“Funny,” said Uncle Steve. “That’s not the kind of mistake obituary people make. I’ll look into it. Call me, all right, Harriet?”

            “All right,” I said. And when he went away, I wiped my eyes and curled up in the chair and stared into the cold fireplace. When I remembered that I was still holding my coffee cup, I drank the rest of the coffee and put the cup down on a box, then put the sharpie next to it.

            All my momentum had run out. I don’t even know how long I sat there. But eventually I got up and went into the kitchen, vaguely expecting to see a note or something from Isaiah. But he had vanished as though he had never existed. I almost wondered whether I had imagined him. Then I opened the fridge and looked at the food. There was some casserole Aunt Ivy had made. Good, so I hadn’t imagined her, too. Or maybe I meant either. I ate some casserole out of the dish and put it back in. I wasn’t that hungry. I got a glass and had a long drink of water, then filled it again and drank it down again. Then I got my coat on and walked out the door as though on my way to an appointment.

            I walked up through the cemetery, feeling the cold bite of wind on my face. At the other end of the cemetery, where the newer graves were making inroads into the woods, there was a path I knew that led into Thrushcross Grange park, the path I used to use to walk home every weekend when I lived with Uncle Harry in his house. I made a detour to go past Uncle Harry’s grave and stood there for a minute, looking at the bare mound of brown soil, then I went off toward the west and found Isaiah’s parents’ graves, both grassed over now, one old and one relatively new. Then I veered off again toward the path to Thrushcross Grange.     

            It was a dirt path. Nobody would ever find it by mistake, but I knew where to dodge around the end of the cemetery wall, the one they throw all the old dead flowers over, and go down into the little valley cut by a creek and up the other side. The creek was frozen. I went up the other side of the little valley like I’d done a million times before and into the mixed woods on the hillside opposite the cemetery.

            You could lose yourself for days in those woods. The mix of oak, beech, pine, hemlock, sumac, and witch hazel meant that everything looked just similar enough that nothing was ever familiar or not familiar enough to work as a landmark. The secret of those woods is the glacial erratics, huge boulders dropped by the glaciers in the last ice age. I knew all of them and had names for them in my mind. The turtle, the mouse, the sleeping squirrel, the kidney bean, the layer cake, and many more. There was a group of five that didn’t need another name. There was one split neatly in half vertically by ice and age. There was one covered with moss and ferns on top but bare on the sides.

            I made my way from one to the next. At the one I called The Map, because of a pattern on the side that looked like a map, I knelt in the icy leaves and began to dig, but the ground was frozen. I had to get up and find a sharp-edged stone to use as a trowel, but they were frozen together or to the ground. Finally I kicked one loose and used it to gouge enough frozen earth away so that I could see the lid of the tea tin I’d buried, then used it to pry the lid up. No hope of getting the tin itself out of the ground. I took the contents out and put them into my coat pockets, and zipped the pockets closed, then replaced the lid and the loose earth and put the rock back into its socket where I’d found it.

            Then back on through the woods toward Thrushcross Grange. I crossed the boundary on the top of the hill, where there was only an old drystone wall, now in the midst of hundred and hundred and fifty year old trees that grew up around and through it. I always imagined that the ghosts of the colonial era farmers who dug those rocks out of their fields and hauled them and built them carefully into these once perfect walls were hanging around shaking their fists at us for not keeping up their hard won cleared land, for letting their work go to waste. But maybe those ghosts had gone off to the Caribbean by now, or Baja California, and were lying on the beach in the sun, soaking up the rays, or at least letting the rays travel through their transparent bodies in a warming kind of way.

            I liked that thought. Maybe everyone could choose where to haunt. My parents would haunt the museum, obviously. That’s the place where they were truly happy. When we went over there on school trips and caught them by surprise, I was always startled to see how different their faces were when they were working with the collections. Uncle Harry would be back in his Hollywood mansion with Wade, for sure. And I would be walking around the grounds at Thrushcross Grange, no question about it.

            I followed a route I remembered that tracked a series of clumps of evergreens like stepping stones through the woods that were predominantly deciduous, then stopped at an old stone horse trough left up in the woods for some unknown historical reason, maybe a lumber camp. There was an old well pipe somewhere nearby, too, but I couldn’t always find it. Near the north end of the trough, I lifted a couple of old pieces of slabwood to reveal a hollow under the trough itself. I reached in, no squeamishness this time, and pulled out a faded plastic pencil box. I brushed it off, shook it to make sure its contents were intact, and stuck it into my other coat pocket. Then I replaced the slabwood.

            The day was turning toward evening, so I hurried my steps a little along the evergreen stepping stones and then along the bank of the biggest waterway in Thrushcross Grange, the one I called The River, even though that was a little too dramatic for it. But it was too big and too deep to walk across. It ran across the whole property, dividing this side from the house side, cutting one quarter of the land off from the rest. The River was why nobody but me ever walked from the cemetery to Thrushcross Grange. There were some old crumbling granite trestles that I used to place boards across, where a bridge had been maybe a hundred years ago, but those got washed away regularly, and anyway they got slippery in the rain, or grew moss, or rotted.

            The best place to cross was in a clump of willows that had colonized the banks and grown down into the water to form squashy weedy islands. They gave plenty to hang on to, and if the ground was frozen enough, they would be sturdy. At this current temperature, I would get muddy feet at the very least, probably wet feet, and might get soaked up to the knees, or the hips at worst. But the current probably wouldn’t be strong enough to knock me over at this time of year, not until the thaw came. On the other side was the old overseer’s house, where I could build a fire and dry off in case the worst occurred. I always kept it stocked with a tin of matches and a stack of firewood, just in case I ever needed it. The windows were mostly broken and the roof leaked, but it had a door and would be decent shelter in a pinch.

            I made my way to the willows and carefully climbed down the bank. The water looked black now and foamed around the little islands. I stepped down onto one and immediately sank over my ankle in mud, but I had a good grip on the trees, and stepped to the next one, then the next, then across a wider gap to the next. I made it to the last island before I caught my trailing foot in some roots and fell forward onto the last clump of willows, which flexed under my weight and dropped me full length into the icy water.