She said, I was in the area. I don’t know, I got lost I think.
It made perfect sense to me then, as if she had just raised her wrist with a watch on it and told me the time of day in the middle of the street back in the town.
If that’s so, I said, why don’t you come in then and have some of the tea.
To her the walls must have looked like they were made out of books, leather that stretched along the eye. I walked behind her to the sink and watched the house fit around her as she stood under the door frame that separated the large first room from the second. She glanced at the oak floor and the wood stove, watched the fountain outside the small side window: a bird wriggled through the water. She whispered how few of the paintings had people in them, the ones on the walls hung by my father and grandfather, one a brown landscape of bare trees, others of seashores, gardens, haystacks, climbing above the bookshelves.
I went off to play a record, some piano music. I should have pressed my question at once about this sudden visit. Outside it fell down some short rain, the flowers dripped, and the notes dripped from the bedroom, a tune by Satie from my father’s days. I poured the boiling water onto the tea bags and handed her a mug with a spoon.
You haven’t changed much, she said.
I said, I don’t think we’ve met.
No, it’s my sister. She was a few classes behind you in school when you went there. She described you.
Though it made little sense, it was what she said. When the shower ended the sun shone through the wet glass and warmed the red roofs in one of the paintings. I wondered why she got lost here and not somewhere else but did not want to ask, since people usually choose the place they get lost in and she must have had her reasons. Anyway I had much of the rest of the day free, and all that was left was to run into the town and pick up carrots and fish and some bread.
Was I rude to just turn up like this, she said.
I asked her what other way there was to turn up.
Her car was in the woods, she said, a half mile away where the road was still wide enough: she wanted to go for a long walk today and kept going. She had to go home now. That must have been her first mission, to see the cabin, to count how many lived here, a short count as it turned out.
I told her I would bring her back as this was no place for walking in once evening made its way through the trees, even in summer. The odd large creature made its way across the river from Canada and might not take well to the surprise. We made our way under the leaves, mostly in silence along a brown line that wound itself into the undergrowth. The way was narrow enough to tell me that the last part of the journey had been too close for her to drive: the branches touched each other across it. In the truck it was just a matter of keeping going for the half mile through everything. It was clever of her I suppose, to keep her car where it would not be seen.
She did not know where to turn, so I offered to drive it out of the lane for her. I was bent around the wheel as it was one of those small cars, and my head bounced off the roof. She laughed. I must say it was funny all right, you get in and turn the key and then your head hits the roof as if you were the one started and not the car.
To the Saint John’s Road, she said, and pointed me back, saying left and right, the particular way she came, though I knew a shorter way myself. Her map was not local. I estimated by the route she took that she had come twenty miles from Fort Kent, though we were twelve miles as the crow flies from that town. They flew above us black and cawing over the trees.
I switched on the headlights as we approached the edge of the deep woods, stopped and said goodbye and stood in the last sunlight along the wall of green, the brush of the leaves scattering in the high wind like surf.
She said, I can’t let you walk those miles. It’ll be pitch black.
I’ve done it many a time, I said, to make her feel at ease. On those nights, with a bottle of something to warm me and a few good cigarettes, I had indeed ventured out in the cool black summer woods.
In any case, I have to drive to the town for some things, I said.
I’ll take you.
I hesitated at the offer, going into town with a stranger whose sister said she remembered me. That wasn’t a lot to be going with and a long time to be in company.
My name, she said. It’s Claire.
The good thing about hearing a name is that it brings the familiar with it, a sound that means someone when you hear it, even if for the first time. And the good thing about wearing a coat for most of the day is that you have what you want in it. We switched places and she covered the gravel road out of the hills, arrived at the crossroads in Saint John, and took a right past the long fields, a few houses and a church.
She said, I knew you lived out here somewhere behind the hills.
So we were coming to it now, why she came, as we sped along the winding road to Fort Kent. Across the river a red tractor in New Brunswick spewed up dust in a potato field. The people of lower New Brunswick were French too, and across the river from Saint Francis was Saint Francois and its own white church spire sticking into the sky. To my right the wide brush of forest led back into the settlements where hunters rented log huts and some families lived. I never met them, but they knew I was where I was and the other way round. That was distance enough for everyone to keep.
Near Fort Kent she slowed past a parked police car and mentioned how isolated we all were up here, even in the town, how important her family was to her and the comfort it brought. I nodded and changed my position on the seat. At the supermarket I was ready to go in when she blurted out that she had been seeing someone recently, but not now, because she needed time to think.
I said nothing as I had not been asked anything, but I should have noted the way she tried to fit a long history into a short trip, how she shared details such as that so easily with a stranger. She brought me back with the groceries as the sun touched the ground and the woods closed in like a zip around us to where the lane narrowed.
You should come again if you’d like, I said, and I glanced a little toward her. It was the way I was then, saying the things a somewhat lonely man will say.
Maybe, she said. Maybe I will.
I walked off into the woods with the brown bag and felt my way by the odd star and a certain amount of memory, stars and memory then, until an hour or so later from the woods I saw the black shape of the barn blot out some of those stars and knew I was home.
I remember thinking as I walked back home that a loss brought her to me, this sudden woman out of the trees, someone she said goodbye to. It made sense, how a lack of something can shake you free of the present and wonder what else there is to be found in life. I admired how she was able to do it, but then the present has the persistence of weeds: it returns every day with the same smell and the same shape and yet you keep expecting something new. Was she expecting that new with me, I wondered.
Now of course I could see the evidence of the seed she had planted: after a brief reference to my school days, she mentioned a man she left behind, knowing that the mind forgets nothing, especially what is left unsaid, and that she could return to the subject of the school later when it would echo against the first reference and seem to make better sense.
I was closing in on her deceit. I placed the rifle inside my coat to keep it warm.
24
ANOTHER TIME SHE SAID THAT SHE KEPT THINKING OF me eating alone, the silence in the house, how the dark nights must affect me. Yes, they did line up in winter, but this was summer and I thought that come the darker months things might be different for me. Then she mentioned I should get myself a dog. I sat in the chair and looked out the window for a minute.