the Writing Circle (2010) (5 page)

“Okay,” said Paul. “But she usually doesn’t call.”

T
HE DIRT ROAD THAT LED TO GILLIAN’S HOUSE RAN PERILOUSLY
between a steep hillside and the edge of a marsh. It was so narrow and so tortuous and so desolate that no one who didn’t know for sure would believe that there was a house at the end of it, that it led to anywhere. Gillian could have driven it blindfolded. She knew the curves, the ruts, the rocks, the soggy places where a tire would get stuck. No one could find her here, unless she wanted to be found.

Gillian avoided driving on highways, and this morning, as she so often did, she took back roads on her way to the Cape, even though it added hours to her trip. When she finally got to Truro, the tide was out. She opened the car window and sucked in the smell as she drove along the dirt road. Her little house was there, waiting for her as always. She stepped out of the truck and leaned against the fender, taking in the scene, holding herself back from entering it, as if not wanting to break a spell. The house was set in a hollow, cupped by hills on three sides. It faced the marsh squarely. Door in the center, two windows on each side, and a squat brick chimney. There were twelve panes of glass in each window, and the sun, now low in the sky, glinted on selected panes, turning them into mirrors.

“Hello, Button,” Gillian said. It was her secret name for the house, short for Buttonfield, a name only Jerry knew. Houses on the Cape often sported nautical names, names referring to wind or sea or mist. If she were to give her house a public name, it would have to be something literary, a pun or allusion, but she found such cleverness wearisome. People in town simply called it “that house on the marsh.” When she was growing up, she lived near a field where a button factory had once stood. The kids called it the buttonfield, because they sometimes found buttons among the weeds. When Gillian was young, she imagined that buttons grew on plants and fell, when ripe, like seedpods. The smaller children believed her when she told them this. It might make good material for a poem, but she had never used it. She did not like to mine her childhood. She did not like to mine much of her personal life either—although she was happy to make use of what she heard of others’.

Gillian had never had a room to herself when she was young, and Button was not just a room, but an entire house. She and Jerry owned the other house together, but Button was all hers. In the rural New Hampshire town where she’d grown up, the restored antique houses were owned by wealthy people who lived elsewhere and just vacationed there. People like her family were left behind to make it through the bleak winter in houses that were just plain old. Here, in Truro, she was the one to come and go, whenever she pleased.

Gillian unlocked the front door and pushed against it with her shoulder to get it to open. Inside, everything looked exactly as she had last left it. She walked the downstairs circle of rooms around the center chimney: living room, dining room, kitchen, and study. The study was painted a pale blue, the color the sea is in children’s paintings but never in real life. There were two bedrooms upstairs, but she wouldn’t go up there. When she was at the house alone, she slept on the daybed in the study. She pulled off the white sheet that covered it and tossed it on the floor. She turned the thermostat up and waited until she heard the furnace turn on. The new heating system was one of the few alterations she had let Jerry make to the house. She’d had to admit that it was magical to be able to come to the house and have it warm within hours.

Before she carried in anything from the car, she walked to the edge of the marsh and looked out across it, towards the bay. A strip of low dune separated the marsh from the bay and obscured the house’s view of open water. The house would have been worth more than twice what it was if that sand were not there, but Gillian didn’t mind. The idea of a view not seen, of something known about but denied was more interesting than an open view. And the marsh held more for her than the bay. Here, in her marsh, a great blue heron perched still as a tree stump. Here, it hunted, lifting each slender leg with the articulation of a dancer, then swooping so quickly to snatch its prey in its beak that her eye couldn’t follow. Here the great blue heron lifted off into the sky, pumping its huge wings until the air received it, let it glide. It was her bird, her muse. It did not appear in all her poems, but it was often what got them going. It got one going now. The images swarmed in her mind, mixed with words, some evaporating before she could get a fix on them, others growing firmer, larger. For no reason whatsoever the word
avuncular
came to the foreground. “Avuncular,” she said aloud, and she smiled. It wasn’t a word that would take her anyplace. She let it go, and the word that took its place in her mind was
still,
with its double meaning. Triple meaning, actually, though she had no use for it as a noun. It was a word worth playing with; she needed to sit down with a pen in hand.

She carried her duffel bag and briefcase in from the car and made a second trip for the bag of groceries. She’d have to go to town to get food eventually, but she had brought enough so that could wait two days, at least. She always did her best writing when she first came to the house, when she had no contact with the outside world, when she could feel that she had slipped into this world unnoticed.

Gillian put the grocery bag on the counter and then noticed a trail of tiny black seeds. They weren’t seeds, though, she realized, they were mouse droppings. She grabbed up the bag of groceries and set it down on the kitchen stool, then wiped the counter with a wad of wet paper towels. She opened the cabinet under the sink and was about to throw the paper towels into the plastic garbage can when she saw what was there: a field mouse lay curled up in death in the bottom of the can. It must have climbed in, looking for food, and been unable to get out. Gillian screamed and slammed the cabinet shut with her knee. Her heart was thumping so wildly she could not move at first. She was shaky, but she was afraid to grab on to the edge of the counter to steady herself, afraid to have her hand that close to the dead mouse. Breathe, she told herself, just breathe. She stumbled out of the room, out of the house, then broke into a run. At the edge of the marsh, she sank to the ground and huddled there, her arms around her knees. She stared out at the darkening marsh, working the view against the image she wanted to drive from her mind: the small creature who had circled frantically, struggled to scale the impossibly slick plastic walls, and died of hunger, thirst, exhaustion, loss of hope.

She didn’t know what she was going to do. She’d driven all the way out here because she needed to be here to write. She was desperate to write. She couldn’t just shut up the house and drive all the way back again. But she couldn’t go into the kitchen again while the small corpse lay there, under the sink.

The only thing to do, she decided, was to close the door to the kitchen and camp out in the study. She’d have to go to town to buy food, but she could wait for that until morning. She had an apple in the car; that would get her through till then.

She stood up slowly and forced herself to go back inside the house. She closed the kitchen door without looking inside. From the phone in the study, she called Jerry. She expected to get his voice mail, and she did, but she had been hoping that miraculously he might answer. She wanted to talk to him so he would help calm her, but she could not have him paged for this: a dead mouse in the garbage can. And though she wanted to talk to him, she was afraid of what he’d say. He would tell her to come home. Impossible. Or, worse, he would tell her he would drive out and take care of it. He would drive all night, after getting someone to cover for him at the office the next day, after making arrangements about Paul. When he had arrived and taken care of the mouse, he’d start worrying about all the things he felt were wrong with the house—Jerry had no affection or patience for antique houses—and he’d worry about her staying here alone. When Christa Worthington, a single mother, had been murdered in her Truro house not that far away, Jerry had been nearly frantic when Gillian had stayed here. But Gillian had never been frightened in her house alone at night, even before the murderer—Christa’s garbageman—had been found and brought to trial.

Gillian stood for a moment, phone in hand, when the obvious solution occurred to her: the handyman, Pete Ambrose, who drained the pipes and checked on the house in the winter. She got his answering machine and left a message.

As night approached, Gillian turned on all the lights. Usually she found the darkness in her house comforting. She liked the smell of the old pine paneling and the ash from the fireplace. She liked the texture of things, the velvet of chair coverings, the fuzzy mohair throw. But she needed lots of light now. The mouse in the kitchen expanded, bloated, in the confines of the garbage can.

Fortunately, there was enough wood for a fire. Gillian rolled sections of old newspaper and tied them in knots. She laid them in the fireplace, arranged kindling and logs on top. It took her three tries to get a corner of the newspaper to catch on fire, but soon it burst into orange, and for a moment the fire actually roared. They always called it a “roaring” fire, and yet she didn’t think she’d ever heard that sound before.

Gillian got a pencil and a large pad of plain white paper from the desk, moved an armchair close to the fire, and sat there, tucking her feet up under her. Although she typed her poems up later, she always composed them by hand on unlined paper. Lines on paper were like prison bars. Now and then the stirrings of the logs in the fire sounded like the pattering of mice, but she was not afraid of live mice. Only dead ones.

When the phone rang, she sprang to get it. It had to be Pete. The phone was unlisted, and the only other person who had the number was Jerry. And this wouldn’t be Jerry. She had trained him never to call unless she left a message asking him to. She said it infantilized her when he called to see that she had arrived safely, to check up on her. It ruined her concentration, her solitude, spoiled the whole point of her going away. “Assume I am alive and well enough, until you hear otherwise,” she said.

She was so certain it would be Pete Ambrose calling that even when the caller said, “Hello, Gillian. It’s Adam,” she didn’t focus on what he said.

“Thank God you got my message,” she said.

“What?”

“Who is this?” she asked. Fear suddenly flooded her. It didn’t sound like Pete’s voice. Who was this man?

“It’s me, Adam,” he said. “Adam Freytoch.”

“Adam?” she asked. “Why are you calling?”

“You left a folder at my house. Poems, handwritten. I thought you might be wondering what happened to them.”

She realized she hadn’t checked her briefcase when she got home from the meeting on Sunday. She hadn’t known she was missing a folder of drafts of new poems, scraps and ideas she had no other copies of. How could she have left them there?

“How in God’s name did you ever get this number?” she asked.

“Your son, Paul. I called your house.”

“My stepson. He gave it to you?” Her voice rose.

“I told him I needed to get in touch with you.” Adam said this as if he was afraid he had gotten the boy in trouble. She hadn’t realized how angry she’d sounded.

“I see,” she said.

“I’m here. I mean I’m out on the Cape. I brought them with me. I could drop them off for you.”

“You’re where exactly?”

“In Orleans. I have a friend out here.”

“I’m not in Orleans,” she said. “I’m in Truro.”

“I could zip out there. No trouble,” he said.

She did not believe for a moment that he had a friend in Orleans. Well, maybe he did, but he hadn’t come out to visit a friend, that was just an excuse. He’d come out to return her poems to her. From the first, when he’d joined the Leopardi Circle, Adam had been obsequious. He’d been a prodigy of Helene’s. Helene had convinced the others to take him on, and soon after, she had died, abandoning him among them. Gillian had always suspected he was infatuated with her, but he tried hard not to show it, sometimes being brusque and then apologetic for his brusqueness. He was young and awkward and sweet, and if he was in love with her, she was used to that. Every time she’d done a stint as a writer in residence, she’d acquired any number of admirers. Adam wasn’t an MFA student anymore—he actually had a job, made a good living—but he still had a graduate student’s demeanor. Once he got published—and she thought he had as good a chance as anyone of getting published—that would probably change. It usually did.

Gillian never invited anyone to Button, but the circumstances argued for an exception. First, Adam had her poems, and she couldn’t bear to think of them being out of her possession, being touched by anyone else. And then there was the dead mouse. It was possible Pete wouldn’t return her call for a long time. He might not even return it at all.

“Perhaps you could do me a small favor,” said Gillian. “How are you with dead rodents?”

“What do you need done?”

“I need one to be buried,” said Gillian.

“Buried?” said Adam. “Sure. No problem.”

“It’s very difficult to find this house,” said Gillian.

“I’m great at finding places,” said Adam. “Just give me directions and I’ll get there.”

“All right,” said Gillian.

GILLIAN THOUGHT OF IT AS A LITTLE TRIAL.
If Adam gave up and had to call her for additional help, that would be the end of it. She’d wait for Pete to come and deal with the mouse, and she’d leave her folder of poems with Adam until she saw him next.