Three

By the time James drove home from Faith’s trailer, dry snow was sifting down from thick yellow clouds. He felt as if years had passed since he had come down from the cabin at dawn. But the clock said it was only midmorning, so he also felt as if time were slowly coming to a halt.

At the house, he sat outside for a moment, looking. The windows were flat and dark, set deep into gray stone, the slate roof a heavy brow above them, the porch rails like gapped teeth below. Yet it was a handsome house, even stately.

On the porch was the wicker rocker Tante’d had him paint green again this past summer. Left out in the weather, the paint had already begun to chip; he could see it even from this distance. The chair was motionless, the wind calm, as if quieted by the solemnity of the day, or as if its past restlessness had been a product of some human turmoil now ended. Tante’s death had stopped time and stilled the wind.

In Faith’s arms he had cried like a child. It had felt good to cry, it had felt right. He had cried because Tante had died alone; he had cried because he had not said good-bye to her; he had cried because their last words had been angry. He had not been able to explain any of this to Faith—the words would not come—but she had not asked him to. When he’d gotten up to go, she’d just sat there on the floor, pale legs folded under her, the look on her face sad but unquestioning.

He decided to hide the truck behind the barn, drove it there, got out, started toward the house, went back for the bag from Keller’s store, started toward the house again. On the stoop, he stood and angled his face toward the falling snow, letting it settle on him. It melted on his skin, made his cheeks wet, and he felt the tears come again, shamelessly warm, and let them come until they stopped of their own accord.

Once inside, he made the decision to go about business as usual. He stamped the snow from his feet, took off his outdoor clothes, hung them on their hooks. He took the wine from the bag and set it on the counter. He put the cheese into the refrigerator and the crackers into the pantry. He squatted by the woodstove and shoveled ashes out, knotted newspaper, shoved it in with kindling and a few sticks of wood, struck a match on the stone hearth. With the stove lit, the kitchen felt more like home.

He moved into the front room and lit another fire in the fireplace there. The simple thing would have been to turn up the thermostat, start the oil furnace—a convenience he’d insisted on only a few years before—but he didn’t feel like doing the simple thing; he felt that the complicated thing was right and proper. A fire warms a house in a different way. He wanted light and motion as much as heat.

So from there he went up to his room. It had been a long time since a fire had been lit in his fireplace, and at first it seemed as if the chimney wouldn’t draw, but then it warmed and up the smoke went. Smoke loves a chimney. Tante told him that.

He went back downstairs. In the front room he turned on the lamps. More light. He saw the deck of cards, loosely squared on the table where they had been played the night before. He found the rubber band for them and put it around them and put the deck into Tante’s drawer. He folded her old silk quilt and put it on the arm of the couch where she liked to keep it. He straightened the twin petit point pillows so that the houses on them stood upright. Then, for a moment, he stopped, stood still. And then he went back through the kitchen toward the back bedroom.

Tante had been eighty-five when they moved her down, next to the kitchen and the bathroom so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs. They had brought down her things, too, all of them. They crowded the smaller room, each piece of heavy old furniture elbowing the next, but that only made it “cozy,” Tante’d said.

He paused with his hand on the knob of her door. It had been a while since he’d entered her room. It felt odd to consider going in without her there to answer his knock. He had no idea what he would find, or even why he felt compelled to see it. But he turned the knob and pulled the door open.

A tall mirror blocked the bottom of the only window, and dark drapery blocked the top, so he had to turn on the light to see anything. The room was little more than a large closet; in fact, it had originally been a second pantry. Where the walls were visible, he could still see the horizontal lines of paint that had accumulated around the pantry shelves, long since removed. Tante’s small, plain bed was directly in front of the door, foot toward him and a highboy towering by the head of it. Next to that, a vanity table with a small, straight-backed chair, then the mirrored lowboy in front of the window, a trunk, a standing wardrobe that she used as a closet (she called it a “chifforobe”), one small cushioned rocker, and the door itself, tucked into the final corner. There was just enough room to step inside. He did.

Not a thing was out of place. The bed was made, white chenille spread pulled tight and exact over the corners. Tante’s heavy, laced orthopedic shoes sat side by side under the bed (her feet the only thing she ever complained of). On the vanity table, her old tortoiseshell brush held its matching comb. A little vial of perfume he’d given her long, long ago was the only other item of toiletry.

Framed photographs crowded both dresser tops. Some were of family or friends from her distant past, people he knew only by the names she gave them, names he’d mostly forgotten by now. The rest were pictures of him as a baby, child, boy. He did not remember the camera snapping, the flash in his eyes, but here was evidence, pictures like stills from a film he had seen so many times that he could reconstruct the gaps between them.

The pictures stopped when he was thirteen or fourteen, when the camera shifted from her hand to his and became an adolescent enthusiasm. In boxes in a closet upstairs were sunsets and water, trees and animals (a deer caught nibbling on the corn in the garden), the house and barn from many angles, his projects (a hand-built go-cart, for one). And a few portraits of Tante, the few she would allow: Tante cooking, big wooden spoon in a pot of steaming black raspberry jam; Tante in the garden, mud to her elbows; Tante rising wet from the quarry swimming hole, gray hair streaming, grinning at the camera and at him. As she aged, she liked herself less and less in pictures, although—this was his opinion—she had aged well, had been one of those women whose characters give their faces an interest better than mere beauty. “Indian bones,” she said. “From my grandmother.”

Finally photography had gone the way of other early hobbies. In recent years he’d taken pictures only on her birthday, sneaking the camera into the room behind his back and snapping just as she blew out the candles, or rather trying to as she ducked her head. Sentimentality neither of them liked, though they kept many traditions.

He had reached a hand to pull open the top dresser drawer when in the mirror he thought he saw her face behind him, her eyes. He turned. Nothing, no one. She was everywhere with him but not there at all. He shook his head and opened the drawer. Underneath some correspondence, he found the envelope with his name on it. She’d gone over it with him when they took the document to the notary: her will, her wishes. It wouldn’t make anything he did legal, but it would give him a defense. He thought he remembered the details, but wanted to be sure. He slipped a thumb under the flap to rip it open, stopped. It was too soon. There would be time later. He had nothing but time from now on. He put the envelope back where he’d found it, left and shut the door behind him.

The kitchen clock said eleven when he heard a car in the driveway. He opened the door to the summer kitchen and looked out. The snow was coming faster now, still fine as sugar. Through it he saw Faith’s car come to a stop.

He met her at the door. “I postponed my flight till tomorrow,” she said. He let her in. She wore the black tuque he’d lent her, pulled down to her eyes; beneath it, her face was like a child’s, small and pointed. “James,” she said. They put their arms around each other. “James,” she said again, this time her voice muffled in his shirt. “What’s going on? What happened?”

He found it too hard to say. “I’ll show you,” he said.

In a moment he was dressed again and they were on their way past the barn and up the hill, climbing into the woods, the only sounds their steps, their breath, and the hiss of the snow through the air. As the path narrowed, he let her go ahead of him so that if she fell, he’d be able to catch her. Snow accumulated on her hat and the shoulders of her jacket, a jacket too light for this kind of winter, although she insisted it was fine, “rated to twenty below.” He didn’t know anything about ratings; he only knew what common sense told him, that she needed more between her small self and the winter.

He’d been walking in the woods, too, when he’d come upon Faith the first time, only the week before. Not these woods, but the woods down and across the road.

The wind had been playing games that day. One minute it’d be roaring through the upper limbs of the trees; the next it would die down so quiet he could hear the twigs cracking under his feet. Then it would gust at him, pulling at his scarf this way and that, buffeting one side of his face, then the other, like two bullies teasing a weak kid, never quite hurting him but never quite leaving him alone. Not the kind of fierce squall the island was named for—just a playful wind, a bored wind, an afternoon wind.

He’d just come up over a ridge when he spotted her. Of course, he didn’t know who she was. Didn’t guess even that it was a woman hidden in that winter gear, until she turned toward him and put her finger to her lips and pointed down toward the lake. He stopped and looked where she was looking and saw what she was seeing: a good-sized flock of turkeys, walking in line the way they did, tallest first and smallest last, coming up to an old piece of split-rail fence and hopping over it, one by one. And then taking off on short flights through the trees, unhindered by the wind.

She was breathless when she got to him. “I thought they were garbage bags,” she said, still watching the birds. “When I first saw them. And I thought, why would someone be out here throwing garbage bags over that fence? And then I realized what they were.”

“Turkeys,” he said.

She turned those eyes on him for the first of many times. “I know,” she said.

He took in the flush on her pale skin, her shiny red hair, the expensive—but too thin—parka with fur on the hood, and figured she was a wandering tourist. Although why she would be here, and be here now, he couldn’t imagine. “This is private property,” he said.

“I know,” she said, looking him square in the eye.

“Doc Milton owns it,” he said.

“So what are you doing here?” He couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a smirk on her lips. He felt himself smiling back.

“I’m his friend,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “I’m his daughter.”

He hid his surprise, he thought, by nodding. He knew Doc had a daughter, of course; he just hadn’t seen her in years or expected to see her now. “How is Doc?” he said.

“You knew he was sick?”

He nodded.

“Well, he died,” she said. “Just a few days after he left here in August.”

The wind quieted for a second, as if listening to what they were saying. “The cancer,” James said.

It was her turn to nod.

“I’m sorry,” James said, and he was. Doc had been different from other summer people; he never had pretensions, always liked the island for what it was, never wanted to change things. Never even built on his land, this hundred acres; just lived in the old trailer already on it. “I’m only here two weeks a year,” Doc used to say. “I don’t need anything fancy.” He’d been a good neighbor, too, there for James Jack and Tante whenever he could be. He was an ophthalmologist and, knowing how Tante hated doctors, always came prepared, took a look at her when she had a chest cold, checked her eyes and blood pressure, wrote her prescriptions. So James had been happy to help him out, fix this or that when it was needed, as strange as it was to see someone else living in the trailer where his parents had lived, where he had lived when he was small.

“He was a good man,” James said.

“Yes, he was.”

James put out his hand. “I’m James,” he said.

“Faith,” she said. They shook gloved hands.

He nodded. “I remember now.”

“Remember?”

“From when you were little,” he said. “Your dad brought you by Tante’s house.”

“James Jack.” She shook her head.

“What?” James said.

“I always thought you were a product of my imagination,” she said. “I had this vague memory of playing with a little boy, but I thought I invented him—you know, the way kids do when they’re bored or lonely.”

“Maybe you did invent me,” James said, feeling himself smile. “I don’t remember us playing together. I never liked girls much.”

She grinned at him. “If I made you up then, how do I know you’re real now?” she said.

He took his glove off and put his hand out again. “See for yourself,” he said. And she’d taken off her right glove and reached out, their bare hands touching warm in the cold.

It was only later that he saw her other hand and the ring on it, and realized she was married. “Where’s your husband?” he’d asked. “Elsewhere,” she’d said, with a little twist to her mouth.

Now here she was with him, climbing up to the cabin where Tante lay. As the hill grew steep, he heard her breath catch. She was a smoker. He’d been surprised by that, given what had happened to her father, given that her father had been a doctor. “I’ve got a strong self-destructive instinct,” she’d said, looking at the cigarette in her hand. “But I’d quit if you asked me to.” If you asked me to. It was the second time they’d met. “What if your husband asked you to?” James said. “Definitely not,” she said.

When the cabin came into view, they paused, and Faith looked at him, inquiry in her eyes. “My getaway,” he said, and she nodded, understanding. She’d called her father’s place her “getaway,” and what she said she was getting away from was her husband.

He led her up to the cabin, opened the door for her. Showed her the bed where Tante lay, uncovered, her face showing no pain, no surprise, no regret. Only the strange posture of her body—the arm still up, the leg twisted under—made it seem as if she had fought death. James explained how he had found her. “What happened?” Faith asked, differently this time. “I don’t know,” he said.

They descended the slope side by side, talking about Tante’s wishes, James’s plan, how Faith could help. “She wants stars,” James said. Faith looked up. “It’ll clear,” she said, gazing at the opaque white sky.

When the going got slippery, he took her arm, and he held it until they came to the quarry road and the going got easier; then he held her hand. The barn and house reappeared, blurred silhouettes at first, and then more and more solid. The snow showed no signs of letting up. “If this keeps on too long,” he said, “it’ll make things harder tonight.” She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back through the thick gloves.

They were drinking tea at the kitchen table when the sheriff’s car pulled up. James stepped into Tante’s room, pulled the door shut behind him, peered through a crack in it that let him see nothing. “Hello, Mrs. Grayson,” the sheriff’s voice said when Faith opened the door.

“You know who I am.” Her voice, light.

“Small place, this island,” the sheriff said. “I was sorry to hear about your father.”

“You knew him?”

“Some. He was a good man.”

“Yes,” she said. Then, “Thank you.”

“So,” the sheriff said. James imagined him looking around, casual. “James Jack here?”

“No,” Faith said. “He and Marguerite went to the mainland for the day.”

“Funny,” the sheriff said. “He didn’t mention that when I saw him this morning.”

Their dialogue seemed stilted, canned—each of them playing a role.

“No?” she said. “Well, they left just before lunch. Invited me to use the house, keep the fire going.”

“Surprised they didn’t just use the backup furnace. That’s what most folks have it for.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Faith said. “I just thought it would be nice to spend the day here.”

“Come to think of it,” the sheriff said, “maybe they don’t have a backup.”

“Maybe not.”

“Well,” the sheriff said, “if you see James, you tell him I’ve got some business to discuss with him. Could be serious.”

Nice touch, James thought: serious.

“What about?” Faith said. “So I can tell him.”

“Just tell him,” the sheriff said, “that there are laws that govern these things. Laws he shouldn’t break.”

“Okay.” James liked Faith’s tone—almost flippant. He pictured the sheriff like a sheriff in a movie, reaching a hand up to tap the brim of his hat. But of course the sheriff didn’t wear a hat like that, not in winter. “Have a nice day,” the sheriff said; then came the sound of the kitchen door opening and closing, then the summer-kitchen door, then the car starting. Then the engine just running. James imagined the sheriff looking up toward the barn, seeing the faint outlines of the footprints and truck tracks the snow had begun to fill. The sound of the engine in reverse, then drive. James stepped out.

Faith pointed to their two mugs, still hot on the table. “I don’t think we fooled him for a moment,” she said.

“No,” James said, “we didn’t.” He shook his head. “ ‘Have a nice day,’ ” he said, mimicking the sheriff’s tone. Faith laughed.

“What did he mean about laws?” she said.

“Don’t know,” James said, although he did. “Doesn’t matter.”

“No,” Faith said, “I don’t suppose it does.” She paused. “Well,” she said, “we have some time to kill, don’t we?” She opened her arms, and James went to her.

Holding her hand, he led her up the unlit back stairs. Took her to his warm room, where the fire had burned down to coals. Put another log on, crossed over and pulled down the green shade. In the false twilight, he turned to see her standing outside the door looking in, as if surveying the future before stepping into it. He held out his hands, and she came to him this time.

They undressed, each of them helping the other with buttons, zippers. They took their time. There was no hurry. He wondered what she felt now, what she was thinking. He wondered if the first time had pleased her at all—if not, he wondered whether she had forgiven the way he had done it, the lack of tenderness. He had needed to get it over then, to get past it fast, but now he was sorry and wanted to make it up to her. When the clothes were gone and they were all flesh, nothing between them, he opened his mouth to say he was sorry, to apologize, but she kissed him and it began again.

Afterward, as they lay deep under the covers in each other’s arms, she said, “This is too easy.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean,” she said, and sat up, the covers falling away from her small frame, “that I’ve been married to the same man for the last fourteen years. It ought to be hard to make love to someone else, don’t you think? But it isn’t.”

She climbed out of the bed and found her shirt, the pack of cigarettes in the pocket, the matches.

“Don’t,” he said.

She gave him a new look, mouth small, eyes large, as if she were about to laugh at him. But she didn’t. “Say please,” she said, and he said, “Please,” and she put the cigarettes down and climbed back into bed.

“Poor Marguerite,” she said, laying her head on his shoulder. He felt ashamed then, to have forgotten for a moment, when even Faith had not, that Tante had died. His throat swelled; he swallowed hard, not ready to cry again.

“Tell me the story,” Faith said.

“What story?”

“The one about the last eight years.”

“All right,” he said.

On his twenty-seventh birthday, James got shit-faced drunk. He admitted it freely: he’d been feeling sorry for himself, sad about his life. Any normal day, he felt okay about things, but for some reason, that birthday got to him. Worse yet, though, he’d come home in that state and said things to Tante, things he shouldn’t have said. The problem wasn’t that he hurt her feelings; the problem was he’d opened a can of worms that just wouldn’t shut.

Tante got on his case. “You need to do something with your life,” she’d say. “I am,” he’d say. “Something else,” she’d say. “Like what?” he’d say. Once a week they had the same argument, although she liked to call it a discussion. Once a week she came up with something new he could do: go to forestry school; join a singles club on the mainland; start his own business with her seed money. “What kind of business?” he said. She rolled her eyes. “Do I have to do all the thinking?” she said.

It was Tante who saw the ad in the paper, brought it to him. “It’s what you always wanted to be,” she said. He shrugged it off. He’d been a kid when he said that; what kid didn’t say he wanted to be a fireman? “I just wanted to wear a shiny hat,” he said, which was a truth, although not the only truth. “Well,” she said, “now’s your chance.”

So he had called for an application, filled it in, gone for an interview, been accepted. The training program was eight weeks. Six in the morning till five at night, six days a week. Too hard a commute from the island. So he rented an apartment on the mainland, lived on his own for the first time in his life. Went home on the ferry every Sunday to check on Tante. She was eighty-six then, still able to take care of herself.

Most of the trainees were a little younger than he, but they’d all been out in the world. Some had been to college. Like him, others had worked—as carpenters, truck drivers, linemen in one of the local furniture factories. There were two women, too. They’d all looked awkward, crammed into old school desks in their winter parkas and boots, like a bunch of working-class parents called in for a talk with the school principal. James had come in late and sat toward the back, near the door, the way he always did in school, staring at his hands, waiting for the teacher to arrive, feeling foolish and trying to fade into the walls. But the guy across from him wouldn’t permit it. “I’m Perry,” he said, sticking out his hand, and James had to shake it and look into the guy’s face. Milk-white skin, hair, eyebrows. Pink eyes with firered pupils. “I’m albino,” Perry said, grinning. “An albino fireman. Unique, don’t you think?” He grabbed the sleeve of the person sitting in front of him, and she turned around. “And this here’s Marion,” he said. “She’s Abnaki. What do you think of that? An albino and an Indian in the same class. I hear you Indians got special talent for fighting fires. Is that right, Marion?”

The woman rolled her eyes and shook her head. “No more than you albiny-o’s,” she said. She stuck her hand out to James. “So, who are you?” she said.

“James,” he said.

“James,” she repeated. “That’s formal enough, I guess.”

“Formal enough for what?” he said.

She rolled her eyes again. “For the debutante ball,” she said. “For anything.”

Perry laughed. “Sharp as vinegar, ain’t she?” he said, nodding to James. “We’ll have to watch out for her.” James liked them both.

The days were long, the training hard. Most of it was drills. Learning SOPs: Standard Operating Procedures. Sprints carrying a hundred pounds of hose, up and down stairs. Dressing hydrants, dragging dummies. Getting the routines. Responding to the call, prepping equipment, carrying and climbing ladders. Getting, as the instructor said, to the point of “automatization.” They had to be able to do the right thing, always, automatically, without thinking. But they had to be able to think, too, in case things didn’t seem to be going according to Hoyle. “Don’t shut your brains down, boys,” the instructor said at least twelve times a day. “Keep those brains up and running.”

The first few days, both Marion and the other woman took a lot of ribbing. But then the other woman found out she was pregnant and quit, and when it was just Marion, the ribbing stopped. She was as strong as any man, and built solid, and she talked tougher than most. James and Marion and Perry became a trio. Teamed up for drills, studied together. Each of them with different reasons for being there. Perry was a dreamer: he wanted to work for the national park system, he wanted to be the guy dropping tons of water on the trees, he wanted to be a hero, saving the forests. He already had his pilot’s license. Marion wanted to do anything other than the waitressing she’d been doing since she was sixteen, to make more money than she could any other way, as a woman with a high school education. And James—he couldn’t tell them why he was there, wasn’t sure he knew, so he just said he wanted to join the volunteer fire department on the island. Do some good. Save some lives and property. “Saint James,” Perry called him.

Saturday nights, before he went home, they went out drinking. It felt good to be with people close to his age. He liked the camaraderie, the talk, the laughing. Perry and Marion would get so drunk sometimes that he’d have to call a cab to take them home. They were three friends—just friends. It was the first time in his life he really felt he could call a woman his friend, or a man for that matter. He felt he could talk about anything with them, although of course he didn’t. It wasn’t his way. Marion would lean across the table, her breath sweet from the Amaretto she liked to drink, and say, “Loosen up, James! Don’t be such a wooden Indian.” And Perry would shake his head and say, “Marion, you may as well ask a tree to do a cartwheel.”

The last week of training was test week. The test was a real fire, if there was any, or a set one, if there wasn’t. You never knew when your test was going to come. Trainees were on call twenty-four hours a day, living at the station, playing cards and polishing chrome if there was nothing else to do. If you passed your test, you got the certificate, and you could pretty much write your own ticket from there: any fire department in the state would take you, soon as there was an opening. Perry pumped himself up. “I’m gonna ace it,” he kept saying. “I am ready.” Marion just smiled and kept to herself. James swam through the days and nights, nerves dancing.

The call came in late Tuesday night. A real fire. This time when they suited up, it felt different; reality had a different flavor, made things sharp.

The house was an old Victorian broken up into apartments, on a narrow street just a block long. At one time it might have been a farmhouse or even the center of an estate, acres of prime land around it. But now it was just an old building wedged between newer buildings, head and shoulders above them like a peacock among chickens. Like most old buildings its wood was dry, its wiring deteriorating, its structure open. Balloon construction. A fire that started in the basement could be in the attic within minutes without touching another floor.

By the time they arrived—minutes after the call—flames licked out every window. The instructor took James aside. “This isn’t your test,” he said. James nodded. He and Marion were to take care of the tenants, who stood clustered on the sidewalk in their pajamas and robes, some of them with bare feet. The chief was asking them, “Is everyone out? Are you sure?” and they were all nodding: a couple of college-age women, a guy in his thirties, an Asian man and his wife and two kids. James and Marion wrapped them in blankets, put thermal slippers on their feet, encouraged them to climb into the back of the ambulance, where there was a heater and coffee.

Perry was right in there, handling the hose that fought his hands like a giant snake, his face grim but also, somehow, happy. He loved it, loved fighting fire; anyone could see that in the red center of his eyes, hot despite the ice that coated him quickly from the back-drifting mist.

But the fire kept on. It was cold that night. Well below zero. The wind was not strong, but it was cutting, and that took the temperature down another notch. The water steamed at first, then froze on the building before it could do much good. The Victorian was lost; now the main worry was protecting the exposures—the adjacent buildings, the garage and the house next door. The fire was loud, popping and roaring and strangely alive in the rigid cold, the darkness of the dead of night. Fireballs shot into the air, seemed to hang there and drip sparks for a moment before they fell, as if the cold made the fire thick as jelly.

Despite their efforts, the garage caught fire as they watched. The garage was actually an old barn, separated from the house by a narrow alleyway. A single tongue of flame flashed out of the vent in its peak, and then the roof was aflame.

Marion and James were standing with the two men who had lived in the building, the four of them gazing mesmerized at the new fire as it was born. “Any cars in the barn?” James asked the men, but they shook their heads. Then one of the college girls came rushing up, her blanket trailing behind her. “Florence!” she screamed, and they looked at her, not understanding.

Shouts came from the direction of the barn. When James turned his head, the doors were just swinging open, seemingly by themselves. Perry, who’d had his hose trained on the doors, shut the flow off for a moment and stared. Through the opening came a walking column of fire—a woman, fire wrapped around her like the petals of a glowing flower. For a moment, she stood there, her face lost in her burning hair, only her mouth visible, gaping as if she were screaming silently to Perry, who stood before her slack-jawed and stunned, letting the moment lengthen beyond tolerance.

It was Marion who rushed forward, wrenched the hose from Perry’s hands, opened the nozzle to a fog stream and trained it on the burning woman. The woman fell; the flames went out. But it was too late.

James stared at the charred heap that had, moments before, been a human being. But in his mind he was seeing the water arcing through the air, the truck nose down in the lake, the smoke, the red fish shanty burning—and then inside the shanty, bodies writhing in the flames. His legs gave way beneath him, his mind left its bony shell, and he passed out, right there on the icy sidewalk, in front of friends, in front of everyone.

Later the story came out that Florence had been old, homeless, a bit crazy, alone. The college girls had given her blankets, food, and shelter, befriending her the way they would a stray animal. Making her feel safe and welcome. But the horror of the fire had made them forget her until it was too late.

When the sun came up, James and Perry were sitting in the pumper truck, watching some of the other men wrap orange tape around the Victorian’s lot, using the shrubs and lampposts for support since stakes wouldn’t drive into the frozen ground. In the morning light, Perry’s face looked even more ghostly than usual; he seemed older than his twenty-three years. He nodded when James asked him if he had passed his test. “Marion, too,” Perry said. “It wasn’t her test, but she passed too.”

James found her back at the station, stowing gear. He stood in the door and watched her for a moment, letting her be unaware of him. When she looked his way, her face was grim. “Congratulations,” he said.

“For what?”

“I hear you passed.”

She clambered up the side of the truck and began to unwind the flat hose from its reel; after a fire, you always had to check to make sure it wasn’t tangled or twisted, so it would spool off clean the next time you needed it. “When’s yours?” she said.

He made the decision at that moment. “I’m not taking it,” he said.

She stopped what she was doing to look at him. “Why? Not because you passed out?”

He shrugged. “I guess I’m just not cut out for it,” he said. He waited for her arguments, but they didn’t come—just the long look, reading him. “Guess you’re right,” she finally said, and kept working while he watched.

When the hose was cleanly spooled, she came down and stood before him. “Well, James,” she said, “I guess this is good-bye.” She put her arms out and he came to her. She was so small he had to bow to touch his chin to her crown. Her skin was warm through the T-shirt she wore; her shoulders were solid under his palms. “Good-bye,” he said, breathing the smoky scent of her hair.

He was at the door when Marion called out. “Hey,” she said. “Maybe I’ll come see you?”

“Sure,” he said, and went home.

When he returned to the island, he decided to fix up the cabin on the ridge.

He’d gathered from Tante that it’d been built when she was just a girl, when the farm was still a working farm. A place for hired help to stay in the summertime. One room with a hole for a stovepipe. No running water, no electricity. He gave it a sink, a cupboard, a countertop; filled in the chinks, replaced the broken windows; hauled up a woodstove, two rocking chairs, a table, a cot, a few dishes. He never intended to live in it. He just wanted a place of his own, a place to go. A place to bring Marion when she came.

She showed up unannounced, as he had suspected she would.

The first night, they opened the woodstove door and watched the fire as if it were a television set. Rocked, drank wine chilled in the snow, and talked. Then they stood up, undressed one another, and got into bed. He loved that. How direct it was, how simple, even that first time. She had round breasts with large nipples, and the wine made her mouth taste like apples. In the darkness when he closed his eyes, she seemed to be all hands and mouth and skin.

Lying in bed, she told him about her difficult parents, her wayward brother, the big sister she depended on; the men in her past; her childhood hurts. He told her how his parents had died, how Tante had taken him in, and what it had been like, growing up on the island. Compared to her, he had few stories to tell. Maybe because he hadn’t had much practice. He’d had girl-friends, of course; he’d even thought he’d been in love, once or twice. But nothing had lasted, and he never knew why, for sure, except maybe it was that he had been unwilling to change his life.

With Marion he was comfortable, too comfortable to think about that.

The cot in the cabin was narrow, so when they slept, they slept touching. His chin on Marion’s shoulder. His knees against Marion’s thigh. One hand on her belly, feeling her breath come and go. Sometimes one of them would wake up in the night and start things again. Usually it was him, the dream of sex so strong that it blurred the line between sleeping and waking, and suddenly he would find himself inside her, not sure who had put him there. Sometimes they stayed like that a long time, not moving. Two I’s bound by him between them. The tie that binds.

They kept each other warm, even on the coldest nights. In the cave beneath the blankets. Like children they would pull the covers over their heads to warm their noses, giggle and grope under there till they came up gasping for air. In the morning he would jump from the bed to put more logs on the fire, then jump back in till the fire warmed the room. Sometimes it was warm enough then that they could move about without clothes, putting together a breakfast of coffee made with bottled water and store-bought doughnuts served on his cracked plates. Hair in her sleepy eyes. Two fleshy creatures doing ordinary things. He liked to see her naked body, to see the way her muscles and bones worked together, to see her whole that way. The unbroken line of flesh, pink here, brown there, almost white in places: downy, smooth. The slope of her back above her buttocks. Her torso narrowing in the middle, but not a lot; a gentle curve inward, that’s all. She had strong legs and a strong back and strong shoulders—her own kind of beauty.

They were together always those weeks. She didn’t have work yet; she was waiting for a spot to open up at a station in the city, where they paid more. Every day she used Tante’s phone to call her sister’s house, to check if there’d been any news; every day that there wasn’t, he was grateful.

She hadn’t brought anything with her, hadn’t planned to stay, so she wore his jeans cinched in with her belt, his flannel shirts with the tails skimming her knees. They walked in the woods, came back to the cabin, ate, made love. Once a day they went down to Tante’s, took wood in, stoked her fire, used the phone, got supplies, took baths—the two of them facing each other in the tub, dovetailing their legs.

He worried about Tante, so old and alone most of that winter, but she said it was fine, she was fine; go ahead and enjoy himself. When she developed a cough, she told him she had a little cold, that’s all. She promised to get up only to use the bathroom and fix herself tea and toast. “I’m fine,” she said, waving him off, her voice like gravel sifting from a hand. She had a cough, that was all; she had her herbal teas, thank you very much. She hadn’t come more than eighty years without learning to take care of herself. “Why don’t you take one of those nice steaks from the freezer?” she said. That was how she let him know that Marion was all right with her, that it was all all right. She seemed pleased as punch, as pleased as if this had been her plan all along: for him to meet someone and be happy. He was grateful, and took the steak. They cooked it in a frying pan over the woodstove and ate it rare with potatoes fire-roasted in tin foil, and rum and cola to drink.

Nearly four weeks had passed when the job offer came in. “I have to take it,” Marion said. “It’s not every station that’s willing to hire a woman.” He nodded. “It’s a chance to prove myself,” she said. “From there, anything can happen.” He nodded again.

The next morning, she got up first and put her own clothes back on. “I’ll be staying at my sister’s,” she said. “Call me tomorrow night, and I’ll tell you how my first day went.”

He nodded, they kissed, and she went, leaving behind his shirts with their sleeves rolled up.

That morning, he came down to Tante’s house with a pillowcase full of laundry. She wasn’t up yet, so he took it straight down to the cellar and started the wash. The sheets had in them the smell of this last month, the smell of him, of Marion, the two of them together. All his clothes smelled of her. He pressed to his nose the crotch of the jeans she had worn and felt no shame in doing so. It was a salty scent that filled him with nostalgia.

They had reached a crossroads, he and Marion; he felt them standing at it. Did he want to marry her? Did he love her? He was comfortable with her. That was enough. He couldn’t let her go, and he couldn’t hold her back either.

Marion was what was on his mind when he came up the stairs and stepped into the kitchen. The fire was almost out; he stirred the coals and stoked it up, and the noise of this kept him from hearing Tante. But as he finally closed the stove, he heard the rasping cough behind her door.

She was lying on one side, curled up on the narrow bed, the blankets on the floor. Breathing hard. Face gray, lips blue. Eyes rolling in her head. This is what he told the doctor, after he covered her and went to the phone. They sent an ambulance, which took her to the island clinic, where they pumped her full of penicillin while he filled out forms and signed papers. Then the helicopter came, and flew her to the mainland hospital. He could not ride along, they said, so he drove the truck to the ferry and waited there, as patiently as he could. He called Marion then, from the pay phone, wanting to let her know what was happening. But no one answered.

Tante’s lungs were so filled with fluid, the doctor said, that she had come close to drowning in it. Yet she fought the nurses so, they had to tranquilize her—dangerous at her age, but what choice did they have? James stayed by her side, day and night, listening to the gurgling wheeze that was her breath, and holding her hand that was like a bundle of twigs in his. In those long, quiet, nighttime hours, he wondered at her strength, her will to live. It would have been so easy for her to give up, and watching her pain, he sometimes thought it would have been best.

But the penicillin worked its wonders, and one day she woke, scowled at him, berated him for keeping her alive. “What are you doing here?” she finally said, when he made it clear she had no choice in the matter. “Get home and make sure my house is all right.”

Sitting in the truck on the ferry crossing, he thought of Marion again. She must have wondered why he’d never called, why no one answered when she called him. He promised himself he would call her, as soon as he got back to the house.

Then the island loomed up out of the cold mist before him, and he forgot again. Tante’s pipes had frozen and burst, and it took days to repair the damage. Then he brought Tante home, and he had her to tend to. He called Marion one evening, but again there was no answer. Spring, he had to plant the garden. When that was done, he called again, but this time a voice said her sister’s number had been disconnected. He went to the mainland and drove by the house where her sister had lived; a FOR RENT sign sat in the curtainless window. He went to the fire station where she’d gotten her first job and found that she’d moved on already, no one knew just where. “Somewhere out west,” one guy said. “Chicago, maybe?” Someone else said it was downstate. He had no way of finding her.

For a long while he lived with the feeling that something valuable had slipped through his fingers. Gradually, that went away, and his memories became more objective. What had there been between him and her, anyway, except sex? Lonely people came together all the time, and sex had a way of connecting them. But a real connection was something more than that, something more like what he had with Tante. He could not leave her, would not risk her dying alone. Not the way she depended on him, needed him. Not after all she had done for him.

And it had seemed, for a long while, as if she would die. And then he would be free. He could wait till then.

But the bird that fluttered in Tante’s chest was as resilient as the chickadee that foraged all winter long, close to starvation but never starving. She lived, and they wove their lives together more tightly than ever, wove them into a single life, bound together by habits and rituals and debts.

It was nearly a year before he visited the cabin again. He went one morning in early spring, intending only to check on it, to make sure it was still standing, whole. It was dank and cold inside. The fire would not draw because birds had roosted in the chimney. Mice had made a nest of cardboard and paper in the cupboard; they squeaked when he opened the door, were quiet when he closed it again. The mattress on the cot was black with mildew.

He pulled one of the rocking chairs into the open front door, and sat. With the leaves not yet out, across the lake he could almost see the mountains, blue and snow-covered. One day, he and Marion had stopped on the top of the ridge to look at those mountains, barely visible through the haze. “How can something so far off be real?” she had said. “They’re probably saying the same thing about us,” he said, grinning, and she punched his arm, and he ran, and she chased him, and caught him, finally, only when they had reached the cot, still warm from that morning.

He found that each time he came back to the cabin, he could recall some other thing, some other moment, sensation, or image, that took him back to that time. And then he could close his eyes, feel the wind, and imagine it was her touching him. For eight years, that was all he had. All he dared to have.

As long as Tante needed him, it didn’t matter what he needed.

“And now she’s gone,” Faith said.

His throat swelled again; he could only nod. They sat silent for a moment. Then he said, “Your turn.”

Faith rolled away from him, sat up, the bones of her shoulders catching the light. “Too boring,” she said. “Besides, you already know as much as you need to know.” Then she turned back with a grin, grabbed his hand. “I’m hungry; let’s make lunch,” she said, and pulled, trying to get him out of bed.

He pulled back. “No,” he said. “Tell me about your marriage.”

Her face shifted. “My marriage,” she said finally, “is much, much farther away than the mountains, and not nearly as real.” She reached for her cigarettes; when he saw the bitterness on her face, he didn’t try to stop her.

There was a time I wanted to be alone.

It was winter. Penniless, fifteen, I rode the rails, not knowing where I was going, not caring so long as it was away. In empty freight cars I often thought how pleasant it would be to let the cold hold me in its arms until the shivering stopped, but my body was young and would not surrender to such a chilly lover.

Then one morning there came a terrible clattering. Through the wooden slats I saw sunshine and a great swampy lake. My lungs sucked in the steamy air, my heart beat fast. And when the train stopped, my feet brought me out and down and plunged me straight into the current of a teeming city, and once again into the heat and complication of love, of life.