Whether thinking of or consciously not thinking of my old girlfriend, I drove alone from Utah to Wisconsin, early in the summer of 1995, the summer after the summer of Mrs. Abel, about whom I was thinking.
I felt so strongly about her and I was uncertain of how I felt, really, or exactly what had happened, the summer before; I believed we might swim again, continue what we’d been doing—that at least things between us would settle in a way that I could understand.
My first night back, I walked down the beach to where the segments of Mrs. Abel’s pier were stacked on the stones. The doors to the space beneath her cabin were locked; I crept around to her back porch and peeked in the windows, into darkness and shadows.
The door rattled when I tried the knob. It was only locked by a hook and eye, and I went into the woods and broke off a twig, then worked it through the gap between door and frame; I lifted the hook free, heard its tiny cold settling.
Inside, sheets covered the furniture, the piano. Yellow boxes of mouse poison were torn open, bait scattered across the floor.
I pulled the sheet from the table Mr. Zahn had made and kneeled down. Taking hold of the lions’ wooden faces, I opened the drawers and secret compartments, all still empty except for the one that held Mr. Zahn’s heavy pocketknife. I picked it up, pulled the stubborn blade open; cloudy, yet its edge still sharp. I folded it again, put it in my pocket, then closed the drawer, and covered the table with the sheet again.
She’d taken the carved airplane with the bluebird on it; the hook where it had hung pierced the air, sharp and empty beneath the loft. I stepped closer, I climbed up the ladder and peeked at the empty mattress, stripped bare, its striped ticking, the metal of its buttons worn through.
Out the window, the silent lake was the same color as the sky, the line between them impossible to see. Tacked next to the window, the same picture of the fire in the forest, the leaves tossed above those flames, the trees’ branches alight. At the bottom of the slope, the little cabin with its one window. In the foreground, puddles of fire; overhead, a tilted crescent moon.
I took hold of that stiff, fragile sheet and pulled it loose, tearing a short line in the top margin, where the nail had been. Carefully, I folded the picture and put it in my back pocket.