Alone, that winter, I often thought of Mrs. Abel. She was the last person I’d spent much time with—even if or because so much of that time was silent, out in that black, mesmeric water.
My neighbors in Mount Pleasant, whose houses weren’t close, never came over to introduce themselves. However, I liked to believe that they were curious about me; I walked past their houses, slowly along the sidewalk-less, icy street to the supermarket, where I’d stand in the parking lot with the cold handset of the payphone against my face, calling my parents.
This was before cell phones, and before email, before the internet. I had no phone in that little adobe house. I wrote letters. I wrote to the girls in Salt Lake City, and to my ex-girlfriend, and long letters to Mrs. Abel.
Just last week, in my rummaging through these boxes, I found a 3.5-inch square diskette that had BACK UP 1993–95? written on it. I pulled the thin metal plate against its spring, looked at the black disc, there, burned with old matter.
It’s been over ten years since I had a machine with a disk drive that could read that diskette. But I took it to the technology people at the college where I teach, and they unlocked it. Even though some files were damaged, and even if I had been writing with a word processor that no longer exists, they accessed this artifact:
February 11, 1995
Hello, hello,
I just realized that I don’t think I’ve ever said your name to you, that there isn’t a name that I call you. I can’t remember if I ever heard you say my name. That’s okay.
You can tell by the postmark that I am back in Utah. Where are you? I’ll send this to Ephraim and hopefully they’ll forward it.
I stayed there until November, only.
I am living here in a two-room adobe house with a bathtub and toilet in my bedroom, behind a screen. The postmistress told me that the house has two front doors because it was built for the wives of a polygamist. The threshold between the rooms is pock-marked and rounded by sheep’s hooves because the house was used to shelter sheep for twenty years, before a friend of mine’s mother fixed it up. I have a barn and a pasture and at the edge of the pasture are bare trees. In one of them is a huge tangle of sticks, an eagle’s nest, though I haven’t seen the eagles. Not yet.
The other day, I looked across the pasture and saw a woman in a bonnet, in the driveway of a distant house, climbing into a pickup truck.
How are you? I am fine. I miss you, I think it’s all right to say that. Days go by, here, where I don’t talk to anyone, don’t say a word. There’s only one grocery store, no swimming pool. I miss swimming.
My only friend here is a big black dog that must belong to a neighbor. This dog chases the snowplows, up and down the street, the white waves they make. He has one crooked foreleg, so maybe he caught a plow, once. He watches me writing, here, his face at the window and his breath steaming it up. He’s a very quiet dog. He never barks. If it’s a really cold night, I let him inside.
I wish we were swimming. There are things now I want to ask you that I didn’t (couldn’t). I wonder what you are doing. Sometimes I think about what if I were in Mr. Zahn’s house right now, up in Wisconsin in the winter, the way you asked me to. Would you have come and visited me? I don’t know.
The other day I walked to the grocery store and the woman at the deli counter asked me about my dog. I turned around and there he was: silent, watching me, sitting in the aisle. The lady asked me if he was a seeing eye dog and I told her he wasn’t even mine. But I got him out of the store, brought him back here to our street, wherever he belongs.
I thought you’d drowned. I was trying to stay close to you. I wish you could tell me more about what happened.
There’s no one here. At the grocery store, all the shopping carts are frozen together. But the adobe walls of this house are so thick that they hold the heat for days, even after the fire is out.
Here I forget what time it is. I lose pens, pencils, books, scissors. The woman who owns the house told me that a ghost lives here, and that the ghost is a little girl. I hope that this is true. The other night I woke up and it felt like someone had just touched the skin of my face and no one else was here.
The letter tapers off; it appears to be unfinished. Did I write more and, lacking bravery, delete some of it? Did I print it out and mail it?