The evening air had turned more humid, carrying the strong mineral scent of fresh water. Lorna emptied the dish tub at the edge of the driveway and then walked around the side of the cottage, where the chorus of frogs and crickets was joined intermittently by the banjo strum of a bullfrog. She climbed onto the deck. Through the lit windows, she could see the old woman asleep in her chair.
So far everything had gone pretty well, better than predicted. In fact, she could say she was cautiously optimistic. That initial scene in the living room had been awkward, but once Lorna had started making dinner, Marika seemed to grow resigned to this visit, even, in her own way, appreciative. And getting Adam out of his bedroom and off his laptop was turning out to be a minor miracle. He was on another walk with Freddy, using his phone as a flashlight.
She sat down in a weathered Adirondack chair. A bottle brush of pine needles was inked against the paling sky, and through the trees the lake glowed milk-blue. Fireflies glinted from clefts of darkness. Something was making her uneasy. What was it? At dinner she’d caught Marika staring across the table at Adam as if trying to remember his name, and he’d blanched when he realized she was looking at him. Maybe she should have mentioned something to Marika about his skin, explaining he was sensitive about it, that he was having an allergic reaction to hormonal changes. On the other hand, Marika had a mordant sense of humor that flashed out disconcertingly every so often; she might make a comment like: So, allergic to yourself, eh?
Lorna lay back in the Adirondack chair and looked up at the night sky, alive with stars. Dinner had actually been fine. Adam had apparently accepted her suggestion to be a flexible vegan, at least for now; he had eaten the pie, for instance. When asked if he wanted another slice he had not answered “Perchance” or “It seems so,” but nodded politely. Aside from that odd moment at the table, when Marika put a hand to her chest and closed her eyes—“Did she stop breathing?” Adam had asked in the kitchen, and surprised he’d noticed, Lorna said it seemed like indigestion—Marika had eaten with good appetite. And she’d finally explained what happened to her car: Engine died. Not worth fixing. But how do you get to town? Oh, I have a ride when I need it. She’d even asked after Roger. How’s Dr. Wiseberg? Still fussing with germs out there in Seattle? Viruses. He’s an epidemiologist. Well, said Marika. Hope nothing catches him.
It was the drive up with Adam that was bothering her. She hadn’t handled the revelation about Marika well; she’d meant to work up to it, but then she’d blurted everything out, unsettled by that long silence in the car. An old device, using her own difficulties to help Adam articulate his. Though was that what she had been hoping to do? It seemed to her now that she’d been trying to protect him from something.
Adam hadn’t seemed particularly disturbed, apart from his first startled questions; probably she had been too worried about his reaction. She and Roger could discuss all this when she called him later to say that she’d taken his advice and they were in Vermont. When it came to Adam, they could talk for hours. She was always frank with Roger. She tried to be honest when she thought she had failed Adam in some way, or when Roger said something insensitive, or obtuse, as he had the other night. He needs a job and a girlfriend, that’s what he needs. And Roger was frank with her; though he’d be the first to admit that “touchy-feely” language, as he still insisted on calling it, did not come to him naturally. Dr. Robot, Adam used to call him when they argued over homework.
So why had he asked how she was feeling?
Their marriage had ended as thoughtfully and generously as was possible. At the time, people probably blamed Roger. He could have stayed where he was, while for her a move would have meant surrendering her practice, which had taken decades to build, and uprooting Adam, who’d finally made some friends. Yet she had encouraged him to go; lately she’d sometimes wondered if, in some suppressed way, she had wanted him to go. They had come late into each other’s lives, and then Adam had been born so soon afterward. It was something she’d avoided examining too closely, yet the question had long been there, how they would have managed, if they hadn’t had Adam to talk about all the time. What would they have talked about instead? They might have traveled. Or taken up hiking, or maybe learned how to do something together, like woodworking, which two of her clients in couples’ therapy decided to try; they built a shed, and it had seemed to solve a problem for them, how to frame their relationship: sometimes their marriage was a house, sometimes a shed. But most likely, Lorna thought, shifting her gaze from the lake to the dish tub at her feet, she and Roger would have ended up as they had, apart, because the truth was they’d lived their own lives from the beginning. In some essential way, they’d kept to themselves.
Which didn’t mean they didn’t care about each other. She had been genuinely glad to see Roger receive the sort of recognition he’d been afraid would never come. His own lab. A team of researchers. They might be divorced, but they were still allied. No one had left anyone.
Something jumped in the lake with a silvery plunk.
Lorna looked up. She had planned to sit outside a little longer, enjoying the warm evening, but the press of dark trees around her, the small, absorbed rustling noises in the underbrush suddenly brought to mind a few tasks to finish before she and Adam could leave for the motel. With a sense of being tracked by many bright, unseen eyes, she picked up the dish tub and made her way back into the house.
A PAIR OF WHITE MOTHS stuttered around the overhead light in the kitchen as Lorna put away the last of the dishes. She hesitated for a moment, and then switched on the transistor radio set on the windowsill above the sink. A voice announced that the temperature was currently sixty-five degrees, with winds out of the southeast.
“What are you doing?” came Marika’s voice from the other room.
Lorna switched off the radio. “Just taking care of a few things.”
Hanging by the old-fashioned Frigidaire was one of those free calendars on thin paper that insurance agents send out at Christmas. E. G. Morse & Co. in Burlington had provided this one for 2019, a different bird for each month. June was a mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos. The entire month was empty. She lifted down the calendar to look at past months. Nothing scheduled on any of them.
Beside the black push-button telephone on the counter, and underneath a phone book, lay a yellow legal pad. The pad’s first twenty pages or so were folded back, each page divided into three columns, “Chores,” “Weather,” “Visitors,” and filled with line after line of cursive handwriting. Marika once said nuns at her convent school rapped girls’ knuckles with a ruler if they did not properly loop their l’s or finish their f’s. The letters had grown larger in the past years; l’s and f’s sprawled across each page.
Each entry was dated. Chores ranged from “housework” to sweeping pine needles off the deck. On Tuesdays Marika did her grocery shopping. Every Friday she listed the same errands: “CVS, library, P.O.” This past week the weather had been logged as “fair” and “warm” with temperatures noted. Under “Visitors” over the past two months were different birds at the bird feeder, a raccoon that got into the trash cans, a meter reader, and Dennis, recorded every Tuesday and Friday. Here, it seemed, was Marika’s ride. Dennis was also listed several times next to notations like “deck stain” and “grout.”
“What are you doing in there?” Marika called from the living room.
Lorna slid the legal pad under the phone book. “Almost done.”
Snooping. That’s what she was doing. Like Wade when they were children, going through dresser drawers and poking into closets, snitching a handkerchief, a matchbook, hunting for “clues.” Sometimes they would go on missions through the house together, pretending to find cameras in light switches and microphones in toothpaste caps.
In the living room every light was off but the lamp by Marika’s armchair, which flickered every so often as if the bulb was going out. Lorna set the bottle of Hennessy, brought as a gift, and two glasses on the picnic table, poured cognac into each glass, handed one to Marika, and sat down on the sofa.
“Proost,” said Marika, raising her glass. She took a sip and went back to knitting. Within the warm sphere of lamplight, she looked almost benign, only the small garnet earrings she always wore burning a little.
“So how have you been up here?” asked Lorna.
“Well, we’re desperate for rain.”
“It hasn’t rained? It rained at home last night. The weather app on my phone said it rained here, too.”
“Hasn’t rained in weeks,” said Marika positively.
The moths had followed Lorna into the room and were batting against the lampshade. She looked at the dark window and then glanced at her watch, tired after the drive, and ready to head to the motel. But Adam was still on a walk with Freddy; so in an effort to find something to talk about, aside from the weather, she asked how deep the lake was. Marika said she didn’t know, that nobody knew.
“Someone must know.” Lorna yawned. “Isn’t there something that’s supposed to live at the bottom of it? Like the Loch Ness Monster?”
Marika didn’t answer and continued knitting, pausing every so often for a sip of cognac. Lorna forgot to drink hers, listening to the ticking needles and watching the loose blue weave purl between them.
“I bet it’s cold up here in the winter,” she said eventually.
“Not too bad,” said Marika.
“But most of your neighbors must head south.” Lorna saw Marika make a face. “It must get pretty quiet,” she continued, picturing the empty kitchen calendar, the birds and the raccoon under “Visitors.”
“No,” said Marika.
Lorna took a sip of cognac. Her statement to Adam earlier in the car came back to her: You can get through all kinds of things by not thinking about them. There must be a whole lake’s worth of things that Marika did not think about. She drank the rest of her cognac and set the glass on the floor.
“I guess my question is whether you ever feel lonely?”
“Lonely?” Marika stopped knitting.
“Well, you’re pretty hidden away up here.”
The lamp flickered and for an instant Marika seemed to disappear. Just then Lorna heard Adam out in the driveway, telling Freddy to get in the car. The car door slammed and a few moments later the kitchen door opened. “Freddy just puked,” he called.
Lorna cast a quick look at Marika and got up from the sofa. In the kitchen Adam was standing by the screen door, drinking a glass of water.
“He ate something,” Adam said. “A stick or something.”
“Well, he does that sometimes.” Glancing again at her watch, Lorna said, “It’s getting late. Let’s go say good night to your grandmother.”