Suddenly the pique I’d felt about my lack of playmates, the dreary vacation, William spending far too much time at Bert Plumly’s, even Philip’s visit to us, all that misery faded in my fright and exhilaration, tiptoeing up the stairs to the gate. The long hall was dark, my heart at the back of my throat as I began to open doors looking for signs of a college boy. Every room I put my head in was like a jumbled attic, a confusion of artifacts and what looked like trash. The fourth door was the winner, the room by the kitchen, a room that must have belonged to one of Sherwood’s many sisters long ago. There was a vanity table with a mirror, the clue. It wasn’t much of a guest room but one of the twin beds at least had been cleared of boxes and clothing and books and records, all the stuff that Louise or Margaret or Emma Lombard had once cherished but not enough to haul up to Alaska and the other places they lived. Philip’s backpack was on the floor, his notebooks and paperbacks on the desk, underwear, socks, and shirts folded neatly on top of a cardboard box, a little island of Philip things. The notebook: a black-and-white-speckled composition book with unlined pages. I opened it. Lists, he was a list maker. Lists of books to read, items to pack, people to write, music to listen to, recipes to cook, and there were drawings, as well, of mushrooms and flowers, a new lamb, and the bridge-graft he’d done with my father down in the west orchard. No master plan for his life, no mention of love or money or William and me or even May Hill. Only the lists, the drawings, and also he had written out poems, poetry by John Keats and William Shakespeare. I turned every page until there was no more writing. It was the most disappointing document I could have imagined, but maybe he used invisible ink for his true feelings? I spit on a page to see if water brought up a message. No. Nothing. On the desk there was a tube of lipstick in a clutter of markers and pencils, erasers and paper clips, the relics from the time of Louise Lombard. I took the cap off, the dull red tongue of it brand new even though it was something like fifty years old. Without thinking I carelessly applied it to my mouth and then I planted a kiss on that fresh page. “The end,” I said. “Ha, ha.”
Where, I wondered, did May Hill sleep? I was no longer quite so frightened or alert, an easy thing, really, to steal through someone else’s house, especially when they were out chopping down the forest. I went along the hall again and stopping midway, with exquisitely tuned radar, I opened a door. Although at first I thought it was only another junk room, I saw instead that I had chosen correctly. It was clearly May Hill’s room because on the bed there was a pair of neatly folded sweatpants and a big top, May Hill’s pajamas no doubt, and by the pillow a book of some kind, her nighttime reading. You had to be attentive to the clues, however, to understand it was a bedroom because the place was filled, from floor to ceiling, with boxes, a narrow aisle to the adjoining bathroom and a corridor also to the window. I carefully made my way along the towers in order to look out to the orchard. Down below I could see my father hauling brush and all the way across the road there was our house, May Hill able to keep track of everyone if she took the time to squeeze along through her maze. I would leave in just a minute, I thought. Wouldn’t William be surprised by my expedition!
Since the interview I had sometimes imagined that May Hill might be one of those people who made whole miniature towns out of bottle caps, or she’d have fabricated a family of paper dolls that were intricately cut with tiny little scissors, the kind of thing lonesome people do to keep themselves occupied. But there in her room were no astonishing worlds, her boxes stuffed with what looked like newspaper clippings and some of them had labels such as CHECK STUBS, 1978–80, and TAX BILLS, and BANK STATEMENTS. There were several towers of ancestral letters, documents I guess she needed to sleep with. A few items seemed nice, an enormous jar of buttons on a shelf, for one, and a crock of marbles for another, and a blue padded book of the sort my father had, filled with coins of silver. I opened it up to see the half-dollars. So there were those pretty things to look at, and to be glad about, too, glad that May Hill had a great many unusual and ornate buttons, and maybe the agates and the coins were worth hundreds of dollars, which probably made her happy.
Had I been looking at those precious things for a long time? It didn’t seem like it, but when the footsteps sounded on the back stairs I snapped to attention. Where was I? May Hill’s bedroom, that’s where. I instantly curled up by the radiator, very tightly, behind a box column, listening to the flat quick footfall coming closer, closer. It could be none other than May Hill herself. The person, she, stopped. The door had been left open, how stupid could I have been! She must have been thinking about that unusual fact before she took the simple action of closing it. There, it was shut. She then went farther down the hall to the living room. She was possibly looking for something and maybe she found it or maybe she didn’t. I thought I might throw up. After a while she went down the front stairs and from what I could hear she was out the door to her work again.
My inner ears seemed to have taken up my entire head—that’s how hard I’d been listening. Time to reverse my steps and get out of the manor house, steam away home. I went to the door. I turned the knob this way and I turned it that way. It didn’t, it wouldn’t open. I rattled it, I looked through the keyhole, and I pulled at it with all my strength. No, I kept telling myself. I’m not locked in. I hurried back to the window to see if my father was still driving the tractor along the rows. He was gone, no hope of holding up a flag, or making a sign that said SAVE ME.