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“I was just...” she says, and leaves the sentence unfinished, realizing she doesn’t know how it ends.
He looks at her curiously and reaches out with the hand not holding the lantern. “Should we walk hand in hand?”
“Like we used to,” she says, almost like a question, and he nods.
“That’s right, my love.”
The darkness closes in as they walk between the trees. The flickering lamp, where is it? Has the light gone out? When she looks down, she sees that his other hand, the one not holding hers, is empty. No matter. There’s moonlight, just enough. She can see the broad white expanse of the reach up ahead, where the path ends and the cove begins, where they will step together onto the ice. There’s another flicker, this one stronger:I dared him,she thinks suddenly, and the memory fills her with delight as she moves forward, more quickly now, tingling with the thrill of what has been and the anticipation of what comes next. That had been the first time, on a night even colder than this one. She had walked onto the ice herself and dared him to follow, turning away without even waiting to see if he would. She knew he would. She had been sure where he was afraid, sure enough for both of them. Not just of the way across the reach, but of what waited on the other side. The cabin, with its little stove and a cord of firewood at the ready. No bed, but a bearskin rug that would serve the necessary purpose. A hideaway for two. His hands slipping under her nightdress and around her waist, acquainting themselves with the curves of her body, the beautiful friction of his calloused fingertips against her skin. She had been so young, they both had, full of blazing passion, with a beautiful life ahead. A boy and a girl.
But Miriam is not a girl anymore.
And when she turns, her husband is no longer beside her. “Theo?”
The wind rises as the moon is swallowed by the fog, and she goes to pull the blanket tighter around her shoulders, but there is no blanket. It’s gone, along with the moonlight, along with him. The flimsy fabric of her nightdress whips around her legs, and she shivers, looking down. There are her feet, warm in their boots, the laces knotted tightly. Below them, gritty snow over an endless expanse of white.
She is standing on the ice.
The wind blows harder. She peers into the murk, her heart beginning to race, her eyes searching in vain for the invisible shore. It could be ahead of her or behind, the fog so thick she can no longer see or remember which way she came. She reaches out, frantic, looking once more for his hand, but clutches only the air. There’s nothing and no one. Nothing but the wind, raw and tinged with salt. She calls hisname as the fog parts, and then she sees him. Just a silhouette, hardly there at all.
He is not there at all.
Instead of his voice calling back to her, there is only the soft sound, somewhere very close by, of rushing water.
If she had been given another moment more, she might have come back. She might have remembered that it had been more than fifty years since she had walked this way, fifty years since she had last crossed the reach on a cold winter’s night. She might have remembered that her husband wasn’t here, couldn’t be, because he was dead, and had been for many years. She might have seen that her own hands, clutched across her sunken chest, were gnarled and marked with liver spots; she might have felt the arthritic flare in her hips.
She might have realized who and what she was: an old woman shivering in her nightdress, lost and alone in the dark.
And she might have remembered that just yesterday, a man on the news had warned that climate change was still bringing warmer winters—and that in the past ten years, the reach had never fully frozen until at least February, if it froze at all.
But there isn’t time. Not enough for a memory. Not even enough for a scream. Her shuffling feet have taken her in the wrong direction, and the white ice beneath her isn’t white anymore, but black and thin and groaning. The groan becomes a crack. A dark mouth opens up beneath her. Miriam gasps once at the cold as it rushes up to meet her. The dark mouth closes over her head.
In the great stone house standing high on the hill, the light behind the upstairs window goes out.
1.
2014
December
I woke to the sound of footsteps. Angry and rhythmic, a march back and forth right under my window.
I peeled my eyes open, reaching automatically toward the nightstand, grunting when the phone slipped out of my fingers and clattered to the floor. The house creaked and settled, buffeted lightly by the wind. I groaned along with it. I’d slept badly again, uncomfortable in a house and a bed that didn’t belong to me. It had been easier in New York—if not easier to sleep, then easier to feel like it was okay that I didn’t. Restless nights were just part of the constant noise and movement of the city; there, I was like a single cell that belonged to a huge, quivering organism as fidgety and restless as I was.
Maine was different at night. Too dark and too quiet, except for the eerie muttering that gave the house its name and that set my teeth on edge. I had been at the Whispers just over six months, but I wouldn’t feel at home here if I stayed ten years.
Beyond the warped and wavy glass of my bedroom window was a copse of barren trees with a few dark evergreens nestled among them, the yellowing grass of the lawn. Beyond the trees, just a glimpse of cold gray water, where the bay crept inland and became a river. Mine was one of only a few rooms without a view. The house sat at the mouth of the harbor, perched on a high point with a steep descent toward the water on one side. Every room there was outfitted with porches and balconies so that its occupants could take in the sea, but my bedroom was on the other side, where a white gravel piazza spanned the length of the front facade, tapering at one end to a narrow driveway that snaked away through the trees.
This was the source of the noise: my mother was out there, marching back and forth on the gravel to a point about twenty feet from the front door—the place where a person would first be able to glimpse a car as it came around the curve approaching the house. I could see her through the window every time she reached her destination. Ten steps out, a pause, then a heel turn. Ten steps back, another turn, another ten steps, repeat.
Even from three stories up, the scuffing of feet was audible, and this was not an accident. Nervous noise was Dora Lockwood’s preferred mode of communication when she was unhappy: taps, clicks, heavy footsteps, the conspicuous roar of the vacuum cleaner. Anything but actual words. One of my most vivid memories from childhood—one of the last ones my father was still around for—was of her sitting at the dinner table, methodically plucking ice cubes out of a glass and crushing them between her teeth. Not speaking, barely touching the food on her plate, just sipping at the melted ice water and then going to town on a new cube. Crunch, crunch, crunch.
It kept on until the glass was nearly empty and I thought I was going to scream. My father was pretending not to notice, but the tension in the room was unbearable, and I was sure that it was going to be a prelude to something—a conversation, an argument, a fistfight. Myparents had been not talking about things for so long. But when the cubes were gone, Mom had just gotten up and cleared the dishes in a way that felt like the period at the end of a sentence, as though she’d said all she’d had to say.
Dad left for good pretty soon after that. I think he was already planning to, but if he wasn’t, the thing with the ice would’ve pushed him over the edge. He lived in Santa Monica now and was married to a very blond, very tan woman who did crystal healing ceremonies for cats with emotional problems—or if not that, exactly, then something equally ridiculous, where the only thing more annoying than the existence of the job itself is how happy and #blessed the woman doing it seems to be. My father and the cat whisperer had two kids, twin girls. Vivacious and well-adjusted eighteen-year-olds. They looked just like their mother and ran a moderately successful YouTube channel where they posted hair-braiding tutorials. I tried one once, but all I ended up with was a rat’s nest that took an hour to comb out and took about half my hair with it, which seemed like it should be a metaphor for something. The YouTube twins were my father’s greatest creation. Me, I was the rough draft that got stuck in a drawer when it turned out that no amount of work would ever make it into something good.
I was only nine at the time of the ice-crunching incident, and it took me a while to realize what a significant moment it was, a first glimpse at some essential truth about the woman who’d given birth to me. My mother’s unhappiness was like a cage, but not one she was trying to escape. She just liked to rattle the door to remind you that she was in there. Crunching ice cubes, clicking her fingernails, walking back and forth on the loud driveway in a pattern that just happens to pass underneath her sleeping daughter’s window: all of these were ways of signaling her anxiety without ever having to talk about it. God forbid shedosomething about it.
I once told my therapist that Mom was a living lesson in the difference between communicating and making noises. I was pretty proudof that, I thought it was clever, but the therapist made this sniffing noise and said wasn’t my phrasinginteresting,since many languages sounded like nothing but noise to people who didn’t understand them.
