Mary and O'Neil Page 0,7

he said he was tired, or touch his cheek with one finger, quickly, when another person might have stopped her hand in the air before his face. Each time they were together it happened, this touching, but only once, and never anything more. Yet it was also true that he had come, in some way, to rely on it; it did something for him that nothing else did. It made him happy, there was that, to be touched by another for no reason. But something else: it was as if, in those instants, he ceased to be who he was. His whole life became a memory, and not even of his own. Whose, then? He had met Sam Auclaire once, he believed, at the high school maybe—a play? parents’ night?—or else merely seen him, striding out of the hardware store with a sack of nails in his hand, or driving his pickup, ladders lashed to a frame over the bed, through the streets of town. Arthur remembered a tall man, muscular, with curly blond hair gone an early, peppery gray. So that was his answer. Dora touched him, and the happiness he felt was not his own but Sam’s, at being so terribly missed.

It went on like this into the fall. He never set foot in her house, nor she in his, and if anyone suspected (suspected what?), Arthur heard nothing about it. He told no one, because who was there to tell? His clients? The old women at the Coffee Stop? The man at the service station who changed the oil in his car? He wished for a brother, as he had many times in his life, but hadn’t one; he worked alone, and had few friends that Miriam did not share. His life was like a small, comfortable room, every piece in its place. Only by being with Dora did he step outside of this room, though only for an hour or two, and never so completely that at the end of their time together he could not return to it, and to the life he understood. He wondered how long it could go on.

Then, two weeks ago, Arthur found himself driving with Dora out of town, to see a parcel of land she said she wanted to buy. The town had begun to feel close to her—that was the word she used, close; she had always dreamed of building a house and raising her boys in the country. She said she wanted to get his opinion, but her meaning was clear: things had reached a certain point between them. The afternoon was cold and bright, and they drove the fifteen miles south with barely a word between them. For the first time since she had come into his office eight months before, dripping with rain, Arthur felt truly afraid. In Domingo they found the unmarked dirt road that led to the property, which was marked with a large For Sale sign pocked with bullet holes. Arthur recognized the phone number on the sign; it was the number of the county clerk’s office, in Harbersburg. On the phone Dora had told him that before the land had been taken over by the county for nonpayment of taxes, it had been a dairy farm.

In the parked car they changed into sneakers and then set out on foot. The land was level and moist—Arthur could hear running water somewhere—and they moved slowly through the shrubs and shabby trees, all of it tangled by brawny grapevine. It took him a moment to realize that the overgrown path they were following was the driveway, but once he saw this, other details emerged: rusted farm implements poking from the ground, gullies lining the pathway that had once been drainage ditches, a shape in the trees that he recognized as the cab of an old Willys Jeep, melting into the leaves and mossy earth. The scene disturbed and interested him. How long, he wondered, had it taken for nature to reclaim this place? Twenty years? Thirty? How much time was required? Then they emerged into a clearing—the trees opened above them like a hatchway, revealing a sky of radiant, shimmering blue—and found themselves standing at the edge of an immense pit. Of course: the house’s foundation. The hole was some forty feet across, roughly square, and some ten feet deep. Its floor was irregular, long buried beneath a sea of leaves and debris. Again, Arthur’s eyes adjusted. An old-fashioned nail-keg lay on its side,