And then I fell in love with Matt, who did a great job of either filling, or further distracting me from, that void. He was a graphic designer for a firm that manufactured a chic line of purses, hats, sandals, and scarves that hit the marketing sweet spot among the twentysomething “hipnoscenti,” as he labeled their customer base. He was hip and smart, with a square chin, red-brown hair, and an intriguing scar on his cheek that he told people he’d gotten in a gang rumble in New Jersey. In fact, he got it when he was nine years old, by hitting his head on a wrought-iron fence while trying to do wheelies on his bike.
We had a big laugh together when he confessed, and I loved that scar as a symbol of our intimacy. Also, it gave him a slightly rakish look that I liked. His style was a little like my brother’s, which may account for the strong sense of connection I felt.
I really fell for him, and I loved every minute of the plummet. We got married six months after we met.
Looking back, I see that the deaths of my parents and my brother’s disappearance nudged me into that inward-spiraling orbit toward some solid thing in a life increasingly defined by loss and uncertainty. Those losses also made me cleave—I can’t bear to say “cling”—to Matt more than I should have. And made the crash of that relationship all the more disillusioning and injurious.
Death, absence, and disillusionment: Between them, I felt unmoored, desperately wanting not only something certain, solid, but also a departure from my life as it had been.
But none of this entered my thoughts as I explored Brassard’s land that day. I felt only a breathless exhilaration, devoid of thought. There was so much to see.
The air warmed as the sun rose higher above the neighboring hills. I was perfectly comfortable in my fleece jacket. Tendrils of steam rose wherever the light shone directly on bare earth or granite. As I walked I occasionally entered pockets of surprising cool, frigid ghosts of the winter just past. In the occasional open patches, where grasses and scrub held the ground, green spears of new growth pierced the snow-flattened thatch. Low-growing bushes were tipped with swelling beads of green and purple.
I wasn’t even thinking about whether this was the right land, whether I felt the intuitive tug, whether I’d make Brassard an offer. I was too absorbed in the small facts of the place, an awareness of detail I’d never experienced. It was as if my eyes had become magnifying glasses, as if local space were occupied by a medium more transparent than air, so that everything visible registered with startling clarity.
The knobs of rough gray granite that humped through the weave of dead grass or wet leaf detritus wore scaling pelts of lichens and brilliant green moss that looked exactly like a rain forest seen from an airplane. Small birds flicked in the trees and among the bushes, picking at dried berries left on the branches despite winter’s winds. A couple of spent shotgun shells lay on a granite shelf, their plastic red and glistening brass startling and incongruous. The sunlight, slanting through almost-bare branches, cast a shifting lacework of pale shadows over the ground. A solitary bottle-green beetle trundled along, sluggish with cold, on a rotten log. My running shoes got mucked, and I was pleased to punish them for their prior naïveté and hubris. The air was so fresh, I wanted only to inhale and never have to exhale.
I started by walking along the plateau toward the uphill end. Here the trees thickened, the slope steepened. My way was often barricaded by whipping saplings, fallen trunks topped by tangles of branches, rearing earthen walls made by the upended root masses of blowdowns. Thickets of brambles encircled the little open patches, and after my first attempt I learned not to mess with them. My jacket picked up knots of burrs; my hair gathered twigs. I stepped unexpectedly into ice-water puddles that soaked my shoes. I slipped and stumbled and tangled my way along.
I was a little surprised by all this. I’d probably absorbed too many images of idealized pastoral life from old paintings in museums. I had certainly watched too many romantic movies about nineteenth-century England, where forests were so spacious that one could gallop sidesaddle on a runaway horse until the scion of some other wealthy family dashed up on his steed and grabbed the reins. Unconsciously, that was what I had been expecting, not this raw, muddy, hard-bitten place. Farther along, facing a particularly dense thicket made by two fallen trees, I began to feel discouraged and irritable.
I was sitting on a rock, retying my wretched shoes, when a sudden racket of footfalls and crackling erupted close behind me. I was so startled, I swear I felt an artery throb in my brain. In unfamiliar deep woods, primal paranoia reasserts itself instantly.
I whipped around but couldn’t see anything through the snarled brush. A bear, a wolf—were there wolves in Vermont? Maybe one of the mountain lions said to hide out around here! A moose? I’d heard the bulls are aggressive and terribly dangerous when they’re in rut. Did moose rut in spring, or was it fall?
The noise moved farther away, and though I
