I’d never asked how Anne had grown so close to the Milton girls and their boyfriends. Had she met them in town? Did she know their parents? I suspected there was one girl she had befriended who brought the rest—and I guessed this girl was Mary Rae—but when I broached this with William, he said that the gatherings at Anne’s were new, prompted by Mary Rae’s disappearance and Anne’s imminent death. “I never saw Mary Rae there,” he said. He gave me a level look, as if he wanted me to take him seriously. “I hadn’t seen her in years.”
The next morning just after sunrise, I awoke to William moving around the apartment. We were on break from classes, spending a lot of time at home, and his early activity seemed curious. Through the fogged glass the day promised to be gray and cold. William stood in the center of the room, distracted. He’d been having trouble sleeping. His eyes were ringed with shadow. He had Geoff’s car keys in his hand, and I could tell that at some point in the middle of the night he’d slipped from the bed and left me and gone elsewhere.
“Where have you been?” I asked him.
“Get up,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
“Let me dress,” I said.
“No, just put on your coat and get your camera,” he said, as if the idea of presentable clothing was unnecessary where we were going.
He left the apartment, and I followed him out the front door onto the porch wearing the sweatpants I’d slept in, my coat over a cotton T-shirt. The air stung my face, my lungs.
“It’s too cold,” I said. William seemed not to hear me.
We got into Geoff’s car, which was parked in the gravel drive alongside the house. The interior was warm, as if William had just driven it home.
“Where did you go?” I asked him.
He drove expertly, one hand on the wheel, the other fiddling with the Leica in his lap. He didn’t answer me, just focused on the road beyond the windshield. There weren’t any other cars—it was too early for anyone to be out, save the people who’d been out all night. These were dark shapes in doorways, smoking last cigarettes.
I’d assumed we were going to a site he either wanted to photograph or thought I would like as a scene for my work. Occasionally, we went on outings in Geoff’s car to scout places. William found roofless barns for me, structures with weathered gray boards and lichen-covered stone foundations. Sometimes, we would be run off the property by landowners or frightened off by the report of a hunter’s gun. We were always trespassing, but neither of us cared. We wanted the shots we wanted. Abandoned places often surprised me with a subject, so those were the sites I liked best.
This time, heading out on the cold morning in my pajamas, I felt unnerved. In profile, William’s brows were set in a low scowl, his lips cracked and dry.
He was being evasive. I was suddenly awake, alert. “Where are we going?” I said again. “I might like some coffee.”
He flipped on the turn signal and pulled into a gas station, stopping at the door leading into the convenience store.
“Make it snappy,” he said, a phrase that Del often used.
“I’m not even dressed,” I said.
“Dressed enough to get a cup of coffee.”
Inside the overheated store it smelled of the hot dogs that had been turning on their spit all night. My shoes stuck to the linoleum. I poured my coffee and took it to the cashier. William hit the car horn, impatient. It bothered me, his repeating Del’s little phrase. Del spent a lot of time with the Milton girls at Anne’s. Maybe William spent time there, too. The cashier, her graying hair held back with a childish barrette, eyed the car beyond the door.
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
“He’s in a hurry,” I said.
He’s an artist, I wanted to add, but realized how ridiculous that might sound.
I got back into the car and we drove out of the city, along Cayuga Lake, and farther still, until the trees thickened along the roadside, and the pale sun that had risen during the drive barely made it through the snarl of bare branches overhead.
“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?” I said.
William’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “You’re acting like I’m abducting you.”
“You aren’t answering my questions,” I said.
“I thought you liked surprises.” William pulled onto the shoulder suddenly, almost randomly.
“Here we are,” he said.
I got out of the car. William began to walk into the woods along a path that seemed to have been trampled earlier. We usually followed old roads—those grown through with saplings, but this seemed more a path. Every so often William would stop as if he’d lost his bearings, and we had to backtrack and head a different way. The snow clung to my pajama bottoms. There was no point in complaining about the cold or turning back. I couldn’t have said which way we’d come. It was as if we’d found ourselves dropped into the middle of a wilderness—a pair of explorers on a reality TV show.
Once, I asked him if he knew where he was going, but his frustrated glare prevented me from asking again. Finally, after thirty minutes of scrambling and climbing, we reached what seemed to be a sort of summit—a clearing in the middle of taller pines where a small stone house sat, its walls covered in lichen.
“Is it gingerbread?” I asked.