, frozen in place. “Hi, Mary.”
“Hi, Dan,” she whispered, giving me a sad smile.
The four of us remained there, no one knowing what to say, and finally Abe cleared his throat. “We’re making preparations.” He tried to sound upbeat and beckoned to an empty chair at the table. “You’re welcome to join us. Give us your two cents.”
Miho smiled.
My mouth went dry. I cleared my throat. “Of course,” I mumbled. “Preparations.”
“What’s wrong, Dan?” Miho asked. She knew me better than anyone. She knew something was going on. I wouldn’t have come down at dusk, only hours after seeing her and Abe, unless there was something I needed to tell them. For the first time since Miss B’s story, I remembered the woman in my house. The woman I should have brought with me and relinquished to Abe. I squeezed the key in my pocket so hard it bit into my hand.
But I put on a dim smile. “No, no. Fine,” my voice said, skipping words, a record player out of groove. “Everything’s fine.”
“Mary is leaving after dark, in just a few hours,” Abe said, and I didn’t know why he was telling me this again. Didn’t everyone already know?
An irrational irritation rose inside of me. I tried to speak, tried to say, “Yes, I know,” or something else along those lines, but the words had burrs on them, and they stuck in my throat.
“Would you mind gathering the firewood for the ceremony?” Abe asked. “You might have to go out to the second or third tree. I haven’t seen much wood around the mountain, and this tree out here is picked clean.”
I nodded, numb. “Sure.” The three of them stared at me. I felt like I should say something else, something that would explain my coming. “I had a word with Miss B.”
“Good,” Abe said, appearing a little confused as to why that was noteworthy.
“You should go talk to her. She had a memory.”
“Is that so?” Abe sounded interested, as if he might ask me more, but I was already backing away.
I clumsily opened the door, spilled out onto the greenway, and returned through the village, toward the mountain, toward my house. I waited for one of them to come out and shout in my direction, ask me why I was going back to my house and not out toward the long line of oaks to collect wood for the ceremony. If they wondered where I was going, no one said anything. No one came after me.
After walking for a bit, I realized I could breathe again. Again I pictured the woman lying on the floor inside my front door, and I stopped. I was torn. I thought about going back to tell Abe. I had to tell him what was going on.
But something else pulled me onward, pulled me home. My walk turned into a jog, and when I passed Miss B’s house, there she sat, not having moved from where I left her a few minutes before. She was staring down at her hands, as if her fingers were squeezing into fists on their own, without her permission, and she was trying to figure out how to undo the knots they had become.
I didn’t slow down, and I didn’t let go of the key. I ran faster when I reached the gap between the town and my own house, the heavy grass swishing with each step. And the fear was there too, that inexplicable fear, growing until it sat in my gut like a throbbing mass.
I opened the door to my house, breathing hard. The puddle was still there, sending up a glass reflection. The gray light was still there too, as the afternoon died off and darkness approached. The back doors remained closed.
But the woman wasn’t lying there anymore. She was gone.
4 The Woman
AN UNBEARABLE STILLNESS settled on the house and made its way inside of me. I stepped in and stood in the puddle where she had been, my feet momentarily stirring the water, and the dying light that came in from outside reflected off the rippling surface. I felt like a foreigner in my own house, but in an unlikely act of bravery, I pulled the door closed behind me. I turned the lock. I couldn’t remember the last time I had locked the door, but the metal slid home in a clean motion.
“Hello?” I said, my voice husky and fading. The air quivered around that one word, but there was nothing that came out in response—no sound, no movement. I stepped out of the puddle, kicked off my shoes, and opened the back doors, looking through them at the sky and the plains and the heavy, after-rain air. It wouldn’t be long before night fell. I breathed deep. I closed the doors and locked them too, and again I wondered why. Was I locking someone out? Or locking myself in? Either way, it felt too late, an afterthought.
I walked through the kitchen to my desk, searching the mountain for any sign of the woman. Did she go back? Maybe. I’d seen it happen before, people shocked by the freedom, the cool breeze, the fresh air, turning and stumbling back into the mountain. She couldn’t have gone through the village and followed the greenway east or I would have noticed, unless she had hidden among the houses and waited for me to pass, which seemed unlikely in her condition. The thought of her hidden among the empty houses made my skin crawl. She couldn’t have meandered out into the plains or I would still be able to see her from my back doors. It would take a long, long time to walk out of sight in that direction. I stared at the canyon, but everything around it was as motionless as the inside of my house.
What if she hadn’t left?
I moved to the closed bedroom door, stared at the knob and my warped reflection in it, held on with one clammy hand. My eye twitched at the corner, and I rubbed it with the back of my other hand. I was tired. Why was I so tired?
I pushed open the door and it swung without a sound. There, lying in my bed, small beneath the down comforter, her form barely enough to create any kind of topography, was the woman, asleep. For a moment the fear dimmed, replaced by a warming sense of concern. She was like a broken animal, something harmless, an injured bird or a lost kitten, and I wanted to take care of her, to nurse her to health. I could do that. I could help.
I walked over and sat in the chair beside the bed. I didn’t want to wake her—I only wanted to watch her, to take her in. By then, I had already pushed away the vision that had overwhelmed me when I touched her arm, the strangeness of her arrival, the fear I had felt before. I only wanted to sit there and stare at her.
Her breathing was so peaceful, so gentle. Why had I been afraid of her? I couldn’t remember. Was she a tangible reminder of what it was like to live on
the other side of the mountain, the terror of what went on over there? Was it because she was a secret I shouldn’t be keeping?
“Are you awake?” I asked quietly, my words barely above a whisper.
She tugged the covers down so that her eyes peeked out at me. She nodded slowly.
“Are you okay?”
Her head moved slightly, uncertainly. It could have been a yes or a no.
“Are you hurting anywhere?”
She paused, seemed to shrug. I waited before asking the next question, not wanting to force her memory back to the other side of the mountain too soon, but I couldn’t resist. Even in that moment, even in the face of someone gravely injured, I still had to ask about my brother.
“Was there anyone else left? Did you see anyone else? On the other side of the mountain?”
Her eyes rolled back and I thought she might pass out again. But instead she nodded, barely moving her head. She squinted in pain.
“Good, good,” I said encouragingly, like a parent to a small child, wanting to coax more out of her. I paused, but the words came out before I could stop them. “A man?”
She nodded again. I felt a surge of adrenaline or emotion, and my hands shook. I wanted to stand up and clap, or shout out a hoot. But tears formed in her eyes, shimmering, welling up, and streaking along her skin.
“Yes,” she whispered.
She could speak!
“Was he still alive?”
She nodded once more, and her eyes dropped below the line of the blankets still pulled up to her face. Could it be? Could this person she had seen actually be my brother? I stood up and paced around the room, feeling caged, trapped. Why was he still there? Why wasn’t he coming out of that place? What were they doing to him to keep him there?
“Where?” I asked. “Where?”
She pulled the covers down even farther, down below her chin. There were wet spots on the sheet from her fingers, a damp halo around her head on the pillowcase. There were also dried brown stains in random places from mud and blood and drool. Already some of the cuts on her face had begun to soften around the edges—this was how it was on our side of the mountain. Inexplicable, really, how quickly we had all healed after arriving. How completely. Maybe it was the air. Maybe it was the grass, or the rain, or the food.
I sat down in the chair again so that my knees were against the bed. I put my palms on the edge of the mattress, consciously keeping my hands away. I was scared of the vision that had come to me the last time I touched her.
“Where?” I asked for a third time, trying to sound calm and gentle, even though I wanted to press her. I wanted to lift her by her shoulders and shake her, demand information, details. But she looked so fragile. It was like negotiating with someone on the edge, someone preparing to jump.
“The very bottom,” she said, barely moving her mouth.
I sat back and shook my head. The bottom. I had so few memories of that place, but an image flashed in my mind when she said those words: a mile-wide funnel, like a pit dug into the heart of the mountain, and the road that made its way down, hugging the edge, dropping into the darkness. The bottom of that? I didn’t remember seeing the bottom. I had been in there somewhere, but I couldn’t imagine a bottom. It seemed endless.
What was I going to do?
“Was there anyone else?” I asked her. “Anyone?”
She looked at me as if she didn’t know what I meant.
I reworded the question. “How many people did you see over there before you came here? How many people do they still have over there?”
A subtle rustling began under the blanket, the smallest of movements, and I realized she was pulling her hand up. She moved it out from under the cover in a tight fist, and one finger slowly uncurled.
“One person? He’s the last person there?”
She nodded.
“How do you know?”
“Emptiness,” she whispered. “Silence.”
I held my face in my hands and tried to stop the tears from coming. “Are you sure?”
She nodded, her eyes closed, and she fell asleep, but there was still that one finger above the blanket, now slightly bent. One finger. One person left.
My brother. It had to be him.
DUSK GREW DARKER, leaned toward night, and I watched it happen from the comfort of my armchair, facing out over the empty plains. I couldn’t look at the mountain anymore, knowing my brother was there, alone. Sadness hung around me like a fog, and loneliness, and that new companion, fear. So I pretended the mountain wasn’t rising just outside my house, and I stared through the wide-open double doors in the opposite direction.
I should have been going for wood for Mary’s sending off. I should have been telling Abe any number of things, either about the woman in my bed or the memory Miss B had told me or that my brother was the last one in the mountain. But I said nothing. I did nothing. I sat there and watched the darkness drift in on us all.
There had been no sound from the bedroom since I left her there sleeping, and there were no windows in that room, so it wasn’t like she could escape without me knowing about it. But I did feel like I was guarding the door. Why? What was I guarding against? Her coming out, or me going in? Or something else?
I didn’t know.
It started to rain again, a steady, soaking rain, and relief washed over me because I knew without being told that Mary wouldn’t leave, at least not on that night. A spark of hope murmured inside of me, the thought that perhaps she would change her mind. But as quick as that thought came to me, I knew it wasn’t true. I knew she would leave as soon as there was a clear evening. And then there would be eight of us left. Nine if I counted the woman in my bedroom, but she didn’t seem to count. She seemed somehow separate.
I stood up and walked forward to lean against the frame of the back door. From there I could see down the gentle slope, to the left and into the village. The houses were quiet in the settling darkness, but I could smell a wood fire burning, and I wondered if it came from John’s or Miss B’s or Miho’s. Miss B’s house was the coziest one in town, and she was constantly bringing out fresh bread or cookies or something else she had made. I wondered if anyone else was there with her. I wondered if she had told anyone else about her new memory. I doubted it—after she had finished telling me, and when I had passed her on my way back home, I had this sense that she regretted the sharing. This is the way of secrets, an always present desire to share them and a pervading guilt after we do.
I watched Misha and Circe walk out into the rain, making a wide circle through the knee-high grass. I could barely see them in the dark. They stopped at one point and looked up in my direction. I gave them a wave, but I didn’t think they saw me because they didn’t wave back. Maybe they were looking up at the mountain. Maybe they couldn’t see me in the darkness of the doorway. They turned, kept walking, and hugged each other at one point. The darkness got thicker and they drifted out of eyesight. Did they plan on leaving too? The town wouldn’t be the same without either one of them.
I was surprised when I heard a knock at the door. A ball of anxiety rose up in my throat when I remembered the woman in my bedroom. The woman I hadn’t told anyone about. I convinced myself it wasn’t the worst secret in the world, but it would have been awkward explaining her presence, especially to Miho, so I was a little relieved when I unlocked the door, opened it, and found Abe standing there, getting wet as the new band of rain became steadier.
“Come in, come in,” I said. “Get out of the rain, Abe.”
He came in and sort of shook himself off, like a dog emerging from a lake. We both laughed.
“Let me get you a towel,” I said, moving toward the bedroom. But I remembered the woman, so I veered into the kitchen and grabbed him a small dishcloth. “Sorry.” I shrugged. “Best I can do.”
He waved off my apology and, while his face was covered with the cloth, asked, “You locking your doors these days?”
I swallowed hard and turned away, pret
ending to be busy with something in the kitchen.
I sighed. “I don’t know. I guess.” With that simple answer a kind of oppressiveness pushed down on me. I stared at the floor while Abe wiped off the rest of his head, his face, his arms. His hands. I stared at them as he handed the small cloth back to me. I knew where the feeling of oppressiveness was coming from: I was lying to Abe about the woman, and I was going to keep lying to him. I wasn’t going to tell him about her. I couldn’t see any way out of it.
When I took the cloth from him, I wanted to cover my face with it, hide my shame, but instead I carried it back into the kitchen and draped it over the counter where it could dry. I lit the lamps in the house and carried one into the sitting room, hung it on the hook in the ceiling. The flames danced and the shadows in the corners of the house came to life.
“I guess you know why I’m here,” he said quietly, still standing inside the door.
“Come in, Abe. Come in,” I said, motioning for him to come with me to the armchair. “Have a seat.”
“You sit there,” he said. “I know that’s your spot.”
“Abe,” I said, taking a serious tone. “Sit.”
He grumbled something about not getting any respect. I laughed and tried to shake off that sense of letting him down that comes with lying to someone you trust.
I sat with my back toward the back door. Cool, damp air lingered there. It had become too dark to see the plains, or the rain, or even the village, although a bit of lamplight glowed from various windows.
There had been a day when the village lit up at night. When all the windows were alight and people gathered around fires built outside of town, when the sound of laughter made its way up to where I sat. Everyone else seemed to think that people leaving indicated progress, that going east was what we were all supposed to do eventually, but I missed the old days. I wished them back, and I didn’t know what was wrong with that. They had been good days. Very good days.
These Nameless Things Page 4