Every house we pass on our way into the woods is closed up for the season. Not a single sign of life. Just beyond the turnoff for Dixon’s house, a fox runs across the road in front of the car carrying a small animal in its mouth. It freezes in our headlights, looks at us for a moment, before moving on.
The pond is thick ice. Hoarfrost covers the dead brush, bright red berries on a thin silvery branch. The camp looks naked, all its faults exposed. I pull in next to the back door, turn off the engine. We sit there in the quiet, the warmth, the deepening hues. Anna rests her head against the window glass.
“Stay in the car. I’ll get the heat on.”
The back door is padlocked. I go around the side of the house, wade through a pileup of dead leaves, reach up under the eaves. Even after all the years, I’m always amazed and relieved when my fingers find it—a single key hanging on a rusty nail. The same key to the same ancient Master Lock that has been here since we were children.
“Got it,” I shout to Anna. I open the door, stumble over the doorsill into the dark pantry, make my way to the fuse box on the far wall. My fingers feel their way down the braille of circuit breakers until they find one switch thicker than the others—the main. It takes a bit of force to turn it over from left to right. The refrigerator has been propped open with a broom to keep it from moldering, and the interior light goes on as it rumbles to life. The living room is clean-swept, empty of color, the sofa pillows and throws stored inside big black contractor bags. It feels colder inside than out, like a walk-in freezer, filled with the boxed-in chill of dead air. The water has been turned off, so the pipes don’t freeze. I’ll have to wait until the house has warmed up before flushing out the antifreeze and getting the water going. For tonight, we will get water from the pond.
I walk around the room turning on lamps. It is far too cold to stay in a cabin with no heat but we can make a fire, sleep in the Big House on the sofas. Tucked under a table are two electric heaters. I plug them into living room outlets. They come on like old-fashioned toasters, thin coils heating to orange-red, filling the room with the smell of burning dust, and always the spark of worry in me that they will burn the house down while we sleep. There’s a pile of wood and kindling beside the fireplace and a stack of fading newspapers—mostly last summer’s New York Timeses, a few Boston Globes mixed in. Someone, probably Peter, has laid a fire in the hearth, in anticipation of next summer. I take the tin of strike-anywhere matches from the mantelpiece, get down on my knees, light the crumpled newspaper, the tinder. The fire hisses, crackles, blazes alive. Behind me, I hear Anna come in.
“We should ice-skate,” she says.
“I’ll open a can of soup. There might be sardines.” I pull a big pile of feather pillows, blankets, and cold sheets out of an old captain’s chest.
We go to asleep listening to the flicker of the fire, the occasional thud of wood chunks falling into the embers. Outside, in the winter moonlight, the world is cold, stark—a bare echo of the place I love, the place where, for me, life begins and ends. Yet, lying here next to my anguished, perplexing sister, her hand within reach, breathing in the smell of woodsmoke and mildew and the winter sea, I can begin to feel its heartbeat. I have no idea what has happened to break Anna like this. I only know that whatever it is, it led her back here. Like a homing pigeon, who, deaf to everything but pure instinct, hears the wind blowing across a mountain range two hundred miles away and sets its course.
At dawn, sodium light seeps in through the porch windows, waking me. The fire has gone out during the night, and already I can see my breath. I put my socks on under the covers, grab my down jacket from the floor, and pull it on over my nightgown. The coals are still red. I add dry wood, stoke the embers, careful not to wake Anna, grab a jug and go down to the pond. I need coffee. There will be an unopened can of Medaglia d’Oro in the pantry. My mother always makes sure to leave coffee, olive oil, and salt. The pond is frozen solid. The ice must be six inches thick. Small twigs and leaves are paper-pressed into it, caught in motion like fossils. But where the ice meets the shoreline, it thins to a sheer brittle. I shatter the surface with a stick, cup my hands and drink from the pond before filling my jug.
The smell of coffee wakes Anna. “Oh good,” she says, yawning.
“She speaks.”
Anna cocks her head, a small gesture, like a winter sparrow. Then her face flushes gray with remembered sorrow.
“Talk to me.” I bring her a mug of black coffee. “There’s sugar but no milk.” I sit down on the edge of the sofa beside her. “Shove over.”