You never say how you feel, but I feel affection everywhere in you. Maybe that’s what matters, do you think?
If solitude could be measured I suppose it might have been in the way I was happy to see her despite being happy anyway. Now I was more than happy, nothing that I had a word for, to have all this company in my life all of a sudden. She felt to me like those first drops of rain that make you wait in the doorstep with your coat above your head, wondering if this is a small cloud or something longer. In response to her question I simply nodded, because I didn’t know what to say. Being given something was new and I hadn’t the natural words for the thanks I meant. Her hands slipped away.
With Claire lying beside me that night I heard a fox and plenty of coyotes howling in groups across the fields, and closer to the house the guineas in the trees flapped up into little rows; the roosters babbled in sudden fright at a creature creeping through the undergrowth where they perched, sometimes a scream of pain and fright, something leaped on in the night. The walls sparked and creaked, most of which must have been the wood contracting in the cooler temperatures, but other noises too, things moving, or Hobbes, I wasn’t sure.
In the morning I woke with his face in mine: she must have left early for the town.
Love, or words of tenderness and affection, yes, she had spoken them to me, and I think now that I was meant to respond in kind: yet I was not used to it, how saying a word meant that the feeling was any less or more when it was given a name, but I should have said enough to let her know that I was thankful for her company, that I missed her when she was not about, and if that was love, then we would be fine. Claire never again said something in order to discover what I might say back, or what might be offered in return. I should have known that people can sometimes come close enough to discover that they are strangers.
After that night, she visited less and stayed shorter. The absence of someone comes like a new season, first only in pieces: you see the absence in them long before they leave. In Claire it started with long glances and silence and arrived fully only after she was gone.
26
THAT DAY WE WENT PICKING BLACKBERRIES ALONG the sloping meadows and wild flowers near Eagle Lake—we made a trip of it with Hobbes in the truck. If there is only one field in the world, it must surely be found in Maine, a hay-green slope to a blue lake that I knew since a boy: I ran down it and threw a hawthorn stick from England that my grandfather brought back, and Hobbes didn’t swim after it. We watched it float away.
Well that’s that, I said.
Claire lay on the grass and drew him in pencil and charcoal. I tipped a bottle of ale sideways for a drink, felt the sun easy on my face, felt that I was happy. That’s it, she soon said, and handed me the drawing: just one glance told me the same as a long stare, that she had captured the living dog and his character, matched him to the whisker. I put the page on the grass without a word, and afterwards stored it behind the seat for safety.
We drove in the afternoon to the west end of the valley until the road ran out at the Allagash wilderness. I parked at the side of a small store by the bridge in front of a large field with fifteen or twenty rusted cars and buses, some from the forties and fifties, clumps of grass showing from the partially open hoods. I left Hobbes in the truck and we walked until I turned and saw that he was a silent waterfall of barking glued to the glass. He noticed what we had not yet seen, what was even now watching us. When we were about to step onto the porch two white wolves jumped down from a bus window and trotted toward us, wolves, the farthest things from men, from any leash that stretches around a property or from a hand.
They moved easily into a run and the crystal blue eyes took up more of their bodies as they covered more ground, a younger one and an older one. I told Claire they were pets, not to worry, though I wasn’t sure yet. See, they were slowing down and their tales wagged. When they reached us Claire seemed afraid even though they ignored her and took no actions that indicated they knew she was even there. She shrank back to the truck. One carried a stick in its mouth, a husky and wolf mix, afraid of nothing. They lay on two front seats torn out of a van and placed side by side on the porch facing the road. I rubbed their ears and moved inside: a man came out of a side room on a walking stick wearing a war veteran shirt, and when he heard what I asked for, kindly made me a fresh cup of coffee, and then we talked in the shadows for a while.
Through the door, as I tried the new coffee, I watched her stare at the sleeping wolves, a stare with absence sown into it, and I decided to keep the card I bought from him, what I had meant to press into her hand to ease the worry I felt in her, a card of a Furbish’s Lousewort that grows on both banks of the Saint John River, nowhere else. Above it I had written three letters with the fountain pen:
You.
After that day she did not return.
In the months following I often drove through Fort Kent and saw the smoke winding up from chimneys like ropes attached to the sky, as if the houses hung from them, and I glanced at the windows with their amber lights and imagined what was happening inside, the evening sweaters taken from storage and shaken, the heated wine poured into glasses as the sun grew gold on the trees, the conversation—what it was like, going on late in the year, to be with another person. It took me a long time to understand that she could never have wanted the life I had.
27
THE PRESENTATION OF EVIDENCE WAS OVER, AND THE only one I could find guilty was me: guilty of having brought the accused to it. Now on this first November night of winter I found myself standing inside the circle of trees at such a late hour, holding my midnight court. More geese flew south, long lines in the dark flying low over the trees, scraping them with their peals, scorching the low cloud with their instinct, and still louder as they crossed directly above, fanning the arrow out wide from the tip, streaking through the night sky like broken glass. I should fly with them. This cold.
It was as clear to me as the direction of the geese that Claire could not be the one who did this murder. She may have been careless with men’s hearts, but surely she was not cruel. Tonight I should have gone straight back to bed, should have switched off the lamp of memory and remembered nothing. Perhaps I wanted to bring her near to me once more, feel for another hour what I had then.
If the culprit came from that time, there had to be someone else, perhaps the one she left behind, a silent man upset at being abandoned. I searched through the weeks I spent with her, looked for a trace of him, something I may have not noticed.
Somewhere I had not looked.
28
I SAW HIM.
I closed my eyes in the clearing and remembered one evening during the time I was seeing Claire: I was driving home alone when the mist was draped around the church steeple on the other side of the river and was heaviest on the river itself. The lights of a car in New Brunswick driving the other way shone on the silver yarn of the street. The road was sparsely traveled in these conditions. A mile out of town my rear window lit up with the lights of another car. I veered off the road and waited in the shoulder with my engine running and an eye on the mirror trying to see through the mess of the swirling fog on a long road. The car did not pass. Another few miles down the road to the cabin I thought I saw weak headlights again sift in and out of the mist. I drove to the corner and then to the treeline and parked, turned off the lights and waited to see if anyone went by, rolling down the window and looking back in case I missed anything. After thirty seconds a car went by with its lights low, shrouded in fog that peeled off it. I continued up to the cabin until Hobbes bounded down the lane to meet me a hundred yards from the cabin, his eyes shining in the headlights, then the white crest and his tail. He knew the sound of the engine and was the cabin’s little alarm clock, had stirred himself into a bark when he heard the truck.