4

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE CHILL THAT PENETRATED their hearts in the night, the miasmas that formed from their own breath, condensing on the ceiling of the lean-to, dripping down upon them in the early morning hours, but by then, in any case, all winter’s creatures had begun their work.

Emily and William talked of weighty matters a great deal—rather abstract things by grown-up lights, but almost fleshily concrete in the mind of a young person, for whom conviction is the very bread of life—and how was Emily to know which topics were best left alone? So it was that they were talking one day of how things might be going “down south,” with the election campaign fully underway, with the inner cities perhaps in flames in the wake of the latest horror, another assassination, a fresh campaign of police repression, the all-but-formal imposition of martial law by National Guard troops.

“Do you ever think,” Emily asked, “that maybe this is running away, hiding from everything that’s terrible?”

“You mean that I ought to be there? Like fighting against it?”

“Maybe. Or trying to do something to change it.”

“I thought you knew,” William said, “that it was too late for that.”

“Maybe,” Emily said. “I just don’t think people ought to give up so easily.”

“This isn’t giving up,” said William, and thought how he might retrieve the amity between them. “And I thought you thought it was good here?”

“I do. I do,” Emily said, and felt how unconvinced this sounded even as she said it. And then, because they did care about what it was they were trying to persuade one another of but had no means to advance it any further, they fell silent. They were silent as William fished, and even though silence was supposed to be conducive to successful fishing, fewer fish than usual came. Emily bailed and the cold water in the bottom of the canoe felt weightier, seemed thicker than it had a week before. She tried to read her poems, but the lines would not hold together: The words bounced around like Ping-Pong balls, spastically, like popcorn popping.

The night was worse. They did not make love, although they held each other. It seemed there was not a sound in the lean-to, not even that of breathing; only a faint ticking that Emily was sure she could hear, the sound of William aching or seething.

Finally she pressed up against him and said, “I love you. I love you more than anything.” This was yielding everything she had to yield, if not, she felt, conceding everything she believed that William did not believe. For were she to do that, who would have been left to love him?

William turned over and said, “I love you too. I just want us to be together. Forever.” He put his arms around her and pulled her close, as though he was cradling her, reassuring her.

But it was Emily who replied, “Of course you do. And so do I.” Then they began to make love, very slowly, cautiously, their flesh seeming to each other a little tender and sore. Even as William thrust toward his climax and, signaled by the way she gripped his neck with one hand and his buttock with the other, Emily rose to hers, they did not move very fast; no faster really than their usual canoe stroke or Emily’s bailing, scooping and pouring, the last of the bilgewater dripping heavily onto the blue-black oil of the gelling lake.

In the morning, all was well again; as it was before, save that it was colder today than the previous day, even as yesterday had been colder than the day before it. Because the fish had been a little recalcitrant in their usual places, William thought that they should try paddling southwest, down the shore in the direction of Nelson’s store. They certainly would not travel that far, but at the point (perhaps a mile out from the island) where they were about to turn around, they noticed the house on the shore, the same summer cottage they first noticed five and a half weeks before when they first paddled in, the only habitation between them and Nelson’s store.

It was clearly closed for the season, just as it had been before. There was no smoke from the chimney and, looking closer, it was apparent that the shutters had been fastened. William looked back to Emily in the stern of the canoe and said, “Let’s go look.” And Emily nodded her assent.

They landed the canoe on the stony beach. There was a wooden stairway ascending the bluff on which the cottage was situated, and at the base of it, several sections of dock, removed from the lake and stacked for the winter. William and Emily pulled the bow up onto the shore—even with nothing in it except the three small fish William had caught it seemed heavy—and then they climbed the stairs.

At the top, the house sat in a grove of big jack pines and the ground was covered in their rusty needles. There was a front door giving onto a little porch, but Emily followed William, who was tracking slowly around the side of the house. At the back was another door, a propane tank, and a road leading into the woods bordered by electrical and telephone poles. There was a little shed that housed the well pump, and another in which firewood had been stacked.

William was surprised to find a real house—not a shack or a trapper’s cabin—so deep in the woods, and more surprised when he tried the door to discover it was unlocked.

“I wonder if it’s a good idea to go in,” Emily said.

“If they were so concerned to keep people out, they’d keep it locked,” William said. “Besides, I read how it’s the custom in the far north to leave these places open. In case somebody needs to hole up during a blizzard. A trapper or somebody.”

“I don’t know.”

“We’re not going to hurt anything. Or even touch anything, okay?” And William pushed the door open and Emily followed.

There was nothing remarkable about the interior of the cottage, although it was a little difficult to see by the single long rhombus of light the open back door let in. William tried a switch and to his surprise found that the lights went on; that they were standing in a kitchen, paneled in pine, giving onto a larger room, similarly paneled with a big hooked rug on the floor, a fireplace, and three doors that probably led to bedrooms. There was a stack of lawn furniture by the front door, and, next to those, a croquet set, paddles and oars, fishing gear, and inflatable rafts and water toys.

Emily sees all this, but she sees more, or perhaps at a slightly different level of magnification than William. She sees—or, really, senses—that this is not the house of an Arnie Nelson or Fred Peterson or some other local person, but belongs to a family, and it is a family more or less like hers. She can tell this from the same gear that William has seen, but also from the potholders (made from stretchy loops on a frame at summer camp) in the kitchen, the olive-green napkins and place mats piled on the counter, the unused components from Chinese dinner meal-kits in the cupboards, and the epigram burned onto a tranche of diagonally cut birch log, coated in shellac, and hung on the wall.

Entering one of the bedrooms, Emily can also tell that this is the room of a girl just like her. She can tell by the smell of Noxzema mixed with some other scent—of damp or unwashed hair?—the smell of a girl her age. She sits on the bed for a moment, fingers one of the knobs of chenille on the bedspread, knows that if she opens the nightstand drawer inside there will be one pinecone, a couple of Betty and Veronica comics, and paperbacks of The Great Gatsby and The Spoon River Anthology from last summer’s school reading list. She gets up and looks in the other bedrooms: One tiny one is clearly that of the boys (she thinks there are two) and the other belongs to the parents, which bears the scents of grown-up sophistication; of hairspray, medicine, and mothballs.

All this is making Emily unaccountably sad. She misses these people, these people whom she does not even know, but who are just like her; who, for all she knows, sit two pews back from her every Sunday at mass; who travel in the same model of station wagon as her family does; who play Scrabble and Clue and do crossword puzzles (but only here, only together, during the summer); whose mother is pious and good; whose father is a hero, who regards his daughter with naked adoration.

The house affected William too. It disturbed him. In fact, it diminished him when he thought of everything he had done to bring himself and Emily into the wilderness and to make a home in it—to make it a real and authentic experience—and here sat, not a mile away, this exhibition of bourgeois living with its septic tank, its charcoal grill and Scotch cooler, and its three-horsepower Johnson outboard.

“We’d better go,” he said, and Emily nodded. They switched out the light, slipped out the back door again, and returned to their canoe, to their three fish, and paddled wearily back to their island.