The man who answered the phone at Glacier Park Market was kind to her, but he failed to put her on hold, and she could hear him ringing up customers while she waited for Edward. “Going to have a few hot dogs tonight?” he asked someone. “No, ma’am, we’re all out of those....I’d just try singing....No, ma’am, if you don’t bother ‘em, they won’t bother you.”
When Edward came to the phone, he sounded tired. “Hey, Mom.”
“Did I wake you?” Trixie said.
“No.”
“You sound tired.”
He sighed. “I was in the back, trying to finagle some more bear whistles. Everybody’s all riled up around here over the bear thing.”
“Bear thing?”
“These people got mauled. They were sneaking up on some grizzlies in the backcountry, trying to take pictures. Now everybody’s bought out the whistles.” He sighed again. “It sounds like a Fourth of July parade out there.”
“Well,” she said. No use putting it off. “I have a little something to ask you.”
This was a difficult thing for her to do. On his twenty-first birthday, just after he’d gotten his first job in the park, Edward had declared himself a family neutral zone. He would talk to or see anyone in the family (at that point Trixie, Kat, and her husband), and wouldn’t talk about them to anyone else in the family. This included Hamish if he ever turned up. Edward moved into the mountains and was only accessible by telephone or long drive, and she noticed a subtle shift in his personality: he acquired a polite reserve, his letters became shorter and chattier. Trixie thought also that he might be homosexual, which, if so, he had never been candid about and probably never would be. Knowing his sister, this was the best tack if he wanted to remain on good terms with everyone.
In the end, the new Edward was a genius of restraint, a package that embodied all the quietness and delicacy of his childhood self and simultaneously jettisoned his fear. Trixie had tried to express her pride in him, in his self-control and even temper, but he resisted talking about it.
Still, she had a feeling he preferred her to his sister. Kat was likely to be suspicious of Edward, as he didn’t share her faith, and the few times he mentioned her—which came very, very rarely—he seemed weary of bearing her scrutiny. So between mother and son there had evolved an unspoken trust, which is what made this phone call so difficult—she was going to ask him to lie to Kat.
“What is it?” he said, suddenly concerned. It was his misapprehension that she was frail, and he would soon need to move to Marshall to care for her. Though she supposed it was possible.
“I’m having a little get-together I want you to come to.”
A pause. “Really?”
“A little thing. Just you, and…”
“Who?”
“My grandchildren,” she said. “I’d like you to bring them along.”
He snorted, a sudden and, she thought, contemptuous gesture entirely unlike him, and afterward fell into a silence broken only by the continuing sound of the cash register ringing, and the genial patter of the checker.
“Come on, Mom,” he said finally. “I can’t do that.”
“Now don’t say that so quickly,” she said, and she could feel the opportunity vanishing, like so much precious water into the floor of a vast and lonely desert. “I’m getting old, and there are things I want known. You don’t know about my parents, do you?”
“Grandma and Grandpa?”
“And my sister. Did you know I had a sister? Your sister was named after her. I’ll bet those kids don’t even know who their own mother was named after.”
“I think I remember something about this, Mom, but really. I can’t bring them to you. That’s ridiculous.” His voice had that sharp, particularly male, edge of finality she had grown to resent. Hearing it disappointed her.
“Do you intend to have a family, Edward? You’re forty years old. Will you have children?”
Another silence, and this time the ambient sounds seemed to move away. When he spoke it was quiet and close, a deep and confidential voice. “No.”
“I didn’t think so. None of this will be passed on, Edward. I know this isn’t so important to you—there is a lot you’d rather forget—but it is my life we are talking about. And my parents’, and their parents’. It’s our family, Edward.” She paused, decided to play the only card she had. “And I’m getting to be so old, you know, I could forget it all. I want to pass it on before that happens.”
“Is this about Dad?” he asked her. His voice took on that patronizing quality it had when he called after the funeral, as if she were the child now.
She sighed. “It is and it isn’t.”
“I can’t violate Kat’s trust,” he said.
“Kat doesn’t have to know.”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I’ll just whisk them away and have them back before she notices.”
“You take them on a trip to the park. Just don’t tell her about me.”
“Think about this, Mom. They’re kids. Do you think they’re not going to tell their mother what they did on the trip? Do you think if I tell them it’s a secret, they’ll listen to me?” He chuckled, a low and sad laugh that made her heart ache. “You don’t know these kids. They’re tough customers. They don’t trust anybody except their parents and God.”
She hadn’t known how well he knew them. Did he visit often? she wanted to know, but didn’t ask. “I see,” she said.
“You’re asking me to undo Kat’s hard work.” He paused a moment. “You know, Mom, she’s told them that you’re dead.”
“What!”
“That’s why she didn’t want you at the funeral.”
“They think I’m dead?”
“They think you’re dead. You’ve been dead since before they were born. That’s the party line.”
Trixie sat down now, on a kitchen chair, to catch herself from a sudden swoon: she felt for a moment that it was true, that she really was dead and had never existed in the first place. The ends of her fingers went cold and numb, and she loosened her hold on the receiver until the blood flowed back into them. How could Kat tell such a lie? Maybe part of her actually believed it. She could see how it might happen: the hatred beginning in isolation, a nacreous bead that floated, hard and inert, inside her; then something happening—their move to Marshall maybe, or Hamish leaving—to dislodge it and let it float free, and gather smaller hatreds like oil congealing on water. And soon it would be big enough to kill Trixie in her mind. To her daughter, she thought, it was better that she was dead. Trixie felt like she was groping at the last threads of her life, her past, things she wanted with a desperation she feared she did not have the strength to maintain.
“I am not dead,” she said.
“No.”
“Then you wouldn’t need to tell them who I really was. I could just be an old lady you knew.”
He let out a weary breath. “They would tell Kat, Mom.”
“It would be the last thing on their minds. They’re going to see mountains and bears and canyons, and that will be what they tell their mother.” He said nothing. “When have I ever asked you for a favor, Edward?”
“I’ll think about it,” he said finally.
“Well, all right,” she said, and hoped the excitement was not so obvious in her voice.
“I have to go.”
“I love you, Edward.”
“You too, Mom,” he said, and hung up.
She pushed herself out of her chair and her muscles resisted, as if they might snap. She straightened slowly and hung the phone on the cradle. It had felt, as they talked, like Edward was here in the room with her, like one of the many talks they’d had in his sister’s absence the last few years he lived at home; now she noticed that it had become dark outside, and the darkness in the corners of the house challenged the kitchen’s single lamp, stranding her in an island of dull yellow light.
The effect depressed her immensely. In the half-dark, the room’s objects sat with an indifferent, immutable confidence, the way other people’s possessions looked in their houses to a visitor waking in the night. Her hands trembled, not from nerves, she imagined, but to shake off the skin and muscle and blood, easier then to settle in their grave. She felt like her body was launching its first offensive against her mind, which it had decided had run its due course.
Her thoughts startled her: so macabre! She remembered Hamish’s strangely smooth hands, the patterns they traced in the dust of her dashboard.
She walked around the house to get her blood flowing, and turned on every lamp. It helped, a little. In the light her things looked less threatening. Still, they distinguished themselves mostly by the shadows they harbored—a smear of dark behind a chair, the black patch behind a photograph.
She took her jacket—a red windbreaker, worn at the cuffs—and slipped it on. It felt a little big on her, the way Schatze’s clothes had felt when they were girls together, the way Hamish’s had when they were married. Outside, the air had taken on a rough texture, like burlap. She inhaled it and the burn in her lungs felt like an infusion of new life. The moon was bright and nearly full, and she could just make out the worn paths into the woods behind the house. She had walked them enough to know them in the dark, especially with the moon bright and the lights of the house still blazing.
She wondered what it would be like to meet them. How much of herself would she see in them? The genetic line between herself and Kat, always clear in her imagination, was in fact broken by a husband she had never seen (or had, barely, in a photo Edward had shown her: he stood with Kat, at a great distance, beneath a blossoming magnolia, a thick man with a round face and the sun’s glare in his glasses). She imagined the children fidgeting, their restraint learned, not innate, and polite. His hair cut short, hers long, with a bow slightly ratty from travel. They would be wearing blue jeans bought especially for this trip, the only ones they had ever owned. They would have white sneakers on their feet and would refuse offered food.
She hadn’t really walked this path during the summer, and it had grown halfway over. She didn’t recall its having grown so quickly in previous years. Perhaps the plants had saved up their growth during the drought, and exploded after the rain. Several times she thought she might have lost her way, but the path reappeared before her in the moonlight. She came to a rise, which she scaled with some difficulty, and looked down at her house from between the trees. The lights cast squarish beams into the weeds in the yard and the split-rail fence that ran around it. From here, it all looked small and inert, pulsing out light that nobody would see or care about. How many people passed it on the road as they returned home in the evening, without noticing it? Her neighbors used to stop by to see her, but the ones who did so had moved, and those who replaced them never came.
It wasn’t the company she missed, but the acknowledgment that she was there, living.
Hers, she thought now, was a life without consequence. It would vanish when spent, the way the house would one day be claimed by lupines and knapweed. She’d always had faith in the forces that combated entropy, but now it seemed like her life, everyone’s lives, were only wounds in the fabric of the universe that would heal up in time, despite everyone’s best efforts at preservation. The evidence was everywhere—the path, growing over faster than she could clear it; the stems of plants around her that would, if clipped, heal and grow double; the rain washing ruts from the mud and making new ones where it wished them to go.
And her family, eroded beyond recognition, leaving and marrying and dying as if they’d sprung fully grown from the dirt, without the intervention of her flesh.
She was cold, and the back of her hand stung and itched. She brought it to her lips and tasted blood; she must have been scratched parting the underbrush. It was time to go back inside. For a second, looking around her, she saw no path at all, and couldn’t remember how she had gotten to this place. She took a step in a direction that felt right, but there was a bramble there that tugged the laces of her sneaker loose; in another direction was a fallen tree, rotted through and overgrown with moss. And then she remembered: she’d stepped over a thick root. The moon had grown dim behind a cloud, so she felt for it with her feet. There was nothing at first, and then it materialized beneath her. In the face of a rising and inexplicable panic, she leaped it, crashed through the groping branches of a thick bush, came down with her foot sideways on a rock and fell.
She landed on the path, the air knocked out of her. The impact was more a shock than a pain, her bones recoiling at the sudden pressure; she felt pine needles dig into her stockings and prick at her knees, and something hard drove itself into her chin. She rolled over instinctively, her hands finding her face in the dark, and she coughed until her breath returned to her, ragged and desperate. She tried moving her jaw: no problem. But her hands came away sticky. She found the wound with her finger, and it stung her terribly.
She got to her feet slowly, fearing a sprain or worse in her ankle, but it had held up. The hurt parts of her throbbed dimly, like electric coils, just beneath the surface of her skin. She felt dizzy and panicked, as if the woods themselves, or something in them, had done this to her; she stood perfectly still, taking deep, cool breaths, trying to calm her thudding heart. When she thought she had the strength, she hurried back down the path, taking it as slowly as her panic would let her, her hand clamped over her chin, stanching the blood. She burst out finally, letting go of a cry that seemed to come from somewhere else, so horribly and perilously weak was it, and she ran into the house, slamming the door behind her.
Inside, she rushed to the bathroom. Her cheeks were scratched, and blood welled thickly in the gash on her chin. Spots of it darkened on her jacket. She opened the medicine cabinet, her hands shaking, and fumbled with a tin of gauze and bandages. It clattered into the sink. She picked it up, set it on the toilet, and went to work cleaning her wounds, washing them with soap and water and swabbing them with iodine. Then she bandaged the cuts, and watched in the mirror as the gauze on her chin sprouted a red blotch that grew and then stopped. Now, finally, she calmed. She cleaned the blood off the sink and floor and went to her room.
In bed, the sensation of falling returned to her, and the room spun. She reached out and gripped a bar on the headboard for support. She wondered what Hamish saw when the plane went down, if he ever saw the ground he would die on or heard the other passengers. Or if it seemed he was alone, everything else just a blur around him, as he hurried to meet the forest floor.
* * *
The telephone woke her. She wondered who would call so early until she saw her bedside clock: noon. She hadn’t slept this late in years. When she tried to lift her head, the pillow stuck to her face, and came away streaked with the dark brown of dried blood. Her face felt bloated and sore.
“Hello?” The room was still hazy, the light in the windows a bright affliction, as if the sun had risen in the yard.
“Mom.”
“Edward!”
“You sound funny. Are you okay?” His voice was distant and tinny; a bad connection.
“I’m fine. I had a fall, and I’m sore.”
“A fall! Is anything broken? Do you need—”
“Everything’s fine. Just a few scratches.”
“Okay,” he said doubtfully. “I wanted to tell you that I called Kat. She liked the idea, believe it or not. Not the part about you, I mean, the trip. I’m taking them for the weekend, and I can put them up in one of the chalets, and then we can hike on some—”
“Wait a minute, you mean you’re coming?” she said, her sluggish blood starting to flow.
“Well, maybe. I’m picking them up Friday morning.” His voice was buoyant with excitement.
“So you’re coming?”
“Well, I think.”
“This is okay with Kat? She’s letting you take them.”
“They have some church thing this weekend,” he said. “There was some kind of shake-up or something, a priest getting drunk, I don’t know. It’s like a retreat. They were going to leave the kids with some neighbors, but they don’t really like the neighbors…”
“You’ll bring them.”
He sighed. “I will try to bring them, Mom. It’s a little out of the way. I have to think of some reason to get them there.”
“You’ll bring them, please, Edward,” she said. Her wounds stopped their dull throbbing and began to sting like fresh cuts. She touched her face. It had the mealy tautness of a tomato. “Tell me you will.”
“I can’t guarantee—”
“Edward!”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’ll bring them. But I don’t know the details. We’ll have to make up something about who you are, I don’t know. There’s still time to think about it.”
“I have to get ready,” she said. “What can I do for them? We can go walking, and—”
“Look, don’t make any big plans, okay? It’s supposed to be no big deal, just some old lady.”
“Right,” she said, though she was loath to hear it.
“I’ll get back to you on this. Let me think about my schedule here and I’ll try to whip something up. Brainstorm, Mom, okay?”
“All right.”
“I’m gonna go,” he said. “I love you, Mom.”
She had heard of her granddaughter’s birth from Edward. Rachel, he told her, her name’s Rachel. Trixie hadn’t even known Kat was pregnant. Edward got hold of a picture of the baby and made her a photocopy of it. Even grainy and cracked from folding, Rachel’s face bore the shadows of Hamish, and a little of Schatze. Somewhere she still had this photo, though she hadn’t looked at it for years.
But after that, Edward sent no pictures. Maybe he had been optimistic that Rachel’s birth would smooth out the rift in the family. If anything, it widened. Kat called only once, and that call had only been a curt declaration of her intentions, an almost defiant (and at that point entirely unnecessary) gesture. “Our spiritual adviser suggested I call,” her daughter told her, and little else. And when David was born, nothing.
In the bathroom, Trixie was stunned at her reflection: last night’s scratches had swollen like streambeds in a flood, and the wound on her chin reopened, turning the gauze and even the tape that held it a gruesome brown-pink. Gingerly, she tore off the bandage and replaced it with another, and the stain quickly stopped its spread.
That afternoon she ate lunch with Diane, at the same place she had eaten with Edward years before. It had a different name now, and the pressed-tin ceiling was gone. Now the water pipes and air shafts were left exposed high above them. Long cords hung from the rafters and ended in lamps that dangled directly over each table. It had been many years since the place changed hands, but this decor still seemed like an affront, a surface change that marked a larger movement in Marshall away from its humble beginnings. It reminded her that she wouldn’t die in the place she had come to so full of hope for a new life, but in the urban landscape that had been built around it, which she would never fully know.
Even so, Marshall was more familiar to her than her own son was. Marshall had built itself out in the open: retail warehouses grew out of prairies, housing developments crept across fields like renegade weeds. But Edward grew up in private, like a greenhouse plant. He read books and listened to the radio, and if she had a tangible effect on him, it was only the fretful leniency that allowed him space to change in. And Kat, finally, seemed less her child than a piece of her broken off and lost, a piece she had lived so long without that it had stopped being hers.
When Diane arrived she gasped and touched Trixie’s face. “I know,” Trixie said. She explained the scratches and told Diane about the welling of panic that had sent her sprawling, the fear that something would find her in the dark.
“Well,” Diane said, “you aren’t getting any younger, now are you?” She raised her eyebrows. “Did your ghost come back?”
She was tempted to confess the episode in the car, but something in Diane’s tone prevented it—an amused restraint, colored with the hope that the answer would be no, that the delusion, if that’s what it was, had stopped. Instead, she told about her grandchildren, that they might be brought to her soon.
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I’m not.”
“So what will you say?” Diane said, happy to get off the subject she had brought up. Trixie shrugged.
“I don’t know. You’re the one who has a way with words. You tell me.”
Diane shook her head. “Not a chance.”
“I don’t even know how to start thinking about it. I’m at quite a loss.”
A waitress came and they ordered lunch. “You know,” Diane said, “it might help you to write down your thoughts. Script it. When Frank and I were divorcing, I always took notes before we met. I kept them on note cards in my pocket. Never had to pull them out, but it helped knowing they were there.”
“That’s a thought.”
“I say, give ‘em something to think about someday. Make it a visit they’ll remember.”
“But won’t tell anyone about,” Trixie said, and thought for the first time of the risk that Edward was taking to try this. A cloud of doubt and guilt drifted through her and she took a deep breath.
They ate, talking about other, easier things, and paid their bill. As they parted, affection swelled in Trixie, the kind you get when leaving on a trip of indefinite duration, when you tell somebody you’ll see them again someday. “You’ve been such a friend,” she said, and almost wept at the sound of the words, thin and empty out on the sidewalk, against the noise of traffic. Diane took her hand. “Well, I’ll keep on being one,” she said, but Trixie could see she was afraid to be moved, as if she saw, in her friend’s confusion, her own future, and wanted desperately to believe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Driving home, she noticed the handprints were still visible on her dashboard, not yet covered by new dust. She reached out during a red light and fitted her own, smaller hand into the wide fingers of his. The surface was cold, and the cold seeped into her, stiffening the fingers. She worked them, wiping the dust off onto her palm, and now there was another cleared space within the first in the spidery shape of her hand.
* * *
Edward called that night; the trip was set, and he would bring the children to her house on Sunday, sometime in the afternoon, as he drove them home. “Your name is Mrs. Kurtz.”
“Kurtz?”
“You’re the mother of a friend of mine, okay?”
“What’s the friend’s name?”
A pause. “Oh, Jesus…uh, Mark.”
“Mark Kurtz,” she repeated, trying to fix the name. Her son.
She had three days to prepare whatever she was going to say. When she’d hung up, she looked through her kitchen drawers for a package of note cards she thought she had. She didn’t find them. Eventually she uncovered a yellow legal pad, its pages dusty and brittle with age, and pulled it out from under a pile of pot holders and dishrags. She threw it onto her table, where it shone dully under the kitchen lamp, and turned back to the drawers for something suitable to write with. A pencil. It was unsharpened, clean and yellow and untouched by anyone but her. With a kitchen knife, she shaved it to a point, then she sat down at the table, the legal pad before her, and set the pencil to it.
It was harder to start than she’d imagined: the memories that had surfaced were less parts of a narrative than evocative and fleeting images, and she could no more commit them to paper than she could justly describe a painting or symphony. There were no words at her disposal other than the words she recalled people saying. When she started, finally, it was at the beginning of her family history as she knew it: My parents, she wrote, came to Great Falls from the state of New York.
She was up late that night, setting her story in motion. She found that her efforts to describe one incident stirred up memories of others, until, by the time she usually went to sleep, her head was so spinning with stories that she could barely write them down fast enough. Her handwriting became nearly unintelligible, and she whittled her pencil into a little pile of graphite dust and wood shavings that steadily grew beside the paper.
She slept lightly, and in the morning emptied her shoebox of Hamish’s things onto the bed. She sifted through them, holding each item for a moment in the hope that it would surrender something of the past. The box itself gave off a rich, musty odor that she recognized as an element of the old kitchen; this reminded her of the grave silence of family dinners in Hamish’s presence, during his days of construction work, and how after his absence he was never mentioned, not once, by any of them during dinner.
Her memories of Schatze yielded a sense of their bedroom back in Great Falls, the yellow window shades with their dark stripes, and the single bowed floorboard at the foot of the closet that made a bench for Schatze’s dolls. She remembered her parents’ discussions, which she listened to from the top of the stairs when she couldn’t sleep. They argued affectionately about how they thought the world was put together, sometimes for hours, and though Trixie didn’t understand what they meant, she always was confident that the world was put together well, hearing it from their lips.
These three days of recollection were a kind of bliss for Trixie. She understood, writing, that it was a rare concentration, one she was not likely to see again. She had, for the first time in many years, a real sense of herself and what came before her. It was like talking to the dead, asking them those things she had always wanted to know. For the moment she let herself forget about what she would tell the children. Such was her state that she assumed she would come up with the perfect thing when the time came.
But then it did, and she had nothing. She was in the bathroom, trying to cover up the marks on her face, when Edward’s knock came at the door. He came in before she had a chance to answer it. “Mrs. Kurtz!” he said, to her puzzlement: she had completely forgotten about the assumed name. She hadn’t seen her son in a year. He had a thick beard now, the same color his father’s hair had been before he left—dark, dark brown, with strands of gray bright throughout, like moonlight. She went to him and hugged him.
“Hello, Edward,” she said, and she marveled again at how much he felt like Hamish, and how his smell, that smoky, cherry brandy smell, was so familiar to her, his childhood smell intensified with age.
And then she saw them over his shoulder, standing in the doorway, backlit and shadowed by the light outside, and remembered her role. “Mark,” she said. “Does Mark look well?” Could Edward hear the apprehension in her voice? Could the children?
“He’s excellent, Mrs. Kurtz.”
“Oh, good.” She had prepared nothing, in her worry over what to say. Did she have tea or coffee? Cookies for the children? “This must be your nephew and niece.”
“Mrs. Kurtz,” he said, “this is Rachel, and this is David.”
The children stepped into the house and Rachel, like an adult, closed the door behind her. “Hi,” David was saying, his eyes straying around the house.
“It’s nice to meet you.” There was nothing of her in David’s face. But then, in response, he hung his head just slightly, his neck vanishing into his shoulders, and she recognized in the gesture her farher, that strange manifestation of his politeness. She thought of the stack of yellow pages in her pocket, that this was something she would add to it.
“I’m Rachel,” Rachel said, and Trixie was astonished—the little girl might have passed for Schatze. She stood perfectly still, wearing a simple dress and sneakers. How Trixie wanted to tell Edward! But she couldn’t, not right now.
“It’s nice to meet you, dear,” she said, trembling.
“Mrs. Kurtz.” It was Edward, at her side now, touching her shoulder. “Did you hurt yourself? Your face.”
“I had a spill out on the path.”
“You have a path?” David said. “We saw a mountain goat and elks.”
“You did!”
He nodded. “And this huge bird.”
“A raven,” Edward said.
“Except real big, like this.” And he held his arms out.
And then Rachel suddenly said, “How do you know Uncle Edward?” It was not quite an accusation, but Trixie feared, for a moment, that they had been found out.
“His friend Mark is my son,” she said, quietly.
“Did we meet Mark?” Rachel asked Edward.
“No.”
They were all quiet, and then Rachel, satisfied, went to the cupboard and peered through the glass doors.
Trixie broke the silence. “Well,” she said. “Let me see what I have to eat.” She went to the cabinets over the sink and found some ginger snaps and chocolate syrup. She got the milk from the refrigerator and mixed it up for the children, who had found their way, along with Edward, to the table. The three sat there silently as Trixie set out the cookies and milk. David thanked her and drank his milk immediately; Rachel smiled and took a single sip before pushing it subtly away. She was a serious girl, nothing at all like Schatze in manner. “David,” she said.
“What?”
“Say your prayers.”
Trixie and Edward exchanged looks as the children bent over the table, their hands folded before them as if they concealed some found treasure. The girl’s voice had real authority. When they had finished, David set upon the cookies but Rachel did not.
“Edward tells me you live in Butte,” Trixie said to them. “Do you like it there?”
“Yes, very much,” Rachel said. David nodded.
“Do you get to go camping much?”
“Mommy doesn’t like it,” David said.
“Because she’s so busy,” his sister added, with a note of warning in her voice. Her eyes turned to Trixie and lingered there, sizing something up. Trixie turned away.
In the silence that followed, Edward talked about the trip: they had gone into the backcountry, where they slept two nights in a rustic cabin, cooked over a fire, and took long hikes. David interrupted several times to add his observations, but Rachel only sat and listened.
“It was real cold,” David said. “I wore gloves to bed.”
“Shoes too,” Edward said.
“Rachel,” Trixie said now, “how did you like the park?”
“It was glorious,” she said soberly. “I’d like to go again.”
“I’m sure you’ll get the chance,” Edward told her.
They went outside to take a walk. David ran back to the edge of the woods and Rachel walked quickly after him, leaving Trixie alone with Edward. She turned to him, keeping her distance in case the children were watching, and said, “Thank you.”
“I wish we could be out in the open.” He looked about to cry.
She nodded. “They remind me of you and Kat.”
“Maybe,” he said, smiling. “David’s a little more thick-skinned than I was. And Rachel’s cleverer than her mother.”
“She is clever.”
“Yes.”
They grinned at each other. “You go alone with them,” he said. “I’ll stay back.”
“All right. I love you, Edward. I feel like I haven’t been mother enough.”
“I haven’t been son enough either, I guess, out in the woods.” He sighed. “I’ll come for Thanksgiving, if you’ll be here.”
“I will,” she said, and took his hands.
Out back, David was calling to Rachel as he ran about: “Look at this! Look at this!” Rachel followed him at a distance, like a worried parent, and made no response.
On the path, David ran ahead, calling back to them about the things he saw. “Don’t go too far!” Trixie yelled to him, and to Rachel she said, “This is where I fell the other day. I don’t want him hurting himself.”
“He gets excited,” Rachel said, and then, without the slightest change in tone: “I know who you are.”
Trixie did not stop walking. Rachel was a stride behind her, her light steps making almost no sound on the trail. If not for her words, it would have been easy to think she wasn’t there at all.
“What do you mean?”
“Mom has pictures of you and her and Uncle Edward.” She paused, waiting perhaps for a reaction. Trixie didn’t give it to her. “She keeps them hidden, but I found them.”
Ahead, David left the path and ran into the trees, toward the ruin of an old stone springhouse. The spring, Trixie knew, was dry. She stopped and turned on her granddaughter.
“You mustn’t tell your mother. She doesn’t want me to see you.”
“She says you died.”
“I know that.”
“She says you drove Grandpa to drink.”
Trixie knelt in the dirt. In the pocket of her jeans, the papers crackled. “Don’t tell her. She would be very angry at your uncle.”
Rachel seemed to consider this. She took a handful of her dress and bunched it in her fist. When she let go, the creases remained. “I won’t tell,” she said.
“All right,” Trixie said. “I trust you.”
Later she would wonder what sent her hand to her pocket for the sheaf of papers. By the time they were out, she had reconsidered, but there they were between her fingers, like an ill-spoken confession that couldn’t be taken back.
“What’s that?” Rachel set her hand on the papers but didn’t take them.
“It’s about our family.”
Her eyes narrowed. “It’s for me?”
Trixie pushed the papers toward her. “Yes.”
Rachel took them, unfolded them, looked for a moment at the writing. “Okay,” she said, and refolded them and slipped them into the pocket of her dress.
Trixie took her arm and held her fast. “You mustn’t tell.”
“I said,” she said. “I thought you trusted me.” Her eyes, gray and brave, her grandfather’s eyes, met Trixie’s and held them there. “You do, don’t you?”
Trixie tightened her grip. “I do,” she said, and let go.