The Book of Lost Friends - Lisa Wingate Page 0,104

a blanket, and you and Brother wrap up. If Athene wakes, you walk her round, play with her some. I’ll be back when dark comes.”

Perhaps the last instruction she gave him was, “Don’t you try to light that fire, now. You hear me?”

But he did.

Carlessa’s children, all three of them, were taken from her that day.

Their horrific fate is recorded in the journal. It ends with a notation, written by a master or a mistress or a hired overseer—the handwriting varies, making it evident that the responsibility for keeping records was shared.

November 7, 1858. To be remembered as a cruel day. Fire at the quarters. And these three taken from us.

Those words, a cruel day, were left to interpretation. Were they an indication of the writer’s remorse, sitting at the desk, pen in hand, the faint scents of ash and soot clinging to skin and hair and the fibers of clothing?

Or were they an abdication of responsibility for the circumstances that ended three young lives? The day was cruel, not the practice of holding human beings as prisoners, of forcing women to leave their children inadequately tended while they labored, unpaid, to fatten the coffers of wealthy men.

The children’s burials were mentioned that same week, but merely in matter-of-fact terms to document the event.

The hour grew later and later as Nathan and I read through the daily logs, sitting side by side on the sofa, our shins touching, our fingers crossing each other’s as we struggled to make out notations that time was slowly bleaching away.

I try to recall the rest, now as I wake, uncertain how I ended up across the room in the recliner asleep.

“What…what time is it?” I croak in a drowsy voice, and sit up and glance toward the window.

Nathan lifts his chin—perhaps he was dozing, too—and looks my way. His eyes are red and tired. His hair disheveled. I wonder if he has slept even a little. At some point, he did slip off his shoes at least, make himself comfortable. He’s taken the liberty of borrowing a stack of blank paper from my school supplies. Several sheets of notes lie on my coffee table.

“I didn’t mean to stay this long,” he says. “I fell asleep, and then I wanted to copy the grid map of the graveyard. The thing is, there’s the annexation deal with the cemetery association, but there are already people buried under that ground. I need to see if I can make some kind of estimate of where these begin and end.” He indicates the plots marked in the book.

“You should’ve thrown something at me. I could have gotten up and helped you.”

“You looked pretty comfortable over there.” He smiles, and the morning light catches his eyes and a strange tingle slips through me.

Horror follows in its wake.

No, I tell myself. Firmly and unequivocally, no. I am at a strange, unmoored, lost, lonely, uncertain point in life. I now know enough about Nathan to realize that he is, too. We pose a risk to one another. I’m on the rebound, and he’s…well, I’m not sure, but now isn’t the time to find out.

“I just stayed and kept reading after you dozed off,” he explains. “I probably should’ve gone into town and grabbed a room at the motel.”

“That would’ve been silly, and you know there’s only the one motel in Augustine, and it’s awful. I bunked there my first night.” It’s sad, actually, that this is his family’s hometown, where his two uncles seem to possess the lion’s share of everything, and he, himself, owns not only my house but an enormous one down the way, and he’s talking about staying in a motel.

“The neighbors won’t start rumors, I promise.” I deploy the old cemetery joke to let him know I’m in no way worried about damage to my reputation. “If they do, and we can hear them, then I’ll worry.”

A dimple forms in one suntanned cheek. It’s endearing in a way I know I shouldn’t further contemplate, so I don’t. Although I catch myself idly wondering how much younger than