Marika lived on the northeastern shore of Lake Champlain five miles from the Canadian border, six miles from the nearest town, on a tapering stretch of land called the Neck. Most cottages along the Neck were invisible from the road, announced by names painted on gray boards or canoe paddles nailed to tree trunks. Names that grew fewer as the pine, spruce, and oak trees grew denser. Lorna didn’t recall this part of the lake as being so heavily forested or as feeling so remote, and began to think they were lost.
But just as she decided they should turn around, she spotted a boulder on the left side of the road painted in flaking white paint with the number she was searching for. At the end of a narrow rutted driveway was a one-story, brown-shingled cottage with green trim, deeply shaded by trees.
It was more or less the cottage she remembered from her visit years before, though more weathered, the shingles speckled with lichen and the roof so thickly carpeted with dry pine needles that it looked almost thatched. They parked beside a pile of stacked wood and got out of the car. Except for the creak of branches and the intermittent calls of small birds from somewhere high above, it seemed extraordinarily quiet; the air was clear, and there was a feeling that comes sometimes with being on a northern lake, that it looked the same as it had fifty, even a hundred years ago.
Leaving Adam to give Freddy a walk, Lorna made her way to the back door. Through the baggy screen the kitchen was dark and empty. “Hello?” she called. After knocking twice, she tried the door handle and found it unlocked. “Hello?” she repeated, stepping inside. “Anybody home?”
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim kitchen, which smelled sharply of mildew. A linoleum counter materialized, knotty pine cabinets. Dripping faucet. And then she made out a closed second door, next to the refrigerator, glowing around the edges and leading to the rest of the house.
“Hello?” Lorna had a hand on the latch of that second door, already preparing herself for Marika’s protests: Shouldn’t have come all this way. A lot of fuss over nothing. And to say in return: Oh, no, it was no trouble. Glad to give you a hand, glad to get Adam out of the house. But even as she lifted the latch, it was impossible to ignore that what she really wanted to do was turn around while there was still time and head back out to her car.
“Hello?” she called again, opening the door.
A flood of late afternoon sunlight struck her full in the face, pouring through a picture window overlooking the lake, shining off the water and into the house, reflecting off the ceiling, walls, floorboards. All the windows were closed and in that brilliant, shut room the mildew smell from the kitchen mingled with woodsmoke and something faintly sulphurous. Lorna put up a hand to shield her eyes. Only then could she see an armchair, positioned to face the lake, and in it a dark motionless figure.
How long did she stand in the doorway before saying, “Marika”?
Slowly the old woman in the chair stirred and sat up, struggling a little. But she didn’t turn around, only crossed her arms and stared at the blazing window in front of her.
“It’s just me,” Lorna said, her pulse quieting. “I just got here. How are you feeling?”
No response.
“Your neighbor Dennis told you he called me, didn’t he? I tried you a couple times yesterday, but then figured your ankle might make it hard for you to get to the phone.” Lorna moved to stand by the armchair, putting her back to the window in order to see into the room. Rebuff was expected. Don’t make too much out of it.
“Dennis said you needed some help.”
Marika did look up then. From behind the lenses of her glasses, her pale blue eyes were huge and watery.
“I don’t need any help. I can take care of myself.”
She was dressed in baggy knit slacks and a long-sleeved navy shirt, a white tissue tucked in at one wrist. Her short gray hair appeared to be unwashed and more unevenly cut than usual, and she looked thinner since last Thanksgiving, more shrunken, her head sunk between her shoulders, her long fingers swollen, knuckly and purplish. A pair of needles and a length of knitting lay in her lap.
“Well, your friend Dennis was worried about your ankle.” Lorna eyed a stick leaning against one of the armchair’s faded-chintz armrests. Not a cane, but a stick. Covered in pine bark, a twig sprouting near the top.
“He’s not my friend,” said Marika.
A black fly bumped against a side window. Lorna watched it fumble at the pane as she sat down on the brown corduroy sofa opposite Marika’s chair. The room was stifling. “I’m sorry to hear that. In any case,” she said, once more shielding her eyes from the sun. “Here I am. And guess who’s with me?”
Marika picked up her needles, silhouetted against the bright window. “Your grandson,” said Lorna more loudly. “He’s out walking Freddy. He can stay outside if you don’t want him in the house. Freddy, I mean.”
Again no response. Marika began working her needles.
By now the trepidation Lorna had felt in the kitchen, her brief panic after opening the door and confronting that still figure in the armchair, had given way to exasperation. So far this encounter was becoming just another version of Marika’s Thanksgiving visits, full of exaggerated consideration on Lorna’s part and exaggerated refusal on Marika’s, when it was hard to offer her so much as a cup of coffee without Marika insisting she didn’t need anything. A standoff that was grueling for them both.
One that had begun eighteen years earlier, almost to the day, when Lorna had carried Adam into this same room, had sat with him on this same sofa. Nothing had changed. The intense light from the window. The silence. The constriction in her chest, the breathless unreality of regarding this frowning woman who was her mother. Although back then there had also been the dislocating shock of how old Marika was, how pale and shapeless and gray, that she wore glasses, and was dressed in an oversized yellow T-shirt with a brown stain near the collar and faded dungarees. No resemblance to the glamorous, aloof figure of memory, with her long blond hair, lipstick, and cigarettes. Followed by the realization that not only had Marika taken no pains with her appearance for this reunion—unlike Lorna, in a new blouse and skirt—but had made no offer of anything to eat or drink, had uttered no welcoming pleasantries. This is your grandson, Lorna had said as soon as she sat down. But how could Adam’s small bare feet, waving as he wriggled in her lap, how could his tiny fat hand, reaching for a stuffed blue rabbit held out for him, bear any relation to that indifferent, slack creature in the armchair?
The room had been hot and close then, too, as Lorna made nervous small talk about the drive, Adam’s teething, Roger who was at a medical conference in Detroit, their wedding in Wellfleet two years before, and asked polite questions that went mostly unanswered. The old woman listened, or appeared to listen, but said nothing. In response to Lorna’s letter asking if she could visit and bring Adam, Marika had written, I look forward to seeing you both. Yet presented with Lorna and a baby in the flesh, she seemed to have no interest in either; in fact, she seemed almost offended by their presence. After half an hour, she announced she was tired and said they should go to their motel. Could we meet later for dinner? Lorna had asked. Marika said, Let’s not make a fuss. Maybe I will see you tomorrow. Fine, said Lorna, shocked all over again by this dismissal. Fine, I understand.
But as she stood to leave, hugging Adam so tightly he started to cry, she’d turned to the old woman and said fiercely: I came up here because I want him to know he has a grandmother. And then she drove home. What a waste, she told Roger that night on the phone, reaching him at his hotel. I will never do that again. Yet that fall she had written once more to Marika, this time to invite her to Thanksgiving, “just for the day.” And Marika had responded by appearing annually at Thanksgiving from then on, so that she could be seen to exist.
Hard to make less of a fuss than that.
Still, you couldn’t deny that those Thanksgiving visits had created at least the semblance of a relationship. During dinner, for instance, when everyone was eating and talking, it was possible to imagine that Marika was glad to be included, even if she wasn’t joining the conversation; she always ate heartily and after dinner sat in the living room watching the football game with Roger while Lorna did the washing up. It had been worth it, these arduous holiday performances. Roger was an only child and his parents had both died when he was in medical school, leaving Marika as the only surviving grandparent. Lorna had wanted to give Adam the feeling of being part of an extended family. Appearances did matter. Showing up mattered, even if done perversely, belatedly. Something even Marika recognized. Why else send that postcard of the lake from Vermont, all those years ago?
As for Marika’s current rudeness, she must be frightened by her fall, by the prospect of having to depend on other people. Which must be why she hadn’t answered when Lorna called out and knocked a few minutes ago, and why the door from the kitchen was closed, and why she was treating this visit as an invasion.
“I’ve gotten us a motel room,” Lorna said. “We can go there whenever you want, but I’d like to unpack the groceries I brought along.” She focused again on the fly’s gyrations. “And I’d like to take a look at your ankle.”
Marika shifted one foot. “You’re looking at it.”
“Does it hurt?”
A shrug.
Lorna settled back against the sofa. Early in their marriage, she’d sometimes tried to describe her work to Roger, and he would tease her by pretending not to understand the point of it. Screwed-up people are like everyone else, he’d say, only more screwed up. What’s the big deal?
Okay, she thought. Try it that way.
“I can see that you’re not in the mood for conversation right now.” This was a tactic that often worked with uncommunicative clients. “That’s fine. We don’t have to talk. It was a long drive. I’m fine just sitting here with you.”
The silence that followed held a note of surprise. Lorna sensed some sort of recalculation taking place within the old woman opposite her, an impression reinforced by the way she shifted in her armchair, moving her hips from side to side, as if suddenly finding her seat cushion uncomfortable.
A cloud had drifted over the sun; the lake was now clearly visible through the picture window, a wide shining expanse interrupted here and there by forested points and small islands, shading from green to pale blue as they receded toward paler-blue mountains. An astonishingly beautiful view that filled the entire room, which Lorna either had not noticed on that first visit or had forgotten. Below the house was a short wooden dock, and to the left of it, wedged into the rocks, was a cement urn planted with a lavender bush, in full bloom.
The room itself had the stark look of something unchanged but also provisional. Beside Marika’s armchair was an upended wooden crate and on it a small lamp with a dusty glass base. Knotty pine walls, rusty electric baseboards. An oval braided rag rug in dingy shades of brown and beige ran half the length of the room, halting at a squat black woodstove. The only other furniture was a picnic table, covered with a red-checked oilcloth, two wooden benches pushed underneath. A yellowed map of the lake was thumbtacked near the door to the kitchen.
Several times in the past few years, concerned about Marika’s old Volvo, Lorna had tried to inquire into her financial situation and had always received the same answer: I keep to my budget. Perhaps she should have kept asking, although the pine stick and the Spartan furnishings suggested something beyond thrift. A kind of frankness. A facing of facts.
“By the way, where’s your car?” Lorna asked. “I didn’t see it parked outside.”
The fly had returned to circle Marika’s head. She put down her needles and made a brisk movement with one hand, batting it away. Then she dragged the tissue from her sleeve and blotted her nose with an expression that was, if not welcoming, at least not a frown.
“So,” she said hoarsely after another moment, “what’s for dinner?”