There was no one left at school, so I went home. I took the letter out of my pocket as I was walking and looked at it again. It had to mean something. The dates seemed an obvious place to start deciphering, and 4s came up again: June = 6, 6 + 5 = 11, 1 + 9 = 10, 7 + 3 = 10, 11 + 10 + 10 = 31, 3 + 1 = 4; 1995 - 1973 = 22, 2 + 2 = 4. But that didn’t tell me anything, except that I could add and subtract. It answered nothing. If there was a code, I wasn’t going to break it. The letter might have been nothing but a joke or game between the two of them. Or it might have been everything, it might have been their secret, something Anna had never discussed with me. It was the proof of a lie she had told me, or had never told me. She had said that she disliked Mr. Devon, but here was this stupid drawing. I hated the letter. I hated them both.
I imagined following Mr. Devon up to Slocum, Alaska, and finding her there, waiting for him. I looked at a map of Alaska when I got home. There was no Slocum, not even anything that sounded like it. There was a Slana, and a Sleetmute. I tried to remember whether Mr. Devon had said either of those names, but all I could remember was Slocum. Maybe it was too small to be on a map, or maybe I hadn’t heard him right. I thought about calling him and asking, but if he had lied about it the first time he certainly wouldn’t tell the truth now. Maybe he wasn’t even going to Alaska.
I threw the letter on my bed and began taking down everything on the walls of my room. I removed things in large swipes, tearing pictures and postcards, knocking off Post-its I had painstakingly attached not too long before. I should have been more careful. I wanted it all gone in a hurry, and I had a thought to throw everything away, but I went and found a box in the garage and piled everything into it. I went to my closet, retrieved the package Carl had given me, and put the box over the spot where I had hidden the package. I took Carl’s package to my desk and opened it.
I had thought I would find Carl’s ledgers inside, but I didn’t. Under the brown paper was a box with a note from Anna, to Claire.
Keep these in a safe spot. Protect them as if they were your own skin and bone. Protect them as if they were your heart. Don’t tell anyone that you have them, but after two months give them to someone you trust and have them follow the same instructions. You are responsible. You must know where they are going, where they will wind up. These are dangerous, you cannot let them fall into the wrong hands. Keep them safe. Pass them on. But keep them safe.
I lifted the box lid slowly, and there they were, Anna’s notebooks, the complete set, fourteen volumes of her obituaries. They were tied together with black twine, and on the top volume was taped a note with big block letters: I KNEW YOU WOULD READ THIS.
I leafed through two of the volumes, but soon realized that without the master list I wouldn’t be able to find any particular obituary or keep track of the ones I had read. Anna had been right, the notebooks were chaotic without the master list. I decided to start reading from the first volume, all 1,516 obituaries. I stayed up most of the night, reading about the deaths of everyone who had helped the Caynes move in, or seen them move in, then other neighbors, people on her street. Her classmates and teachers started dying next. It seemed that people appeared in the notebooks not long after she came into contact with them. I jumped ahead, and found the obituaries of people I knew she had met after she met me, but my death was not in the spot where it should have been. I went back to where I had left off in the first volume and read until I fell asleep.
I spent the next five days reading Anna’s notebooks at every opportunity. I could hear her voice talking about every person, how each one lived and died. I had read some of the obituaries before, but never so many, and never so many at one time. Her caustic humor was still fresh and funny, but now I noticed another, less satisfying element in her writing. While she dutifully recounted the achievements and highlights of each person’s life, the real achievement was the person’s death. Almost without exception, Anna spent the most space describing the precise details of a person’s demise. The deaths contained more drama and importance than the lives. I could hear Anna defending herself, arguing that the facts of everyone’s life were accurate and well represented, and if the lives seemed inconsequential or diminished, so be it. Besides, she would say, you wrote a few yourself; are they any different from mine? They weren’t, but I found myself, for maybe the first time, wanting to stick up for people and their lives, to defend the whole town. They couldn’t be as pointless and insignificant as they seemed, these small lifetimes one after another.
I was sitting in the backyard with the tenth volume when I heard someone whisper my name. I closed the notebook and turned to see Carl standing at the corner of the house, his blue visor pulled low across his forehead, wearing his usual blazer, looking as he always did. He looked at me with a hint of a grin.
“Are you hiding?” I put the notebook under the lawn chair.
“I didn’t want your mom to see me.”
“She’s out,” I said. “Are you back?”
“I’m back,” he said. “I just got back and wanted to see you.”
“Where were you? The whole town’s gone crazy since you left.”
“I know. I just had some things to take care of. I told you I’d come back. I’ve got something for you,” he said.
“Do you want to go inside? I need to give back your stuff.”
“I’ll get it later. I just wanted to bring you something.” He slipped his backpack off his shoulders and opened it. He took out a manila envelope and handed it to me. “It doesn’t change anything, I know, but I wanted to apologize and try to make things right.”
I opened the envelope. Inside was the photograph of Anna and me, and a negative.
“How did you get this?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It was just business.” I knew better than to ask anything else. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t want anyone else to see me before my mother does.”
“Hey, Carl, about that package you gave me.”
“It’s Claire’s package,” he said. “She wanted me to give it to you.” My mother’s car pulled into the front driveway and Carl ran across the backyard, toward the woods at the top of Brook Road. It would take him twice as long to go that way, but he probably wouldn’t be seen. Carl knew what he was doing. I was glad he was back, glad he had come to see me, and glad he had done something for me. For a moment I thought that things were going to get better. If Carl could come back, why couldn’t Anna? Why couldn’t everything keep getting better? I returned to my chair, put the envelope in the notebook, and continued reading.
Near the end of the last volume, I saw my own name. I had resigned myself to the idea that she had not written one for me, and was glad for every page where I was absent. I didn’t want to see my own life belittled and demeaned. At the top of the page she had written, “Something as simple as snow,” and then crossed out the first word. I won’t repeat the entire thing here, but most of it:
One of the most important writers of the past century died in his sleep at the age of eighty-eight, at his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he had lived for nearly seventy-two years. . . . His first novel, published two weeks after his eighteenth birthday, was a modest success, but two years later, his next novel established him as one of the most important contemporary ghost-story writers. Four more novels and a collection of short stories followed, all published before he turned forty, and then there was nothing. Rumors circulated that he had disappeared into the bayous of Louisiana, that he had suffered a collapse from exhaustion or mental breakdown, or that he had drowned in the Mississippi River. His readers found clues and explanations in his writings, but none of the stories and theories was true. He was living quietly in his house at the end of Glasgow Avenue in Baton Rouge, down the street from his brother, raising a family of his own.
A chance encounter with an old high school friend, Anastasia Cayne, at Ichabod’s bar had changed his life. They were quickly married and had two children, Erich and Bess. She wrote obituaries for the B
aton Rouge Advocate , while he raised the family. After a fourteen-year absence, he returned with The Casualty of Obituaries, a collaboration with his wife. “Everyone could benefit from being silent for a while,” he was quoted as saying. “You have to pay attention, take the world in before you can accurately let it out again. There’s something to be said for silence, exile, and cunning.” While the novel was an immediate critical and popular success, it was his last work. The writing kept him away from his family, and he devoted his remaining time to them. . . . He is survived by his wife and two children.
I called my brother and asked him if I could come and stay for the summer, or longer. “Absolutely,” he said. “Getting out of there might be just what you need. Mom and Dad could drive anybody crazy. They’re fine with you coming down?”
“They won’t even notice I’m gone,” I said. I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t talked to them about it. With any luck I’d be there before he could say anything.
“There’s a ton of stuff to do here, and all of us want you to come. You can stay as long as you like.”
It was easy. Why should I stay? My parents didn’t seem to care whether I was around or not; the whole town didn’t seem to care. If by some miracle Anna came back, I could come back then too. But what were the chances of that? Maybe she was somewhere else, living a different life as a different person, filling in her notebooks with the names and dates and deaths of a whole other town. Maybe she was in Louisiana right now, recording the deaths of one person after another. Maybe when she was done, our paths would cross or she would contact me. It was a fantasy, but there was nothing left for me here anyway, and who knows what was waiting for me in Louisiana? All I had to do was step on and off a plane and everything might be different. It was easy.
I left. I was gone.
I didn’t pack that much, only a small suitcase of clothes and a backpack with a few books and Anna’s notebooks. If I decided to stay, my parents could ship the rest of my stuff. There was nothing I needed, even the shortwave could wait. I could use my brother’s computer. Or just do without it. Now that I was leaving, it seemed so easy. Maybe that’s why Anna had left, because it was the easy thing to do.
I took the photograph Carl had given me—it was the only photo of Anna and me together, and it wasn’t even real, me with a dumbfounded look on my face, and the ghostly image of Anna hovering over my shoulder—and the first postcard she had given me, the one with the photo of Pancho Villa on the front and the Ambrose Bierce quotation on the back. After writing those lines he had disappeared, vanished into the thin air of Mexico or who knows where. I could vanish too, step off the plane and disappear into the crowd.
I fantasized about stealing a car, to get me to the airport, or taking my mom’s car and driving all the way to Louisiana. I wanted to disappear, leave without anyone’s knowing. But I also wanted to leave something behind, to keep everyone guessing. I thought about taking a canoe down the river about sixty miles, where I could walk to a train station. Then I’d get the train to the city and go to the airport. I still had the money Carl had left me. I would leave the canoe on the shore and be gone. I would defy gravity and fall off the face of the earth, just as Anna had done. It wasn’t as dramatic as an empty dress and a hole in the ice, but it was the wrong season for that, and I would still get out of here. People could still wonder what had happened; they could worry and look for me. They might think I had drowned in the river, or been kidnapped, taken against my will. Or they might think I had simply run off. Maybe they would think that I’d met up with Anna and we were finally together again, that it had been planned all along. She and I would be forever linked, both of us mysteriously disappearing into the river, or not. There would be questions and doubt. They would remember us both forever.
In the end, I simply told my parents that I was going. I came down for breakfast, and they were both sitting over their empty grapefruit halves and full cups of coffee, just sitting quietly, waiting for something to happen. “I’m going to spend the summer with Paul,” I said.
My father said he couldn’t afford it, and when I told him he didn’t have to worry about it, he was fine with the idea. That was the only obstacle. My mother came over and gave me a hug, but she didn’t protest. It was easy. It was certainly easier than some scheme of sneaking out of town on a canoe like Huck Finn. All I had to do was get in the backseat of the Volvo, and my parents drove me out of town.
“Anything you want to see before we leave?” my father asked.
I had to think about it. What was there left to see? Finally I said, “Gurney’s.”
We drove by on the way out of town, even though it wasn’t on the way at all. Derek and Erick were there, one of them pumping gas and the other sitting on a folding chair next to Mr. Hathorne in the dim coolness of the garage. Both of them were drinking Cokes and watching the road, waiting for traffic. They all waved as we drove past; my father slowed, and he and my mother waved back. A second later we were out of town, and even though they were out of sight, I could still see them waving, their arms raised high and happy, a shiny excitement on their faces, glad to see somebody they knew.
My brother is going to pick me up at the airport. He’ll be surprised when he sees me in my black jeans and black T-shirt. I’m a completely different person, more like Bryce than myself. Maybe I’ll shave my head; maybe I’ll dye my hair blond. No one knows me, so no one knows what to expect. I can have whatever past I want; I can forget how I used to be. It seems like it’s all just remembering and forgetting. Things happen so fast, and then they’re gone before you notice them. Events ambush you from out of nowhere, blindside you, and then you have to spend the time afterward trying to remember or forget what the hell it all was to begin with. The more you think about it, the more the events crumble, crack, break down, or refuse to change at all. They’re either pieces of ice in your hand, changing shape and melting away until they’re nothing like what they were to begin with, or pieces of glass, sharp and irritating, unchanging, reminders of pain and unpleasantness—or happiness.
I know absolutely nothing about where I’m going. I’m fine with that. I’m happy about it. Before, I had nothing. I had no life, no friends, and no family really, and I didn’t really care. I had nothing, and nothing to lose, and then I knew loss. What I cared about was gone; it was all lost. Now I have everything to gain; everything is a clean slate. It’s all blank pages waiting to be written on. It’s all about going forward. It’s all about uncertainty and possibilities. I have Anna to thank for that. I wouldn’t be here, flying into the future, unafraid, if it hadn’t been for her. Whether she meant to or not, she prepared me for this. I will be like her—the two of us gone wandering.
Back home they’ll be wondering whether I ran off to find her; some will say that I did. Others will have nothing good to say; let them say it. In a few hours I’ll be the new kid in town, with the neighbors lined up along the street, waiting for me as I arrive at my new home. I’ll be the new kid in school. Who knows, I might even be popular for a change. I could be. I could be a question, just like Anna—open-ended, curling around the answer without ever delivering it. I could be whoever I want to be. I could go out for the football team, I could become a drug dealer, or I could be the new kid all dressed in black. I could be mysterious and have secrets. I could send out letters and postcards and art. I could take people down to the basement and let them listen to the secrets coming over the shortwave. There’s a lot that I know. Anna didn’t teach me everything, but she gave me a good start. There’s a lot I can use. I could play games. I have the very last song she put on the last CD running through my head. Is that what she wanted to leave me with? My life is meant for joy? She always knew what she was doing. Maybe I will too, finally. This could be the best thing that’s ever happened.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (with apologies to Harry and Bess)
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why does the author leave the narrator of the story unnamed, but tells us that he was named after his mother’s brother who had died at thirteen? What clue does Anna give the reader about what the narrator’s name might be?
2. Anna mentions the legendary escape artist and illusionist Houdini on several occasions. What about Houdini fascinates her? How does she ultimately emulate him?
3. The first time the narrator visits Anna’s house, he finds a Bible on Anna’s nightstand in which she has underlined the following passage: “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly; I perceived that this also is vexation of the spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” The narrator finds a card in his locker with the same inscription, after Anna’s disappearance. Why was the passage so relevant to Anna? What might it say about her relationship with the narrator?
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