booth in his backyard, a way to call his lost beloved cousin and deal with his grief. He called it a wind telephone. After a while, others from the town started to come, everyone trying to find some way to reach out to the many people lost. I heard about it on NPR. It struck me, how we hold on to each other, how we are so desperate to find those who have been taken from us.
I know you still think about her, too, Rain. Because that time together, those friendships, they were special. Grown-ups dismiss the love that children share. But there is nothing purer, no love more accepting, no affection more complete than the love among young people. You don’t know yet how much pain there is on the other side of it. You haven’t learned to hold back the biggest part of yourself so that you can survive the end of things.
Maybe that’s why I can’t let her go. Why I can’t let you go. I’ve never cared about anyone as much since. You told me that you found it sad. Maybe, you said, if I’d built a life, I wouldn’t be clinging to the past. But I wonder.
“Let me go,” Tess says. “Let this go.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t?” she asks. “Or he can’t.”
“There’s less distance between us lately.”
“Maybe you should see a shrink about that.”
We drive a long time; it’s late. “What would you tell a patient who was behaving like this?” she asks.
“I couldn’t condone it,” I admit. “This is criminal behavior. I’d have to advise my patient to stop immediately. I’d have to turn him in to prevent him from harming others.”
She nods solemnly. “Physician heal thyself.”
“I saw Lara today,” I tell her.
“She doesn’t love you,” she answers.
She was always so honest like that, remember? Never cruel but just an innocent stating the facts. “She never did. Not even when we were little, and you stared and stared at her, tried to hold her hand at the Valentine’s Day roller-skating party that time.
“Or that crystal heart you gave her for her birthday,” she says. “Remember how proud you were of that, how you shopped and shopped for the perfect thing. What did she do with it?”
“She left it,” I admit. “She forgot about it.”
Tess nods meaningfully. It still hurts. How sad is that? We were ten.
“And she just liked that goth kid who wrote that horrible poetry and didn’t even know she existed.”
I remember. That guy. He was such an asshole. What did you ever see in him?
“She might have loved me, later when we met again.”
Those weeks with you, they’re like a film reel I play in my mind. Your scent, your skin, your body in my bed, the sound of your laughter, the silk of your hair. It was a glimpse at the world that was still there waiting for me—love, a family, children. Helping people in order to ease my own pain. Not the other things—the obsessions, the secret plans.
“But not him,” she says. “You let him scare her away.”
“No,” I say. “He is not lovable. He’s a dog on a chain.”
“I was the one who loved you,” she says softly. “I love him, too. He tried so hard to save us.”
She reaches out to touch my face. Her fingers are ice on my skin and I shiver. She looks wounded, then disappears, stardust. I watch the empty seat beside me. I’m not a hundred percent sure what she is. A haunting. A hallucination. A manifestation of my deep and total aloneness. I don’t dwell on it for long. She is what she is, I guess.
Physician heal thyself?
Easier said.
The house is isolated—as it would have to be. So I park the car just inside the hidden drive, pulling it close to the trees so that it can’t be seen from the road. Then I walk through the woods.
The temperature is dropping. Winter comes later in our age of global weirding. But the cold arrives like an ambush, bringing all-new superstorms, like the “bomb cyclone” that’s expected to hit later this week. Or maybe there are just new names for these things, some marketing department somewhere cooking up phrases to incite maximum dread. Keep people afraid and you keep them consuming, stockpiling supplies and buying generators.
I know my way around this property now. I know all the exits and entrances to the big house. I understand that there’s another structure here, as well. But I’ve yet to find it. That’s why I’m here.