I descended from Mrs. Abel’s loft; I locked the door behind me as best I could, then returned through the woods, which was more difficult and took longer than walking on the lake. The wind gusted, and icicles chimed together, breaking off to knife down silently into the snow around me.
By the time I reached the rental car, my feet were numb, my jeans covered in ice to the knee. The sky was darker in the trees, away from the glow of the lake.
The cow path up to the bluff was drifted in, impassable, so I drove around—up our road then onto the highway, doubling back on the road above.
There was no sign to Mr. Zahn’s place, but I knew which driveway it was, and it was drifted in, unplowed. I parked on the road, walked toward the house. As I came around the trees, however, there was nothing but an open field of snow in the moonlight, glowing faintly blue. There was no wreckage, no marks where the foundation had been—the house had disappeared, and everything was so silent.
I walked out into the field, across the glowing snow, into the space where that living room had been. I walked the perimeter of the house, tamping down the snow where the walls had rested.
I floundered, then, through the deep snow, to the edge of the trees. Under them, there was no boat. I kicked at the frozen ground until finally I dislodged some boards with faded paint on them, the wood all perforated with the teeth-marks of porcupines.
The cold moon shone down. The tires of the rental car spun, caught, and I drove back toward our road, through the trees, where my Aunt Dee’s house stretched dark against the lake.
Long and narrow, the house has been expanded since my grandparents’ time; it has windows on both sides, and I could see straight through it, the haunting white of the ice.
I found the hidden key, unlocked the door, then gathered my few things and carried them inside. I switched on the lights, turned on the heat, and kicked off my frozen boots.
The floor in the entryway was green slate, as it’s always been. On the walls, photographs of Dee’s grandchildren, and her children, my cousins, and even one or two of me—standing in shallow water, wearing a diaper, laughing or shouting. A note on the table welcomed me, explained how to use the complicated espresso machine, told me the password for the internet. I glanced up, across the sunken living room with its shag carpet; above the piano, a painting of my mother with Dee and their older sister, Sally, from sixty years before, when they were girls.
In the dark kitchen, I drank a glass of water, looking out at the ice, white beneath the moon. And then shadows shifted—a movement on the beach, through the sparse trees. I leaned forward, my forehead against the glass of the window. A shadow, a dark shape, hidden behind the tree. I hurried out of the kitchen, around the table. I unlocked the door, stepped out into the snow in my stocking feet.
“Who’s there?” I called.
A scrabbling of stones on the beach, a crashing into the underbrush. A tangle of dark limbs resolved itself into the shape of a deer just as it bounded away.
Back inside, I found my computer, opened it, turned it on, and connected myself to the rest of the world. Emails from students about setbacks they were suffering, messages from colleagues about upcoming meetings, another from my wife about a hike she and our daughters had taken, a story about the girls disappearing deep into a cave, and a picture of a note they found inside a hollowed out tree trunk:
I took off my coat; the house was warming up.
Searching the web, it didn’t take me long to find out what had happened to Mr. Zahn’s house. I suspected that it had merely been demolished, making way for a wealthy Chicagoan’s summer castle, but in fact it was being moved, relocated. A museum in Minnesota had purchased the house and had carefully taken it apart, piece by piece. They planned to reconstruct it exactly as it had been, to gather his far-flung carved animals and to repopulate those rooms.
Next, I carried my things down the short hallway, past the laundry room where we used to steal warm Fresca, where the badminton rackets were always kept. In the room where my grandfather once slept, blankets were piled high and thick on the single bed. I undressed and slid in beneath them. I closed my eyes and thought of Mr. Zahn’s house, the pieces of it all stacked somewhere, waiting to be put back together. I wondered about the museum workers, and I doubted they’d know about the secret compartments, that they’d understand where to press so those lions’ jaws would open. When the house is put back together I’ll go to that museum; I’ll wait until the security guard is distracted, and I’ll climb up and open that lion. I’ll see if there’s a message or story inside, waiting for me.
I switched on the bedside lamp and began to read The Hollow Tree, aware that my grandfather—wearing a cardigan sweater, golf slacks, maybe smoking a pipe—might have, years before, written the words in the very room where I was reading them.
He jumps from Montaigne (patron saint of all digressers), to Darwin, to something my mother said when she was five, to Spinoza, and then writes, “One thing that has always fascinated me is how big (in feet and inches, in pounds or stone) were the people I read and read about in history? What did they look like and act like precisely? Their biographies sometimes give some general specifications, usually not.”
His attention drifts in currents, crosscurrents, undercurrents. On the next page: “I’ve read many definitions of Zen. Here is a new one, ‘Merely becoming what we already are from the beginning.’ Below this in my journal is ‘The map is not the territory.’ That also sounds as if it means something.”
For two days I asked everyone I talked to—at the post office, the Piggly Wiggly, the AC Tap—but no one had any news of Mrs. Abel. If anyone asked me why I was looking for her, I told them the truth: that I believed she was looking for me.
And if I do an internet search for Claire Abel, I find nothing, no helpful results at all. Even if I pay the search engines (as I have: PeopleFinder, anywho.com, Intelius, etc.), I only get people who share her name, who are not her age, who have children and spouses she could not have, who live in places she could not possibly be.