I share all your sentiments, James, even the ones we shouldn’t be so careless to speak about in letters. Would that you were here and we could talk more plainly face-to-face. I think about the day you left for school, and the things we said. It’s all true, James. I have never had a better friend. And my feelings grow ever stronger in your absence.
Life at home in Mayville is as you would imagine. Pretty and airy and oh-so dull. I ran into your brother George while picking berries with my nieces. He was out hunting with some friends and seemed well and red cheeked and jovial. George is charming and well liked, isn’t he? Splendidly suited to take over the Axton family business, and always dressed in the finest cotton.
Sincerely yours,
Fidelia
TWO
GRETCHEN SNAPPED HER FIRST PICTURE STANDING IN front of the house. She was not a person to take dozens of photographs a day of frivolous things. Of all her friends, she was proud of never having taken a selfie. She used a real camera, not her phone, and she chose her subjects carefully.
Never in her life had she seen anything as remote or abandoned as this place. And yet it was somehow vibrant. The sun shone through the pine trees onto the gray boards of the porch and spilled over the roof and the cupola, glinted off the weather vane; the air was wild with dust motes and pollen and speck-size insects. There were billions of shining particles in the stillness, circulating madly. Birds were chirping. The whole place was teeming with nearly invisible life.
She stepped back away from the porch and took a shot of the house surrounded by light and insects—then a picture of the black car pulled up in the looping drive, to capture the strange juxtaposition of country dilapidation and city wealth.
“Oh, Simon,” she said under her breath, “you would love it here.” Simon had always said of writing poetry that he didn’t know how people who didn’t write could stand it—and, by “it,” he didn’t mean “not writing,” he meant being alive.
“I mean, if you’re not a writer, you could be walking down the street one day, and a brick could fall on your head,” he said. “And then you’re just, you know, some guy who had a brick fall on his head, and it totally sucks. But if you’re a poet and one day you’re walking down the street and a brick falls on your head, if it doesn’t kill you, you’ve got material. Whatever bad shit happens to you, you can use it in your writing.”
“Exactly,” she said aloud to the memory of his voice, and snapped another picture. She felt the same about photography. That with her camera she could at least bear witness to the hard and strange things that happened. Being in this place where her mother lived, after her mother was gone—it was like photographing her absence. Documenting what loss looks like.
The Axton mansion was simultaneously one of the most amazing pieces of architecture and one of the most amazing examples of neglect she’d ever seen.
The quiet of the country was profound and unnerving. She scanned the horizon—nothing but rolling hills and farmland for miles. Farther down the dirt road on which they’d traveled she could make out a barn and a small white house, but nothing else. She snapped another picture of the road, the distant buildings. The smell of woodsmoke drifted on the wind, and there was something unsettling about it; no smoke was visible, just summer haze.
She looked again at the door; though they’d seen her aunt’s face in the window, she had yet to come outside. When the driver came up behind Gretchen and touched her shoulder, she jumped.
MONA AXTON JOURNAL
AUGUST 18, 1977
I fell outside near the woods near a raccoon trap and now mother and father say that we are leaving the Axton mansion. Forever. We are going to Buffallo. And No the Children cannot come with us. And not the little white man with hooves or those people who ask for help either. Bcause they are not reel. espelcialy those people. And not Rebecca, and not Celia Either. And I am to throw away the camera. It’s no good. Its broken. Those aren’t Children in those pickchurs. Those are smudges. I said I don’t want to go, my friends are here and they say thos are not friends, they are your imginashun. you will be happy in Bufalo where there’s not all this old moldy stuff but a clean new house you will like. Celia and I said No. But no one cares what I say. And no one even knows she is there.
THREE
GRETCHEN WAS CONVINCED THAT HER MOTHER HAD planned to leave them.
After it happened she went back through her memory and tried to pinpoint things her mother had said that might reveal a plan to abandon her.
Her father assured her there was no way this was true—that Mona loved her, loved them both, and that if she could be there with them she would. But there were things Mona said that made her suspicious—things about souls being everywhere in the universe at once, and about how Mona would always be with her—even if she wasn’t physically there.