truck.
I was about to tell her good-bye, when she said, “Hey, Wade, why don’t you come along today?”
I hadn’t considered this. I tried to imagine spending the afternoon with someone. The last time I had real company was months ago.
She glanced at her man. “No offense to Petyr, but I could use a fresh face around here. And you’re not a weirdo, right?” she said.
I told her I wasn’t a weirdo.
“Good. It’s settled. Let’s start scavenging.”
And so we did. I let Sonny out so he could rest in the shade beside the truck, and then the three of us set off into the woods behind the house, Petyr walking behind Grace and me.
At first I felt nervous, being around someone new, but the day was ideal, warm and sunny, and soon enough I began to relax. The metal detector gave off gentle, bird-like clucking noises as we walked. A soft breeze blew up from town, causing the Indian grass along the forest floor to sway back and forth and tickle our bare legs.
As we made our way deeper into the woods, I explained to Grace about the surrounding land, about why it was so rich with collectibles. I told her about the air force base that used to exist ten miles west of town many years ago, back during the two World Wars. And about how the air force men of those days believed that, upon returning from combat in foreign lands, it was good luck to throw something out of the plane just before it touched down, some token of your time overseas. “If you did,” I explained to Grace, “according to the superstition, you wouldn’t be haunted by anything you’d seen or done while you were away. The person you’d been couldn’t follow you home.”
“What kinds of stuff have you found?” Grace asked. A jay flapped up behind us and I remembered Petyr. Despite his size, Petyr was unusually stealthy.
“All sorts of things. Lockets, watches, bullet casings. Last month I found a toy train, a little windup engine. There’s an antique store in town that takes almost all of it.”
“You don’t get lonely living out here all by yourself?” she said. “Alone in the woods? No people to talk to?”
“I talk to people at work,” I said, helping Grace over a log. “And I talk to the old man who runs the antique store when I bring things in. Mr. Gourd.”
“Mr. Gourd?” Grace said, and chuckled. “What are you, Wade, twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? Don’t you have a girlfriend? Some friends our age?”
People were always asking me things like this.
“I like my own company,” I said. “I’m not lonely.”
And it was true: I wasn’t lonely. I had never been lonely. I had no real friends, no family, but I didn’t long for any of that. Alison, the last woman I’d dated, had left me because she felt that I acted like I didn’t need her, like I didn’t need anyone at all.
“You don’t relate to people, Wade,” she’d said the day she left. It had been scorchingly hot. We were sitting naked on the kitchen floor with the refrigerator open behind us, its vapor cooling our backs. Behind Allison’s head were bags and jars of uneaten food. “It’s like you don’t know how and you don’t care to learn. What happened to you? Who fucked you up?”
But nothing had happened. No one had done this to me. I had never been any other way. If anything, it was living here, in this place, that made it hard to become attached to other people. No one stayed around very long. It seemed that, eventually, everyone moved away. In their old age, residents left for warmer weather, as my parents had done. And most young people took off for big cities to start careers and families as soon as they finished high school. Over time I’d come to think of this area, my home, as a kind of port that people stopped at for a little while, a port in which to do a bit of maintenance before piloting off.
I understood why no one stayed, too. The land here is unattractive. It’s frozen and bare nearly ten months out of the year. The frenzied parade of summer comes and goes before anyone can really enjoy it. Flowers huddle in frightened little bunches. The trunks of too many trees are knotty with tumorous black burls. Even Alison herself wanted to leave. The whole time we were dating she kept talking about getting out, going somewhere exciting.
But there are things to like around here. It’s quiet and peaceful. In the winter the ice is so thick it glows blue. You can hear it slowly rolling forward at night, splitting and pushing on, making noises like grinding teeth.
The metal detector gave off a burst of sharp clicks. “Yay!” Grace said, and laughed. She laid the detector on the ground and took a garden shovel out of the pack around her waist. Petyr came over and offered to dig for her, but she said she wanted to do it herself.
I sat beside Grace as she dug. Whenever she hit a rock, I scooped it out and tossed it to the side. As she worked, she passed in and out of a patch of sun that caused her hair to change color. In the light it shined up to a brilliant red, in the shade it became a dull brown. Seeing it shift back and forth like that, I felt as though she were sharing something special with me, letting me get a glimpse of some secret part of herself. It was noon by now, and after a few minutes of digging, she took a break and we sat back on the grass. The sun felt wonderful on my face and chest. High above us, the pine trees creaked back and forth in the breeze like the masts of ancient ships.
“What was it you lost at the beach?” I said. “When you were a kid. The thing the metal detector couldn’t find.”
“What? Oh, it was nothing,” Grace said. “Just a piece of metal.”
I waited for her to go on.
She laughed, but it was a sad hiccup of a laugh. “It’s dumb. It was the latch to the mailbox of my mom and dad’s house. This little tin ladybug you flipped down to keep the mailbox door from falling open. I took it with me when we first left for California. I know. It’s stupid.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid,” I said.
Grace pulled her knees to her chest and smiled at me. “Thanks, Wade,” she said. “I was pretty hysterical about losing it at the time.” She took off her sunglasses and wiped them on her shorts and there were those eyes of hers again. The stitches beneath them looked like extra sets of curling eyelashes. I felt myself staring, so I glanced at Petyr, who was lying beneath a tree with his eyes closed. A bright green leaf had landed on his giant chest and rose and fell with his breath.
“Look at him,” Grace said. “I should probably just let him go, now that I scare everyone away myself.” She pointed to her face and laughed, but then she looked away, at the pit she’d dug in the ground.
“I find you very beautiful,” I said, which I knew then to be true.
She blushed. “You know, I didn’t do this to look younger or anything like that. I was in an accident. I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, touching the bag under her chin, which now had some liquid in it. “I’ll tell you a secret, though, since I was so nosy before.” She leaned closer and I could feel the warmth coming off her body. “I poke at it sometimes, at my face. I know I’m not supposed to, that I’ll scar it, but I do it anyway.”
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m just not ready to go back home yet.”
“Everyone around here leaves sooner or later,” I said.
“Well, who knows? Maybe I’ll be a ‘later,’” she said.
Grace and I started spending time together regularly after that. Sometimes she’d meet me at the store and Haymont would let me go—would, in fact, nearly push me out the door after her. Other days I’d drive out to her house after work. I’d pull up with Sonny and find her waiting for me on her porch swing, or on her stomach reading in the tall grass, the sunlight fanning over the backs of her long legs. Petyr hardly ever joined us. Grace told me that his sister was having problems with her husband, who coincidentally was also a bodyguard. Petyr had a high, soft voice, a soothing voice, and he spent long hours walking around the lawn with his tiny silver phone, talking patiently to one of them, then the other. At night he retired to the guesthouse, a cabin at the edge of the yard with vines strangling it.
Grace and I spent most of our time loafing around that cavernous house of hers. She had movie players that could hold up to two hundred movies at once, and a huge flat-panel TV that hung on the wall like an antique mirror,
