He understands; but now there is other pain That he must bear, the bitter torment
Of seeing his own hand’s mischief,
The guilt that none can share.
   —Sophocles, Ajax

THE HOUSE was empty of light. From far away the shadows of passing cars swept across the room. In the front room, a breeze gusted across the heap of old letters on the coffee table. The contents of each envelope had been carefully revealed, the shards and scraps of moldering paper pieced together laboriously in the late night, perused for every syllable of meaning.

Even though the story was composed of uncertain sentences, pieced together by a dying woman undergoing a long and useless convalescence, these let ters had found their intended destination at long last. The ink seemed to have grown stronger in the last four years, aging like a rich wine. For the reading of them had worked some change in Matt, a change that was near to intoxication. After reading through all of the scattered letters, he had only just managed to stagger to bed, exhausted and perplexed.

In his dream, a broken yellow house stood slanted on the hillside above Osburn, a block above the abandoned graveyard. Sunlight flickered on its surface, the rest of the world floated in an underwater gray. A woman sat on a straight chair against the far wall, the heap of letters piled about her feet. He saw that she was smiling at him. In her lap was a ball of yarn. She was crocheting or knitting.

Her face was different. It was as if he’d never seen her before.

“Irene?”

She laughed, a small girlish sound, and Matt felt he should explain. “Faces take a while for me to remember. Something that happened to me.”

“The accident,” she said, a chuckle still in her voice.

“Yes. Of course, you’d know about that.”

She lifted a hand from her lap. “You look different now too,” she said. “Older.”

He was not frightened by the woman in the chair, not in the way that he’d thought he would be. Instead, he felt himself drawn by her vulnerability.

He was close enough to see her fingers on the roll of yarn. “They told me that you visited while I was in a coma,” she said.

“I wish. I did drive to the hospital a time or two, but I could never work up the courage to get out of the car. I guess I couldn’t get over what I did to you.”

“Anyone can have an accident.”

At her words, he felt something lurch inside, some dark beast crashing through empty rooms below. Déjà vu. The same sensation he’d had when he’d read her letters that night. His mouth was dry and parched. He swallowed hard. “Could I get a drink?”

She smiled gently at him. “It’s all dry here, Matt. Nobody drinks.”

“Right.” Again, he felt out of place, nodding dumbly. “I should have known.”

There was a tremor inside him, something recoiling. He turned his head toward the door, hearing the crickets shriek. He could leave now. He could be gone in a moment.

Matt looked at the woman in the chair. The sweat broke through his skin, his fear rising to the surface. “Where are you now?” he asked. “Where are we?”

Irene fumbled with the yarn in her lap. “You do need a drink, don’t you?” She held up something, in his hand it felt like a glass, cold and wet. “I’m sorry I brought up the accident,” she said. “You haven’t seen me in four years, first thing I do is remind—”

“No, it’s all right, Irene. Sounds like you never knew.” Matt drank. Ice clanked together as he put the glass down. “You didn’t wonder why I stayed away from you.”

“Well, I thought I was a liability. You were trying to win the election, I thought.”

Matt found that his hands were trembling. He picked the glass back up, giving them something to hold on to. “Even at the cost of being a friend to you?”

“Well, I don’t know how politics work. Someone told me that maybe people would think you were cheating on your wife, if you stayed too close. Having an affair.”

“Weren’t we? Having an affair? That’s what Russ has always told me.”

“No, not as far as I remember.” She looked down at her knitting. Her fingers moved around on the yarn. “I mean, we were just casual acquaintances. Coffee now and then, if we happened to need it. Not that I would have minded if we had slept together, but you weren’t interested. You had a marriage, you said. You just needed a friend.”

Matt leaned back. He sighed. “Jesus, why were you friends with me? A sad sack drunk. That’s real amusing.”

“Well, at first I think I felt sorry for you, Matt.” Irene picked up his glass from the table. With a loud crunch, she cracked an ice cube in her teeth. “You were like some big lost puppy dog or something. Really confused. Drinking too much. And really nice to talk to. You never tried to come on to me. And I guess I was lonely, far away from home.

“But you were funny too—you made me laugh. Even though you were kind of numb to it all. Sally was thinking about leaving you, you said. You remember how we met? You gave me a ride one day in your sheriff’s car when my car broke down. That’s how we met. Then we kept running into each other, we had coffee. We were just friends.”

“You wrote that I never loved you and left you. But I don’t know.” Matt sighed. “I hit bottom after you died. After I was told about a woman I was cheating with, drinking with, and how I killed her, I tried to die too. The whole year after that alternated between blurry hangovers and drunk blackouts. Sometimes I still live that way.”

“Someone lied to you.”

Matt rubbed a hand over his glass, condensation wetting his palm. He groped his way through the dark, dead memories emerging like old fingerprints.

“Matt,” said Irene. “Look at me. I was your friend. Like I wrote, that’s all it was. Until you fell asleep at the wheel, and then I fell asleep forever, because of that accident.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean when you weren’t visiting me, before I died.” She grinned.

Matt sipped at the glass, and felt only ice against his teeth. “No, I mean the other thing you said. What do you mean—I fell asleep at the wheel?”

“That’s how I got banged up. How I lost my life?” She gestured sarcastically at the gray wall, the surrounding room. “That accident—the one we were talking about?”

“Oh no, I understand. I just don’t know what happened.” Matt put his glass down. “I mean, your letters seem to know me—but how well did you really know me?”

“Well, like I wrote, there was one deep dark secret we shared. You told me about your drinking, and you told me when you quit. And so I asked you, every time you drove me home. You swore you hadn’t had a drop that night—I put it down in a letter to you. I figured it might give you peace. And it was true, Matt. You never lied to me about that.”

Matt looked outside the open door. Here, it seemed, the mines were still running, time had shifted back. A faint haze from the Bunker Hill smelter gauzed the towns of Wardner and Osburn in a translucent sheen. The faint lights of the town seemed to float in the evening smoke.

“I must have lied to you that one time,” said Matt. “At the scene, they said they could smell it, even before the test—blood-alcohol level of three point five. I was drunk as a skunk.”

“Who are you going to believe? I remember. There wasn’t anything to smell.”

Matt coughed. He could feel his throat constrict, his voice grow hoarse with the effort of what he was trying to say. “I guess—I guess I’m here to say I’m sorry. Sorry for all the pain I caused you. Finally. I’m sorry it took four years. I know you can’t forgive me. There’s no way you could forgive me. But I’m sorry for lying to you.”

“But Matt, what are you apologizing for? What do you remember?”

The despair rose in him, a nauseating flood. He was lost in the dark now, there was nothing else to grope for. “I don’t remember any of it anymore. All I have now are these damn letters you wrote me. I tried to drown my memory. Blackout. And it worked.”

The woman leaned forward, her face insistent. “But Matt,” she said. “You hadn’t had a drink in a month. You were so proud of yourself. You said that after you got elected as sheriff, you weren’t planning on ever having a drop again. And if Sally left you, even that was okay, you said. You were going to make it. You were in a good place, Matt. You had it beat—you were solid with the guys at AA. I just can’t believe you were on the bottle. Read the letter again. There’s no way you were drinking that evening.”

“You don’t want to believe it,” he said bitterly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for it all.”

“I know you,” she said gently. “Or at least I knew you. And I forgive you, Matt.”

Matt started in his chair, glancing up at her face. “But if I was—”

“Even if you were drinking. Even if that—I can’t believe that—but even if you lied to me.” Irene leaned forward, touched his face with her slight hand. “I forgive you.”

Matt moved back, stunned. An unreal world swelled out at him. The force of his feeling hit him like a wave passing, something immutable and astonishing. He felt overcome, cleansed and fearful at the same time, alive in its terrifying power. Irene was smiling, she could not stop smiling.

He closed his eyes, a sudden vertigo overwhelming him. He had made a horrible mistake, he wanted to beg for forgiveness, but it was too late for that now. There was nothing to be done to redeem the time. Maybe he could do the next best thing.

When his eyes opened again, Irene reached out to the phone on the table and spoke to him. “She knows something.”

“Who?” he said. But then he was looking out the window. Her house was floating over Lake Coeur d’Alene. And he knew that Arlen’s little girl was waiting for him down there.

In the sky were small dark specks, bats that flitted over the surface of the lake. He watched them move against the fading light in the west. Darkness covered his vision as the phone buzzed under his hand. He turned back once more, but Irene had disappeared.

Flickering in a submarine light was the little girl who had waited for him on Five Mile Prairie, who had been at the funeral. Arlen’s girl. The phone buzzed under his hand again, but he questioned her insistently.

“You aren’t dead, are you?”

“Not yet,” the little girl whispered. “Not yet.”

Then she said something else to him, a question he could not understand. Sall stirred restlessly beside him in the bed.

Matt lay there for a long hour, waiting for sleep to return. Finally, he got up again and went to the kitchen. The little bottle was right where he’d left it. He could go back, like no time had passed at all. Go right back where he’d started.

He was so sure that he was going to take a drink, that for a moment he didn’t feel her hand slip onto his shoulder. Finally, as he brought the bottle toward his lips, she said his name.

Sall’s voice calmed the shiver that had come to his face. His body burned with a sudden heat. When he opened his eyes, desperation overwhelmed him, as if he were falling off a cliff. He tried to pull himself into the present, gripping the edge of the table hard enough to hear his knuckles crack. He did not look at her, staring instead at the small bottle in his hand.

“Matt,” she said, whispering to him. She rubbed her hand across his shoulders.

Matt began to cry, groaning as each spasm cut out of him.

“All those years wasted. I just read Irene’s letters. She didn’t—she didn’t hate me when she died. I did nothing to her. It was an accident. I thought I killed her. But . . .”

“Jesus, Matt, you carried this around—you lived with this, and you never told me?”

Matt turned toward her, his face streaming. “I couldn’t. I thought I had an affair, or something. But I didn’t—it was all a lie they told me. I lived a lie. I thought . . .”

Sall shook her head, shock breaking across her face.

“Coffee,” she said. “I’ll make us some coffee.” She ran water in the sink, poured ground beans into the filter. The aroma of it was sharp, it cut through the anxious fog. Sall put a hand on his shoulder, quieting him as he sobbed.

“And Pop—how could he have lived like that for decades? His whole life, a lie.”

Matt stared blankly down at the tabletop, his eyes fogged with tears. “And now it’s mine. I have to live with Pop’s goddamned secrets forever.”

Sall took a swallow and pushed a mug into his hands. There was a pause as he gulped hungrily at the coffee.

“No,” she said finally. “You don’t have to.”

“What do you mean?” Matt took a breath, the air painful in his lungs. “You’ve made it this far.” She turned toward him. “I’m not going to let you fall now. I know you.”

He shook his head and stood from the chair. He curled his hard arms close around her warmth, pressing them into the soft places, holding on as tight as he could.

“You know me.” Matt looked into her face. He rubbed an arm across his reddened eyes. “And damn, you still believe in me. Jesus Christ, you are beautiful.”

She laughed hoarsely as he cradled her in a rough and desperate grip. Her mouth tasted sweet and bitter, sugar and black coffee.