True Places(85)

A strange feeling settled over Iris. “I think I’ve been here before.”

Suzanne slowed the car. “You recognize the house?”

She shook her head. “The tower. Whatever that is.”

“It’s a windmill,” Suzanne said. “Did you live here?”

“I don’t know.” Iris recalled her thoughts from the night before, the idea that her memories weren’t the solid things she had believed them to be.

Suzanne pulled the car off the road onto a level patch of field. “Maybe you lived here before you moved into the woods.”

Iris looked at the windmill again, and at the house and the barn, waiting for a detail to spring out at her. None did. “Maybe.”

Suzanne consulted the map and pointed ahead to where the woods rose gently out of the field. “We’ll start somewhere there, okay?”

Iris pointed to a sign on a tree. POSTED. NO HUNTING, FISHING, OR TRESPASSING. “What about that?”

Suzanne folded the map and opened the door. “Ignore it.”

They put on their backpacks, locked the car, and skirted the edge of the woods, searching for a path. Iris glanced over her shoulder several times, getting a different view of the house and the windmill, wondering why it felt so familiar yet failed to conjure any specific memory. Suzanne looked behind her, too, as if she expected someone to appear out of nowhere. A pair of crows swooped in and landed on the roof without circling first, a clear indication no one was around. From where she stood, Iris sensed the emptiness. The place was like a skeleton with no blood or flesh or soul inside.

They couldn’t find an obvious path, so Iris chose a deer trail pointing in the general direction of the location on the map. The topo map wasn’t detailed—one inch covered one mile of reality—but it didn’t matter. These mountains were rugged. Even with a better map they couldn’t just walk straight from one place to another. The woods were so dense it could seem like dusk in the middle of the day, and what seemed like an easy path could stop dead at the bottom of the sheer cliff. Iris followed her instincts, and the deer.

As they walked, Suzanne asked her about the windmill again. Iris answered by hiking faster. She didn’t want to talk. She felt a tug in the center of her chest, and in the center of her forehead, too, a soft pull, a yearning. Iris let herself be led, but she was also under her own guidance, mindful of her surroundings: the contours, the appearance and disappearance of certain plants and trees, the sighing of a breeze in the crowns at the top of the tall, straight trunks. As she breathed in, she tasted the changing scents and touched the leaves and branches as she passed, feeling her way.

“Iris!” Far below, Suzanne had stopped to lean on a cedar. She took a drink of water and caught up to Iris. Suzanne was breathing hard as she pulled the topo map out of the side pocket of her pants. “Don’t you want to check this?”

Iris shook her head.

Suzanne looked around. It was only trees and shrubs and flowers and sky to her. “Do you recognize this?”

Iris wasn’t sure how to answer. If she said yes, Suzanne would ask more questions. But denying what she felt would be a lie.

She shrugged and walked on.

Deer trails appeared and disappeared. Iris chose the ones leading mostly west toward the larger mountain she intuited lay beyond her view. They crossed a small stream, but the sounds it made spoke an unfamiliar story, and Iris did not turn to hike alongside it. At the top of the hill, the trees were spaced farther apart. Crowded between them were blackberry bushes, white with blossoms. The sun had climbed with them and showered the understory with light. Iris paused.

Suzanne offered her water. While Iris drank, Suzanne was silent. Perhaps she sensed what Iris now felt with certainty and dread. Her woods—her home—were near. Iris passed the bottle to Suzanne, avoiding her gaze, and set off again, more slowly now, not for Suzanne, but for herself.

Iris picked her way across the hilltop and down the gentle western slope into a shallow crease between this hill and the one to the south, then continued along the next rise, tracing the contour of the large mountain she had been heading toward all morning. Suzanne kept pace with her. The birds had quieted in their midday roosts. Suzanne and Iris’s footfalls in the damp mulch and the occasional frantic rustling of a squirrel were the only sounds. They skirted a tangle of downed tree limbs overgrown with brambles. On the far side stood an enormous boulder and, beyond, a lightly forested area filled with dappled light and blanketed in delicate white flowers.

Iris stopped.

Suzanne came up beside her. “Look at that.” She crouched and lifted the petals of a flower with two fingers. “Least trillium. The one you talked about, Iris.”

Iris nodded. She adjusted the backpack on her shoulders and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, trying to account for the sliding sensation in her belly. She scanned the area. There, near the boulder, was a wooden sign, half-hidden by the flowers that had grown up around it. She approached the sign, placing her feet with care among the flowers, and squatted in front of it.

“What is it?” Suzanne said.

The sign was two feet square and made of hickory, the streaky grain running horizontally. A name had been carved in the wood. Iris held her breath and touched the grooves of the letters.

Ash.

The edges of her vision darkened and she blinked hard. She ran her fingers down the board, pushing aside the flowers.