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Epub ISBN: 9781448192557

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Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage,

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

Chatto & Windus is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Emily Ruskovich has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Grateful acknowledgment is made to John Michael Ruskovich for permission to reprint lyrics from “Take Your Picture Off the Wall” by John Michael Ruskovich.

First published in the UK by Chatto & Windus in 2017
First published in the US by Random House in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

For Dearest and Fa

2004

They never drove the truck, except once or twice a year to get firewood. It was parked just up the hill in front of the woodshed, where it collected rain in the deep dents on the hood and mosquito larvae in the rainwater. That was the way it was when Wade was married to Jenny, and that’s the way it is now that he is married to Ann.

Ann goes up there sometimes to sit in the truck. She waits until Wade is busy, so that he won’t notice that she’s gone. Today, she comes here under the pretense of getting firewood, dragging a blue sled over the mud and grass and patches of snow. The woodshed isn’t far from the house, but it’s hidden from view by a stand of ponderosa pines. She feels like she is trespassing, like none of this is hers to see.

The truck is parked on a rare space of flat land, an unlikely shelf carved into the mountainside. In front of the woodshed, around the truck, a few loose bricks lie here and there in the grass and snow. Spindles of mangled wire lean against the trees. Hanging from a long larch limb are two thick ropes that sway opposite each other now, but look as if they might have once been connected by a flat board—a child’s swing.

It is March, sunny and cold. Ann gets into the driver’s seat and shuts the door quietly. She pulls the seatbelt across her body, then rolls the window down so that several droplets splatter on her lap. She touches the wet spots with her fingertip, connecting them with lines in her mind to make a picture on her thigh. The picture reminds her of a mouse, or at least a child’s drawing of a mouse, with a triangle face and a long, curlicued tail. Nine years ago, when Wade was still married to Jenny and both of his daughters were still alive, a mouse had crawled along the top of the truck’s exhaust pipe into the engine compartment, and built its nest on the manifold. She thinks of how strange it is that Wade probably remembers that mouse, remembers the sound of it skittering under the hood, and yet he’s forgotten his first wife’s name. Or so it seems sometimes. But the mouse—the mouse is still very much alive in his memory.

A few years after Ann and Wade married, Ann found a pair of deerskin gloves in a toolbox high on a shelf in a closet. They were much nicer than the work gloves Wade usually wore, and seemed to be brand new except for the odor of something burned. That was how she learned about the mouse in the first place. She asked why he kept the gloves stored in their closet instead of using them. Wade told her that he wanted to preserve the smell.

What smell is that?

The smell of a rodent’s nest that caught on fire.

The last smell in his daughter’s hair.

It was a long time ago now that he said things like that. He stopped talking about the details of his daughter’s death once he saw how much Ann held on to them. He probably thinks she’s forgotten about the gloves, it’s been so many years. But she hasn’t. He keeps them in the filing cabinet with his papers, in his office upstairs. She has opened the drawer just enough to see them.

That mouse had probably been in the truck the whole winter, during that last year that Wade was married to Jenny, that last year that May was alive and June was safe. Ann thinks of the mouse going back and forth in the snow between the truck and the barn, hauling mouthfuls of hay or insulation or tufts of stuffing from the dogs’ beds, making its nest bigger and having babies in it once spring arrived. Some of the babies probably died early on and were absorbed by the nest, their tiny bones like shards of straw themselves. And other mice came, too; you could hear them moving under the hood if you put your ear against it. The little girls liked doing that.

Well, at least Ann imagines they did.

One day in August, the whole family got into the truck. Wade at the steering wheel, where Ann is sitting now, Jenny next to him, their daughters, June and May, nine and six, crammed in back with a jug of lemonade and Styrofoam cups, which they carved pictures into with their fingernails. The girls probably wanted to ride in the truck bed, but their mother would have said it was not safe on the highway. So they sat facing each other in the cab with their backs against the windows, bumping their knees, probably fighting.

They forgot all about the mice. They didn’t notice anything at first, driving slowly over the dirt roads. But once they reached the highway in their town of Ponderosa, a smell like decay and burning hair, skin and seeds sizzling on a hot engine, entered through the vent and filled the whole cab of the truck until the little girls were gagging and laughing and pushing their freckled noses out their windows.

They had to drive on with their windows down, tolerating the smell, for the hour drive through the Nez Valley, past Athol and Careywood, then up the long road nearly to the top of Loeil, the mountain where the birch wood was already cut and piled, ready to be loaded. Their hair and clothes, and Wade’s gloves, held the burned smell in their fibers. Ann pictures June and May. They wait in the sun while their mother rolls the birch logs onto the truck bed and their father stacks them there. The girls lean against the tires, slapping horseflies on their legs, pouring lemonade into the dust.

The smell would have been there on the way back, too. It is the one constant. It connects two things in Ann’s mind that she can’t manage to connect otherwise—the drive up the mountain and the drive back down. The drive back down is the part Ann comes here to try to understand.

There would have been things Wade had to consider, before he could take control and go for help. Practical things. Shutting the tailgate, for example, so the logs wouldn’t roll out. He would have had to remember to hold the handle up and then push in—there was a trick to it—in order to lock the tailgate. That he would remember, that his fingers could do what they were supposed to do even in the midst of his horror, has something to do with the reason Ann loves him. One day, perhaps, everything will be gone from his mind except the trick of the tailgate latch, and Ann will love him still.

She thinks of how easy it would have been to get lost on the way back down, since they’d gotten lost so badly on the way up. How could anything have looked familiar? The narrow, grassy roads. The crudely made road signs nailed to trees: That he had read them an hour before seemed impossible to her. All of it seemed impossible. The summer sky, the snapping of twigs under the truck’s tires. The smell of grease and honeysuckle. Jenny’s breath fogging the window.

Ann has had to imagine most of it, everything beyond the facts Wade told her or she heard on TV. She did try very hard during those early days to keep the radio and TV off, so that everything she knew she knew from Wade. What Wade wanted to tell her, she would keep. But she wouldn’t let herself go searching; she wouldn’t let herself ask.

But all of that is different now that Wade is forgetting. She wants to ask him if he and Jenny spoke, before his memory is lost for good. Did Jenny look out the side window or straight ahead? Or did she look at him?

At what point did he rip down the rearview mirror?

No, Ann thinks, it isn’t even the drive back. It is his getting into the truck at all. Opening the door and getting in. Jenny there with the cup of lemonade shaking in her hand—or maybe not shaking, maybe perfectly still. Maybe the cup empty. Maybe the droplets of lemonade spilled on her lap like the droplets of water now on Ann’s thigh, in the shape of something harmless, something that the child in the backseat might have drawn.

Ann runs her hand over the dashboard and the soft, moist pollen of last summer sticks to her palm. It is all put together for her, here. The rearview mirror is up again, glued in place, and there’s a dream catcher thrown around it, with two fluorescent feathers hanging down. The carpet has been shampooed, the right backseat replaced entirely, with one that looks like the original on the left, only a brighter shade of blue and missing the little holes where the stuffing came out and where the girls might have once stuck their fingers.

Ann turns the key to let the engine run while she sits here. She breathes deeply. Nine years and the smell of the mouse’s nest is gone, but every now and then, when she shifts in the driver’s seat and the dust rises from the cushions, she catches what might be the hint of that old smell, distant and thinly sweet, leather and burning grass.

Though of course it could also be the controlled spring fires down in the valley fields, far away.

Ann and Wade have been married for eight years. She is thirty-eight now, and Wade is fifty.

Last year, Ann found a box of Wade’s old shirts in the attic. She brought the box downstairs and sat on her knees in a warm square of sunlight on the floor. She unfolded the shirts one at a time, held each one up, and placed some in a pile for the Salvation Army and some in a pile to keep.

Wade walked into the bedroom and saw her doing this.

“Is this too small?” she said. She didn’t turn around because she was trying to decide about an oil stain. She was holding the shirt up above her, to see the light shine through it.

Wade didn’t answer. She thought he hadn’t heard. She folded the shirt and moved on.

But the next thing she knew, Wade was pushing her head down, pushing it hard, into the box of clothes. She was so shocked that at first she laughed. But he didn’t stop. The cardboard edge rubbed against her throat, and her laugh became a gasp for air and then a scream. She clawed at his legs, thrashing blindly. She pounded her fists on his shoes, jammed her elbows into his knees. He was speaking to her in a voice she recognized—she couldn’t think from where—but it was not a voice he’d ever used with her. “No! No!”—almost a growl.

His dogs. He used that voice to train the dogs.

Then he let her go. He stepped back. She lifted her head, slowly, with caution. He sighed deeply, then he touched her shoulder as if to ask for her forgiveness, or—this occurred to her even in her shock—to offer forgiveness to her. After a minute, he asked her if she’d seen his mowing shoes.

“No,” she said, staring into the box of clothes. She sat on her knees, shaking, smoothing down the static in her hair, over and over again, as if that would make a difference. Wade found his shoes, put them on, went outside. In a few minutes, she heard the tractor. Wade was clearing the knapweed from the pasture.

In the year leading up to the strange episode with the box of clothes, he had done other things that alarmed her. He made phone calls to his customers, accusing them of sending bad checks, even as Ann proved to him with bank statements that he was wrong. He threaded his bootlaces so that they tied at the bottom instead of the top. He purchased the same pair of pliers three times in one week. He threw her fresh loaf of bread, still sinking in its warmth, into the mulch bucket to feed the hens as if she had baked it for them. Once, in the last week of January, he cut a beautiful white pine and dragged it a mile through the new snow. When he arrived in the yard where Ann was, he motioned to it, smiling. “You think this is too tall?”

A Christmas tree.

“But Christmas— Wade, it was a month ago.”

“What?”

“You don’t remember?” She laughed, horrified. “Where do you think you got that coat you’re wearing?”

But the day he pushed her into the box of clothes was something very different; it was the only time his disease manifested itself in violence, violence so far removed from the man he was that Ann couldn’t fathom such a thing happening even in the moments that immediately followed.

But after it happened once, it happened again. A few months later, he pushed her against the refrigerator, so that her cheek pressed against a coupon she’d hung there, for a diner called Panhandler Pies. She fought him, but just like the first time, fighting only hurt her more. When he let her go, she pushed him away from her and screamed at him, but he just stood there sadly, as if disappointed in her.

Another day, not too long after that, Ann poured a bucket of pinecones onto the kitchen table. She intended to decorate them with peanut butter and birdseed, to hang on the tree limbs for the finches. But as soon as she sat down to work, she felt his hand on her head, and he pushed her down into the pinecones. The pinecones left a rash of tiny cuts on her left cheek.

Later still, the wind blew open the door of one of his daughters’ old rooms. He thought it was Ann who had opened it. He pressed her forehead against the door once it was closed again, and told her, “No, no, no,” until she said, in her fear and shock, “Okay.”

She did not understand these things, but knew that Wade didn’t understand them, either, and so she found no way to express her anger. No way to stop these episodes from happening again. The pain and the shock of them wore off the more they happened, and she began to bear the assaults because she didn’t know what else she could do. She took note of what provoked him, and made sure never to do those things again. No more pinecones, no Panhandler Pies, no boxes of old clothes, no going in his daughters’ rooms. Simple enough. These things were a kind of collection she began to keep, a list she would run down in her mind, eventually not out of pain anymore but out of wonder, as if something were right there on the edge of her life, waiting for her to discover it. At night, when he was asleep, she thought about these things as she studied the face she loved. His pale eyelids stark on his sun-roughed face. His lips chapped, his cheeks unshaven. Such inherent kindness in his body that it was impossible to picture this man doing the things he had certainly done. She touched her lips to his thick hair, and she closed her eyes, too.

Wade has been training dogs since he was a boy. Hunting hounds, rescue dogs, seeing-eyes, service dogs for veterans. Now he raises bluetick coonhounds from pups, just a few of them at a time, and he trains them to tree animals he never shoots, because killing doesn’t interest him. What interests him is the training itself. And now it’s what interests Ann. She watches this training as if she is learning something about their marriage. When she sees him teach a lesson to a dog, pushing its snout down hard into the feathers and blood of a hen it killed, and then into the freshly dug soil under the chicken fence, she sees that he does it with love. Love and disappointment and a sense of duty to teach it something for its own good, as if the only way the dog will remember its mistakes is if those mistakes have a texture and a smell and taste. It isn’t punishment, exactly; it’s a way to remember. And maybe it’s the same with her. It’s as if he now acts upon what he’s always felt, that there is a language barrier between him and Ann that can be broken only with force and brute love and a few hard, repeated words. No, Bad, Not Yours. At least he wanted her to hear him.

Sometimes, of course, it breaks her heart.

Once, a commercial for fabric softener came on TV. It showed a mother and two girls taking clothes down from the line after a sudden thundershower, snapping the dresses from the pins. The line sprang up; the droplets flew and splattered them. The scene on the TV upset him. He couldn’t remember why, or whom to blame, but just like the time with the pinecones on the table, Ann saw this special panic on his face. She touched his hand as if to say, as if to make it easier, “I’m doing this to you.” His eyes fell on her. She got down on her knees in front of the television. He pushed one side of her face hard against the TV screen, saying in his practiced voice, “No! No!”

This was the way she loved him now.

She felt his rough hand against her head, the static in her hair and the small shocks of the screen on her temple. She felt in those moments that she was finally doing something for him, something that mattered, as if this were a part of her vow she’d only just now learned how to keep. She nodded her head between his hand and the screen (“I’m sorry, Wade, I’m so sorry”) and promised him it would never happen again.

Ann has seen two pictures of his younger daughter, May. The first was on TV. The second, a Polaroid, she brought out from under the refrigerator with her broom five years ago. She picked it up out of the dust and hair, and there was something sticky on its surface that when she scratched it came off in tiny red peels, like dry jam.

In the picture, May held a cloth doll that looked just like her: blond, straight bangs, hair cut to her chin, Popsicle-bright lips. She wore a swimming suit top and skirted bloomers, and there were cat scratches across her round, white belly. She sat on a tall stump in a clearing in the woods, with her chubby legs crossed in a perfect mimicry of maturity, her pink sandals fallen in the dust.

May wasn’t smiling, though she was well aware that the picture was being taken. Instead, she looked down dramatically with her eyes fluttered closed, holding her doll loosely away from her but also against, as if she were about to passionately kiss its dirty cloth face. Her head was tilted to the side and her lips were parted, her bangs swept just slightly over her eye, and she faced the doll and not the camera, touching the little pink thread of a mouth with her cautious finger, like a lover. She looked maybe five or six years old, full of passion and feeling beautiful.

It is this May whom Ann pictures sitting in the backseat of the truck nine years ago on that August day.

In the scene Ann sees in her mind, May feels personally slighted by the horseflies that bite her arms. She has crawled into the backseat of the truck but the flies have followed her from the outside. Her mom and dad are still loading wood. Her older sister is in the forest somewhere. May is pouting, her lips kissing the small bites on her white skin, murmuring as they kiss, as if they’re the lips of someone else, consoling her, touching her, telling the bites to go away.

As the flies land, she slaps them. Her handprints are bright on her skin. At first she tries to capture the flies in the Styrofoam cup she has for lemonade, but there are too many. The flies learn her rhythms and try to trick her, landing in places that are difficult to slap, like the back of her neck, where she can hardly feel them on her downy hair. The buzzing around her head is as infuriating as the stings themselves. They are equally in peril: the flies of her vicious little hands, and she of their bites, each one a surprising pinprick of pain that makes the skin on her whole body tighten. It is a maddening game that they are playing, full of anticipation, tension, dares.

Ann sees May, sitting with her hand perfectly still in midair, waiting for the fly to trust her so she can kill it, and then there is a black stop in Ann’s mind. As if her eyes have shut suddenly after looking at the sun and the last outlines of color are swimming in the darkness under her lids. The buzz of the flies, the sound of someone running, the halfhearted clucks of bored crows in the mountain woods: All of it reduces to a crackling static and a darkness.

When Ann’s mind opens up again like an eye, what is most startling is how peaceful the scene has become. May, in the backseat, sits with her head down on her knees, perfectly still. The horseflies land on her arms, now that her hands aren’t slapping anymore. Her blood is sticky and warm in her hair. The buzzing quiets and the flies settle on her arms, almost tenderly, like children sick of fighting and ready for sleep. Some of them are not sure the game is over, that it isn’t a childish trick and her hands, so quiet now, won’t suddenly tense and fly to life. These flies rise again and buzz and bounce against the window and then land somewhere else. But eventually they settle down, too, settle down so much that they stop biting, and rest on her still arms like those arms are home, washing their antennae, letting the hundreds of facets of their eyes go out of focus for a while, as the dense yellow light through the window penetrates the fractured panels of their wings and warms them in these moments when everything is safe.

There was one time a few years ago that Ann didn’t return home to Ponderosa until very late. She’d been out running errands when the car broke down. She called Wade to let him know, then waited in town for the car to be repaired.

Driving home that night up the steep dirt driveway, she saw their house in the distance. It was dark except for the window in Wade’s office upstairs on the left side, and then, strangely, two glowing rectangles of light at the bottom of the front door. His workshop, which was a separate building on the other side of the garden, also had two glowing lights on the door. The lights perplexed her. She didn’t know what they could possibly be. Lanterns? But why? It was only when she was standing right at the door of the house that she understood the rectangles of light were holes that had been cut into the wood, through which the inside lights were shining.

It made no sense. Frightened, Ann went inside, grocery bags in her arms. In the dim light from the floor lamp, she saw that there were many holes cut into the knotty-pine walls, leading to the outside. Each hole was a rectangle, about a foot tall and a half-foot wide. The books were cleared away from one of the shelves so that holes could be cut into the wall behind them. There was one hole above the kitchen counter, so that the moonlight spread out on the Formica.

Her heart raced. “Wade?”

Through the holes, the wind entered the house. On the wall above the lamp, five or six silk moths, some of them as large as her palm, opened and closed their eye-spotted wings. A giant beetle was dragging itself across the hardwood floor, gleaming like a knife. In the sawdust, which was everywhere, were cat prints.

She turned on the main light, and saw that the insulation had been pulled out in perfectly cut cubes and these cubes were stacked neatly by the sliding glass doors. There were other holes on the inside walls of the house, between rooms. Some of the holes led nowhere but deeper into the walls. One hole in the bathroom door.

“Wade—” But her voice caught. A cat meowed.

She turned around. A cat rubbed his side happily against a chair leg and purred up at her, slowly blinking his green eyes. He wasn’t a cat she knew, but she picked him up. His heavy, warm body calmed her down. He rubbed his face vigorously against her jaw as she held him.

She took the purring cat upstairs, walked quickly past the two closed and empty rooms, each with a perfect rectangle cut into the bottom of the door, then opened the third door and looked at Wade.

He was sitting on a stool in his office, wearing a coat, looking down at some blue and yellow receipts on the desk. The wood burner was on the desk, too. There was pine smoke in the air.

“You’re home,” he said, turning around on his stool, reaching for her hand. She saw the blisters between his thumb and forefinger, where he would have held the saw. “I’m sorry you had to wait in town so long.” He pulled her gently down onto his lap, while she held the cat in her arms. When she saw his face, she felt like crying. The weariness in his eyes was gone. Strangely, against all reason, he looked younger. He looked like the man he’d been when they first met—he looked like Jenny’s husband.

He smiled, looking down at the cat. “He’s a stray,” he said, shaking his head. “But he hasn’t always been one. He meowed right at the door of the workshop when I was out there, so I let him in. Then I thought why not let him in the house, too?” He laughed.

She touched the sawdust on his sleeve with her thumb, a gesture that took the concentration of her whole body. The sawdust was in his hair, too. “What happened to the house?” she said in a low, careful voice. He looked at her, confused. “The holes,” she said.

“They’re doors,” he said, as if he were surprised that she didn’t know. “He can come and go as he pleases.”

“Oh,” was all she said. The cat leapt off her lap. She stood. “Doors.” She heard the violence in her voice, and only then did she know that what she felt was anger. “You were cutting cat doors, dozens of cat doors.” She felt what he must have felt the time he shoved her face against the TV, a frustration and pain so deep and hopeless and long-standing, having nothing to do with him but which she blamed him for entirely.

She thought she might say something else, but she didn’t. She turned around, walked down the hallway, past the two empty rooms, and went downstairs. He did not seem to understand she was upset, so he didn’t follow her. Good. She found a flashlight. Outside, the stars shone and the wind was strangely warm and it tossed her hair. The dogs, sniffing her pockets, excited that someone was out in the night, followed her down the hill to the larger of their two barns, which was empty except for some lumber and tools. She thought of nothing but the task before her. She climbed the ladder to the loft, where she found some plywood and several sheets of siding, left over from when Wade and Jenny had built the house. She threw the scraps down to the floor of the barn. Up in the loft, there were mouse and dove droppings everywhere. The pollen and dust stuck to her face. She started to cry, throwing down the lumber. Eventually, still crying, she climbed down the ladder and plugged in the chop saw and quickly made a stack of little rectangles out of the siding and plywood, which she then loaded into a wheelbarrow.

She pushed the wheelbarrow up the steep road in the darkness. Ahead of her, in the clearing, the house, with all its lights on now, glowed through the windows and holes. It was a house that a child would draw, with its dozens of crooked, too-small windows. She lost her breath pushing the wheelbarrow, but she didn’t stop. The flashlight in her pocket, still on, shot straight up out of her coat, diffused in the sky.

She worked for over an hour, nailing the squares of siding over the holes, pushing the chunks of insulation back into the empty squares on the inside, so that only their paper backs were showing. She did not fix the holes between rooms. She fixed only those that led to the outside. The cat went inside through one of the holes and then back out, as if making a display of how well the doors were working.

When she was finished with her work, she put the tools away, swept up the sawdust from the floor, and then took a shower and got into bed.

Eventually, she heard Wade coming down from the second floor. His steps were slow, as if he were realizing something. She heard him stop and stand for a long time in the middle of the stairs. She could almost hear his fingertip outlining one of the cat doors, as if he couldn’t believe that it existed.

She lay in bed staring at the wall. When he got into bed with her, she felt the change in his body as soon as he touched her. He was himself again.

“I didn’t realize,” he said. She did not turn to face him. She could hardly contain the relief that rushed through her, so she trapped it inside of her by shutting her eyes. Her whole body began to shake with it. She was crying again. He wrapped himself around her. “I’m so sorry.”

She turned around to face him when she heard that he was crying, too. She touched his face over and over again, tenderly, running her finger down his cheek and across his forehead like she would a child’s. “It’s okay,” she said, smiling through her tears. After a while they closed their eyes, held each other for a long time.

When it felt like he had fallen asleep against her, she turned around in his arms, holding his hand against her chest. He woke when she moved. “Can I ask you something?” he said after a moment. She could tell already, from the innocence in his voice, the trust that there were still things he’d never asked her, that a piece of him was gone again.

“Yes,” she said.

“Have you ever loved someone else?”

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

“Did you sleep with other people, before me?”

She shut her eyes tight and swallowed. Of course he once knew that she’d been with others, but now she said, “No.” She said, “Just you.”

He sighed like he was relieved.

In the darkness, she lay thinking how strange it was that suddenly her history was gone, too. Everything in her life that had happened before him, everything that had brought them together, was gone. The school. Her childhood. All of England.

For a moment, the lightness of this absence was almost a relief, and his hand at her heart was its own beginning and end, a story that included only them, that began with the touch of their hands and ended with the same. She could live in this moment for a while, if she had to.

For all she knew, Jenny was gone, too, from his memory. His life with her, with May and June, the sounds of his daughters’ voices and the last smell of their clothes, bled out of the house through its many wounds, bled out into the night, gone now from this story of him and her.

The moment had passed, but she decided to ask him anyway. “Did you?” Barely a whisper.

“No,” he said softly. “Just you.”

She turned around and kissed him. And just like that, they became each other’s first love.

The following morning, Wade understood the damage he had done to the house and to his workshop, and he felt ashamed. But Ann did not let him see how much the event affected her. She remained cheerful as she swept the beetles out with the leaves, and hung the fly tape in the kitchen. They caught the large moths in jars and set them free. He set traps for the spiders and the mice. The cat left again, as if he had come only for the prospect of a hundred doors.

Ann and Wade had made plans that year to visit her father in Scotland, but she canceled after this happened. She was sad not to visit him, especially since she felt him drifting away from her. He was awkward on the phone, wanting only to joke, and sometimes he handed the phone to his brother, her uncle, so she could talk to him instead. It pained her that he never once mentioned her letters to him, though it was not in her father’s nature to talk about personal things. She made a promise to herself to be more lighthearted in her letters, as a way of bringing him closer to her.

It turned out to be a beautiful fall on Mount Iris, maybe the most beautiful of her life. She and Wade went on long walks together through the changing woods, chilly in their sweaters, kicking leaves. They put leashes on their goats, and fed them apples that they picked from haggard, wild trees. The goats chewed with difficulty. Ann watched the green froth fall from the leathery lips.

Wade’s memory went in little ways, mostly. One time, he made the bed inside out, with the comforter underneath and the sheets on top. But what was more surprising to her was that he’d made the bed at all. She’d always been the one to do it, and it was nice, this change.

She found her hairbrush in the freezer and sometimes he got calls from concerned customers who said their orders had been filled twice. But nothing really mattered, the way most things don’t, even the things done right.

She learned how to deal with the moments when his memory lapsed. Sometimes, she felt it happen even without him saying a word. On a sunny fall day, she lay next to him on the ground, and as he dozed she felt his old life, his memories, radiate off his skin. She felt everything leave him but her. She shed her own life, too, to match him. They lay there together like a point in time. A cloud drifted in front of the sun and things shifted inside of him, and when she sensed this, she allowed things to shift inside of her, too. They became their regular selves again, still warm from the lost memory of a minute ago.

But underneath her happiness was a dread that one day this would be all they had. All associations would be lost: the smell of the gloves, the sound of the truck door slamming shut. All the details she still wanted to know. Everything reduced to nothing more than itself.

They burned some rotten furniture one afternoon, way out in a clearing in the woods on the edge of their property. Surely it had been brought there by some distant, unknown neighbors. Often, on their walks together through the forest, they made a game of searching for these corrupted places that needed their attention. “Let’s go on a date,” Ann would say, laughing, taking off her clean clothes and putting on her filthy, torn jeans, smelling of past garbage fires.

Sometimes, among the garbage, they found useful things. Once, for example, Wade found a wrecked truck, and he tore the leaf springs from the axle. It was a special kind of metal he could find only on older trucks; he used it in his work. He heated the metal with a forge until it glowed red, then he pounded it down, shaped it.

On the day they found the rotten furniture, they threw branches over a mattress, then poured diesel on the pile. They stood back, watching their fire crackle and blaze. He slipped his arm around her waist. There was a heaviness in his touch, a sorrow in his smile, even in his laugh, and an understanding that they had arrived here together from somewhere else, that the story was longer than just each other.

She will miss that awareness in him once it’s gone. She leaned into him, smelled the fire in his clothes. She looked at his handsome face turned toward the flames, then she looked at the flames, too. The air above the smoke burned invisibly, wavering like reflections on water, making the mountains far behind it seem to tremble in their heat.

“Here we are,” she said, not knowing what she meant.

“Here we are,” he agreed, and pulled her closer.

When Ann first moved to the mountain, there were horses here, not goats, Appaloosas grown so mean after a year without Jenny and June to ride them that Ann was afraid to go near them, even to brush the burrs from their matted manes. The smaller barn, which was close to the house, was where Jenny stored the hay, stacked to the roof. Not long after Ann moved here, she and Wade sold the horses and the hay with them, all but a few bales.

It was a different building after the hay was sold; it was empty and full of possibility. There was a window that looked out on the forest. Ann had a vision then of turning the barn into an office, where she planned to put a piano keyboard and a desk.

The dust rose around her as she swept. She used a broom to remove the spiderwebs and abandoned hornet nests in all the corners. It was exhausting and good, and when the room was all swept, she lay on one of the few remaining bales in the corner, and her hand fell down in the crack between the bale and the wall.

There was a book on the ground, fallen so that the spine was up and the pages were bent and splayed against the floor. She felt it at her fingertips, softened from mildew and grainy with dust, a large paperback.

It was called Drawing Faces. It was an instructional book that showed various methods for sketching expressions, beginning with ovals and grids and un-melded shapes. Each page showed one further step in the evolution of the sketch, and ended with a detailed generic face, all the grid lines erased, the hair filled out. It was a book for adults, the sketches too precise and difficult for children. Near the end, on the first sheet of practice paper bound into the book, was a half-finished pencil sketch of a woman’s face. In the bottom right corner, a signature.

Jenny.

Ann saw the erased lines of the face. She saw how carefully the instructions had been followed. The face was turned a little to the side. The nose looked confidently drawn—rectangle and circle erased—but one eye remained unshaded, blank, caught in the lines of the previous step like an eye seen through the scope of a gun, the pupil at the crosshairs. But the hair that fell on either side of the face was bold and detailed.

Ann shut the book.

The barn wasn’t the same after that. She tried to ignore it. She moved her things in. A desk, a piano keyboard, and even an old computer with a program on it for writing and recording music. The little studio was beautiful.

But the woman in the corner thought so, too. Ann could feel her there, thinking how nice it was to have a moment to herself, away from her daughters and husband, to sprawl out on the hay bales with her drawing book on her chest and her bare toes curled over the tight red twine, her arm slung lazily over her eyes to shield them from the light, her pencil sharpened. Ann imagined the old spotted horses chomping their hay nearby. The hornets in the corners buzzed, and outside somewhere, under the clothesline where rose-colored shirts were starched with sunshine, two girls were filling miniature blue teacups with sand.

Because Wade had thrown everything away—drawings, clothes, toys—each accidental remnant loomed in Ann’s mind with unspeakable importance. Four moldy dolls buried in the sawdust of a rotten stump. A high-heeled Barbie shoe that fell from the drainpipe. A neon toothbrush in a doghouse. Then, finally, the half-finished drawing in a book. Artifacts heavy with importance they didn’t deserve, but which they took on because of their frightening scarcity; they built up against her, making stories of themselves, memories inside her head that should have remained in Wade’s.

Even the raspberry bushes that Ann didn’t plant. For a long time they came back every year to haunt her, came back with pure perennial will to snag her sleeves and scratch her legs and pull her in. Jenny had put them there. Ann deprived them of water but they lived on rain, the berries shriveled and dry and sour, crumbly as chalk. Each year they announced their future selves with stubborn reddish-brown shoots of new cane alongside the green ones. For a while, she did everything she could to kill them passively, but then one winter, when she saw them leafless and without power, she hacked them away with a machete, the fine snow flying up around her.

It was confusing, not knowing if what she needed was more of his family or less. Those four moldy stump dolls had made her cry out of love; the teacups by the clothesline, each one small enough to cap a fingertip, overwhelmed her with disbelief; the bluebird embroidery on a tea towel, which surely Jenny had done herself, made her feel guilty; the empty rooms made her feel nothing but their emptiness. Once, waiting in line at the post office, she saw a little girl in the parking lot beating her fallen bicycle with a stick. Ann laughed. But then, very suddenly, her eyes filled with tears.

She kept the drawing book for a full year, moving it from place to place, trying to lessen its meaning by shoving it here and there on the bookshelf, mistreating it ever so slightly. Then one day, in anger at herself, she sealed the book with the drawing still inside of it in a manila envelope and addressed it to the Sage Hill Women’s Correctional Center. She did not put her return address in the corner. She wrote on the outside of the envelope, “Attn.: Prison Library. A donation for your stacks.” The postwoman made no comment, though surely she saw the address. She smoothed a postage sticker onto the corner, then dropped the envelope into the pile with one intimate and protective glance.

Now, this March day, Ann stops at the barn on her way back from the woodshed. The truck exhaust hangs in her hair. Her blue sled is full of birch logs she doesn’t need but which she will use to make a fire anyway, the logs an excuse for visiting the truck, the fire an excuse for the logs. The more fires she makes, the more she can go up to the truck and try to understand.

Sensing that Ann is near, the goats call out from inside the barn. She drapes the sled’s rope over the birch wood, then pushes open the barn door.

Inside, the air is chilly and stale. The goats rush toward her. She squeezes their ears, pats their hides. They shiver gladly at her touch. She speaks cheerfully to them, though she feels Jenny’s presence here as strongly as she ever has. Through the barn window, she can see the ponderosa grove from which she has just emerged, and she feels suddenly the presence not only of Jenny, but of a life she herself nearly led. A life without Wade.

Breaking with a stick the skin of ice that’s formed on the goats’ water trough, she struggles to understand what she knows is a simple fact, I am here because you are not here.

The goats clamor; she feeds them hay.

“You are not here,” she says, softly, to the presence in the barn. “You are not here.”

But the reassurance is its own admission. Its own pain.

She leaves the barn quickly, closes the door behind her, resumes her dragging of the sled down the hill.

When she’s nearly to the house, she sees Wade in the garden. He is kneeling in the mud and snow, untangling the wire the beans will climb. She stops to watch him, stands in the threshold of pale grass between the house and garden.

“I love you,” she says.

Startled that she’s there, he looks up from his work, his face both tired and innocent, his dark-blue eyes expressing gladness.

Ann grew up in Poole on the south coast of England. But she was born here, in Idaho, not in Ponderosa but in the small mining town of Kellogg in the Silver Valley of the Panhandle.

She does not have a single memory of those three early years in Idaho. When she was nine years old, her mother mentioned having come from America, and Ann didn’t know what she was talking about. She had forgotten the journey across the Atlantic altogether. The only thing her parents could think to tell her about Idaho was that her father had worked in the Sunshine Mine and had escaped the famous fire three years before it started.

After that, Ann could close her eyes and let Idaho become not a place but a feeling, entirely separate from America, without borders or a history except for that which belonged to her: the silver mine. One hundred miles of tunnels one mile deep below the ground. She couldn’t believe that she had come from such a place. When she thought of it, she felt that those three forgotten years in Idaho had settled deep inside of her and unsettled all those beautiful years that followed. Idaho was the mine and England the unsteady surface of her life.

So she moved back. She was twenty-eight years old. Her mother had passed away a few years before, and her father had recently moved to Scotland to live with his brother. So Ann left England, too. She got a job teaching choir at a small school in Hayden Lake in northern Idaho, less than an hour’s drive from where she was born.

The school sat near the lake on two acres of treed and unmanicured land at the end of a newly paved road. It was a small charter school for high-achieving students interested in the humanities. The students at her school, about two hundred total, spanning ages six to eighteen, seemed as a whole very sweet and devoted not only to their studies but to one another. Though it was nearly an all-white school, the curriculum stressed culture and international studies. Ann couldn’t decide whether it was very strange or very natural to find this adamant broad-mindedness in a rural school so close to the headquarters of the Aryan Nations, the white-supremacist group, which at that time still held its World Congress every year and marched in the Fourth of July parade. Every day on her way to work, Ann passed the long dirt driveway that led to the compound in the woods, and she felt sickened and bewildered that it was real.

Ann’s classroom was a portable set apart from the rest of the school. She could open the window and listen to the waves on the lake just down the hill, or to the sound of chainsaws somewhere far away that carried over the water. The school grounds did not include the lake, but the students liked to go down there in the afternoon to wait for their parents. One evening during the first year that the school opened, the year before Ann came, a boy looking for his backpack fell through a half-sunken dock that was almost entirely hidden by cattails. His right leg went all the way through. Thick splinters of treated wood cut into him. The piling below, which had once held the dock in place, speared his leg. No one heard him calling out for help, and his parents, believing he was at a friend’s house, didn’t think to go looking for him. It was a windy night, and in the morning, the janitor found him unconscious, lying on the dock, his leg still caught. The doctors had to amputate his leg at the thigh to save his life.

His name was Eliot. He was sixteen when he enrolled in Ann’s choir class. She remembers how she felt when he sang behind her as she played the piano. That such a voice could come from a high school boy, a careless, clowning boy, never seemed real to her. Underneath her effusive praise was an impossible suspicion that he was cheating. He made her uneasy with how at ease he was. All the special attention she gave him, extra help after school, every major solo in their concerts, he accepted as if he didn’t notice, without embarrassment or gratitude. He had large brown eyes and matted hair, and behind his ear he wore a sharpened pencil that he never used. The way he leaned on his crutch when he talked to her, one leg of his khakis pinned up loosely against his thigh, made him seem so casual and cool that she felt herself trying to lean with him, holding out her hand to touch a wall or desk that wasn’t there, as if she were the awkward one because she had an extra leg. When he spoke to Ann in those practices after school, at the very end, when he was no longer singing but telling her about the other things in his life, she felt so disoriented by her joy at being near him that it was like half of herself was about to fall, only without his crutch to catch her.

It didn’t occur to her then that she felt differently about him than about any of her other students. There was a group of girls and boys who liked to linger and talk to her after class, fooling around with the piano and looking through her music. She loved them all, treated them in a sisterly way, but there always came the time when she had to send them home because Eliot needed to practice. When it was just the two of them, when he leaned over her, singing, to turn the page as she played, she smelled his warm, sweet breath near her neck, and that was when she felt most keenly her dread of their daily parting.

Ann didn’t like the apartment she was renting at the time, and her roommates were friendly to the point of intrusion, so she found herself spending a great deal of her free time in her portable classroom, which was furnished with an old piano, a small rising stage, a desk, a green couch beneath the window, and the musical posters left by the previous teacher. She spent so much time in her classroom that it came to feel to her like her real home, and the rented room a place she merely visited. Often, she spent the night on the green couch with the classroom window open above her, so that the night sounds of the school and lake, unknown to anyone else, even the janitor, fell over her and carried her away into sleep. She rose early and showered in the teachers’ lounge, brushed her teeth and hair at her desk, in whose drawers she also kept a few pairs of clean clothes. When her students came each day, they seemed to her more like visitors than students, and the things they touched seemed like her things. She noticed where on her door Eliot’s shoulder leaned, to hold it open for the person behind him. She did not wash off the mess of fingerprints he left on the windowpane when he opened it in order to shout at another boy in the parking lot. She did not tell him to stop picking at a hole in the green cushions, where he would never in his life guess his young teacher had slept the night before.