I am dismissed without being dismissed.
I take the stack of forms.
I get up.
I go down the hall to the small office at the corner, the one with no window and the single desk and the one chair and the lamp and I shut the door, and I put the stack on the desk, and I sit, and I look at the first form, and the first form is the witness narrative, the first form is the page that wants me to write, in my own hand,I, Maxine Hale, on the night of ___, and I look at the page, and I think of Evangeline at the cabin and I think of her sayingI love youin the lamp-warm bedroom last night, and I think of myself at this desk for the next ten hours writing awitness narrative about a fire I lit. I think of the date I am going to write in that blank:the night of October fourteenth.I think of the time beside it:zero-three-fifty.I think of the line of black ink that will put my own night on the page. I close my eyes.
I count to four.
I open my eyes.
I pick up the pen.
I write the first line.
The lamp is on. The door is shut. The chief is down the hall. The fire is in me. Evangeline is at the cabin. Evangeline loves me. The pen is in my hand. The page is in front of me.
I write.
20
EVANGELINE
Iam a missing woman in a cabin in the woods.
She took me from my burning house and kept me here. Had sex with me. And loved me. And now I love her.
I made a chicken. It is in the oven and smells good.
I have not made a chicken in eleven years. Daniel did not eat chicken. Daniel ate fish on Mondays and lamb on Wednesdays and a rotation of three pasta dishes on the other nights, and we ate at eight on a long table that was polished every Tuesday by the woman who came to clean, and on Saturdays we ate at the club. I have not made a chicken since I was twenty-two years old in a kitchen I shared with two other girls in a flat above a bookshop in Providence.
The chicken is in the oven at three-fifty.
The potatoes are on the stove.
The bread is on the cutting board because I made bread today, and the bread is good, and the kitchen smells of rosemary and butter and bread, and the lamp is on at low on the counter, and the note she left me at five in the morning is folded twice on the table by the window.
Back tonight. Lock the door behind me. M.
I have read the note nine times.
I am at the window at six o'clock with a glass of the wine I found in the pantry, and the sky over the pines is purple at the rim, going grey, and the road from the highway is empty.
She saidback tonight.
She did not say what time.
I drink the wine. I go back to the kitchen. I check the chicken. I baste it with the butter and the lemon and the rosemary. I close the oven. I wash my hands at the sink. I look at my hands. The pink skin on my left palm is new and tight and a little shiny in the lamplight.
My ring and chain are still in the dish in the bedroom.
I have not put it back on.
I am not going to put it back on.
I think this for the first time with certainty at the sink with the lamp on at low and the chicken in the oven and the bread on the board, and it is a sentence that arrives as a fact, like the water from the tap. I am not going to put the chain back on. I am not going to put the ring back on the chain. The ring is going in the brass dish and it is staying in the brass dish until I decide what to do with it, and what I decide to do with it is going to be a thing I decide alone.
I dry my hands.
