The woman blown in by the storm was asleep in Tee’s bed. He stood in the doorway. Almost without breathing, it seemed, she lay motionless on his sheets, her face—so weathered, so strangely natal—a white heart against the slate pillowcase. Her eyelids twitched, amethyst in the shadows. Was she dreaming? Of what?
Tee almost got lost making his way again back up to the attic rooms where he’d first discovered her. He was looking for something to wake him from this dream. To make sense. Reveal who she was.
What he found: a tangle of brassiere and torn dress stained red with mud, wrung like a dish rag and dried at the foot of an old bathtub. Sharp slivers of glass—windshield? bottle? not weathered enough for sea—lined up like a shell collection along its wide rim. Long light hairs everywhere, tub, cot, floating in air. A nest of blankets, pair of panties, one mud-caked leather shoe, again seemingly stepped out of wet and left to dry in a dormer like the shed body of a soul taken up precipitously into the rapture.
In the nursery’s galley kitchen, empty cracker boxes, paper cookie wrappers, overturned rice tins, perhaps left by some of his great-aunt’s tenants or the crew that stayed there a while to clean up the place before he arrived—what she’d been living on. The fireplace a charred maw, half-burned dismantled furniture, shelving, a wrecked desk drawer. Flame-bitten spines of books. Had she burned them to stay warm? Another pile of children’s books, intact, beside the trundle bed in the glass room. It had been a long time since he’d lowered his torso that far to rest in such a place, perching gingerly on the edge of the thin mattress, and opening the book at the top of the tall stack, a page verdant, nocturnal, and green ushered him suddenly into a lost, familiar room, “good night to the old lady,” he read aloud, “whispering ‘hush.’” No gun beneath the pillow, no knife in a cupboard, no wallet or purse, no scrap of illuminating or identifying paper. No little white mouse to find in this picture, no clue, crouched behind the clock, beside the hearth. No diary, letter, ransom note, address book.
She’d clearly survived up here for a while, as much as a month, maybe longer. Well, he supposed he would have to go in to the store, see if anyone was talking about anything—an accident on the interstate, runaway lover, lost camper or hiker, domestic trouble, that sort of thing. He had no internet or cell connection out here. He felt glad about that. Bought him some time.
Tee stood and walked to the window. Only the towering oaks still held their leaves, and he could see past Orphan Mountain, its low swell, all the way to the most distant pale blue ridges, some deep snow already fallen there, the nearer bronze leaves dredging the pond, patches of recent snow, and the stiff green brushes of the evergreens, a reddish, hormonal light suffused in the expanse of forest.
He stepped back. On the cold glass, prints—fingertips, flat palms, breasts? Tongue? Is this where she’d stood, naked, the November day he’d seen her from the ridge? He adjusted his eyes again. Stepped up and breathed on the cold glass. Pictures? Something like writing, backwards, cursive, the way Blake, Em once told him, taught himself to write in reverse on the copper plates so his Songs could be read correctly when printed. “I wander through each chartered street,” &c.
Hard to make out the scrawl and loops—Jules? June. Duke. Juke, maybe. Yes, J–U–K–E. Juke. Whatever that meant. Juke it was. Juke held. Juke Was Here. He would call her Juke. No, no. No. He would ask her if he might, if he could have her permission, the privilege, of calling her Juke.