"No. They've probably been renovated out of existence. Probably somebody found out they were really just storerooms after all. Revision."
They sat instead, and ordered wine. The sky was clear green and gold, stained with dark contrails. Of course he knew that they were there somewhere, the row of dark doors, one of them his, and he felt sure he knew now why he wouldn't and couldn't find them, why no more than in dreams could he go back to a place he had once been, start over, and find the right way ahead. But it was all right. The world is only a cruel maze if you think you ought to be able to find a way from where you have been to where you want to be. He knew nothing of the sort; where he had been was the unvisitable Then, and this was the never-before-imagined Now. So maybe he was, and had always been, if he had only known it, a lucky man.
8
In an April of the following decade, Rosie Rasmussen drove over to Cliff's, going the back way over a hump of the Faraway Hills from her office in the Rasmussen Conference Center. Unafraid of spring mud in her new car or truck (it was a little of both, and called a Sport-Utility Vehicle) she went down an old road officially closed, bouncing and splashing hilariously through a slough at the bottom, and stopping to hear what she hadn't yet heard this year: peepers in their hundreds.
Upward again, and the roads improving as she rose, till the still-bare woods gave way a little and there were houses, many new ones, some huge ones, on new-made lots. A dozen years before no one lived out here but Cliff; pretty soon now it would be a neighborhood, the school bus would have to come. In some of the new driveways there was a Sport-Utility Vehicle like hers.
Cliff's place was still part of the woods more than it was part of the world. The entrance, marked only by a yellow mailbox on the other side of the road, was as easy to miss as a woodchuck's burrow; you turned in and went down a rutted way through a tunnel of trees more than a dozen years taller than they had been that first time she came, to a fairy-tale glade, where Cliff's house was. Cliff had made the house, with Spofford and others too to help sometimes, and it had seemed raw and just hewn when she had first seen it (Spofford was bringing her then, to have her heart healed or looked into): made of bare beams and boards, a row of old storm windows not all alike making up a front wall, the scragged necks of trees that had been roughly executed in the yard. Now it was different: the never-painted wooden heap looked ancient and gray, archaeological even, a lost galleon at the bottom of the sea. Not forbidding anymore. Maybe because she'd come so often since then; maybe because her heart had healed.
Cliff was working on the engine of his truck, an oily rag on the fender where tools rested. He looked up to see Rosie drive in and roll to a stop. He too, she thought: fifteen years ago his hair was as white as it was today, and almost as long, but back then it was shocking, wrong, like his pink pale skin and colorless eyes. Now he was only, or might seem only, an old man gone white with years.
"Hi, Rosie."
"Hi, Cliff."
"Just let me clean up."
"Don't hurry."
He smiled. It's what he told her: don't hurry. What he had told her so often, as though he knew she had a lot of time, when she didn't feel she did: no time at all.
When Spofford first brought her here, Cliff hadn't been at home. It was the Fourth of July, emblematic summer day; it was the day of the night Boney died, leaving Rosie (though Rosie wouldn't know it for some time) in charge of his house and his family foundation and all the business he had refused to finish. So that day nothing of what Spofford said Cliff could do was done to her.
Once, when Spofford was at his lowest, coldest, saddest, Cliff had bent over him, placed his mouth against Spofford's breast and made a sudden loud noise. A noise like a shout or a bark. Hey! Wake up! And Spofford had felt the whole of his being shaken, and startled tears had rushed to his eyes.
She too, when he had done the same to her: like one of those machines they start a stopped heart with. He had done it only twice.
He made her tea, which she didn't really need but which she thought he had his own reasons for wanting to occupy himself with. His house smelled of the fires that had burned all winter in his tall stove—his wife, Cliff called the stove, because of its matronly hourglass figure maybe, and its merry warmth. He asked Rosie about herself, about Sam.
"Sam's away,” she said. “Did I tell you where she's going?"
"No."
"The Antarctic,” Rosie said gravely. “Can you imagine?"
"That far."
"It's a university research trip she was selected for. Two months. She ought to be there by now."
Cliff took no notice, but she knew he listened.
"So, Cliff,” she said softly. “Do you ever think of that night."
"That night."
"When Beau and you and I went to The Woods.” She took the cup he gave her, and put her hand around its warm body. “That night in winter. When Sam was there."
He sat before her, sliding onto his stool with that wasteless motion, and bending toward her as though she had not asked for a memory or a story but offered to tell one.
She didn't need to, of course. Cliff knew it. How Sam's father, Mike Mucho, had joined a supposed Christian group, the Powerhouse, and they'd helped him to get legal custody of Sam. How then on a night in December Beau Brachman had gathered them, she and Spofford and Val and Cliff, like a SWAT team or band of brothers, and they had gone up to The Woods where the Christian group was squatting, and Cliff and Beau went in, and in a while they came back out, with Sam. And never after had that group or Mike complained or tried to get her back or sued to recover her. Why? No one could tell her that either. Mike went away to the Midwest where he'd come from, just a trip, he'd said, and then to California, where eventually he'd married a Christian wife; he'd sent long letters to Sam telling her stories about God and prayer that she liked at first and then grew bored with, then angry at: like a tiresome old aunt who keeps sending you babyish clothes or cheap jewelry long after you've got too old for it, because she can't really imagine you.
He loves you, though, Rosie would say.
He doesn't love me, Sam said simply, a fact. How can you love somebody you don't know?
Rosie had never decided if Sam had really ever been in danger from those people; it might be (she thought later, not then) that they were well intentioned and kind enough in their way, but only narrow and self-deluded, their conceptions driving them to cruelties they couldn't even perceive or count as cruelties. Maybe. But what she remembered—it was all that she could remember now with any of the intensity she'd felt then—was how Sam was returned from dark to light, danger to safety, like a lost child in a fairy tale rescued from an ogre who had imprisoned her and meant to eat her. It seemed at that moment, that winter night, as she took Sam in her arms, that the world ceased rocking in its socket and settled down to turn equably again.
Even the weather. Hadn't a drought, one that had lasted for months, ended the very next day—well, it might have been a week later—in a series of vast and heartening snowstorms all over this sector of earth? Heartening, exhilarating, alarming finally as the ploughed snow piled over Sam's head and nearly over her own, as it had when she was a kid herself; she watched Sam incorporate it all, the felt physics of frozen water, bluejay on the seed-speckled snow-clad pine, unforgettable even if you never exactly remembered it either.
The time she had spent there with them in The Woods, too. She'd had a seizure there, before Beau and Cliff and Rosie had arrived. Rosie used to ask her, with care, then and later: Sam, what happened? Do you remember? Do you remember being there? And she always said she forgot, or wouldn't say what she remembered.