That afternoon a storm was rising, rows of whitecaps out on the lake. The girls were making cookies, with my mother; my father sat on the couch, eating peanuts and watching the Green Bay Packers preseason report, complaining about the television’s reception.
I was searching through the shelves next to the fireplace, looking for a book that I remembered, from when I was young. Next to my head hung the old marshmallow skewers, long and sharp and shiny, their wooden handles all colors, the paint faded and chipped.
“Is it all right”—my mother appeared from the doorway to the kitchen; she was smiling, wearing an apron with a cow on it—“the girls want to eat some of the cookie batter.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“They told me you found a human skeleton.”
“We did,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“They believe you,” she said, half-scolding me.
“Not really,” I said. “They’ve known me their whole lives.”
“And we met an old lady!” my younger daughter shouted from the kitchen. “We’re going swimming at her house!”
“Mrs. Abel,” I said.
“Claire Abel?” my mother said. “I didn’t know she was back. Where has she been, all these years?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Grambee!” my girls called. “The cookies!”
My mother turned and went to them, and I returned to my search through the books. I pulled out histories of Door County, and the Berenstain Bears, and even books I had written, but I could not find the book that I sought, that I remembered from my childhood. What was it called?
It was a book of scary stories, of hauntings, and the one I wanted to read was about a young woman walking a mountain path at dusk. The light was very important, the haziness, the way that she could not be quite certain what she was seeing. Because someone was following her, a shadowy figure, and once night fell it would be impossible to know if he was still following her, or getting closer, or where, exactly, he was. He? That was what was most disturbing about the tale—the young woman, glancing back, could not make out the person’s face, could not even be certain that it was a man, or a person. It could have been something else, something other. She even stopped and called out to it, once, twice, and the shadowy figure paused in its pursuit, but did not answer. When she turned, it resumed its pursuit, always keeping this shadowy, perfect distance.
A little later, my father had fallen asleep, a bowl of peanut shells in his lap. My girls came out of the kitchen to tell me that the cookies were almost ready.
“Tell a story,” the younger one said. “A story of when you were a boy. A trick story—”
“But you can’t get hurt or in trouble!”
“Someone has to get in trouble, but not you.”
“At first it looks like it’s going to be you, but then someone else gets in trouble!”
Later that night, I read A Wizard of Earthsea to my daughters, in the upstairs bedroom of the cabin. I could hear the wind gusting in the trees and the waves pounding the shore.
“What’s an otak?” my younger daughter said.
“Some kind of little animal,” her sister said. “That’s probably their name for squirrel or something.”
I finally got them both to quiet down, and I lay between them, listening to the rain against the windows, on the rooftop, the wind in the trees. The knotholes in the ceiling looked like laughing faces, and the sound of the waves echoed off the bluff, above and behind the cabin, making it feel as if we were surrounded by water.
I imagined the white stones on the beach, the raft rising and falling, tethered against the waves. As I drifted off, I thought I heard a piano—Chopin’s Fantasies, Beethoven’s Pathétique, talking back to the storm—and I could feel myself out in the waves, could see the flag at the end of the Zimdars’ dock, blowing out straight and square, candlelight flickering in the window of Mrs. Abel’s cabin.
High in the cedars with the storm coming in, I sit on one branch and hold tight to another. I shiver, thrilled to think that no one knows where I am, hidden up here in the darkness, and then I imagine that there are others in the trees, all around me, all of us oblivious to each other, all believing ourselves to be alone in the storm.