“It’s a mystery,” Geoff said. “When someone disappears without any explanation, it’s like a death, isn’t it?”
I agreed with him, uneasily. The cool breeze came through the open doorway from my apartment. Then Geoff said he had to head back to the shop, and he turned, wearily, toward the stairs. After he left I decided to walk to the campus to have lunch. I had signed up for classes for fall, but I wasn’t sure what I’d be doing then. The woman who’d helped me after the accident had contacted me about returning my clothes. I wanted to tell her to throw them away, but she’d sounded so kind on the phone, I’d agreed to stop by to pick them up.
I stepped out on the porch. William was across the street in his usual spot. He wore his beaver-skin hat, a dress shirt tucked into khaki pants. I stood on the porch, watching him, almost hoping I might make out his expression, and then he spun on his good leg and started off down the sidewalk. Rather than let him go, I crossed the street and went after him. It was a beautiful spring day—the dogwood blooming and shedding its petals on the ground, the air warm and filled with birdsong. I kept a steady pace behind him, but he turned toward campus and joined a great throng of students. It was so unlike the dead not to wait for me. Maybe he’d simply disappeared. Or maybe at some point he’d taken off his hat and ducked into one of the campus buildings. Either way, I couldn’t find him. My heart raced—not from exertion as much as from anxiety. I knew I didn’t want to catch him. I had nothing to say to him. I suppose I could have cleared my conscience and apologized. Ordered him to leave me alone. I had the strange feeling that I wasn’t being haunted but stalked. The missing items in my apartment, the feeling that someone had been there and gone through my bureau drawers—the dead had never taken anything from me before.
That afternoon, after I’d eaten and spent an hour or so in the lab, I returned home to discover my apartment nearly emptied of its contents—William’s boxes and the remaining furniture had disappeared, and only my belongings and my suitcase were left. I examined the stair treads and the muddy footprints. Geoff was at work, so I knocked on Professor Whitman’s door, but he, too, was out. That night I made a pallet on the floor, and I slept there and dreamed I lived in the encampment, working as the local clairvoyant. The place was shrouded in green growth, the tarps stretched in the sun smelling of wood smoke and melting snow, the creek rushing its banks. In the dream, I went to bed and little strung lights left spangles on the canvas like stars. But it was a fake, like a stage backdrop. In the morning I walked out of my tent to the mud, and the smell of rot and decomposition.
I awoke, startled, and sat up. Gray light filled the window, and the tree’s leaves fluttered in shadows on the wall. The room with its cracked plaster and blown dust made me think of the asylum, as if I had come to live inside one of my photographs. The throaty rev of a motorcycle idled outside my window, and it took all I had to restrain myself from looking out. Downstairs, I found Professor Whitman at home, and he admitted that he’d come in the day before to witness an old box truck at the curb, and two movers on the stairs.
“Can you describe the men?” I asked him.
Professor Whitman adjusted his glasses over his nose with his age-mottled hands. “I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention. It’s that time of year, people moving in and out.”
When I talked to Geoff later that morning, he was lugging grocery bags up the stairs. “Your mother probably sent movers,” he said, huffing. He unlocked his apartment door and disappeared inside.
My mother had bought me an airline ticket. I tried to call her, but she wasn’t home, and I left a message. My flight left the next day, and I wasn’t sure what to do in the meantime. Then I remembered the woman who had helped me after the accident with Anne, her hopes that I would come by to pick up my clothes. I called her back, and we arranged to meet. Outside, I stood in the gravel drive under the elm’s shade. I looked into the tree’s branches. Once, I had imagined myself in love, my heart warm and rapt. The elm had chafed in its coat of ice, and the frozen world had held a silent promise. I went down to the end of the driveway and glanced at the back of the house. William’s Triumph was no longer there. Like my furniture, it was gone.
36