The Cloisters(45)

There was no denying the position I had put myself in by concealing the card from Patrick; the risks to my job and my future were enormous. And yet, I wasn’t sure if the choice had been mine to make. In that moment at Ketch’s, I had felt as if I were possessed by something outside my rational self, as if instinct had overwhelmed logic. It was, I realized, as another group of roots tugged at my feet, a feeling that I had only ever felt once before. During a day when everything seemed automatic, instinctual—the day I had come home from campus to find the phone in the kitchen ringing and ringing and ringing, my mother never having set up the answering machine, until finally, I answered it, and heard the words on the other end. I’m so sorry to tell you this, but Johnathan Stilwell is dead.

Nothing else from that day ever came through, just the feeling of acting on instinct, of being unable to distinguish between what had really happened and the dreamlike reality I had entered. I could remember the clunk of my car as I shifted it into park, the faint ring of the phone audible even from outside, the feeling of the phone in my hand. But there was nothing else besides the inevitability of it all.

This time, the hardwoods that flanked the path reached out and tripped me, and I found myself, knees scuffed, palms muddy, face-to-face with the damp soil and hard shale that made up the trail. I wasn’t sure, at that point, how long I had been walking. Long enough to realize I was no longer certain of my surroundings, nor even of the route the path had taken to get me there. Under the canopy, it was impossible to tell how quickly the sky had darkened, or if it had done so at all.

I picked myself up and brushed the twigs and dirt from my hands and knees, and decided it was time to retrace my steps back toward the house. As I walked, I thought about the card sitting in my bag, about the strange inscription—trixcaccia—that had been painted across its front. If the word looked unfamiliar, the language did not, at least not entirely. And I searched my memory—that thin, imperfect archive—for where I might have seen it before. But while I worked on this, it was becoming clear that the temperature was dropping and that the light was waning. I should have, by then, reached the shores of the lake, but all I saw was the same tangle of hardwoods, the same undulating stone and loamy soil, the same ponding water where the sound of beavers, their tails hitting the surface in warning, echoed through the forest.

I had never been afraid of the wilderness, at least not in the West, where I could overland, where I could see my destination. But here, the forest was so thick I could only see twenty feet in any direction. The hardwoods were like a hall of mirrors, always receding into sameness. I stopped moving and took a moment to listen, hoping to hear the roar of a boat motor or the occasional rush of a highway, but the only sound was the water dripping from the leaves of the trees, a steady and maddening break to the silence. In front of me, the trail continued; I had not noticed it branch or loop back, and so, I kept moving, waiting to see the stretch of lawn in front of the house, the boathouse, the lake, anything.

Before long, it grew dark. Dark enough for me to be sure that it was not simply the shadow of a passing storm, but nighttime, with its concomitant coldness, working its way through the tree trunks. And although my eyes had adjusted some, I still found myself tripping every few steps and reaching out to catch myself, on a rock, a shrub, anything that might help keep my balance. But the cold and the darkness weren’t the worst of it. The worst of it were the shadows, the deeper blacks that darted along the edges of my vision like apparitions, so quickly, I couldn’t be sure if they were real. And with them came the fear. Not just the fear of the night and the cold and whatever else might be in the forest with me but the fear of my decisions—to hide the card, to leave Washington behind with its open, grassy rangeland, to agree to come to The Cloisters at all. And then, the fear that none of it had been mine to decide in the first place.

I paused and realized that in the darkness I had lost the trail. There was no way I could continue on until the morning, until the sun came back and allowed me to get my bearings. Out of options, I sat on the damp ground, my knees pressed against my chest, my back against the flaking bark of a tree, and waited until the dampness seeped into my bones, and my teeth began, every few minutes, to uncontrollably chatter. There was no space, then, to worry about anything other than keeping warm enough to make it through the night.

I still don’t know how long it took her to find me, but by the time she did, I was so cold I couldn’t work my jaw open to call out. It didn’t matter. She had brought a jacket and a flashlight, and she saw me immediately, my white shoes now caked with mud and splashes of green.

“Oh my god, Ann.” When she reached me, Rachel wrapped the jacket around my shoulders and slipped an arm around my waist. “Can you stand?”

It turned out I could, if unsteadily. The jacket was helping, but it was Rachel’s body heat, which came off her as she worked to help walk me back toward the path, that warmed me the most. Within a few minutes, I was able to take more confident steps, so long as she stayed by my side.

“It’s okay,” she said as we followed the trail of her flashlight. “This is the way. You can trust me.”

Even when I felt better—warm enough, well enough—to walk on my own, I didn’t want to let go of her. As if she, herself, were a ghost who might disappear if our bodies ceased to touch. But then, after about thirty minutes maybe, I could see it—the lights of the house, the trim on the veranda. And most importantly of all, the difference between what was real—our bodies, the card, the house—and what wasn’t: my memory of the shadows from that night, maybe even my memories from nights before.