The empty house held its silence like a solid volume. There was weight to it. The hosts on talk radio sounded brash and insipid and oblivious. The music on the classical station sounded like music for a dentist’s office. Rock music sounded lurid and insincere. I tried to read a newspaper but the bad news made me feel more hopeless and the good news seemed invented. I wanted to call Sue’s parents’ house and ask if she’d arrived okay and ask if it felt better to be there, but I knew that that would be the wrong thing to do. Sue had called at some point the night before. I remembered hearing the message on the answering machine, and from the tone of her voice that she’d arrived without any problems. I already felt bad, not having answered her call, not having already called back, as if I’d missed my one slim chance. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the message and I unplugged the phone. I checked my cell phone and saw that she’d left a message on it as well. I slid the backing off the phone and removed the memory card.
By three o’clock, it was unbearable to be in the house anymore, so I went outside and started to walk. I didn’t want to walk along the road, on the sidewalk. Someone might see me and stop and offer condolences or deliberate small talk. I imagined myself walking down the sidewalk and a woman pulling over and asking if I was doing okay and other people driving by and seeing me and knowing I was that grieving father and separated husband, and the exposure and embarrassment and humiliation being too much to take. But, since the Fairfield estate had been subdivided into a development twenty years earlier, it was no longer possible to cut through the fields that had originally been called Wild Man’s Meadow, when Enon had first been colonized, at least during the day. As conspicuous as walking along the road felt, cutting through the meadow would have drawn more attention, if only for the strange and sorrowful fact that in the thirty years there had been houses set around it, I had never seen anyone, adults or kids, in the meadow, no one exploring or stalking through the high summer grass or marching through winter snows. Whenever I passed it, I recalled swiping my way through the tall, buggy grass and being half terrified that the wild man, after whom the area had originally been named and about whom I had been told by some older neighborhood kids, was scrambling toward me with unnatural speed and aim from somewhere along the line of trees bordering the meadow. My terror was greatest in broad daylight, because of a sense that the wild man was so terrible and so wild he did not even need the cover of darkness or creeping stealth to claim his victims in his realm. I told Kate about the wild man one day when we were walking by the meadow. She must have been seven or eight — old enough to be told the story and be thrilled instead of frightened. But she had not been thrilled or frightened in the least.
“That’s just people’s backyards,” she said, and just like that it was true; her understanding of the landscape unseated my own — the mythical wild man of the meadow simply disappeared or, simply, had never existed for her and would never be grafted into her impression of the place.
Scooting past the meadow, I felt so panicked that someone was going to pull over and talk with me before I reached the woods that twice I nearly stopped and turned around and ran back to the house. When I reached the West Enon playground, I hurried off the sidewalk and past the empty basketball courts to where an old path entered the woods at a break in a stone wall. I sat on the wall for a moment and half-sobbed in relief at reaching cover. My broken hand ached terribly. The blood pulsing through it hurt. I took one of the six painkillers from the breast pocket of my flannel shirt and swallowed it.
The path in the woods dated back to the Revolutionary War, and I thought that only animals and kids must have used it for many years, deer and coyotes and the dogs of the village, which were allowed to roam with complete freedom, Enon never having had a leash law, and kids, at least when I’d been young, always having been given the run of the village by the time they were nine or ten years old. My friends and I had used the path when we were kids. I realized that I’d never shown it to Kate and that I had not walked it in over twenty years. As I recalled it, a quarter mile into the woods the path crossed in front of the ruins of an old cabin engulfed under thickets of bittersweet. The cabin was harmless but eerie. I had been inside only a couple of times, when I was a boy, on dares, during the day; otherwise, I always skipped into a half run to get past it. It lent the sense of some forsaken soul lying in a bed in the back room, someone who had been ill and semiconscious for two hundred years, his limbs and body wrapped in the bittersweet, too, who sensed me passing by out on the path, and who wanted me to come into the house and snip the vines from him and take his hand and put a cloth soaked in cold water on his forehead. But his hands would have been hairy with roots and would have crumbled away like dirt when I cut the vines from them and took hold of them, and his old striped shirt would be rotted and full of spores that would have made me cough, and his old body would have been packed dirt that had half-rotted through the bedding, and the entire room would be full of a noxious suspension that had been fermenting for over a century, since the dying man had been quarantined and forgotten, exiled in an obscure dead water of time, the sort of which Enon is full, if you observe carefully enough.
There was no trace of the cabin where I remembered it being. I ranged up and down the area where it should have been, looking for a pile of logs or tangle of bittersweet that somehow might have digested the cabin, but there was nothing.
“There was an old cabin here when I was a kid, Kate,” I whispered out loud, still scratching a little at the underbrush with my foot, half-looking for a threshold. “But it’s gone, just disappeared, like it never even existed.” I turned back to the path and resumed walking.
I walked all afternoon through the woods and hidden meadows of Enon. The sun went down and dusk spread and darkness began to fall. At one point it occurred to me that I had not eaten anything, but I felt neither hungry nor very thirsty. I reached the western shore of Enon Lake as the last light left the sky. I knelt down by the water and raised my broken hand above my head so it wouldn’t get wet and cupped some in my good hand and took a couple sips. The water was cold and clean-tasting, fine, mineral. I swallowed two pills with another mouthful, then jogged across the street and into the trees on the other side of the road, at the edge of one of Enon’s two nine-hole golf courses. The cemetery was a quarter mile away, back toward the village. It lay between the two golf courses, along the flank of a large hill. The golf courses and cemetery begin on flat tracts directly off the old Post Road to Boston, which then steeply elevate in a succession of rises. I crossed the near golf course and stepped over the stone wall into the upper part of the cemetery. Kate was buried below, toward the front, in the family plot, next to my grandfather George Washington Crosby and my grandmother Norma Crosby and my mother, Betsy Crosby, and where I will be buried when I die. My great-grandmother Kathleen Crosby is also buried in the cemetery, in another section.
It was just superstition, but I did not want to pass in front of Kate’s grave. I felt the way I would have had she been alive and I on as many drugs as I’d taken over the course of the day. Without having paid attention, I realized I had taken at least twice as many pills as I ought to have, and maybe more. It almost felt as if I were levitating when I stopped walking and stood still and looked down through the shadows to where Kate’s stone was. The moon was out and there was a beautiful view from the top of the cemetery. Deer browsed on the golf greens below to my right, and the tombstones made of white marble glowed. A corner of the lake was visible below, past the road, beyond the trees, sparkling.