The truth was, she liked the sparse look of bare countertops and shelves; the empty white walls felt like a clean slate. She was even hesitant to hang her clothes in the closet, preferring the vagabond feel of living out of suitcases. What did one really need to live? The thought excited her a little—an experiment in pared-down living.
Katherine looked around at the piles of cardboard boxes, neatly marked KITCHEN with contents written below: mixing bowls, steak knives, ice-cream maker, bread machine. But who on earth really needed an ice-cream maker or a bread machine? These, she decided, along with a great many other things in the boxes, would need to go.
Out in the living room were more boxes: CDs, movies, books, photo albums. The things that made up a life. But now, in their boxes, they seemed strangely unreal. A remnant from another woman’s life. The Katherine who had been married to Gary and once had a son; who had wedding china and photo albums and an electric knife sharpener. Now all these objects felt like toys, like she was a child in a playhouse trying to imagine what it was that grown-ups did.
Austin had died two years and four months ago—leukemia. He was six years old. And it had only been a little over two months since Gary’s death. Sometimes it felt like two days, sometimes twenty years. Her decision to move from Boston to West Hall, Vermont (population 3,163), had seemed absurd—concerning, even—to her family and friends. She claimed she needed a fresh start. After all, she’d just been awarded a Peckham grant: thirty thousand dollars to cover living expenses and art supplies, enabling her to work on her art full-time, to finish the assemblage-box series she’d been working on for the past year. For the first time in her life, she’d be an artist and only an artist—not a wife or a mother or the manager of a gallery. She gave notice on their Boston loft, resigned from her job at the gallery, and moved to a small apartment on the third floor of an old Victorian house on West Hall’s Main Street.
She didn’t tell anyone the truth.
Almost a month after Gary’s accident, she’d received his final American Express bill. The last charge on it, dated October 30, the day he died, was a $31.39 meal at Lou Lou’s Café in West Hall, Vermont. For some reason, he’d driven the three hours to Vermont, had a meal, then turned around and headed back to Boston. He’d taken the scenic route back, heading south on Route 5, which snaked its way down beside the interstate, I-91. It was snowing, an early-season squall, and Gary came around a bend too quickly, lost control of the car, and slammed into a ledge of rock. The state troopers told her he’d been killed instantly.
When she took the trip up to the garage in White River Junction to claim any belongings inside Gary’s car, she took one look at the deployed airbags, the smashed windshield, and the whole front end crushed like an accordion, and actually fainted. In the end, there wasn’t much to claim anyway—some papers from the glove box, an extra pair of sunglasses, Gary’s favorite travel mug. The thing that she was really hoping to find—the black backpack he used as his camera bag—was not in the car. She tried to track it down, pestering mechanics at the garage, the insurance adjuster, the state police, and the staff in the emergency room—but everyone denied having seen it.
Gary had left home at ten that morning with his backpack, saying he had a wedding to shoot in Cambridge and he’d be home in time for dinner.
Why had he lied?
The question plagued her, ate away at her. She searched through his desk, files, papers, and computer and found nothing out of the ordinary. She called his friends, asked if they knew of any buddies Gary had in Vermont—any reason he might go up there.
No, they all said, they couldn’t think of anyone. They told her he’d probably heard about a great antique shop, or just wanted a drive. “You know Gary,” his best friend, Ray, had said, choking up a bit, “a spur-of-the-moment guy. Always up for an adventure.”
As soon as she opened the bill with the charge from the café in West Hall, Katherine got in the car and started driving north. She found West Hall, Vermont, about fifty miles north of where Gary had had his accident.