NOVEMBER 25, 2011
Thanksgiving was yesterday: Deb brought a small turkey, green beans, mashed potatoes. Vale came. Not all that different than any other day. Was it once? When they were girls?
Hazel looks out the window and sees a girl in a gray sweater walking into the mist-filled woods. Lena?
Once, that summer their mother died, Hazel found Lena knee-deep in the creek, naked, her dress in the leaves beside her.
Hazel wrapped her own sweater around her sister’s naked shoulders and said, “Come.”
But Lena just smiled. Her body cold. Shivering. “The leaves, they look like rubies, don’t they?” Face lit up, glowing. Leaves and sticks tangled in her hair.
“Yes, they do, Lena. Time to come home,” Hazel said, taking her sister’s arm and lifting her up, gathering her dress, walking her home across that field.
Is this Lena now, headed toward the woods? Hazel puts on her jacket and walks out to the porch. “Lena,” she calls out, but the girl doesn’t turn around.
Hazel pulls her collar up around her neck. A cold morning. Brutally so. A fierce wind. The girl turns and waves and grins and keeps walking, and so Hazel follows.
She hasn’t been into the woods for so long. The mess of it surprises her: its many roots, fallen branches, and blackberry canes near impossible to pass over. She’s never liked the woods—has always preferred the clean order of fields. But she continues, following the girl, stumbling over a fallen tree and catching herself, standing upright. When her breath returns, the girl is gone. Hazel braces herself against a pine tree and closes her eyes. She’s dizzy, spinning uncontrollably, her head throbbing.
It’s five in the morning and she’s young again. She wakes at the crack of dawn to the rooster’s crow and the sky’s slow blueing. She rolls over to wake Lex, to say “milk” into his ear, but the bed is empty.
It’s not the first time. Those sheets vacant beside her. Hazel rises, pulls her nightgown up and over her head, looks down at her body, caught in this early morning light. She is thirty-five years old and still young. Flat stomach, full breasts, strong legs.
She gets dressed and turns to look out the window: Lex’s truck in the driveway. No lights from the kitchen windows, no lights on in the barn.
Outside it’s cool, already the mornings so dark here on the hill, just a pale moon setting over the trees on the west side of the pasture.
“Lex,” she calls out at the door of the barn, but there’s no answer, just the cows’ restless shuffling, the low storm of their voices rising.
Hazel goes to the woodshed, but the woodshed is empty. She goes to the edge of the field, but it is empty, too.
She heads up the old logging road to the camp where Lena lives, not sure why she’s going that way.
The cabin is quiet, all stillness, woodsmoke rising from its thin tin chimney. There’s something near the door, a familiar shape.
She steps closer. Takes a deep breath. Her husband’s boots. Cracked leather she’s oiled many times.
Hazel stands still, twenty feet away, her hands by her sides, breathing in the cold air.
Goddamn, she whispers to the pines on her way back down the hill. Goddamn to the grass and leaves and ferns underfoot, to the sunshine that touches her brow. To the mountain, to the spring, to the house, to the barn, to the boy, in that second-story bedroom, sleeping: Goddamn.
Hazel turns and a spruce branch whips across her cheek, drawing blood. What on earth is she doing out here in the woods? Her stomach is in knots. There is no girl. You fool, there is no girl. Her arms and limbs and face are cold. Swamp water pools around her feet, soaking through her shoes.
She turns to make her way back to the clearing, just visible through the trees. Not far, she tells herself, her body shaking, her socks soaked through.
She’s almost back to the house when she stumbles. Falls, there behind the barn. There’s a cracking sound, and an unbearable pounding in her head. A streak of pain shoots up from her left side, and she feels a pool of wet leak from between her legs. Jesus no, she thinks. Lying still. Trying to breathe. Will I be found? Also: the unbearable indignity.