And Wally was gone even more often, if that could be possible. He was not at the house or in Agloe with us more days than he was—and when he was there, he seemed agitated, lost in thought. A haunted, pursued look clung to him, which he couldn’t shake, even when you tried to draw him out of his brooding and into a game, Nell. Like he couldn’t wait to get back on the road, conducting his mysterious, essential research.
But to me the strangest change was that he’d somehow convinced Francis, of all people, to go with him on these excursions.
Perhaps they were searching for a specific piece of data, I figured at first. Perhaps Francis needed some historical context for the area, for his and Eve’s survey. Sullivan County had once been part of neighboring Ulster County until the early 1800s, when it was split off—maybe he wanted to go through even older records for the land, to find what previous colonial settlements might have been there, or perhaps the Indigenous tribe that had lived on the land before the colonists took it, the Esopus, had ever mentioned anything strange about the hills in their history. He was nearly as detailed in his work as Wally and always liked to do things himself, if he could.
But when I asked him about it, Francis was brusque. He refused to talk about it and made up some excuse to leave dinner early. By the time I got up to the room, he was already asleep, or faking it, and when I woke up the next morning, he was already gone again with Wally.
Something was going on with him, I could tell, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. We’d been together for a decade by that point—I’d seen him stressed out, angry, or sad plenty of times. But I’d never known him to be withdrawn. Yet somehow, there was now a huge gulf between us, one that I couldn’t bridge, no matter what I tried to do.
“Has Daniel ever been distant?” I finally asked Tam one day when she’d come to see my progress at the ice cream parlor, in a rare moment that we weren’t fighting over her own. We hardly ever talked anymore, not about anything but our impossible project, but I was desperate.
“What do you mean?” she asked, looking up from my notes.
“Become secretive,” I said, fumbling. “That’s not it. It’s not like it’s something specific—Francis just seems aloof, and tense, all the time. Has Daniel ever been like that?”
As soon as I asked, I felt foolish. Daniel was never any of those things. He wore his heart on his sleeve, as the saying goes. You could always tell what Daniel was thinking, even before he could.
But to my surprise, Tam smiled. “Actually, yes,” she said. “There was one time. It went on for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t draw him out of it, or get him to talk about it, no matter what.”
“What did you do?” I asked, my hope buoyed. If they’d survived it, perhaps so could we, I thought.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Then what changed?”
Her smile had grown into a full-fledged grin by that point. “He proposed.”
It felt so good to laugh, after so long. We laughed and laughed until our cheeks hurt, and we could hardly breathe.
“Do you really think so?” I finally asked, wiping my eyes. “We’ve been together forever, but it doesn’t seem like the right time. None of us have thought about anything but this town for months now. I can’t remember the last time we even went on a date.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything,” Tam replied, backtracking. “We’re coming to the end of our sabbatical, and maybe he’s stressed out. I just meant, there isn’t necessarily always a bad reason for things.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s probably not a proposal, but I should go easier on him. This project has been hard on all of us.”
“It has,” Tam said. “But you never know. It is almost over, and maybe he’s looking forward. To what comes after this.”