 
CHRISTMAS IN CULM: Three Stories

by Vincent C. Martinez

Copyright ©2014 Vincent C. Martinez. All Rights Reserved.

This short story collection was corrected and revised July, 2015.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the reader. It is the copyrighted property of the author and may not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase a copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Discover other titles by Vincent C. Martinez at his official author webpage.
CONTENTS

THE TRAILER

I. The Fields

II. The Darkest Night

III. Fred

IV. The Night of Snow and Stones

V. The Whitest Day

VI. The Forever Island

LEMONTREE LANE

I. The Routine

II. The Cottage, the Coin, the Pen, and the Shapes

III. Ms. Simmons

IV. The Messengers

V. The Coldest Christmas

VI. The Endless Journey

DEAR VIVIAN . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE TRAILER

I. The Fields

The black field looked like a tear in space stretching for almost two miles—though sometimes a toothpick tree would break its surface—and trees clustered round its perimeter, hiding abandoned mining equipment or unsealed holes into which people would sometimes fall and disappear. Farther away from the field, clumps of homes called patches dotted the hillsides. When the mines were still open, miners walked to work, but when the mines had been exhausted of all coal, the patches remained, and the miners had nowhere to go.

We called the black fields culm dumps, waste coal that didn't burn well for steel mills or power plants, coal cheaper to dump than to use. It was piled high, filling forests and fields until they left behind black scars.

We were told to avoid the fields, told that sinkholes could swallow us whole, or that old blasting caps littered the landscape.

There was a culm pile that towered so high it looked like a mountain to my ten-year-old eyes. Kids called it Sky Hill, and during summer days some of us would climb the pile, reach the summit, and survey the black fields below us, the green hills of the Northeastern Pennsylvania valley, the towns of Duryea and Avoca, the brown Susquehanna River snaking through Pittston. Up there, everything seemed so far away and untouchable, everything except the clouds.

We'd grab pieces of thick cardboard, sit on them, pull ourselves to the edge of the summit, and slide down, coating our skin and clothes in dark dust. I tumbled down the hill more than once, and my skirts offered no protection against the sharp coal edges. I'd wander home in the late afternoon, legs burning from sweat and scrapes, happy that for a few seconds I felt I was close to being airborne.

But by the time I'd arrive home, I'd stare at the white front door, the two darkened windows on either side like dead eyes. I'd walk up the cracked concrete pathway, my ears listening for his voice, listening if he was wandering room to room, inspecting corners for stray dust or dropped socks, listening if something he was eating was too cold or too hot or too salty or too . . . anything. Extra beats would thump in my heart, and a panic would settle in my chest. Sometimes I'd stand outside and stare at the house as the sun dipped below the horizon, and the sky turned purple, and the front porch light turned on.

I'd just stare, thinking of places to hide.

***

When hiding, I noticed how certain colors blended well with certain shadows, how twilight made it difficult to see someone walking over fields or through forests, how sometimes you can hide just by sitting still, remaining silent, and not making any quick moves.

My first hiding places were basic: blankets slipped over my head. I knew anyone looking could still see my thin frame, but it shrouded me in darkness, and if I closed my eyes hard enough, I could pretend I was elsewhere, and if I closed my ears tightly enough, I could pretend not to hear Mom crying in her bedroom and the slams of Dad's hands against the walls. I discovered how I could fit the space under my bed and that I could enclose myself in walls of pillows and folded clothes. I discovered the door to the old coal room at the front of the basement and figured out how to lock it from the inside. One March I swept it out when he wasn't home and wiped clean the narrow window that was once the coal chute. It was still cold, damp, and sooty, but the room was quiet, and the space was mine.

When Mom found me sitting in the coal room one day she asked, "Jane? What're you doing down here, Honey?"

I looked at her pale face in the gray light, the long bruises on her neck and said only, "I'm hiding."

"From what, Honey?"

I said nothing, looking out the narrow window again at the pine tree in the front yard, knowing he'd be home soon.

Mom never mentioned the coal room to him, even when he pushed her against the wall and screamed at her about the dark smudges on my dresses, even when he walked the room wanting to know where I was, his deliberate pace creaking through the floorboards above my head.

I found hiding spaces in the forests around the culm dump: from the circular clearing surrounded by tall birches, to the thickets of high blackberry bushes behind the house where I sat and escaped in books by Bradbury, L'Engle, and LeGuin. If I looked hard enough, there'd be a space into which I could fit, a shadow into which I could slide, a wall behind which I could duck.

Then there was the rusting red semi-trailer at the far edge of the culm field.

Lots of the kids knew it was there, its decaying hulk surrounded by knotty trees and tall weeds, but most steered clear of it after one boy had wandered into that section of the field and blown off his right hand with a blasting cap and another who'd fallen into a small sinkhole. It rested on eight wheels, the old Firestone tires frayed and deflated or deflating from years of exposure to the seasons. Someone had placed wooden chocks behind and in front of each set of wheels, which had become overgrown with ivy and thistle. The paint had no markings save for a blocky white number 13 on its side. The rear doors were sealed by two large, rust-encrusted locks that had frozen in place. Around the locks, gouges like claw marks were cut into the trailer's red skin, failed attempts at entry.

Some thought it contained old mining equipment or television sets. Some thought it contained stolen decorations from the nearby Party Time factory in Duryea. Kids had their ideas about its contents, each idea more exotic than the next.

But aside from the dormant weed-covered railroad tracks a few yards away, the semi-trailer sat alone, marking the years with new layers of rust and new tangles of weeds.

Beneath the trailer, I could cool myself in its shade, keep myself dry from rains, and could sit against its softening tires and read until the afternoon sunlight died. One day, I decided to name it Fred. Because it seemed like a Fred. I'd not known any Fred's, but if I had I'm sure they would have been like the trailer: simple, solid, dependable.

I'd pull the weeds and the ivy from Fred's wheels and clear away the trash from the clearing surrounding it. I'd bring an old towel from home and sit against its wheels and read whatever I'd brought with me, or I'd draw pictures of islands in my school tablets, islands with pine trees, islands with lighthouses, islands with just two houses: one for me, and one for Mom.

Or sometimes I'd talk to Fred. I'd ask it how lonely it was out there, or where it came from. I'd tell it where I was from, tell it about my small house in the patch just outside Duryea, about my hiding places, about the nights of screams and the days of tears. I'd tell it how Mom would spend her days keeping the house clean and keeping the refrigerator filled with cooked food, or about how she spent hours looking in the bathroom mirror trying to match makeup colors to her skin color so she could cover the marks that appeared almost every week, or about how she sat alone and waited for Dad every night, her head in her hands, her green eyes staring at the front door.

I'd tell Fred everything.

And it would listen, whistling, rattling, and squeaking in the breeze, but saying nothing.

***

One mid-December I walked to Fred, my worn jeans making loud thwick sounds over the quiet culm field. In my gloved right hand, I carried a library copy of Dune, in my left was a dried pussy willow branch with which I cut the air like an épée. The southern skies were green-grey with clouds, but the skies overhead were brilliant blue, and I pushed my thick wool cap back while staring into the cold sun and swiped at it with the branch.

Fred whistled as the icy breeze whipped around its skin, and its doors rattled as if someone inside was pushing its way. I walked around Fred's tires, running my gloved hands over the metal before stopping and placing my book on the ground. Around me, trees wavered like sea plants caught by invisible waters and dropped their few remaining leaves to the black earth where they spun in cyclones at my feet. Here, there were no screams or no tears. Here, my heartbeats were slow and steady. Here, I'd no reason to hide.

I began to clear weeds and ivy from around the tires again, burrs sticking to my gloves and skin. As one set of tires was cleared, I moved to the next set, pulling at weeds and ivy, clearing the deflating tires, then pushing the culm back into place before I threw the weeds into a pile under a creaking maple. I didn't realize that I'd been sweating or that hours had passed or that the sky was now dark with heavy clouds. I shivered in the wind, picked up my book, and leaned against the rear gate of the trailer.

"I don't want to go home, Fred," I whispered. I began to cry and brought my twig-covered gloves to my face, as if I could hold back the tears or the words or if I had pressed the gloves hard enough against my eyes, the world would somehow shift and re-order itself like a puzzle, create a new pattern where I didn't have to hide, where my mother didn't have to cower, where our biggest concern would be what we'd be putting on the Christmas tree or if we'd be staying up late on New Year's Eve.

But when I pulled my gloves away from my eyes, and as the tears rolled down my cheeks, and the flurries of snow began to fall, I saw that the sky was still dark from clouds, that the trees were still bending in the winds, and that Fred was sitting quietly, its only sound the winds over its skin and the soft rattling in its doors.
II. The Darkest Night

Mom was like the coal underground: quiet, solid, dark. Years of pressure will do that—take something once was alive and press it, mold it, and solidify it. She was born in and lived in the nearby Wyoming Valley ever since. She was part of the last generation of mining families, her father dying from black lung, her mother dying from liver failure. She'd worked at the ammunition factory in Scranton, the party favor factory in Duryea, the mattress factory in Old Forge, all of which had either closed or downsized until she found herself at home all the time with a daughter, a small house, and an ever-darkening husband.

I'd seen pictures of Mom and Dad in the photo albums: wedding photos, birthday photos, night-out-on-the-town photos. At the beginning of their marriage, the photos cluttered every page, but quickly tapered off until the final photo album's last three pages remained empty. Looking through the photographs was like thumbing through a cartoon flip book—a man becoming more stone-faced, a woman becoming more stone. She'd once had short brown hair—the same color as mine—but it became mostly gray in less than twelve years. She'd once had smooth, fine skin, but it eventually turned a bloodless white-gray. When Mom showed me the old pictures, she'd point at herself, remark how young she used to look not long ago, then say, "That's what life does to you, Sweetheart."

But I didn't believe her. Life doesn't do that to you. Dad does.

She'd said how he was once romantic, how well he used to dance, how he funny he was, his jokes leaving her in laughter for hours, but it only made me think of a cat that once lived in the forest behind our house. It was sleek and gray, with golden eyes and a soft purr. I used to feed it scraps from the kitchen, leave it bowls of water, and the cat would purr and let me pet it Until the day it didn't, when it swiped at me with both front claws then ran into the underbrush where it disappeared forever.

Things hide their nature until they don't have to anymore.

Mom never said when Dad changed his. Maybe there was no single event, no single act that signaled things had changed. Maybe it happened when he had to take a new job towing cars in Scranton. Maybe it happened when he moved us into a house that needed more repairs than he thought. I never saw the change. It happened before I came into their life, which made me realize what the change was: me. Mom never said so. She never would.

Eventually, Dad had become something dark that crossed the floor or covered the walls with a form that held no substance but made its mark wherever it rested, like the marks on Mom's neck or face, or the limp in her leg, or the pains in her side that would make her stop and suck in air while she gripped the edge of the kitchen sink. Sometimes I'd see his form through the blankets thrown over my head or through the curtains as he walked through the backyard. Sometimes even when he sat at the kitchen table, where we all ate quietly, he was a darkness that seemed to shift shape in the daylight, his brown eyes glaring at me when I dropped my fork too loudly, his jaw tightening when Mom asked me what we were doing at school that week.

Fridays, the nights would be quiet, with only the sound of the television piercing the silence. And then, behind their bedroom door, I'd hear the strange calmness in his voice, an even tone that would only rise slightly in volume, and I'd hear the slow response of her voice, a soft questioning that became a rapid spill of words that would end with a sharp snap of skin against skin or a loud thud against the wall. And I'd slide under the bed and seal myself in with clothes and pillows, or I'd crawl into the corner of my closet, quietly slide the door shut, push my hands to my ears, and wait for Mom's cries to trail off into the night's darkness.

Every night I hid. Every night I'd stare out at the stars and think about my dream island with just two houses. A house for me. And a house for Mom.

***

By the time I arrived home, the kitchen was filled with steam from the sink and the stove. Mom moved along the countertop, slowly pouring green beans into a glass bowl and setting it aside. She checked the red potatoes boiling on the stove, stabbing at them with a fork to make sure they weren't too soft or too hard, the texture that Dad liked. She moved to the sink and rinsed a bowl, looking out the fogged window at the darkening evening, then looking back at me. "Could you set the table, Jane?" she asked, hair pulled slightly over her right eyebrow, which looked purplish and swollen. Her voice was quiet and ragged, her movements repetitive and robotic. I stood in the doorway for a moment, still swaddled in my coat and hat and gloves, and watched her move through the kitchen. I wondered if she was thinking about the snow and the sun outside or about the days before I'd entered her life, the days when she could do anything and go anywhere. Maybe a new job. Maybe somewhere out west. California. Texas. Places where the land stretched into forever.

I set the table the way he wanted, used the plates he wanted, the utensils he preferred, the paper toweling instead of the flimsy napkins, and Mom placed the bowls and plates on the table and sent me to my room to hang up my coat. When I walked through the living room, I opened the curtains to see the neighbors' house across the street. They'd strung Christmas lights around the window frames, and the lights twinkled and illuminated the snowflakes that fell upon the windowsills, spattering their front yard with splotches of red, yellow, blue, and green.

***

When we finished dinner, Mom and I cleared the table and cleaned the kitchen while Dad sat in the living room watching the news, saying something about the weather and people being too dumb to know how to place chains on their tires properly. Afterwards, Mom sat in the living room and looked out the window at the neighbors' Christmas lights and said quietly how pretty they looked.

Dad said nothing, his face locked on the television screen.

As I walked to my bedroom, he stood up, walked to the window, and closed the curtains.

***

Sometimes even the best hiding places can't stop the sounds.

Even though I closed the closet door behind me and pushed myself into the farthest corner when I heard the first slap and threw a heavy comforter over my body and a pillow over my face and my hands over my ears, I could still hear her scream and feel the hard thumps, the vibrations rippling through the wall beams and the sheet rock. I could still hear his voice, so strangely calm but deep, his footsteps steady and heavy.

I heard her ask him to stop, but he didn't for twenty minutes, pausing for periods to ask in his monotone, "You going to keep asking me about money? Are you? You going to keep asking me about money?"

I didn't sleep that night. I waited until sunlight peeked under the closet door; until the sounds of the front door opening and closing; until the sounds of Dad's car starting, pulling out of the driveway, and fading down the street before I slid the closet door open and left my room. The house was quiet except for the tinny drip of snow melting off the roof. I walked to my parents' bedroom door and opened it. Mom sat on the bedside in darkness, facing away.

"Mom?" I said.

"I'm not feeling well, Honey," she said, her voice sounding like it had been muffled with cotton. Not looking at me, she shooed me away with a hand. "Can you make yourself something to eat?" she asked. "I'll be in bed for a while."

I nodded. "Okay, Mom." I closed the door quietly then backed away.

I stood in the hallway and listened to Mom cry, her breaths heaving quietly through the door.

***

The sun was brilliant white, and it reflected off the snow that covered the culm.

My boots crunched the snow and culm, creating a gray slush. There was a slight breeze that chilled the icy air even more and made the cold tears on my face even colder. I wiped my face with my bare hands and closed my eyes to the blinding white all around. Ahead lay the red semi-trailer, its roof covered in snow, its tires sunk into meringue-like snow drifts. Behind me lay a mile of snow-covered culm which ended in a gray treeline that hid my home from view. When I finally entered the clearing and walked up to Fred, I leaned against its rear doors and cried.

I told Fred about the sleepness night, the screams and the slaps and the pounding on the walls. I told it how the closet space didn't hide me enough anymore, how I stayed awake the whole night under a blanket like a ghost, and how Mom stayed in the bedroom probably wondering how she would cover up the marks this time or how she could say the right thing when he got home so he wouldn't do it again. I told Fred that I was thinking of hopping one of the trains that passed through town and letting it carry me to wherever it could, but that I couldn't go without Mom and that I wanted us to have that island somewhere on a blue ocean where we each had a home and the only nightsounds we had to hear were the winds in pine trees and waves on a beach.

Then I slid to the ground, my buttocks planted in cold snow, my face between my knees. Somewhere, melting snow trickled through the trees and off-key birdsong twittered in the sky. The semi-trailer whistled in the icy breeze, and I cried in the cold air, ideas and options running through my mind, but always returning to the inevitable: return home, return to the closet, hide, hope things will remain quiet, at least for a few days. I slipped my hands into my coat pockets and felt for my gloves before realizing that I'd left them in my bedroom, so I kept my hands in my pockets, drew my arms tightly to my body and sat in snowy silence.

Above my head, a strange whine and creak carried on the wind.

Metal on metal, rough and grating. A pop and a clang. I looked up and saw that the twin locks that no one had been able to open on the trailer doors for years were now swaying in the wind and banging against the doors.

Unlocked.

I stood up, brushing snow from my pants, and looked at the locks. They appeared as though they'd been open for some time, but still caked in rust and dirt. I was sure they were locked the previous day, as they had been for years. I looked around and saw only a blue jay alighting on a birch branch, its wings flapping out old feathers. I crawled onto Fred's rear gate, balancing against one door while reaching over to the locks and pulling them off. The locks felt like ice in my hands, and I placed them in my pockets as I grabbed the door latch, pulled it up, then slid it over, surprised at how smoothly the rusting latch opened.

The door creaked open an inch, and warm air spilled out. I wrapped my fingers around the door's edge, pulled it open, and stepped inside, kicking snow off my boots.

I stood in the semi-trailer, my mouth agape, unable to form words.

The trailer's interior was a long, straight corridor that seemed over a hundred yards long with soft lighting flickering from the far end and warm air flowing out—from somewhere. I stepped forward, closing the door behind me, and looked down the corridor's wood-plank floor and steel walls.

"Hello?" I shouted. "Hello?"

The only response was the breeze whistling from outside.

I pulled off my wool cap and inched forward, examining the ceiling, the floor, the walls. I continued walking, shouting "Hello" every few steps, pausing, listening, then moving forward. "Hello". Pause. Listen. Move.

And I kept walking. . . .
III. Fred

My voice echoed off the walls and bounced down the corridor, which seemed to lengthen the deeper I walked into it. Warm breeze, salt scented and fragrant with pine, rolled over me. The walls groaned like a ship rolling over ocean waves, and the ambient light was deep amber, dim but soft, the kind of light I remembered from old libraries and old churches. Every few feet I paused, looked behind me, saw the doors recede farther and farther the deeper I walked into the semi-trailer.

After a couple hundred yards, a dark recessed doorway appeared to my left. I waved my hand in front of it and felt warm, moist air rushing out. My eyes adjusted to the dim light, and I called out "Hello?" several more times before I rounded the corner and stepped through the doorway.

I was staring into another corridor, but this one was shorter, and I could see its end opening into what looked like a room filled with stars. I stepped lightly, moving along the wall as if somehow it would give me security if the corridor collapsed or if the floor. My eyes examined every shadow for anything that might jump out, and my ears listened for any footsteps or breaths that may have been sneaking up behind me, but I saw nothing but the red metal walls and ceiling, the dark wood floors, the rich amber light, and I heard nothing except the warm air rushing past my ears, a distant groan from somewhere in the walls, and my boots thumping on the floor.

The corridor opened up into what I thought was a room, but when I stepped over the threshold, the room became a dark blue starry sky, a shoreline of sand and stone, and tall pines reaching high into the air, their tips like arrows aiming at a crescent moon. I was standing on a long pier that stretched straight over a large body of black water that lapped at its pillars. In the bright moonlight and starlight I espied an island several hundred yards ahead, perfectly round and dotted with high pine trees. At one end, a tall lighthouse flashed bright beams of white light over the water, scanning the shoreline and the sea in a steady slowdance.

Behind me, the doorway through which I'd just passed was embedded in stone, the corridor walls still glowing with amber light, and the shoreline to my left and right seemed to stretch into infinity, an unending line of rocky shoreline, low hills, and tall pine trees. Ahead of me, the island floated on the calm black waters, and I walked toward it, the thick pier boards creaking under my feet, the night waters lapping below.

The dark sea gently caressed the island shoreline, foaming lightly as it passed over pebbles that shimmered and sand that glowed under the night light. I stopped at the end of the pier and bent down to run my fingers over the sand, which was warm and moist, and I picked up some round stones and smelled the salt water in which they'd been soaking. I placed the stones in my pocket and looked again back at the shore, the pier stretching back in its perfectly straight line to the doorway that was still embedded in the shoreline's stone wall, and I stepped onto the island.

***

The pier transitioned into a flat stone path that curved into a dark forest of pine and led in the direction of the lighthouse. I followed the path, taking off my coat and hat and feeling sweat trickle down my back. Air whispered through the pine needles, and crickets chirped in the underbrush. Every few seconds, green and yellow fireflies drifted from leaves as they found new homes, and the white flash of the lighthouse cut through a light mist that flowed over the island.

The path twisted and turned, its edges marked with glowing green lichen and scattered mushrooms. A small rabbit stopped on the path and looked me up and down before walking on, its long rear legs and white tail disappearing in a crash in the underbrush. The path made another tight right turn and opened into a large round lot covered with hard-packed gravel.

Opposite one another sat two small houses. Each house looked familiar, one roof edged with blue, the other pink, both sided with solid redwood. Both houses had porches with two wood rocking chairs and a flickering gas porch lights. Behind the homes, the land dipped down into the area where the lighthouse lashed the night sky. I walked a few steps, then stopped in the middle of the lot.

The houses did look familiar.

The windows, the roofs, the doors, the porch chairs.

One house for me.

One house for Mom.

Through the windows, soft light flickered. I stepped up to the blue-roofed house and peered through a side window. Inside, a lantern glowed on a small white kitchen table around which sat four white chairs. The kitchen had a small sink, white cupboards, a small stove, and a cabinet that I realized was a refrigerator.

I stepped back, then backed out of the lot. I turned and ran for the pier, almost falling over seams in the flat stones several times before I reached the island's shoreline. I clumsily ran over the pier, and I panicked, thinking the pier was getting longer as I tried to reach its end, but it remained the same length, the doorway remained in the same place, and through it I ran until the corridor turned right.

I continued running, now thinking the walls were about to close on me. The semi-trailer doors were little more than a rectangular dot that gradually increased in size the faster I ran. My breath became gasps, and my coat flailed wildly in my hand. The island stones fell to the floor, and I stopped to pick them up only a few feet from the doors.

I reached up to the steel doors and pushed at them. The one I'd opened swung free, and white daylight and icy air stung my eyes and skin. I threw my coat and hat to the snowy ground, jumped onto the rear under-ride bar, then onto a patch of unmelted snow. I fell on my side and rolled, sharp edges of stone stabbing me. After gasping, I rolled over, grabbed at my coat, and pulled it towards me. I rummaged through the pockets and found the rusting locks and the sea-smoothed stones, then looked up at the open trailer door.

It swung in the breeze, whining on its rusting hinges, warm air spilling from its opening.

I stood up and brushed snow off my coat, pants, and hat, then pushed the door closed. As the door squealed shut, I jumped back onto the under-ride, slid the latch back into place, and replaced the locks, locking each one before jumping to the ground again.

I stared at Fred, the rusting-red semi-trailer covered in snow, the semi-trailer that sat inert for years. It stood without sound or movement as it always had. Cold air lifted snow off its roof, carrying it over the clearing where it shimmered like diamond dust in the winter sun. I put on my hat and my coat, zipping it up to my chin, then backed away as Fred's skin sang with the whistle of swirling air.

***

I ran across the white-patched black culm field, the air cooling and drying the sweat on my neck and back. I breathed in air that smelled sweetly of burning wood and tasted of metallic grit. My face stung, and my legs ached, but I ran off the field and into the treeline, over the abandoned railroad tracks and down the embankment that led to my house.

By the time I got home, Mom was limping to the pea green station wagon. She was dressed in her heavy gray winter coat, her neck wrapped in a black-gray checkerboard scarf, and her hands covered in heavy blue gloves. She turned to me, the left side of her face covered in purple bruises, her lower lip swollen and split. She was shoving black trash bags into the rear seat, and the wagon was filled with clothes.

"Where've you been?" Mom asked, her mouth still sounding muffled. Her eyes narrowed as she spoke, her jaw swollen on the left side. "Jane," she said, "where've you been?" Every word seemed to hurt as she spoke.

"Mom," I said, gulping as much air as I could, my lungs heaving. "Mom, I—"

"Doesn't matter," she said. She lowered herself to one knee and put her hands on my shoulders. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth trembled as she spoke. "I want you to go to your room and grab anything you need. I think I have all your important clothes and books. We can't take everything, but get whatever you need, okay?"

"We're leaving," I said. "Just you and me?"

"Yes, Honey."

"For good?"

"Yes, I—"

"Let me get a couple of things," I yelled as I ran to my room. I pulled my comforter out of the closet and the tablet that it covered. I looked around the room, thought about what I might need, but if Mom packed my books and clothes, I didn't need anything else. I left the room and closed the door behind me, hoping I'd never need its hiding places ever again.

Minutes later, Mom had locked the door, started the car, and pulled us out of the driveway.

The old station wagon rumbled down the street, and behind us the house got smaller and smaller and smaller.
IV. The Night of Snow and Stones

It was the first night I could remember lying on a bed and feeling safe.

We found a motel room outside Scranton. It was a small motor inn with twelve rooms and was tucked away several yards from the main road. We'd tried to find a room for several hours, but most of the local hotels were filled with Christmas visitors. As the day wore on, the sky got darker and darker, and in desperation, Mom pulled into the first motel that looked like it had an empty lot. As the sun flattened into an orange line on the horizon, we were finally able to sit in seats that weren't car seats, and we were finally able to shower with hot water. She parked the car around the back so it couldn't be seen by anyone driving by, covered as much of our stuff as possible with my comforter and with another blanket, then locked the doors and sat on the edge of the bed, holding a bag of ice against her face.

She had the hotel telephone in her lap and had just replaced the handset back onto the receiver.

"Your father canceled the credit card," she whispered. "We'll need to leave tomorrow morning." Mom placed the telephone on the nightstand Bible and lowered her head, ice pack still pressed against her face. "We have enough money for a few days."

I lay on the bed, looking at her hunched back. The lamp light enclosed her in a glow like the light I'd seen in the semi-trailer, amber and soft. Mom's breath rasped heavily through her swollen lips. The knot on the left side of her face was a bit smaller than when I saw it earlier in the day, and she kept the ice pack on it, pulling it away every few minutes to feel her face with her hand, wincing with every touch.

"They released your father," Mom said. "Released him. Arrested him this morning and released him just a few hours later. Just a few hours," she whispered. "They saw my face, Honey. They took pictures and promised they'd do something, but they just picked him up and released him on bail." She placed the ice pack on the nightstand.

"We're not going back, Mom?" I asked, more statement than question.

She shook her head. "No, Honey. Never." She grabbed the ice pack again, pressed it against her face. "Never."

"Where can we stay?"

Mom breathed deeply and exhaled. "I called my mother this morning," she said. "Said she didn't want to deal with the drama. Drama, Jane. That's what she called it. I don't know who else to call." Mom turned, then lay beside me, groaning as pain must have crept through her face and body. "All these years," she said, barely audible, "just drama. Now we have just a few hundred dollars and a car that should've been scrapped ten years ago, Jane." She kept the ice pack on her face. "We're never going back to him, Jane. Never. I don't care how far we have to run or where we have to go."

We lay on the bed, bedsprings squeaking from our breaths. In the room next to ours, someone had turned up the television. Professional basketball echoed through the wall, one player passing the ball to another, one player fouling, and one making a long jump shot. The crowd roared like falling water.

I thought about Fred. The long corridors, the pier, the shoreline, the island and lighthouse and houses. The warmth that surrounded me like honey. The air that tasted of ocean mist. The stars and moon shining like nightsun. I'd not told Mom about it, and I wasn't sure if I should. For a moment, I thought maybe I'd dreamt it, that there was a moment when my brain insulated me from what I'd heard in my parents' bedroom the previous night, but I had the scents in my nose, and the sights in my mind, and the stones and flakes of rust in my coat pocket. If it was a dream or hallucination, I'd still managed to pull the locks off somehow, and I'd gotten the stones from somewhere, stones that smelled of salt water and beach sand.

"I think I left your Christmas present at home, Honey," Mom said.

"It's okay, Mom." I nudged against her, and she pulled me close, running her fingers through my hair.

Mom turned out the light, and we drifted into an early sleep.

I awakened somewhere after midnight. Mom sat in a chair and looked out the window. Wet snow fell in large flakes that churned and tumbled in eddies of air. She stared at the parking lot, her chin resting in her hands. She'd close her eyes and shake her head, whisper something to herself, then blow out a mouthful of air, blasting the window with a thin layer of fog.

I tried to imagine what she was thinking. Was she thinking of places to where we could escape? Was she thinking about how much money was in her purse? The cancelled credit card? If Dad was stalking the streets of every town and city in the area, his white truck rolling down main streets and side streets, bright headlights slashing through curtains of falling snow? Yes, probably all that and more. Mom hadn't worked for years and had no income. She had no family to which she could turn, no belongings that she could really afford to sell for money. For years, Dad had been able to control what she did and where she went. He'd placed her in a pot of water, slowly increased the temperature, and it wasn't until the last minute when she realized that she was being boiled alive. She had a station wagon, she had some clothes, a fistful of money, and a daughter to feed and clothe and send to school.

When a frog realizes it's being boiled and can't reach the edge of the pot, what does it do?

I only prayed she wouldn't turn around and take us home, that her never wouldn't become a maybe. We'd make it without Dad. We had to.

But outside, the snow and the temperature kept falling. It was Christmas Eve, and though I was only ten years old, I knew Mom didn't have a plan and that we could soon be living in a car under snow-thick skies until the weight of winter finally crushed her once and for all.

I rolled over, looked at my coat hanging on the room's coat rack, and thought about the smooth stones sitting heavily in the right pocket.
V. The Whitest Day

The man behind the motel desk wanted to let us stay through Christmas, but he said the motel owner would fire him if he found out. He saw Mom's face when we first checked in, he knew what had happened and offered to call the cops, but Mom told him she'd already done that, but didn't tell him Dad had been released when we were leaving. She paid with cash, and we were back on the road the morning of Christmas Eve. The previous night's snowstorm had cleared the valley, and pale sunlight reflected off the roadside and hillside snow, blinding me as our station wagon rumbled down the slushy road. Hulking yellow trucks with snowplows attached to their grills and spinning salt and cinder dispensers attached to their rear gates passed us in the left lane, clearing the road of the remaining slush and sprinkling ice-melting salt behind them. Mom wore sunglasses to keep the snowlight from blinding her eyes and to hide the purple welts around them.

The station wagon twisted through the back streets of Scranton, and we pulled over once to a gas station to fill the tank. More cash out of Mom's wallet, less time to decide what to do next. When she filled the tank, she got back in the car and pulled a small folded sheet of paper from her left pocket. She unfolded it, read the text that was scrawled in blue pen, then started the car. We were back on the road again, driving up one road, then down another until we pulled up to a small red brick house, its window frames creme white, its snow-covered yard enclosed by a waist-high white iron fence.

"Come on, Honey," Mom said, and we walked to the front door, upon which she knocked three times and waited. There was shuffling behind the door, then several slow clicks as locks were disengaged, and the door cracked open. A tall woman with long black hair and a round, white face peeked out, examining us for a couple of seconds.

"Can I help you?" she said in a low, soft voice.

"I'm Bernice," Mom said, "and this is my daughter Jane. I was given this address last night by a friend—"

The woman smiled sadly, "Come in, Dear," she said, opening the door wide to let us in. As I pressed by her, I saw an aluminum baseball bat clutched in her right hand. She placed the bat in the corner next to the door and locked the door behind us. Mom removed her sunglasses, and the woman stopped. "You been to the hospital yet?"

Mom shook her head. "I called the police and got Jane out as soon as I could. I didn't have time to get to a hospital."

"Okay, but you should." She examined the knot on Mom's jaw. "Need to make sure something serious isn't damaged, and you need to have medical records documenting what he's done." Mom nodded, and the woman looked down at me. "You want some hot chocolate?" she asked. I looked at Mom to see if I should answer, and she smiled through her swollen lips and face.

"Yes," I said.

"Okay, let me take you to the kitchen and get you some while your mother and I have a little talk." She took me by the hand and led me through a swinging door that opened up into a small living room that had a round table and three children sitting around it. One little blonde girl sat in the lap of a pudgy blonde woman who brushed the little girl's hair with her fingers. The woman looked at me and smiled, her face dotted with purplish-green bruises. Another woman with straight brown hair had her back turned to the table and was staring out the curtained dining room window, her thin arms folded. We passed through another door and entered a large kitchen ringed with shiny steel appliances. In the center of the kitchen was a marble-topped island with two more women and a young sandy-haired boy sitting on stools, drinking from multicolored cups.

"We don't have any more marshmallows, Jane," the tall woman said, "but I think it tastes fine without it. She opened a cupboard, pulled out a large red cup, filled it with hot chocolate that had been sitting in a saucepan on the stove, then handed it to me. I gripped it with both hands and the woman smiled. "I'm going to talk to your mother, Jane, okay? Why don't you just have a seat here, and she'll come get you in a little bit, all right?" I nodded, and the woman left the kitchen. I looked at the unused stool, but stepped back against the wall and stood near the door, sipping hot chocolate from the red cup and watching the women and the boy sit hunched over at the island, not a single word escaping their mouths.

***

"Come on, Honey, let's go."

Mom stood in the kitchen doorway, buttoning up her coat and slipping her red woolen cap on her head. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her nose a deep pink. I placed the cup on the counter and followed Mom as she walked out the kitchen, through the living room, and back to the front door. The tall woman stood next to the door with her hands clasped in front of her.

"They should be able to help you at the address I gave you," the woman said.

"You said they didn't have a room, either," snapped Mom.

"It's a bigger house. They might be able to fit you somewhere."

"Somewhere? What does that mean?" Mom asked.

"In a back room, something like that. We have fifteen families here right now, Bernice. We can't fit any more families right now."

Mom opened the door and stepped out into the blinding light. "Come on, Jane."

"Bernice, I'm really sorry. I really am. Holidays are always the worst time for us."

"They're not exactly the best time for me, either," Mom said, grabbing my right hand and pulling me along with her.

"Where we going?" I asked.

"We got to get to Wilkes-Barre. We have to hurry."

Mom and I dashed to the station wagon. She was panting as she slid the key into the ignition and turned over the engine. The car sputtered, rattled, then settled into an even idle. She placed a yellow piece of paper on the dashboard. "Honey," she said, "get the maps from the backseat.'

I reached behind her seat, pulled out the Wilkes-Barre and Scranton city maps, and handed them to her. She handed me the Scranton map then unfurled the Wilkes-Barre map and traced the brown and green lines with her gloved fingertips. She checked the yellow paper again, then pointed at a specific point on the map. "Okay," she said, "okay." She handed me the map. "Don't fold it up. Leave it like that." Mom gripped the gear shift knob on the steering column, pushed it down, and we were off again, speeding through the gray-slush streets of Scranton, Mom whispering prayers to the gods of open roads and empty rooms.

***

The afternoon sky was already turning pink, the eastern horizon turning violet. We sat in the parking lot of an A&P grocery store in Pittston that was closing early for Christmas Eve. Mom had purchased some bread and bologna and a six-pack of 50/50 soda, and we sat at the far end of the lot under a buzzing white light eating cold bologna sandwiches and drinking cold grapefruit-flavored soda. The air in the station wagon was icy, and Mom pulled a couple of blankets over us as we sat in silence.

The house in Wilkes-Barre had no room for us that afternoon. When we'd left it behind, Mom stopped at an intersection and made a quiet joke. "No room at the inn, Jane. On Christmas Eve. Isn't that something? Isn't that—"

And she stopped talking, just turned her head and looked out the side window. We drove through small towns that melted into one another, homes and buildings and streets all the same, the only difference the size of their cemeteries. We drove north, then south. We pulled up to motels that still had vacancy signs but wanted credit cards or large cash deposits that Mom didn't have. We parked at a bus station that Mom thought would be open but saw it had shut down early for the holiday as well. We drove east, then west. In straight lines. In circles. Soon, were passing the same buildings over and over again until we arrived at the A&P where at least the lot was clear of snow and the lighting was bright. Mom spotted a shadowy corner next to a dumpster and muttered, "We could stop there," before she shook her head and sighed.

After we ate, she started the car, and we headed west again, the sky now milky purple. Around us, cars hurried down the road, headlights bright like cats' eyes. We passed homes glittering with Christmas lights in the windows and Christmas displays in the yards. We passed pedestrians holding bags and pedestrians holding each other. Stores were closing, and streets were emptying for the night.

Ahead of us: the dim pools of station wagon lights, a dark road, and stars vaulting above the horizon.

***

"We can't, Mom," I said.

Mom stared at our house from across the street. The porch light was on, and the living room light glowed through the navy blue curtains. Dad's white pickup truck sat in the driveway like a slumbering dog.

"Mom?" I said.

She sighed.

"Mom, we can't go back. We can't."

"I didn't think they'd release him," she whispered.

"We can go somewhere else," I said.

"Honey, we don't have any money to stay anywhere. We don't have a credit card."

"We'll stay in the car."

"And freeze?" Mom turned to me, swollen, bruised face glowing green from the dashboard lights, eyes wide, mouth trembling. "I thought we could stay at a shelter for a few days, you know? Just a few days."

"They said they might have a place for us in a few days, didn't they?" I asked.

"And do what before then, Jane? Do what? Sleep in the car? Sleep in a bus terminal?" She turned back to the house. "I didn't think they let him out, not so fast. I didn't think he'd be able to cancel the credit card that fast."

"Mom, let's go," I said, grabbing her sleeve. She was crying now, he face wet with tears. "Mom," I repeated, "let's go."

"We can't go anywhere, Honey."

Behind the curtain, something moved, a shadow shifting left, then right.

"Mom!" I pulled and pushed at her arm. "We have to go."

Slowly, the curtain parted, and a familiar shape appeared, its hands at the sides of its face as it peered out into the street, directly at the blue station wagon in which we sat. It stared at us as Mom froze in place and as I pushed and pulled at her arm.

The curtain closed.

"Goddammit, Mom!" She whirled around to look at me. "Go!" I screamed. "Go!"

Mom pulled down on the gear shift, and the station wagon lurched backwards. She pressed on the accelerator, and the car rocketed back, throwing me forward. She turned the wheel, and the heavy car spun on the pavement with a roar. Mom pushed the gear shifter up, and pressed hard on the accelerator again. We bounced over a pothole, skidded to the side, then sped down the street.

I looked over the pile of bags in the backseat and through the rearview window. A shadow ran into the driveway toward the pickup truck.

"Hurry," Mom, I said. "Hurry!"

The truck's headlights burned as it backed out of the driveway. As we approached the end of the street, the truck had pulled into the road, its high beams switched on. The lights grew larger as the truck sped towards us.

"Turn left," I shouted.

"Honey—"

"Turn left!"

Mom jerked the steering wheel left, kicking the rear wheels to the side as they squealed and grabbed for traction. We dashed through the stop sign and headed south, homes and Christmas lights a blur.

"Keep going," I said. "Keep going." I looked behind us again. The truck had turned left as well. Its headlights swerved as its tires spun and bit at the pavement. "Keep going," I repeated. The car thundered over the train tracks along which I'd walked every day and bottomed out as the road dipped. "Keep going straight, then turn left at that road!" I pointed to a clump of birches, their dark eyes staring into the station wagon's headlights.

"Do you know where we're going?" Mom screamed. "Where are we going?"

The truck crept closer.

"I know where we're going," I said.

Mom turned the wheel left, and we swerved onto a dark dirt-packed road, rocks and snow flying into the air.

"We're going to get stuck, Jane."

I ignored her, concentrating out the windshield until I knew exactly where we were. "See that path up there?" I asked. "The one that has the big trees? Turn there, and turn off the lights."

"Jane, we're heading to the culm dump!"

"I know, Mom, I know where we're going. Now turn and switch off the lights. Come on, Mom!"

She pushed the station wagon into another turn that it wasn't designed to make, and the suspension groaned and popped. She turned off the headlights, and we were bathed in blackness. "Jane, I can't see anything. I can't see."

"It's okay," I said, looking behind us again, "just keep going. The path goes straight."

"And then what? Jane—"

"It ends just up ahead. Slow down." There were no headlights behind us, but I knew Dad was out there. I knew he was slowing down, looking from left to right and right to left, looking down every road and path that branched off the main dirt road. Maybe he even stopped to figure out where he was, but that wouldn't last for long. We needed to keep moving, guided by stray moonlight, guided by memories of where every road and tree lay.

Mom slowed the car. "I think it ends here, Jane. Jane, where're we going to go? Tell me where we're going to go."

I looked behind us again, satisfied the truck wasn't rumbling down the snowy dirt road.

"Come on," I said, opening the door.

"Jane!"

I turned to her. She seemed shrunken behind the steering wheel, so small in the dashboard and moon light. "It's okay, Mom. I know where I'm going. Zip up your coat and lock up the car."

She turned off the engine, opened the door, and stepped out. I walked around the car and grabbed her hand. "This way," I whispered, and closed the door. We walked through a thick patch of trees that bordered the edge of the culm field, and we scurried over the snow-covered culm that glowed blue-white under the silent moon, the only sound our feet crunching over culm and snow and the distant thrum of a pickup truck's engine meandering through the maze of long-closed coal roads.

***

Mom's breaths came in gasps, and she reached up to her right side and groaned.

"We need to stop, Jane," she said. "I need to stop."

"We can't stop," I said. "We're almost there."

"Jane, let's go back."

"We're not going back, Mom."

"Jane—"

"We're not going back. We're never going back. That's what you said. Never." I grabbed her hand even tighter and pulled her. Ahead, the dark shapes of trees, dark shapes that I'd known for years, only a couple hundred yards ahead. I knew we only had to run in a straight line, that once we reached the trees we only had to turn right, then left, then walk through a narrow space, that it would open to a circular clearing, and at the center of that clearing was a rusting red semi-trailer.

Behind us, something growled and scraped. We stopped and turned. The truck had punched through some underbrush and was now on the culm field, its headlights aiming straight at us. I pulled Mom, yanking at her hand with as much force as I could.

We ran to the trees, and the truck gathered speed. One hundred yards. Fifty. Twenty. Ten, the truck roaring over the culm, headlights cutting shafts through clouds of snow.

I pulled Mom to the right, her legs wobbling, her breath heavy and raspy, her head flopping about like a rag doll's. "Jane," she kept saying, "Jane." But I pulled her through the narrow space, birch branches slapping at our faces and arms until we stumbled into the clearing where the red trailer sat.

"Fred," I shouted. "Fred!" I let go of Mom's hand and ran up to the trailer and jumped up to its under-ride bar, banging on its door and pulling at its locks. "Fred!"

Mom dropped to her knees, coughing, her breath now heavy with phlegm. She began to cry. "Jesus, Jane. This can't be where you wanted us to go. It can't be."

I banged on the semi-trailer doors. "Please, Fred," I shouted. "Open up! Please!" I kept banging and banging as the truck got closer and closer, its headlights glowing hot white through the trees. I hit at the doors with my gloved hands and then tried to kick at them when I lost my footing and fell back, landing hard on a pile of snowy stones.

I cried out, and the truck engine stopped, its headlights now stopped and shining directly through the trees and into the clearing. I propped myself on my elbows and rolled over and onto my knees. I crawled over to Mom, who coughed and wheezed in the cold air. I put my arms around her. "Mom," I whispered.

And behind us . . . there was a loud creak, a squeal like a long-locked gate swinging open, and a thump. Then another squeal and another thump.

I looked back at Fred.

The locks had fallen to the ground.

"Come on," Mom, I hissed, pulling her to her feet.

Through the trees, heavy footsteps thumped over culm and winter-dried grasses, and I jumped up to the trailer doors, pulled the door latch up, then slid it out as quietly as I could. But as the latch was almost completely open, it jammed. Mom looked up with wide, panicked eyes, and covered her mouth to muffle her breathing.

The footsteps were closer now. Heavier.

I pulled at the latch again. And again. And again. And the footsteps stopped. I froze and looked around, then took in a deep breath and yanked hard on the latch. With a loud screech, the latch slid, and the metal door creaked open.

The footsteps began running now, stumbling over rocks and fallen branches. I reached down and grabbed Mom's hand, swinging open the door and letting warm, salty air spill into the winter night. Mom winced in pain and crawled up to the under-ride bar and the rear of the trailer. I pulled at her coat, pulled her as hard as I could, hissing "Hurry, Mom, hurry!

She pulled herself into the trailer, and I started yanking her up by the shoulders, but she got to her knees and stood on her own. I shut the door as best I could, then grabbed Mom's hand. "This way," I said.

"You have to lock the door, Jane!"

"Can't lock it from inside," I said, pulling her deeper into the trailer.

"Jane, he's going to get in here!'

I ignored her, pulling her even harder. The air was waming, the trailer creaking as it lengthened itself into a long corridor.

"Jane, what—"

"Keep going and don't stop, Mom," I said. "Just keep going. We're not going back. Just like you said."

Suddenly, the trailer doors opened wide, and Dad's shadow stretched down the corridor. All around us, his shadow touched everything.
VI. The Forever Island

Mom was dazed by the lengthening corridor in front of us and the lengthening shadow behind us. Her head snapped back and forth as I pulled her forward, her feet tangling, her legs rubbery and unbalanced. Dad had stepped inside the trailer, his heavy boots thumping on the wood floor. "Bernice," he said loudly, but calmly. "Bernice, come back here. I just want to talk."

We zig-zagged down the corridor, the way illuminated by deep amber ambient light that seemed to come from nowhere but was everywhere. The metal walls creaked as the corridor lengthened and as the trailer doors steadily receded. Dad was still standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the white of his truck lights pouring through the treeline. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he was simply gaining his footing. Or maybe he stood in bewilderment as the interior of the semi-trailer stretched before his eyes, his wife and daughter hurtling down its length, getting farther and farther away.

Dad increased his pace, his boots thumping like deep heartbeats that echoed off the steel walls. He called our names again and again in flat, almost robotic tones.

He kept walking faster. And faster.

Mom began limping. She was having a hard time catching her breath, and the run through the fields and down the corridor was beginning to wear on her knees. She'd reach down, trying to rub away her left knee, but she'd see Dad closing in and then lope forward with a gasp, my hand pulling her forward.

I smelled the salt and felt the air warming, and I scanned the walls for the doorway that led to the pier, but the corridor only continued to lengthen. Several yards ahead, a doorway seemed to appear to the right, then to the left, then vanish, and after a few seconds, another dark doorway would appear, then vanish. I heard myself say, "No," every time a black doorway appeared then disappeared. "No," I'd say, "No." All around us, the walls creaked and groaned. Something like the sound of metal sliding over metal came through the walls, and when it stopped, another door would appear, then disappear.

Dad was now jogging. "You better not make me run, Bernice," he shouted.

Mom yelped as her left knee buckled.

"You never could run fast," he shouted.

As I turned I could make out the features on his face. The dark, almost plastic-like eyes, the straight mouth, the black hair flecked with gray at the sides. He was wearing his heavy coat from work, his name Tom sewed into a blue oval above his left breast.

Suddenly, a doorway opened to the left. Cool breeze seeped from the dark opening. I pulled Mom into it, and we stumbled down another corridor, this one shorter and darker. When we got to the end, Dad rounded the corner, only a few yards behind us, breath was heavy and steady, his hands balled into fists that pumped back and forth with every step. In the amber light, his gold wedding ring shimmered on his finger.

The corridor turned sharply right, and we turned with it, Mom banging against the steel wall. She limped heavily, almost becoming dead weight in my hand. Then, she began to slow, her breath wheezing, her eyes filling with tears. "Keep going, Jane," she gasped. "You keep going."

I shook my head. "No! Get moving, Mom. Just a bit more."

She shook her head. "I can't, Baby. I can't." She fell to her knees, and the steel walls around us groaned and creaked. Dad's footsteps thumped around the corner, and I pulled at Mom's coat. She tried to get up, but her knee buckled again, and she fell back, bracing herself against the wall. She howled in pain, closed her eyes and winced, then looked over. She seemed to stop breathing and shuddered, her face shaking. I pulled at her coat again, then stopped, following her eyes with mine.

Dad stood only feet away, his mouth clamped shut, his breath rapid and heavy. He smelled of oil, of sweat, of dime store aftershave. He stared at Mom, unzipping his coat.

"You know they're all laughing at me at work?" he said. "You know I might lose my job? That make you happy, Bernice? You happy with me not having a job? You happy trying to send me to jail?" He began to pull off his coat. "All you've ever done, Bernice, is make my life hell. Doesn't matter what it is"—he dropped his coat to the floor—"you just have to have things your way." He stepped closer. "And I've had it."

"Get out," I shouted. "Get out!" I wrapped my arms around Mom, but Dad said nothing. He just kept walking towards us, slowly and steadily.

He reached down, only a couple of feet from Mom's face. "You act like your mom, Jane," he said, "you get what your mom gets." He opened his hands, and his oniony breath poured over my face. I held Mom tighter, and she closed her eyes.

Then, all around us, the walls howled with the sounds of scraping metal and thunderous bangs like invisible doors opening and closing, and a steel wall slid between us and Dad. He fell back as the metal struck his hands, and he screamed as the wall closed shut. His voice became muffled barks, and he struck at the wall, pounding with his fists and feet. The walls groaned again, metal scraping on metal, and there was another clang, and the shouting stopped. Dad fell silent, then began shouting again, his voice more muffled, more distant.

Mom and I stopped breathing for what seemed minutes. We stared at the wall, listened to Dad's panicked wails on the other side that sounded less like whales dying in the deep. He kept striking the wall, but the punches and kicks became slower. And slower. And slower.

I stood up and yanked on Mom's coat. "Mom," I said, "you have to get up. You can do it."

"Where is he?" she asked, her tear-logged eyes locked onto mine.

"I don't know," I said. "Please, Mom, you have to get up."

Mom braced herself against the wall, then slid herself up, still panting, and still trying to recover her breath. She pressed her hand against the wall that had slid between her and Dad and ran her fingers over it. Her jaw tightened, and she backed away, reaching out for my hand, which I grabbed and pulled, leading us down the new corridor.

The corridor took another right turn after a few feet, then another right turn immediately afterward, Dad's muffled shouts behind each wall. I stopped.

"What's the matter, Jane?"

"He's trapped," I said.

"Where?"

I pointed at the steel wall. "In there," I said. "We just walked around him." I walked up to the wall and looked it up and down. "An animal in a box," I said.

Mom stepped forward and put an arm around me. "What do you think we should do?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said.

"He's your father."

"I never had a father. Only a mother."

We turned and walked back down the side corridor through which we'd run, walked through the doorway, and turned into the main corridor. To our left, the corridor seemed to continue on forever, to our right were the trailer's rear doors, dad's pickup truck headlights still burning brightly through the treeline.

"Where now?" Mom asked.

I looked up and down the long corridor, still smelling the salt air, still feeling the warmth.

I squinted and saw that, tucked in a shadow, a dark doorway had appeared. I walked towards it and peered in. The moist, warm air rolled over my face. I smelled sea salt and pine and night air. I waved Mom over, and she limped to me, her eyes darting up and down the corridor.

"What if your father gets out?" she asked.

Behind her, the metal squealed and creaked, and the doorway we'd just exited disappeared behind a sliding sheet of metal, leaving only a red steel wall in its place. "I don't think he's getting out," I said, taking in a deep breath. "Ever."

"Jane, what is this thing?"

I held my hands up. "This is Fred. Fred"—I lowered my hands to my mother—"this is Mom."

***

We stood at the island's center, the moon bright and shimmering, the lighthouse carving its narrow beam through the starry sky. Fireflies floated through the pine and ferns, and crickets sang their symphony. We took off our coats and placed them on the porch of one of the houses and stepped inside. The house was warmly lit by lanterns, the cupboards stocked with flatware and food, the beds large and covered with thick blankets. It smelled of fragrant wood. It sounded of nighttime silence.

It sounded of peace.

We sat on a couch in the living room, and I told Mom about my walks over the culm fields, about my talks to the semi-trailer I'd named Fred, about how I'd clean its wheels and ask it where it was from and if it was lonely like I was, about the islands that I drew in my tablets, about how I never wanted to go home and just run away to my islands, taking Mom by the hand, taking us away from Dad forever.

"But Jane, what is all this?" Mom asked.

"Our homes, Mom," I said. "One for you. One for me." I walked through the living room, the walls lined with bookshelves packed with hardcovers, some I'd seen, some I'd never heard of. "This can be my house," I said.

"Jane, we can't stay here."

I turned to Mom. "What?"

"Baby, we can't stay here. We don't even know where here is. We don't know what any of this is. And wherever and whatever this is, your father's still in here."

"He's not getting out, Mom."

"And how do you know?"

"Fred wouldn't do that."

"You don't know anything about this . . . place."

"Fred saved us," I said. "Fred made this place for us."

"You don't know what Fred is," Mom said. "Or what it wants."

"Mom—"

Mom grabbed my shoulders and softly shushed me. "Baby, what you found here . . . I don't know what to make of it. My God, I don't know what to make of any of this." Mom let go and placed her hands over her face before resting them in her lap. "This island? Jane, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And whatever . . . Fred . . . is, we have to thank it for that. We have to thank it for keeping your father away from us. But we need to be careful."

"Fred's a friend," I said.

Mom nodded. "You know, when I met your father, he was the world. He was beautiful, and kind, and considerate, and all of that. He was my island. I thought he was my dream come true. Then I married him, and things started changing slowly, a little angry comment here, a little insult there. Then it turned into a push here and a push there. Convinced me to quit my job, convinced me to let him have the checkbook all the time. It took a couple of years until he started hitting me. He'd hit me, then apologize, then be wonderful for weeks. Until he hit me again. And that's how it happens, Honey. Everything's wonderful and perfect at first, and slowly, the bad things start to happen, and then, before you know it, you're afraid to speak. You're afraid to live."

"What're you saying, Mom?" I asked. "What does this—"

"I'm saying that I won't fall into that again. I'm saying that I won't let you fall into that now. This Fred thing, whatever it is, you don't know anything about it. It may be kind, it may not be. We don't know. We need to be careful. Look at my face, Honey. Look at it."

I looked. Her eyes purple with bruises, her face swollen, her jaw misshapen on one side. I knew her arms and back and torso were probably bruised as well, that she ached from head to toe. So many years of pressure had turned her to stone, so many years of pain had etched cracks into her surface, cracks that might never fill again.

"My perfect island did this to me," she said, pointing at her face. "I understand you love this place, that this Fred has done and can do some, all I can say is, amazing things that I don't understand, but I do understand what making a snap decision without thinking can do. It can trap you. It can ruin you. And I won't let that happen to you. Now," she sat back, slapped her knees with her hands, "if Fred is what you say it is, then we can always come back to visit, to say hello, to spend time here. But, Baby, we need to live out there. That is where we belong."

"Mom," was all I could say, my voice a dry croak. I didn't realize I was crying until I felt the tears on my lips. Mom reached over and wiped my face dry, then wrapped her arms around me and rocked me gently. Through the windows, fireflies and stars glowed, and in the night air crickets sang a farewell dirge.

***

Mom helped me down to the ground, one hand on my waist and one holding my right hand. I jumped into a patch of stirred snow. In the white of the pickup truck headlights, Dad's bootprints cast deep shadows. Next to one footprint were the locks that had fallen to the ground. I reached down and picked them up. Mom stood and watched as I walked back to Fred, crawled back up to the under-ride bar, then closed the doors. I slid the door latch closed, inserted the locks into it, and snapped them shut. I ran my hand over the door and sighed before I jumped back to the ground, kicking muddy snow into the air.

Mom walked up to the trailer, placed her hand on the metal door, patted it, and whispered, "Thank you," before backing away.

We walked through the clearing and between the trees to the pickup truck. Mom looked into the open driver's side door and saw the keys dangling below the steering wheel. "Let's go, Honey, "she said as she slid into the cab and unlocked the passenger door for me.

The truck started with an electrical wheeze, then roared as the starter kicked over. The truck rumbled and shuddered as Mom put the truck into reverse and backed us away from the trees, their branches like anorexic fingers waving good-bye in the glow of the receding headlights as we drove back to the station wagon.

***

When we got home, Mom called the police. They came to the house, they drove out to the culm fields and down the dirt road where we left the truck. We told them how Dad chased us down the road, how we escaped into the culm fields, how we came upon a semi-trailer in a large patch of trees and hid from him there. We told them we didn't know where he was, if he was on his way back, and that we were scared and not sure what to do.

"Oh, we'll find him," one officer said. "And he better pray I don't get my hands on him."

Mom found money in the house, and the police were able to find a motel room for us in the next town. At the motel, I asked Mom why we just didn't stay home, and Mom's answer was simple: "We don't know if your dad's going to be in there forever or just for the moment. I'm not taking any chances."

That night we ordered pizza from a chain restaurant just down the street that was still open. We ate it on a king-size bed and watched television shows about flying reindeer and a man with a wonderful life and a cartoon about a boy who couldn't even buy the right Christmas tree. We fell asleep at one in the morning listening to cars whoosh by on the road outside.

As I began to doze, Mom whispered so softly: "Merry Christmas, Baby."

And I slept deeply and dreamt of islands and stars.

***

After weeks of searching, the police gave up. They figured Dad had fallen into a sinkhole, an uncapped mine shaft, something. A couple of officers muttered how they hoped he was rotting in hell.

Every week, I visited Fred. Sometimes Mom came with me, and we spoke to it. We thanked it. We asked it if there was anything it wanted.

But it remained silent, its skin still rusting, its doors still locked.

A year later in the heat of a humid July, two large tow trucks and a police truck crossed the culm fields, their tires throwing up roosters of dark dust. I watched them from my window as they crawled across the culm and stopped at the thick cluster of trees at the fields' edge. The state was beginning to clean up the culm fields, hauling old equipment and trash to faraway dumps, reclaiming the lands with newly planted trees and grass.

I watched as the tow trucks pulled the rusting red semi-trailer from behind the patch of trees, watched as they rolled it over the field for almost an hour, the trucks stopping occasionally, then crawling forward again. Mom sat next to me, and she placed her right hand on the window pane as the semi-trailer, the tow trucks, and the police truck made it to the shoulder of the main road and then eventually disappeared around the corner. After a few minutes, I walked to my room, placed a blanket over my head, and cried.

I heard they were able to open the semi-trailer before they attached it to one of the tow trucks.

I heard they found it empty.

I heard they took it to a salvage yard in Scranton and dismantled it piece by piece.

Mom and I left the old house the following year. We moved to a small town in Washington state, and she married a man a few years later whose biggest fault was an obsession with bird watching. Soon I began to attend the University of Washington in Seattle, and I discovered that I loved the clouds and the rains that wrapped themselves around the city.

And now, sometimes Mom and I and her new husband travel up and down the Pacific Northwest coast, past small towns and past large cities, and we look out at the islands dotting the vast coastline, islands covered in pine, and ferns, and fireflies.
LEMONTREE LANE

I. The Routine

The holiday loads had been diminishing over the years. The days of the Sears and JC Penney's and Montgomery Ward's Christmas wish catalogs long passed, shoppers now placing orders over computer networks and getting their gifts overnight from private shipping companies. Those who couldn't afford the overnight shipping sent their packages through standard mail, and while some at the postal service didn't relish seeing the piles of parcels, Eddie Mercury didn't mind.

He remembered when people sent everything through the mail, when people ran out to the mailbox to grab handfuls of cards or armfuls of gifts sent across the miles. Usually the people would smile, they'd say "Hello," they'd sometimes leave small gifts in the mailboxes for him: a small Thank You card, a gift certificate to a restaurant, a gift card to a bookstore. And when the holidays were done, when the confetti had settled in Times Square and the calendars had flipped to a new year, he knew he'd be back going door to door, mailbox to mailbox, through the wind and snow and sleet and rain. His mailbags marked his years, and as his years became shorter, his hair became thinner, his mailbags became lighter, and the mailboxes became emptier.

Many at the post office worried out loud how people seemed to need them less and less, how people wanted their gifts yesterday, how they wanted to pay nothing for postage, how they'd rather ship through private companies who paid their workers less, offered no pensions, and released employees like dogs shaking off fleas. Eddie worried about it, too. He turned in bed at night thinking of what he'd do if the postal service let him go. He had a two-year college degree in computer technology, but computers were getting faster, smarter, and more complex by the minute, and people weren't even bothering to fix their computers anymore, just tossing them into recycling bins and buying new ones. He was approaching forty, and he had some savings—but not much. He had a pension, but there was no guarantee it would be there when he could no longer carry the ever-shrinking bags of mail. But he'd finally sleep after a resigned sigh, relieved that he and his job had survived another day.

Eddie would awaken at four in the morning to the sound of the coffeemaker gurgling and growling in his apartment's green Formica-floored kitchen. His eyelids would scrape over his brown eyes as he opened them, and he'd shut them again in pain, reminding himself once again to head to the eye doctor and get a prescription for something to soothe his dry eyes. The clock radio next to his bed would bark to life, and he'd lie in his soft bed staring at the round light overhead and the tulip-patterned tin ceiling tiles painted over with thick white paint. He'd listen to radio announcers read through the news that had passed while he'd been sleeping and the traffic and weather reports that were occurring while he was awake.

He'd rub his eyes carefully, then run his fingers through his thinning black hair and take in a deep breath. He'd look over at the space next to him that was always empty and out the window that always had its blinds shut to the rising sun and the nearby streetlight. He'd say a few words to himself, usually about having to get up, about having to use the bathroom, or about whether it was Monday or Friday.

If it was the winter, he'd sit up, wrap a blanket around himself, and walk to the small living room to turn on the heater. If it was the spring or summer, he'd do the same thing to turn on a fan or the air conditioner, only without a blanket. Then he'd use the bathroom, he'd shower and shave. He'd brush his teeth and gargle with some incredibly strong mouthwash that burned his teeth and gums, and then he'd stare in the mirror. He'd stare at the face that was getting ever rounder, the stomach that was getting ever softer, and the eyes that were getting ever sadder. Sometimes he'd lose himself in the stare, thinking about how his mother used to tell him that he'd grow out of his awkward looks, that his wide eyes would narrow and his face would lengthen and become chisel chinned. But that phase never arrived, and the years took the weak clay that nature had given him and began leaving odd shapes here, bulbous deposits there. He'd tell himself to start going to the gym, but thoughts of the gym usually dissipated by three in the afternoon, when the back ached from the curve of the mail truck seat and the weight of the mailbags.

He'd drink his coffee, he'd eat his bagel. He'd put on his coat in the colder months and wear his short-sleeve shirt in the warmer months, and he'd head out the door, down the creaking steps of his apartment building, then walk outside into the morning blackness. He'd drive his dented red Chevrolet four-door Malibu the five miles to the post office and park in the employee lot just as others were arriving, all of them hunched over from the early morning hours and the toll of heavy work and poor diet. He'd check to see if his mail trays were ready, or how many parcels he had to carry to his truck, and he'd go to the breakroom and drink more coffee. People would mutter their hellos to one another, they'd sip their coffee, maybe they'd heat some pre-processed food in the microwave oven, but then they'd be at work, sorting mail trays, slipping envelopes into post office boxes, or loading up the trucks with mail trays.

When Eddie had his mail truck filled with mail trays and parcels, he'd make sure that he had his mail satchels, his Thermos of coffee, and his small digital music player. He'd start the truck's engine, sit for a few seconds, take a deep breath, then join the convoy of mail trucks as they crawled onto the main road, splitting off onto their individual routes like white boxes on conveyor belts as the quiet roads of Northeastern Pennsylvania came to life with morning commuters, school buses, and grocery delivery trucks.

Eddie was happy when he could just pull up to mailboxes, open them, drop in the mail, then quickly move on, but was less happy when he arrived at one of the older apartment buildings or the neighborhoods where the mailboxes were next to the front doors. He'd load up one of his mail satchels, place the strap over his increasingly aching shoulder, then trudge up and down the street, dropping mail into each box, then moving on to the next street.

Sometimes he'd stop for a sandwich and coffee for lunch, but when he was falling behind, he'd forego food and concentrate on delivery, finishing his routes as quickly as he could so he could get back to the post office at five every afternoon.

Every week.

Six days a week.

Fifty-two weeks a year.

For fifteen years.

At stoplights, he'd sometimes get hypnotized by brake lights in front of him. In heavy rainstorms, he'd feel the butterflies of panic flutter in his chest and stomach as the mail truck tires would lose grip for a split second. In snow, he'd squint to avoid being blinded by sunlight, and he'd curse himself for forgetting his sunglasses in his car.

Fifteen years.

At every day's end, he'd park his truck, return the trays and any deliverable and undeliverable mail. He'd say "Good-bye" to whoever passed him and then get back into his dented Malibu and drive home to the gray brick apartment building that squatted on a street corner in the town of Avoca. He'd walk in, check his mail, then walk back up the creaking stairs, the sounds of televisions or laughing or crying or coughing echoing down the stairs and the hallways as he walked back to his apartment, his back aching, his calves twitching. He'd open the door, walk in, close the door, then sit on the couch in his living room, rubbing his eyes and looking at the clock atop his television.

He'd sit in the darkening room, his mind empty, his stomach growling. Sometimes he'd walk to the kitchen and eat a sandwich, maybe a bowl of cereal. But usually he'd nod off for an hour, his head tilting over the back of the couch. Sometimes he'd dream of strange streets upon which he'd never walked or of smiling women to whom he'd never spoken. Often he'd dream of nothing, just a sleep of gray and black.

Nights would be filled with television repeats or pages of mystery novels he ordered by the boxful.

Then he'd slip into bed and sleep until four the next morning, his last waking thought just two words: Fifteen years.

***

Eddie had received more than enough grief over the years because of his name. He'd heard every joke in the book about singing songs for the rock band Queen, but no matter how many times he'd tell them that that was Freddie Mercury, and no matter how many times he tried to get people to call him Edward, the jokes would continue, as would the use of Eddie, and he'd shake his head and sigh. In high school, the jokes became frequent and often cruel, but he sometimes found that asking "Don't people stop listening to Queen after fifth grade?" was a good enough rejoinder.

He'd been named after his great grandfather, or so his father had told him: Edward Mercury, Esq., a bookbinder from Essex, England. Eddie had never been to England. He'd not even been to Philadelphia. Every new year he promised he'd be able to save enough to travel, but every year the promise would dissipate like snow in spring. He'd think about being a bookbinder in old England, the smells of paper and leather, the light milky and golden from oil lamps. Cover lettering in gold foil, page lettering in the blackest of inks. And he'd think about letters passing from hand to hand, letters with wax seals, letters with scents of perfume, hand-stamped postmarks, packages carefully wrapped in perfectly folded brown paper and twine.

As a boy, Eddie would write letters to companies and pen pals. When an envelope arrived, he'd run his fingers over the ink and the stamp. When letters arrived from Europe, he'd think of the grand buildings he'd seen in encyclopedias. When thick manila envelopes arrived from companies he'd pore over the enclosed brochures and read about how the company manufactured televisions, or how it refined oil, or how it made candy. He'd keep letters and brochures in their envelopes and mark them on a map on his bedroom wall with red pushpins, then type replies on a typewriter his parents had purchased for his ninth birthday. His mother would watch from the doorway as he typed letters to England or Ireland or Germany, her arms folded, her smile tender in his desk's soft lamp light.

He'd ask his father about his work as an engineer for the Bell System, and his father would draw pictures with pen and pencil on napkins of switching stations and phone lines, his balding head and black-rimmed glasses bouncing up and down in excitement. "You love your work too much, Robert," his mother would say, and his father would look up at her and smile.

"It's a miracle, Nicole," Robert would say. "Really, it is! Our voices pulsing through copper lines, bouncing up into space, bouncing down again, and into someone's ear. Come on, Honey, it's got to impress you."

"Not every day," she'd say, running her hand over his head.

"We're Mercury's, Nicole. You know what that is, Eddie? You know what Mercury was? Messenger of the gods, that's what he was. He took messages from the heavens to earth and back again. That's a lot to live up to, don't you think?"

And Eddie would nod.

"Darn right it is. Messengers. Without messengers, this whole world, everything, just falls apart. People become out of sight, out of mind. That's no way to run a society, Eddie. No way at all."

Then one year, Eddie's mother began to bruise. Her arms, her legs. Her blood had turned against her, her bone marrow disintegrating, and his father began communicating less and less, sitting by her bedside, his head on her chest, his eyes red from tears as the months of failed radiation and failed chemotherapy took her farther and farther away. One day she weakly grabbed Eddie's hand, brought it to her dried, almost-white lips then kissed it. "My little Eddie," she said before falling asleep one last time.

His father had her buried high on a cemetery hill in Avoca overlooking the street where she and he had first walked when they were in high school, and he spent hours after work sitting by her graveside, speaking to the green grass and the cold stone, brushing dust from her name, polishing the granite with his necktie. Five months after Eddie had graduated from Pittston Area High School, his father crumpled to the ground while looking through the window of a stationery store in Wilkes-Barre as his heart gave out. Eddie had him laid to rest next to his mother where the autumn leaves could dance around their headstones, where the winter snows could cover them in cold blankets, and where the street upon which they once walked could be seen forever.

***

After high school, there were stabs at college, a stab at learning how to service computer workstations, but like the leaves whirling around his parents' headstones, no single idea, no single career settled in his mind. Half-formed thoughts and partial dreams appeared and disappeared in his thoughts like dust. When he sold his parents' house to a young couple, he took his old letters and his typewriter and moved to the small apartment in Avoca and looked for work. Any work, anything to pay for food and rent while his mind jumped from idea to idea. An ad in The Scrantonian newspaper looking for postal workers sat in the center of the classifieds section, a large box with large black text.

The following week he took the bus to the city of Wilkes-Barre, took the civil service exam, and waited for the results.

A month later he was on his way to the post office in Pittston on a cold, cloudy day.

Then the routine began.

The routine that took him through small towns and medium-sized towns, down narrow streets and potholed roads, to old apartment buildings and new schools and turn-of-the-century homes. Up twisting hillside access roads, down arrow-straight avenues, and around curving cul-de-sacs. Into gated communities and out of dead-end neighborhoods. Villages, boroughs, patches. Sunup, sundown.

Fifteen years.

Through those years, Eddie watched the amount of cards and letters lessen, the amount of bulk mail advertisements increase. Sometimes he'd see letters from around the world, and he'd study their addresses, their exotic stamps, their computer-printed postal bar codes. Sometimes he'd see postcards from countries he'd never heard of or cities he'd only dreamt of. Always he'd slip them back into his mail satchel and then drop them in their mailboxes.

In his tenth year as a mail carrier, some of the mail routes had been consolidated and folded into one another to help cut costs. He was given a new route, and he looked at a map on his kitchen table as he drank coffee and ate corn flakes for dinner to make sure he could find the quickest way to the new streets. He picked up a red pen, gave silent thanks that the streets could easily be reached on his return leg back to the post office, then drew a red line from the main route he usually took to the new streets: Bingham Road, Red Soil Road, Humphrey Street, Starry Lane, and a short dead-end line named Lemontree Lane.
II. The Cottage, the Coin, the Pen, and the Shapes

Winding off the main road leading to Pittston, Lemontree Lane was a narrow path of pavement that was barely one lane wide. Its entrance was shrouded by tall maple trees that covered the road in dark shadows, and its steep drop off the main road almost completely hid it from view. On the first couple of days on his new route, Eddie had passed Lemontree on several tries before finally spotting the opening and easing the mail truck down the steep-angled road, letting gravity and a low gear carry the vehicle down the snaking path that was densely lined with thin birch and lemon trees overgrown at the base of their trunks with weeds and tall grass. The lemon trees were arranged in neat rows, five trees per row, and the first year Eddie had driven down the road, the air was filled with overpowering scent of citrus, bright yellow lemons filling the trees and falling to the ground. He'd never known anyone had tried planting a lemon orchard in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and he wondered why someone would try in the first place. There were plenty of crops one could plant in Pennsylvania, but heat-craving citrus wasn't usually one of them.

The orchard looked like it had been abandoned for some time, the lemon trees unpruned and the grounds unkempt. Plots of dirt not claimed by weeds were claimed by alien trees usually cleared from orchards. On several occasions Eddie considered pulling over and gathering up some lemons for himself, but realized he'd really no idea what to do with them since he made lemonade from factory-processed powders and ate lemon pies purchased from large grocery stores. But every day he'd look at the lemon trees, their leafy boughs dotted with yellow orbs, and he'd take in the silence all around. The longer the road twisted downwards, the quieter and cooler the air became, as if the nearby neighborhoods and streets had faded away, giving way to the whisper of leaves turning in the wind. In autumn, the light seemed darker on the lane than elsewhere, and the leaves would burn with reds and yellows, and the lemons would decay into the soil, covered by leaves, composting and feeding the roots to begin the cycle again.

The road ended beside a Victorian-style cottage, its fiery red wood siding cooled by white eaves, window frames, shutters, and gingerbread-style gables. The front steps led to a small porch upon which sat a large red pot that must have contained flowers at one point, but now only held dried brown weeds. Dark curtains cut off the interior from the outside world, and when Eddie would pull up to the cottage, he'd shut off the engine and listen for any signs of life. Out back, a rusting windmill remained locked in position beside a rusting metal water basin, both heavily edged by tall weeds. Atop the cottage, a spinning black weather vane crowned with a crescent moon denoted the cardinal wind directions with the letters N-E-W-S.

Sometimes he thought he'd see a curtain pull back, then close again.

Sometimes he thought he saw dark figures walking behind the trees.

Sometimes he thought he heard voices behind the front door and window, sometimes a few, sometimes many, sometimes just one.

But there were no cars or trucks, no footprints in the dirt, no sounds of music or televisions or smells of food cooking in the kitchen. The cottage seemingly sat inert like the orchard that surrounded it.

Out front was a large white mailbox, looking new and bright white, and every day its metal red flag was raised. Eddie would pull out thick handfuls of envelopes, each with different handwriting and in different envelopes, but each one properly stamped and each one sealed by a round wax cursive L on the back. Eddie would place the letters in his truck, lower the flag, close up the mailbox, then drive a few yards and flip through the envelopes. Some were addressed locally, some were to be sent to all corners of the country, some were thin, some were thick with tightly folded letters inside. Some were addressed with flowing cursive script, some were addressed with simple block printing, some were typed on an aging typewriter, with individual typed letters higher or lower than others, and, without fail, each envelope was sealed with that red wax L on the back. Eddie ran his fingers over the wax seals numerous times and smiled every time he did.

When he finished flipping through the envelopes, he'd place them in the outgoing mail bin in his truck, then continue back to the main road. And every time he looked in his rear-facing mirrors, he was sure he saw not only a curtain open slightly as whoever was in the cottage would watch him pull away, but dark figures, like flickering shadows, dart from tree to tree, evaporating into the air like steam.

***

In the first few months of his new route, when snows and ice storms settled over the county, Eddie felt like skipping Lemontree Lane when he saw road caked-over with snow or ice, but after a few moments of thoughts and sighs, he'd pull over to the road's entrance, bundle up his coat, lock up the truck, and make the slippery walk to the red cottage where he'd find the mailbox stuffed with outgoing envelopes, all in different handwriting or typed, and all secured with the waxen L on the back. Then he'd walk back up the road, a road wrapped in total silence except for the trickle of snowmelt or the thump and creak of tree branches in the winds, a road where the shadows seemed to watch him as he made his way back to the main road.

Every day, he pulled handfuls of mail from the mailbox. Every day, he'd drop off a few envelopes addressed to a P. Simmons in the mailbox, and sometimes he'd deliver parcels from stationery companies or food delivery companies. He'd walk up the creaking front porch steps, place the packages by the door, then knock loudly and wait for the sounds of stirring behind the windows and doors, but instead was usually met with silence, and he'd walk back to his truck or walk back up the street, the last part of his mail delivery duty completed until he got back to the Pittston post office where he'd drop off the outgoing mail, the certified and registered mail receipts, and the mail trays, then head to his car and drive home.

Sometimes he ran address searches on Lemontree Lane on his computer, often coming up with little more than the name P. Simmons on the county tax assessor records. When he ran searches on the name P. Simmons, he'd find nothing of any use. The cottage on Lemontree Lane hid its secrets well with thick curtains on its windows and anonymity on the computer networks and county records. Eddie spent his quiet evenings thinking about the letters he carried from the Lemontree cottage, the different envelopes, the different styles of writing, the same wax seal. He wondered if the cottage was a mail forwarding service, but if it was he couldn't find any notice of it in the postal service records. He wondered if a family lived there, or if several lived there, but found no evidence of any significant movement in and around the cottage, save for the strange shadows that seemed to dart behind the tree trunks.

At night, he'd dream of the cottage in his sleep, the twisting road, the wavering trees, the vaporous shadows, and then he'd fall into darkness.

***

During his first week of post-Thanksgiving Day delivery runs to Lemontree Lane, he'd find the mailbox jammed with envelopes for mailing, sometimes wedged in so tightly that Eddie would have to remove his gloves and slip the envelopes out one at a time, muttering curses under his breath as he dropped the mail into his satchel and carried any parcels to the front door, where he'd rap his knuckles on the door, then walk back to the truck and return to the main route. Every day of the holiday the mailbox would be packed with outgoing mail, and every day Eddie would curse to himself and guide the truck or—even worse—walk up the icy road, surrounded by dead-silent air and strange shadows.

A week before Christmas, he arrived at the red cottage and again walked to the large mailbox, lowered the metal flag, and opened the door.

Inside was only a small box, a bit bigger than a matchbox, and tightly wrapped in brown paper and twine. The precision of the folds in the paper and the tightness of the twine impressed Eddie, and the small card attached to the double knot on the box was addressed in expertly scripted calligraphic handwriting: To the Mail Carrier—Merry Christmas.

Eddie smiled and waved to the cottage, unsure if anyone was home or if anyone was watching behind the heavy curtains. He walked back to the truck and returned to the Pittston post office for once without a large load of mail from Lemontree Lane.

***

That night, Eddie sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee with a turkey sandwich and potato chip dinner. He was tired from the long day, and his eyelids were already getting heavy, drooping as he sat in silence. As he closed his eyes, he thought of Mom and Dad, thought about the last time someone else had been in his apartment, a black-haired girl named Nicole who decided she wanted to be with a banker instead of a postal worker, leaving behind only a note on the refrigerator and an empty space that Eddie didn't know how to fill.

He thought about going back to college, maybe brushing up on his mathematics and getting a degree in computer science. He thought about how much money he had in the bank and if he could stretch it another two weeks. He thought about how he came home to silence, how his mailbox would be empty save for some utility bills, how each day seemed more empty than the previous day.

And he thought about the small twine-wrapped box he'd left at the center of the table.

Eddie opened his eyes, pushed aside his empty plate, then grabbed the box. He cut the twine with a steak knife and carefully pulled off the paper with his frayed fingernails. Wrapped in the paper was a small glossy-black paper box, thin with sharp corners and unblemished surface. He gripped the bottom section of the box, then pulled away the lid.

Inside, a thick gold double eagle coin rested on a bed of white cotton.

"Jesus," Eddie whispered as he picked up the coin, its skin reflecting the dim kitchen light into his eyes. On the obverse, the figure of Liberty carried a torch and an olive branch, on the inverse, a flying eagle passed above a shining sun. The coin's date was 1930.

He dropped the coin back in the box. Eddie wasn't a coin expert, but he knew the coin could be worth thousands, maybe even a lot more. He placed the box on the table then stared at it for most of the night, wondering what to do next.

***

The following day, Eddie pulled up to the Lemontree cottage, emptied its mailbox, left two parcels on its porch, knocked, then waited. In his left hand, he held the small black box. He took a few quick glances at it, the thought of keeping it running through his mind more than once the previous night and all morning. He'd run a search on his computer as to how much the coin could be worth. The amount staggered him. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. All night he thought what he could do with the money, how he could take those trips to those places that he used to mark on his map as a boy or how he could buy a cottage and move out of his cramped apartment. But then he knew the law. He couldn't accept it or risk jail. Small gift cards were acceptable, anything under twenty dollars, and that was it, but rare gold coins worth hundreds of thousands were not.

He knocked again, this time harder, and he called out "Hello?"

No response.

He knocked one last time, waited, then placed the box in between the other two that he'd left on the porch and slipped a small note under it:

Thank you for the gift, but I cannot accept gifts over $20. Merry Christmas.

He knocked one last time, then backed off the porch and returned to his truck.

On the drive up Lemontree Lane, he was lost in thoughts about the coin, about how another day was coming to an end, and about how he only had a quiet apartment and a quiet night waiting for him . . . and nothing else.

***

Eddie stared at the Spencerian-scripted letter that he held with his gloved hands:

One with a duty as important as yours should not be limited to silly regulations intended for bureaucrats with no morals. Your service is valued. Your service is crucial. However, in keeping with your request and with inane governmental rules and restrictions, I have enclosed a gift that is intended with true appreciation of your profession.

Kind regards,

P. Simmons

Attached to the letter was another tightly wrapped and twined box, this one several inches long. Eddie wasn't sure if he should open it in front of the cottage, or if he should wait when he got home. After a minute, he decided to take it home and open it there. He waved to the cottage again, made his way back to the Pittston post office, hurried home, pulled a few items from his mailbox, then jogged up the squeaking stairs to his apartment where he unwrapped the package and removed a long, thin cherry wood box. He slid the lid off the box and peered inside where he espied a shining black simple Waterman fountain pen and a small bottle of black ink.

Eddie lifted the pen and held it in his hand where it felt heavy and sure. He unscrewed the cap, examined the shimmering nib, and pretended to write large loops on the tablecloth. He replaced the cap, placed the pen back in the box, and mulled over how much the set cost. Most likely, it was a bit more than the twenty dollar limit, maybe by fifty or sixty dollars. But he stared at the box for a few minutes, slid the lid back in place, and set the box to the side.

He decided to keep it.

***

For five years, Lemontree Lane was the last stop on Eddie's route. For five years he drove down the twisting road, dropped parcels on the porch, pulled handfuls of wax-sealed mail out of the mailbox, loaded up his satchel and placed it in his truck. For five years all of the envelope addresses were different and had different handwriting or sometimes different typefaces, the only consistency the wax L seal on the back of each envelope.

The house was silent whenever he made his mail runs. Even when he sat outside and pretended to organize his mail trays in his truck while keeping his ears trained on the house, he heard almost nothing. Sometimes there were the odd whispers behind the doors and windows, and sometimes he'd hear the soft clacking of typebars striking paper, but nothing else. During one mail run, something clanged in the backyard, something metal on metal. Eddie walked around the back and saw nothing, just the rusting windmill, the rusting basin, and a segment of an abandoned railroad line, which wasn't surprising. The entire region was criss-crossed with abandoned rail lines. He'd stumbled over a few in the woods when he was a kid, and the one behind the cottage was pretty much the same: overgrown with weeds and covered with decaying leaves. After seeing nothing he returned to his truck and drove back to Pittston.

Each Christmas a new gift was left for him: one year a fine linen stationery set, another year a small leather-bound address book with gold-edged pages. He kept each gift on his writing desk in his apartment, and at night he'd hold them in his hands, run his fingers over them, and remember that he had no one to whom he could write letters, no addresses or phone numbers he could place in the address book, no one close except the neighbors in the apartment building.

And the resident of Lemontree Lane.

***

One Sunday just after one in the morning, Eddie lay awake. A mid-March rainstorm was clearing the valley, and he listened to the rain pelt the windows and to the tires of cars whooshing down the street. He lay on his side, thought about how Nicole used to fill the space next to him, and thought about where she was, if she was happy, if she ever thought about him. As the rainstorm faded to a trickle, Eddie got up and got dressed. He put on his shoes and his coat, walked to his rain-beaded car, and decided to go for a drive. To anywhere.

The streets were mostly empty, save for traffic signals flashing yellow or red, shadows, and rain-mirrored roads. After a few moments he realized that he was driving the same route that he did every day, up the same roads, down the same streets. He had his radio on, and scratchy, staticky oldies music filled the car, a song from the forties here, a song from the fifties there. It was white noise to Eddie, who drove in circles looking at streets and houses that never changed in his years as a mail carrier.

Eventually he slowed when he came to Lemontree Lane. At the road's entrance, budding tree branches dripped rainwater onto the street and swayed in the black morning breeze. He stopped for a few seconds, turned the radio off, then turned the car down Lemontree Lane.

The road glistened in the headlights, and the roadside trees took on the appearance of disfigured skeletons peeking through the earth. The branches swayed gently, carving shapes from the shadows. Eddie rolled down his window to let in fresh air, and his breath came out in clouds. At the end of the road sat the red cottage, quiet and lonely, like the orchard surrounding it. He turned off the headlights and looked at the cottage.

"You're being creepy," Eddie said to himself. "Just damned creepy." He put the car in gear, then took one last look at the house. Something moved in the front windows. He squinted, focusing his eyes, noticing that the curtains had been opened wide. In the windows, dark shapes, heads, shoulders, torsos merged into one another then separated, and peered outside with eyes that glowed a dim white, flickering like candlelight.

White, flickering eyes that stared directly at Eddie.

"Jesus!" he shouted, pushing the accelerator to the floor and blasting the car back up Lemontree Lane, roadwater hissing under the tires as his heart thumped heavily, and, hands shaking, he finally switched the headlights back on, narrowly avoiding a roadside tree.

He hurtled the car through the street's entrance, then whipped the car onto the main road, speeding through stop lights on the road back to Avoca.

***

For two days, Eddie avoided Lemontree Lane and even put in a request for a route change, but he knew he was stuck with the route until the next round of consolidations, which could be months or years away. He decided to slightly modify his route, arriving at Lemontree Lane midday and not in the late afternoon hours. He kept his hand-held cell phone with him and made sure it was completely charged before resuming the route.

Carefully, slowly, he guided the mail truck down the twisting lane, doing his best to ignore the bony-branched trees and the odd silence all around. There were two boxes to be delivered to the house, and he kept them close as he pulled up to the cottage. He got close to the walkway leading to the porch, grabbed the boxes, took in a deep breath, and ran to the porch, where he dropped them next to the door, knocked once, then bounded off the porch steps before he ran to the mailbox, flipped down the red flag, opened it . . . and saw only one envelope.

He grabbed the envelope, jumped back into the truck, and sped back up the hill, trying not to look at the house in his rearview mirrors, the envelope still in his lap.

By the time he got to the main road, he pulled onto the shoulder and finally let out a gasp of air. He ran his hands through his hair before he picked up the envelope and examined it.

No postage.

No seal.

Addressed only to: Postal Carrier. The lettering was typed, each letter somewhat misaligned.

Eddie opened the unsealed envelope and removed a small piece of white linen stationery.

Loneliness leaves our nights empty and our days meaningless. May you fill your empty nights and give meaning to your days however you see fit, whether in the pages of a book, in letters to long-lost friends, or on endless roads that take you everywhere and nowhere.

—P. Simmons

He sat on the roadside shoulder, the truck engine idling, the road traffic passing, the weight in his chest heavy and unrelenting.
III. Ms. Simmons

Eddie thought about the diminishing holiday mail, the days of mailed catalogs and cards, the days when one could touch the ink on paper and feel the miles under one's fingers. He looked at the mail trays in his truck, the parcels stacked in the back, and remembered when the parcels filled the truck. In those long-gone days, he cursed the parcels, the need to trudge them up to porches and ring doorbells or knock on doors. He cursed how the end of every holiday route left his back with pain and his legs with aches. But as the years grew, the parcel piles shrank, and the roads would be filled with trucks and vans from private shipping companies, and eventually no one left Thank You cards or small gifts in the mailboxes for the mail carriers anymore. He began to miss the day-end aches and pains, the small notes or gifts of appreciation, and he began to miss Nicole, and his mother, and his father even more.

Driving the snow-slush streets in his mail truck, he found himself pulling over onto the shoulders or into parking lots and sitting in silence, or sitting in coffee shops longer during his lunch breaks nursing one cup of coffee. His birthday came and went without notice, and December wore on, his fifteenth year overall, his fifth year delivering to Lemontree Lane. As he drove, he fell into trances, calculating years to retirement, amounts of money in his savings and checking accounts, desperately flipping around numbers and columns in his head to see if he could somehow create money from nothing and inevitably failing.

He even drove down Lemontree Lane in trances, not caring much about the shadows in the treeline or the figures he'd seen in the windows. Sometimes he felt tears in his eyes and not know why, or he'd only think about driving home where he could sit on his couch and watch something on television, lulled to sleep by the sound of passing traffic on the streets below.

He'd drop the packages on the Lemontree cottage porch, knock on the door, pull out the handfuls of outgoing mail from the mailbox, then leave. Go home, grab the mail, sit at the kitchen table, sit in front of the television. Sleep. Another day, another routine.

Until one day. December twenty-first. Saturday.

***

Eddie brewed his late-afternoon coffee that day and sat at the kitchen table. Outside, the day was cold, short, and darkening. Inside, the electric heaters were pinging to life, and the light over the table pulsed as the heaters kicked on and off. He was thinking about dinner, the limited choices running through his head, as he reached for the pile of mail on his table and flipped through it. Advertisements for oil changes. Advertisements for clothing stores. Electric bill. Water bill. White linen paper envelope with typed address and no return address.

He dropped the rest of the mail and held the white envelope with both hands. As the coffee maker gurgled and groaned, he flipped the envelope over and saw the red wax seal with the cursive L pressed into it.

A sensation like electricity ran through him, and his hands shook. Whoever was in the Lemontree cottage knew his name and his address. He asked himself how they could have gotten the information. Public records of some sort? Loose lips at the post office? Eddie inserted a knife under the flap, then sliced through the seal and the paper. He pulled out a couple of small sheets of neatly folded white stationery and opened them to read the typed note:

Dear Eddie,

We hope this letter finds you well. We have tried for so long to reach you for so many years, and it's been more difficult than we thought.

Are you doing well? Have you traveled the world as you wanted to? Remember the map on your wall? The red pins in the map where all your pen pals lived? Have you seen them yet? So many places, Eddie. We hope you've seen some of them. So many things to see in life.

We know you cannot reply, but every day we wonder how you are, what you're doing, what kind of adventures your life has brought you. Sometimes we stop what we're doing and say, "I wonder how Eddie's doing"? or "I wonder to whom he's married?" or "Where do you think he is these days?" Sometimes it's almost a game we have. We'll say, "He's in Chicago now," or "He's in New Orleans listening to jazz now." Wherever you are, we hope you are happy.

We are doing well. Things, at first, seemed so odd, but we've gotten used to it. Isn't that how things are, Eddie? Things seem really scary at first, but once you get used to them, they become interesting, even exciting. We've gotten used to the oddities, the strange way things are here. We've made friends and seen amazing things. After the darkness, we felt so alone until we found each other again, and then everything, a whole new everything, opened up to us.

We don't have much time to finish this letter, so we will be wrapping it up for now. We just want you to know this: We're thinking of you. We're always thinking of you. Every day we love you, and we look forward to seeing you again someday when you can tell us about your life, your loves, and your triumphs.

Goodbye for now. We'll try to write again, but if we can't just remember that we'll see you again . . . someday.

Love Always,

Mom and Dad

Eddie dropped the letter onto the table as if it were hot coals and stared at it. The coffeemaker finished brewing, and the kitchen was filled only with the sound of electric heaters buzzing to life again.

***

When he pulled up to the cottage, Eddie parked his car and switched off the ignition. He pushed open the car door and slammed it shut, his coat open and flapping in the cold night breeze. The cottage curtains were closed, and behind them the soft glow of lantern light flickered.

He stomped up the porch stairs, pulled the letter out of his coat's right pocket, and reached up with his left hand to bang on the door with a closed fist. He pulled his fist back, and the front door swung open.

A short, thin elderly woman with smooth skin, gray hair pulled back into a bun, and wearing a red cable knit sweater stood in the doorway. Black reading glasses were chained around her neck. She folded her arms and squinted at Eddie. "The postal service know you're bothering customers late at night?" she asked.

Eddie held up the letter. "No, but the postal inspector might find out that you're sending harassing letters to mail carriers." She looked at the letter in his hand, put on her reading glasses, and her eyes widened. "You know?" he said. "Postal inspectors? They're federal officers, and I don't think they're going to be too happy with someone harassing one of their own."

"Harass?" she said.

"That's the way I'm going to file the criminal complaint," he said.

She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "If that's not the damnedest," she said. The wind blew through the slumbering orchard, and the trees responded with creaks and groans. "Technically," she said, "it was, well . . . forwarded to you."

"Sending harassing mail and operating an unregistered mail forwarding service?"

"You're really angry, aren't you?"

"You'd be too if someone's sending you letters saying it's from your dead parents."

"Oh," she said, nodding. "Yes, I can see how that would be distressing."

"You think, lady?" Eddie said, stuffing the letter back into his pocket. "Did you think I wouldn't find out? Next time, maybe don't use your wax and personal stamp. You must really not think too much of us."

She looked up, her eyes dark and hard. "On the contrary. The service of messenger is one of the highest callings anyone can have."

"Well, my calling doesn't involve dealing with nutcases who have access to my name and address and decided to play games with me. Just wanted to let you know before I file with the postal inspectors."

"Mister, uh—?" she said.

"Don't play games, you know my name," he said, turning to walk off the porch.

"Actually, I don't," she said. "I write out so many letters, it's too difficult to keep track."

"You got sick kicks, lady."

"That letter? It was from your parents. If that's who it says it's from, that's who wrote it."

"They're dead, lady," Eddie shouted. "You know that."

"They wrote it," she said. "They wrote it through me."

He stopped and turned to her again. "What?"

She stepped onto the porch. "If it says it's from your parents, it's from your parents. I wouldn't remember writing it, but I hardly ever do when I write my letters. You see"—she looked around—"they used me to write the letter. No, that sounds a bit negative, doesn't it? They used my, faculties, to write it. I put the pen to the paper or put the paper into the typewriter, and they . . . created the words. They addressed the envelope. Once that's done, I simply seal it, stamp it, put it in the mailbox, and . . . that's it."

Eddie looked at her, a strained smile crossing his face. "Holy hell," he said, "you're crazy."

The woman took in a deep breath. "I know it's difficult to understand. I didn't understand for the longest time, but now I do. And I accept it."

They stood on the small porch facing one another, cold December wind now whipping around them, lifting dried leaves and skittering them over the road.

"Please come in," she said. "I'd rather not freeze out here." Eddie looked at the door and the windows, looked for the dark white-eyed wraiths. She motioned him to follow her inside. "There's nothing in here that can hurt you. Nothing."

He followed her to the doorway and stopped. "I saw things," he said. "In the windows. A couple years ago."

"Please don't call them things," she said. "They have feelings just like you and I do." She reached out her hand to him. "My name is Simmons. Persephone Simmons."

He reached out and grasped her hand. It was warm and soft. "Edward Mercury."

"Mercury," she said. "A fitting name for a messenger."

She walked into the cottage, and Eddie followed her, closing the door behind him as the wind pushed through the orchard and over the rooftop, spinning the weather vane to all points of the earth.
IV. The Messengers

The interior of the cottage was even smaller than Eddie thought it would be. Directly to the left of the front door was the living room, a room ringed by bookshelves stocked with leather-bound books and crammed with three small desks, one piled high with paper and pens, one with two typewriters, and one with letter trays and an unlit white candle. Beside the candle, Eddie espied a small wax stamping set, a shimmering gold fountain pen, and a bottle of black ink. At the center of the living room sat two dark cherry wood chairs and a low coffee table upon which a white hurricane lamp glowed brightly. To the right of the front door was a darkened room that Eddie guessed was a kitchen. In the corners, dark things churned like smoke.

Persephone led him into the living room and motioned to one of the chairs. "You might want to take off your coat," she said. "It may be a small, old house, but they knew how to build them back in the day. Gets fairly warm in here when I want it to, and tonight I want it to."

Eddie slipped off his coat and hat then sat in one of the chairs, his buttocks sinking into the thick pink seat cushion. He draped his coat over his lap and looked around the room at the books and the desks and the lampshadow dancing over the walls.

"I'll get coffee," she said. "I always have coffee ready. Helps me do my job." She slipped out of the room, leaving Eddie to listen to the winds swirling around the front window. Sometimes things seemed to move in the corner of his eyes, a brief movement of shapes taking curious glances at him, then evaporating when he turned to look. Sometimes feathery, whispery sounds chattered behind his head, and he'd lean forward, scan the room with his ears, and hear nothing but the cold December winds again.

On the coffee table, a shadow stretched towards the hurricane lamp, a shadow shaped like a long, bony hand with fingers that flexed and bent. Eddie watched the shadow as it crawled to the base of the lamp, reaching for the wick raiser knob, slowly, slowly—

"They do that sometimes."

Eddie looked up. Persephone stood in the doorway holding a tray with two large white porcelain cups and a large silver coffee pot. She smiled at him and walked to the table, setting the tray beside the lamp. "Sometimes," she said, sitting on the other chair, "sometimes they think they can turn off the lights, thinking it'll make it easier to be heard. Usually the new ones are like that, the ones who don't understand how it all quite works. They expend a lot of energy, you know? Like a, how would one say, like a rookie? But then they figure it out and stop wasting their time."

She reached down and started pouring coffee into the cups. "I use real cream, I hope you don't mind," she said. "And I don't use sugar. I prefer the artificial sweeteners, too. Once again, I hope you don't mind. Kind of interesting how my tastes can be so anachronistic one minute then so current the next. But we've all got our inconsistencies, don't we?"

Eddie smelled the coffee from where he sat and reached down for a cup. He kept it black and unsweetened, as he usually did when he wanted to stay awake. "They," he said.

"Excuse me?" Persephone sat back and sipped from her cup.

"You said they."

She nodded. "I did," she said. "And I know you've seen them. Oh, not just the one on the coffee table, but the ones at the window that one night a couple years back. I usually keep the windows closed so no one can see them, and that gets tiresome sometimes. I miss being able to open the windows at night and let in fresh air."

Eddie remembered that night, the shadows at the window with the dim white eyes. The shadows that seemed to join and separate like storm clouds. "I remember them," he said.

"And you probably see them in the orchard from time to time. Little glimpses. Like glimpses from the corners of your eyes. The glimpses of hands moving over the coffee table." She smiled and looked down, as if remembering sweeter moments from her life.

"What are they?" he asked. "The mail, from this house, where—?"

"When I was a little girl, this little house was my world," Persephone said. "Well, the house and the orchard. We never knew why my grandfather wanted to set up a citrus orchard in Pennsylvania. Apples would have made more sense, but my grandfather did things his own way, sometimes good, sometimes bad. But, for whatever reason, it was my world. Blossoms in the spring, lemons in the summer, falling leaves in the autumn, cold snow and dark light in the winter. At least that was a good part of my world."

She lowered the cup to her lap, looked directly at Eddie, her eyes dark and narrow. She then looked over at a clock on the wall. "It's about time." There was a low rumble, and Eddie felt the floor shake under his feet. "Won't take long," she said. "Just a few seconds."

The rumble built to a deep roar, and a bright light shone through the curtains. Enmeshed with the roar was a rhythmic thumping like railcars over a railroad crossing. The roar built until a locomotive horn blared and dopplered through the living room, the sound filling every corner, the light burning out every shadow. Persephone sat in her chair, gripping the cup with two hands. Eddie stood up, ran to the window, and pulled aside the curtain.

Rolling behind the house, a black locomotive roared past, pulling a short line of black Pullman passenger cars and a blocky, dark caboose with the word Lackawanna on the side in white lettering. After a few seconds, the engine roar faded, the clacking on the rails silenced, and the horn dissipated into the winds rolling through the orchard.

And then the room was quiet again. The deep room shadows returned. The hurricane lamp flickered slightly before burning bright once again.

Eddie turned to Persephone. "I thought that rail line was out of commission."

"Did you?" she asked.

He walked back to his chair, then sat down. "There's weeds covering the tracks," he said. "The crossing on the main road that leads to that line has been torn up for a few years now. It's just pavement. I've been taking that road every day for fifteen years. Never seen a train on it."

She took a sip of her coffee, looked him up and down, and began to speak. . . .

***

We had a small family, Edward, a very small family. It wasn't for lack of trying on the part of my parents, grandparents, and relatives. We just came from, I guess you could say, weak stock. A child would be born, then die a year or two later. We thought it was bad luck. Sometimes we thought it was a curse or that the Lord Himself had it in for us for some reason. That was before we knew about genetic abnormalities, before we knew that some family lines just had one amino acid in the wrong place, one step on the ladder slightly cracked. I was a lucky one, of course, and my parents and grandparents watched me every minute, made sure my coughs weren't too severe or that the scrapes on my knees wouldn't consume me with infection. They spoiled me, I admit it, but I never let it go to my head. I knew they spoiled me because I didn't die like the others, and I knew that I could die any day, just like everyone else. Just like you, Eddie. Just like your mother and father.

But I saw from an early age how things were different here in the orchard than they were out there. We'd take our weekly trips to church or to the grocery store in Pittston, short vacations to small lakes in the Poconos or to New York or Philadelphia, and we could all see the differences. The differences in light and shadow. The differences in sound. We noticed how things seemed to move in between the lemon trees and how voices seemed to come out of nowhere, like echoes from far away. For years we'd attributed it to just the isolation from the main roads, silence playing tricks on the mind, creating voices to fill the empty air, things like that. Sometimes I'd invite friends for sleepovers, and they'd notice the change in light and sound as soon as they turned onto Lemontree Lane. They'd tell me the following day how they couldn't sleep because it was either too quiet or too filled with strange sights and sounds.

For a while I started to hate the differences. I just wanted to walk away from it all, live on a street with normal houses with normal sounds and normal light. But we couldn't, of course. This small house, this orchard . . . it was all the family had.

But I had a happy childhood, Edward, I truly did. I had a grandfather and grandmother who played games with me and told me stories of faraway cities, and a mother and father who looked after my every need and made every day in this strange orchard feel bright, even when the light was dark.

Then my grandparents died. Too quickly. Lung cancer for one. Heart attack for the other. And in a year, it was just Mother, and Father, and I. Father did what he could to maintain the orchard, but it was too much, even with Mother and I helping every day, day and night, weekday and weekend, it was just too much. Eventually he had to work in the mines over in Duryea, like so many others did. The orchard made little money, but coal mines always paid, so Father would be gone all day, and I would be at school, and Mother . . . Mother would be here, in this house and orchard all wrapped up in silence and strange light.

Father and I would come home in the afternoon, and Mother would have dinner ready. When we sat together and ate, she began to look off in the distance, even when Father and I would speak to her. Not ignoring us, mind you, just concentrating on two things at once. She spent more time walking through the orchard, sometimes with Father and me, often by herself. I'd look out this very window here and see her walking among the lemon trees. Sometimes when I'd watch her, her body seemed to darken, even in sunlight, but just as quickly, the darkness would go away. I thought maybe it was my eyes, that maybe I was getting sick like others in my family had, and I told her, but she'd only shake her head and run a hand over my cheek and say, "You're fine, Percy."

Then Father and I noticed the papers on her desk. Mother was an avid letter writer, you see, and seeing ink-stained papers on her desk was nothing new, but we started spotting something strange. At first, the letters seemed to be filled with scrawl, just illegible scrawl. Father worried the most since he admired her handwriting so much, but then the scrawl began to take shape. Each letter had a different style of handwriting, some in elegant cursive, some in primitive print, as if each letter was written by a separate person.

Then we started reading the letters. Father and I knew it was an invasion of her privacy, but we were worried, as you could imagine. Mother in a quiet house all to herself. Maybe her mind was beginning to turn inwards? Maybe she was losing touch with reality? Each letter seemed to be the same: I am fine, I am content, I hope you are well, that sort of thing. Reassurance to, well, to whom Father and I had no idea until one day he finally sat with her in the kitchen, his clothes black with coal dust, and asked her what she was doing.

And all she did was smile and say, "Listen," and point at the ceiling. And Father did. He looked up, said nothing, and listened. "Don't hear a thing," he said to her, and Mother just said, "It takes longer than that. You need to let all the silence wash over you, like water in a bathtub." Father just looked at her, and from where I sat out here I could see the worry in his eyes. I knew he was thinking about hiring a doctor we couldn't afford or taking her to the mental hospital in Blackbridge.

"When you take away the noise of this world," she said to Father, "you hear the noise of the other world."

Father was wary of her after that, unsure if he should leave me in her care when he wasn't around, but he had no choice. The salary from the mines paid the monthly obligations and not much more. If we needed professional help, we'd be unable to buy any. So, in the summer months, I spent the entire day with Mother, helping cook and clean as always, clearing away what little we could in the orchard, collecting lemons, buying groceries. And Father would come home, take me aside, and ask me how Mother was doing. I'd tell him the truth: that she seemed fine; sometimes distant, but fine. When we finished with morning chores, Mother would sit at her writing desk quietly, sometimes for almost an hour, close her eyes, then begin writing, almost non-stop, for three, four hours. Then she'd stop, get up, and call me to help make dinner.

"And that's it?" Father would ask.

"Yes, that's it," I'd say. Father would eye me suspiciously, but deep down he knew I'd tell him if something seemed truly wrong.

And that's how the days went until one day Mother began her writing, then, minutes later, stopped. I heard this loud wail from that very desk over there, and I ran from the kitchen only to see Mother hunched over the desk, crying loudly. I asked what was the matter, but she kept on crying and wailing, and she got up and ran to her bedroom, where she locked the door and refused to let me in. I looked at the desk, at the ink bottle she'd knocked over, the pen that she dropped onto the floor, and the paper upon which she'd been writing. I picked up the paper and read it. The handwriting looked so familiar, but it wasn't my mother's. After reading it over and over, I finally realized whose it was. It was Grandmother's handwriting.

The letter was like the others, wishing her well, wishing Father and I well, informing us how she and Grandfather were somewhere but couldn't say where, and so on. But it ended with this one line, and I'll never forget it: "Robert will say Hello when he can."

Robert was my father's name.

Just an hour later, this rickety old car pulled up to the house, and two men from the mining company stepped out and knocked on our door.

Machinery accident was what they called it. A coal car ran right over my father when he wasn't looking. It happened so fast, they said. There was nothing we could do, they said. And then they left, and we never heard from the company again. Families of some of the miners pooled their money to get Father a coffin and a burial at a cemetery not too far from here. They were able to give my mother and I some food to help us for a bit, but then we were on our own.

That summer was the worst of my life. Mother had no time to grieve. Autumn and winter were coming soon, and we had little money for coal or food. We could chop down trees for firewood, but that would only go so far, and there were only so many lemons one could eat. We gathered lemons to sell at markets in Pittston, we tried to sell any furnishing we didn't need. Chairs, small tables, anything. Mother spent every day walking through the house appraising every book, chair, or fork for what could be sold. In two months her hair turned from brown to gray, her body went from tall and firm to hunched and frail. Like the orchard, she wilted before my eyes, and when everything that we could sell was sold, and when the trees were picked bare of lemons, she sat in the living room, sometimes for hours, wondering what to do next, until one Sunday morning she walked to her desk and started writing again.

Hours and hours, sheet of paper after sheet of paper. When she completed one letter, she took an envelope and, as if in a trance, addressed it, slipped in the letter, then closed it with red wax and marked the wax with the stamp that bore the first letter of her name: L for Laura. She took me by the hand to the post office the next day, this large stack of letters in her hands, and mailed them. To where, I had no clue, but in the coming weeks, envelopes began to arrive in our mailbox, parcels arrived on our porch. And Mother continued writing day after day, and the postman got used to collecting handfuls of letters and leaving boxes by the door.

Does any of this sound familiar, Edward?

Mother would open the mail and pull out carefully wrapped cash, sometimes just a few dollars, sometimes a few hundred, sometimes even gold coins. The parcels would be filled with food or paper and ink. Parcels and letters from all over the country. Sometimes people would drop by, and Mother would send me outside to play, and the people would leave with freshly written letters in their hands and tears in their eyes.

And I noticed how the light seemed even darker, how the shadows among the trees seemed ever thicker, more alive. At night I thought I saw things looking through the window, dark figures that floated silently on the other side of the glass, and I'd run to Mother's bedroom and hide under the covers, and she'd say so quietly to me, "There's nothing out there or in here that wants to hurt you, Darling. Nothing at all."

By the time I was sixteen, I started having strange spells. I'd be sitting at the kitchen table or in the sitting room, and an hour would flash by in a second. Sometimes I'd find myself sitting in another part of the house, or sometimes I'd see a piece of paper in my lap, a pen in one hand, and strange scrawl all over the paper. It only happened at home or in the orchard. A moment of lucidity followed by a quick flash, and the sun would be lower, or the clear sky would suddenly have clouds, or the late afternoon would give way to a dark twilight. I kept it quiet as long as I could. I didn't want Mother to send me to a doctor or to Blackbridge, but one day sitting on the porch, the clear morning suddenly transformed into an afternoon thunderstorm, and Mother was sitting beside me, looking at me and smiling.

And all she said was: "They're reaching out to you, Percy."

After dinner that evening, Mother said to me: " Do you know how water flows to its lowest point? How rivers flow to the ocean? Do you know how certain places in the floor seem to collect more dust than others, Percy? Gravity, indentations, air currents. Things we can't see pulling other things to one place. That's the orchard, Darling. All these things we can't see, all these voices we can't hear, sometimes they just float all around the world, all through the universe, and they find resting places. Sometimes the resting places are filled with noise, or people too busy to notice, or no people at all. But sometimes the resting places are just right. Quiet, peaceful, with just enough people to scoop them up like lemons in a basket. This whole orchard, Percy, it brings things here, things that frighten some people. The orchard's an indentation in our universe, a fold in God's blanket, and if you listen with open ears, if you look with open eyes, you'll see them."

And I asked Mother, "See what?"

And she said, "The dead, Honey. The dead."

And Mother took me by the hands and smiled and said, "And they need to speak. Sometimes when we leave the world, we never really say 'Good-bye', not like we should. Sometimes that need to say 'Good-bye' becomes so overwhelming it becomes an obsession. I don't know what it's like over there, where Grandmother and Grandfather and where . . . your father . . . are, but I know it's not like here. I know days there are like seconds here and years here are like minutes there. I know that they see and hear things that couldn't be described and maybe shouldn't. And I know that the tether that kept us close to them in life keeps us close in death, but it becomes stretched and strained, so they speak to us however they can. Voices in the night. Raps on the window. Letters in the mail."

"At first," Mother said, "I was like you are now, scared that hours were disappearing, terrified to find a piece of paper in my hands with odd words and odd handwriting, but then I listened. Sat and listened. Like I told your father once, I let the silence wash over me like water in a bathtub, and I found myself awakening instead of simply falling into trances. They'd guide my hand and whisper in my ear, and I'd write their words. I became their messenger, Percy. A messenger from one world to another."

Mother showed me what to do. How to sit, how to listen, how to walk through the orchard and not run from the shadows as they peered from behind the lemon trees. How to be an antenna, to draw in the signals, to put pen to paper or finger to key and begin writing or typing. At first it was gibberish, but then one night in early October, a day after my eighteenth birthday, I picked up that fountain pen over there, unscrewed the cap, and touched the nib to paper. Fifteen minutes later, I'd written a letter in flowing cursive to a woman's husband in Iowa, I'd written an address on an envelope, and I'd sealed the flap with wax and Mother's stamp. My first.

That's how we made our living, Mother and I sitting at our desks, listening, writing, mailing. Years. Mother died twenty years later in her bedroom. We knew it was coming, you know. Her constant aches and pains swallowing her up like the moon swallowing the sun, but she said 'Good-bye'. We both said 'Good-bye'. I held her hand in the end as she fell asleep, and all around us the shadows watched quietly . . . and then it was just I.

Or, I should say, the shadows and I.

***

Persephone took a sip of coffee and smiled at Edward. "Messengers are so unappreciated, Edward," she said. "These days? These days people don't bother to thank those who trudge through the rain and snow just to bring that small Thank You or I Love You from across the miles. People want to cut out the middle man and send lazy electronic impulses over computers. And they wonder why they feel so alone, Edward. They wonder why they find themselves on their deathbeds trying to find old letters that no one sent or cards that no one bothered to buy for them. They move on to the next world feeling lonely and unloved. Then they ask me to send one short note, one brief reminder to the living that they once existed, loved, and cared. Such a sad irony, don't you think? Just a sad irony."

She set the cup on the coffee table, then sat back, resting her hands in her lap. "We're a dying breed, Edward. The world won't realize how much they'll miss us until we're all gone."

He looked down at the coat in his lap, the letter peeking out from one of the pockets, the now-empty cup in his hands, but said nothing.

"Take your time," Persephone said quietly. "Have some more coffee. I made enough."
V. The Coldest Christmas

"My parents," he said. "You contacted my parents."

She shook her head. "You misunderstand, Edward. I can't contact them. It's a one-way street, like getting a letter or a postcard without a return address. They speak through me, or, through my hands. I write what they tell me to, they give me the address—"

"If they know my address, why did they ask me questions about my life in my letter?" he asked.

"Did they ask you questions?" Persephone asked. "As I mentioned, I really can't remember all of the specific letters. There are just so many of them. Sometimes I even have the letter sealed and addressed by the time I know I've actually written one. And that's fine by me. I don't need to know others' dirty laundry. But my mother didn't mind keeping track of those things when we were at our most desperate, I must say."

"But my address—"

"Mother and I thought about that quite a bit. If they know where someone lives, why not just pay a visit? A good question, but we could only come up with one answer. Maybe they can feel where you are, maybe they can sense it, and if they work hard enough, they can even see it. I don't know if all the letters I send out are correctly addressed, to tell you the truth, Edward, but then again it's not the radio's job to determine the quality of the programming, just as long as it can tune it in."

"Jesus," he whispered.

"I know," she said. "Sounds insane, but that's how it is. It's how it's been since my mother started doing it as a child."

"And I'm the first who tracked you down?"

"Oh, well, I never figured I'd be sending a letter to my mail carrier, but you're not the only one who knows."

"The money. When your father died—"

Mother sent requests to the . . . wealthier recipients. You'd be surprised how thankful people can be for that final Good-bye. They can be very thankful." Eddie sighed and pushed the letter into the coat pocket. "If you don't mind me asking," she said, "What did your parents ask?"

"How my life was," he said quietly. "They wanted to know about my"—he laughed—"adventures."

"Why's that funny?" Persephone asked.

"Funny?" he said. "It's funny because my adventures consist of waking up in a tiny apartment, eating bagels and coffee for breakfast, getting up before the sun rises not to hit the high seas or to tackle a mountain peak but to drive to Pittston to load up a truck with trays of mail. My adventures are driving around the same place where I grew up, checking my bank accounts every week to see if I'm going to make it to the end of the month, watching the same television shows, and falling asleep in the same bed. My adventures—Jesus, I can't get over that word—my adventures caused a girlfriend to walk out on me, has added more than a few pounds to my gut, and has pretty much drained all my dreams from my mind. All of them. Oh, I'm sure my folks are really anxious to hear about my adventures."

Eddie stared at the coffee pot, lamp light glistening off its surface. "I feel really worn out," he said. "I feel that it's all over. Forget about adventures. Forget about marriage. All I have now is all I'll ever have."

"You're a young man," she said.

"I feel two steps from the open grave."

"A stupid thing to say."

"That so?" he said. "I'm only a mailman. That's it. That's all I am."

"Is that such a bad thing?" she asked. "Would you rather be a banker, shuffling papers and stealing investors' money? Would you rather be a captain of industry, paying your workers the lowest wages while you jet off with mistress after mistress? You and I, Edward, this is what we are. I've accepted it."

"You sit here all day—"

"All day?" she said. "What makes you think I'm here every day or all day? I do get out of the house, you know. I do travel. Just because you don't see it when you're not making mail runs doesn't mean I'm not doing it. I vacation twice a year. Nothing special, mind you, but I do enjoy my vacations. You, Edward, are quite fortunate. No family commitments, no house or property to care for, and a steady job. Maybe not a high-paying one, but I'm sure you could piece together enough money for a trip somewhere. I recommend train travel. A much better way to see the country. Much less stress."

"Let me guess," he said, "you hop the train behind your house."

"Oh, that thing?" she said. I can't make heads or tails of that. I thought it was one of those fabled ghost trains. Everyone has a ghost train story, Edward, but I don't. I know that line shut down in the sixties, but like clockwork that train flies through there at the same time every two weeks. Seems to come out of a tunnel that we can't see, then goes back into another one. And it's a real train, Edward. It crushes weeds and flattens pennies. Never stops here, though I do wonder where it does stop. Interesting all the things we can see when our senses aren't cluttered, isn't it?"

Eddie stood up. "I don't know if I'm insane or if you're insane."

"We both are," she said. "At least a little. Who isn't?" She stood up, placed her hands behind her back. "All things seem crazy when you first encounter them, Edward. And then they just become part of everyday life, as normal as the clouds in the sky or the changing of the trees in autumn."

He turned and walked to the door, Persephone following. He took out the small pad and pen that he kept in his coat pocket and wrote his address and phone number on it. "If you have any other letters to my address, could you let me know?" he asked.

She took the paper and folded it. "Usually they only make contact once, Edward, but I'll hold onto it." Behind her, shadow bodies shifted on the wall, arms and legs and torsos wispy and ragged like torn cloth. He stared, wide eyed. Persephone turned and looked at the wall. "Sometimes they get impatient, but they can wait," she said. "They've got their schedule, and I've got mine." She turned to him again with her dark eyes. "Just everyday life, Edward. Nothing more."

He opened the door, backed onto the porch, then stopped. "I think," he said, "you're the only person I've met who didn't think I was a failure."

"I don't think anyone sees you as a failure, Edward."

"My parents might disagree."

"Your parents loved you enough to break though. They loved you enough to let you know they still existed, that they were waiting for you. They'll never see you as a failure. Never."

He took a deep breath, stepped off the porch, and walked to his car. As he opened the door, his head swimming with images of ghostly shadows on walls and tables, of hollow eyes glowing in windows, of nighttime trains crashing into and out of existence, of his tiny, empty apartment, of his mother and father.

"Edward," she said. He looked up at Persephone standing in the doorway, her arms folded against the cold nightwinds. "Come by when you feel like talking. Maybe you can help me write a few letters someday."

He nodded.

"You're not a failure, Edward. You're not a waste of space on this planet. You mean something to somebody in this universe. You mean something to so many who need you. You're a messenger. Don't forget that." She backed into the cottage, waved, then closed the door. As the door locked, Edward stood in the swirling wind, his clouds of breath whisked into the dark spaces between the lemon trees.

***

Eddie sat on the small couch in his living room, his parents' letter and his open address book on the coffee table. He'd been cradling his telephone in his lap for an hour, staring at the letter, at the address book. Nicole's new phone number was at the bottom of the page. Since she left he'd spent hours looking at the number, wondering if he should call, wondering if the number was still active, wondering if, like she said, she still wanted to be his friend.

The night was late, but she was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, now. Or she was when she'd given him the number days after she left, a number she'd spoken through tears on the telephone, a number heard through the numbness in his ears.

He lifted the receiver, began dialing, then hung up. He sighed, then began dialing again. After a few rings, the connection was completed. "Hello?"

Eddie took a deep breath. It had been a year since he last heard her voice. "Nicole?" he said.

"Eddie?" Nicole shouted. "Hi, Eddie! I was kind of thinking about you the other day. I was just talking to a couple of friends, and I mentioned you in conversation."

"Did you."

"It's been a while," Nicole said.

"Can I ask you something?" Eddie said.

"Oh, well . . . yeah, sure, I guess." Her voice lowered to a whisper. "You okay?"

"Did you . . . do you think I'm a failure? Someone who's just kind of . . . taking up space?"

"That's kind of an odd question, Eddie."

"I kind of figured you'd tell me," he said. "I don't have anyone else to ask. I didn't know if I should call. I know I'm the last person who you want to hear from—"

"That's not true, Eddie."

"—but I just need to know what you think about me. Tonight I . . . I just found something my parents left behind. I think they had these high hopes for me, these ideas that I'd be something more, something that mattered in one way or another. But I've been thinking a lot, you know? I've been thinking about what they'd do if they could see me now. Their son the mailman. Their son who can't afford anything more than an apartment in Avoca. Their son who's done nothing of consequence."

The line fell silent for a moment, and Nicole let out a soft sigh. "Oh, Eddie," she said, her voice like the sound of distant wind. "It's the Christmas season making you feel this way, isn't it?"

"I don't know," he said. "It could be."

"You know, Eddie, every week you used talk about the map in your childhood bedroom, the pushpins in the map, the letters you got from all around the world, and I'd say to myself, 'Why doesn't he do something about that? Why doesn't he put up a new map, put his finger on it, then say "This is where I'll be next?"' But you never did. You only sank into yourself. No, Eddie. I never thought you were a failure. I was never ashamed of you. You, Eddie. You were ashamed of you. Ashamed of being a mailman, ashamed of being who you were. I could only take so much of that until, until I just couldn't anymore. I couldn't fall into that."

Eddie nodded, feeling tears fill his eyes as they did on the day she told him she was leaving. "I see," he said.

"You know," Nicole said, "when I think of you, I always say, 'Hey, did Eddie finally go back to college like he said he was going to?' or 'Hey, I wonder if Eddie finally took that trip to Scotland or Alaska or wherever?' But you haven't, Eddie. Like you feel unworthy of life or something. You're a daydreamer," she said, "and there's nothing wrong with that. But you've got to do something with those dreams. They don't have to be grand dreams, Eddie, but they have to amount to something."

"I'm sorry I wasn't better to you," he said.

"You were fine to me, Eddie. You just weren't fine to yourself."

Electronic silence passed between them again, a pause filled with ghosts on the circuits and ghosts of the past.

"What'll you be doing this Christmas?" she asked.

"Nothing I can think of," he said.

"Maybe you can come to Santa Fe next month or something. We can catch up. We can go skiing up in Taos. You, me, Jim."

Eddie felt tightness in his chest at the sound of her husband's name, and he cleared his throat. "I don't know, he said. "It's . . . it's kind of busy at work."

"I see," she said. "I understand."

The silences between them became more frequent in the following minutes until he blurted the I'm going to let you go, and she said the Okay, Eddie, it was so good to hear from you. And then he replaced the handset back on the telephone's cradle and sat in the cold living room, the windows rattling in the wind.

That night he lay on his bed, wrapped in the warmth of heavy blankets. He remembered Nicole beside him. He remembered his mother covered in cancerous bruises. He remembered his father sitting by her grave until the night swallowed him.

That night Eddie slept as shadows circled the room, watching him, protecting him, holding him as he dreamt long and deep.

***

The holiday load was heavy again. More parcels in the back of the mail truck. More mail in the mail trays. And Eddie drove down each street, stuffing mailboxes, leaving packages, drinking coffee, and sitting in parking lots. He knew he'd be delivering late to get the entire truck emptied, so he made Lemontree Lane the final stop for the day.

The winter darkness covered the sky and streets, and Eddie slowly navigated the twists and turns of Lemontree, noting the shadows and shy, shimmering eyes darting behind tree trunks. Persephone had left the flag up on the mailbox, and he pulled up, unloaded the box, then turned off the engine. He stared at her front door and the glow of the hurricane lamp in her living room window, then got out and walked to the front door. He knocked three times, and the door swung open.

"Edward," Persephone said, her reading glasses balanced on the edge of her nose. "How are you?"

"I'm fine, Ms. Simmons."

"What can I do for you?" she asked.

"A favor."

"What kind of favor?"

"Well, you said to take a train somewhere."

"That I did," she said. "So much better than those damned airplanes. Much slower, of course, but I prefer the romance of the rails."

"I was wondering if you'd like to take a trip with me."

She cocked her head to the side. "Don't you think I'm a bit too old for you, Edward?"

He smiled and shook his head. "No, it's just—I don't have anyone else to talk to," he said. "I don't have friends. I don't have family. I've never taken a trip anywhere. I don't know where to go or what to do. I have some money in savings, I have some in checking. I could go by myself, but, well—"

"Some things are just better with company," she said.

"Yes," he said. "I still don't know if you're on the level, but, and don't take this the wrong way, but you're all I've got."

She raised her eyebrows and folded her arms. "I don't know if I should take that as an insult or compliment, Edward, but I know what you mean." She pursed her lips and nodded. "Do you know where you'd like to go?"

"Clear across the country. Los Angeles, up the coast, then back again."

"That's ambitious."

"I have a lot of catching up to do."

Persephone let out a deep breath. "If you can afford to wait until spring, I'll agree. The holiday months are the busiest for me."

"Me too," he said.

"We messengers have the same schedules, Edward. Okay, then. Spring it is."

"It is," he said, smiling. "You think I'm weird, don't you?"

She clicked her tongue. "What are you doing this Christmas Eve, Edward?"

"Sitting in my apartment."

"Come inside," she said, walking into the living room. Eddie followed, closing the door and stopping at the entrance to the living room.

The room was a-swirl with shadows, glowing eyes and dark shapes dancing over bookshelves and walls and windows. A warm breeze circulated through the room, and the hurricane lamp dimmed and brightened with a steady pulse. Every corner and surface was painted with swooping and floating shadows, and they whirled like zoetrope projections from floor to ceiling.

"Like I said, the holidays are the busiest for me," Persephone said. She sat at one of the desks and pulled out a stack of paper and a pen. She leaned back, took in a deep breath, and a thin, slender shadow peeled itself from the floor and stood by her side. She hunched over the desk, placed the pen onto the paper, and began writing, a frenzy of scribbling and scratching. Eddie edged closer and watched Persephone's hand glide across the page writing out long, cursive script from one edge of the page to the other. She filled one page then moved to the next, then the next, then the next.

And the shadow stood beside her, a dark arm over her shoulder.
VI. The Endless Journey

The silvery train crossed forests, grasslands, and deserts. It passed through cities of old and cities on the edge of new centuries. It crawled up the Pacific coastline where the pines became dense and the skies became heavy with cloud and rain. Whenever it stopped, two figures, an old woman and a young man, spoke, walked the streets, smelled the air, and stared up at the glass towers or looked down into the winding valleys. The two could be seen in the observation cars, pointing at the deer running alongside the track or the ruins of old rail towns decaying under an early spring. They'd talk about the strange lore of the small towns in which they'd grown up. They'd talk about past loves and future hopes. They'd pull out maps and trace the routes with their fingers. They'd pull out cameras and record each moment, each sunset, each cloudbank, each smile, and each laugh.

And the old woman struck up a card game with retirees from Wisconsin, and the young man struck up a conversation with a graduate philosophy student from Pittsburgh named Rebecca. And when the young man and Rebecca said 'Good-bye' at the station they swore it wouldn't be their last.

And when the old woman and young man arrived home, the shadows were waiting, so the old woman picked up her pen, and the young man picked up her mail, and the letters continued.

The wet spring became a stifling summer, and over the following years the letters flew to all the cardinal points of the country, messages written by the hand of an old woman in a lone cottage in a lemon orchard left fallow, letters carried by the hand of a young man whose wife was named Rebecca and whose new apartment overlooked ribbons of long road that carried them on journeys to points indicated on a map in their small living room, a map dotted with red pushpins, a map placed beside a framed photograph of the young man when he was a child sitting close to his smiling mother and smiling father.
DEAR VIVIAN . . .

. . . I am hoping this letter reaches you in time for another Christmas season, but the days and months have become a blur to me, like leaves in wind. It is a bit difficult to tell which Christmas is approaching, or whether the holidays are days or months away. Since I left, keeping track of such things is a skill I haven't mastered yet, but I'm told that I'll get better at it. But I do know a year has passed, and I wanted to pass along this holiday Hello while I can. Please excuse the rather long length of this letter, but I wanted to tell you as much as I could in the short moment of spare time that I have.

I'm glad you returned to work in New York and that your husband started his new job at the Gravitar Group. Your new house in Connecticut is a smart buy. With three daughters, you'll need the extra space. Maybe someday I'll be able to visit your new home and visit with your little girls, maybe even help you see them off to college or to wherever they choose to go.

As you know, last January was the third anniversary of your father's death. It's a terrible way to mark every new year, but the universe has its own way of timing, and I have mine. I suppose the best news of the month was the burning of the mortgage. Finally, the house your father and I built is now free and clear. I'm quite happy that you were able to attend the burning party that month, and even though we were all sad that he could not be there to see that debt go up in ashes, we all knew he was looking down on us with a smile. In fact, since his passing, I can't help but think that he was sitting next to me on that back porch every summer when I watched the sun go down over those abandoned railroad tracks behind the backyard.

It was difficult getting through those days on my own, sitting in that house with no one, passing the time instead of living it. You know that I continued volunteering at the library in Taylor to pass the time, and that I considered returning to my administrative assistant position at the Pittston Area School District, but I eventually decided that twenty-five years was enough, and that, no matter how empty the house was, filling out spreadsheets and invoices was not much better. Still, the house was empty much of the day, and each passing year without your father made it even emptier. I'd have dreams that he'd be sitting on the back porch watching the sunset or in the living room watching football, but dreams don't fill the home or the heart very much. I stayed out of the house as much as I could and tried to keep myself busy, but one can only do so much of that. Soon, I thought about selling the house and traveling the world, but I'd no idea where to go if I did.

But last December, the strangest thing that had ever happened to me, well, happened. One night I was awakened by the roar and the light of a train passing over those same abandoned railroad tracks behind the house. The short train rumbled past the house, appearing out of nowhere then disappearing into . . . somewhere. My heart raced the whole night, and the next day I called the rail authority. They confirmed that the railroad tracks behind the house were not only not in use but were actually torn up at both ends about a mile in each direction from my house. I walked the entire length and found it to be true: the tracks behind the house were just a small remnant of what used to be a long line that had passed all the way from Pittston to Scranton. I thought I'd had nothing more but an incredibly realistic dream, until the same thing happened two weeks later, and then two weeks after that. The same train: a black diesel locomotive, five Pullman cars, and a caboose. I scheduled an appointment with Dr. Evanson to have my brain checked, but since it was December twenty-third, I would have to wait to see him until the end of January.

On Christmas Eve, I awakened in the morning, and, as I usually did, showered, dressed, walked downstairs to the kitchen, and I looked out the kitchen window to see the train sitting right outside, its steel wheels steaming, its black paint clashing with the white dusting of snow we'd had the previous night. It was just sitting there, and this short man and tall man were walking down the line with flashlights and tools, checking the wheels and passenger cars. Not knowing what else to do, I opened the back door and shouted, "What are you two doing there?" and the short man—a dwarf, really—shouted back, "Our jobs, and you?"

Of course, it angered me quite a bit, so I stomped out to them, and they watched me, this chisel-faced dwarf and this tall wide-eyed beanpole. I told them, "You're not supposed to be here," and the dwarf just said, "I don't remember this house being here, what year is it?" The dwarf nodded and said to the beanpole, "So we jumped back twenty." He looked me up and down and asked, "This is still Avoca, right?" before turning to his tall friend and saying, "Check the other lines. They should be okay."

So here in my backyard was a tall, long-faced man with pale skin and wide eyes dressed in a heavy coat that seemed like it could tip him over, a dark-eyed dwarf bundled in heavy denim, and a train with steaming wheels that should not have been there. Before I could get any words out, the dwarf folded his arms, looked at me, and said, "Everyone on here pulls their own weight, you should know that. We go where we want to go, but no slackers. You got your things?"

"Things?" I asked. "What things are you talking about?"

He stepped up to me and said, "Your things. Your belongings. The things you need. The things that you'd pull out of your house in case it was on fire. The things you'd clutch to your chest in the last seconds of your life. The things to which you turn when nothing else brings comfort. Those things. Hopefully you have them all ready. We'll be leaving in an hour."

Yes, I ranted. You know my personality. I demanded to know who we was, where his train had come from, what he was doing in my backyard, where he thought he was taking me, and he nodded and said, "It's okay. Most people don't know where they're going or where they want to go until they're actually there. My name's Mike, but people call me Ace. And before you get thinking, I'm going to say right now that I'm not some magical dwarf or elf or any other idiotic mythical creation, so don't even start with any of those ideas. I was born in Dupont back in nineteen-forty-three, and I was born this way. Achondroplasia. I had to put up with a lot of short jokes and midget jokes growing up, and you know what? I didn't like them then, and I don't like them now. That tall guy over there? Ray. Don't know his last name, never talks much, but he's a good egg and good mechanic. Picked him up years ago outside Lincoln, Nebraska. This train? Former property of the Lackawanna Railroad. Yes, I said former. It's ours now. At first I thought I was stealing it because I was tired of putting up with the jokes from other engineers, but, no, I guess the universe had a reason for it."

He spoke so rapidly I had to ask him to slow down, and he stopped and stared at me in the eye. "You're right," he said, "we're not supposed to be here. Everyday physics doesn't allow for that. But what if I told you we live in a universe that's just a massive hologram projected onto a flat surface? And what if I told you that you could jump from one point of that surface to another like a fly on a kitchen table? And what if I told you that, sometimes the universe is alive, that it opens little doorways for us, that we have the keys to open those doors and we don't even know it? Prayers, tears, cries in the night, all little keys that if they're jiggled and twisted the right way, they open a series of tumblers and a series of doors. Let me ask you this: How's life been going for you? Happy and jaunty or sad and empty? You see, sometimes that sadness and emptiness sends out signals stronger than quasars, just tugs hard enough at the strings holding everything together and lets us see into that hallway we never knew existed. Interesting, huh?"

I thought he was insane or that I was insane, but there was the train. There it was steaming on the rails, the tall man, the little man, the smell of oil from the wheels, the smell of coffee on his breath. For a brief moment, I thought of Stanley, and I looked back at the back porch where he once sat with me when we held hands, even in the final weeks when the cancer made his hands so thin and cold. I thought of how I idiotically believed that he would always be there, that he'd never die, and that we'd be together always. I never grew out of that childhood dream, even after he died. I know you nudged me to move on, but I didn't want to listen. I just wanted things to be the way they were, even if they couldn't be. I just wanted your father back, I wanted the house filled again, that childhood dream to come true. But it never did.

But the dwarf kept talking, even when I looked away. "You see," he said, "you called us here. We don't have a timetable or regular schedule. We go where we want, we stop when we're called. We made a couple of stops in the area a couple weeks ago, and now we're back for one more. You. It's up to you if you want to come along, but we'll be gone in an hour. If you want to stay, that's fine, and I hope you find your happiness here. But if you want to come, you're more than welcome, but everyone has to pull their own weight. It's the only way to manage this operation. And, no, we're not ghosts, we're not here to take you to the great beyond. We travel. We see the world and the people in it. We listen to new music, eat new foods, and we help others like us, others with sadness so deep that even the Challenger Deep can't rival it.

"You see," he said, "like I said before, I thought I was stealing this train to get even with people. But I wasn't just taking it for myself. I see that now. I saw into that other hallway that's normally blocked from our view, and I saw how to unlock the doors to travel through it. And now I can show others that other hallway. This train takes us wherever it needs to go, wherever we need to go. Sometimes we're in other lands, sometimes we're in other times. We get to see things most people only dream about. Also, if you want, so can you. But only bring those things you need, those things you can't live or die without. And we could use another hand, a conductor. Our last one decided to get off in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Met a pretty little Mexican lady there and decided to settle down with her. If you want the job, it's yours."

And the little man turned away and walked to the caboose, looking at the connections between the cars, tapping the wheels here and there. I walked back to the house, shaking, not knowing what to do, but I kept thinking about Philip. I kept thinking about the house being so empty, so quiet, and so cold, even when the furnace was at full blast and when the summers were at their hottest. I thought about how my life had only been given meaning by my small family and by my small job as a glorified secretary. Like I said, I wanted to do something, but didn't know what to do or where to start. What does one do or how does one start over at my age?

So I made the oddest decision in my life up to that point. I locked every door and window. I turned off and unplugged every appliance. I closed every curtain, pulled my old car in the garage and locked it up. And I grabbed your father's old leather suitcase, and in it I placed a small bag filled with family photos, my father's old gold pocket watch, my mother's cameo locket, my Bible, my journal, my fountain pens, and my purse. I bundled against the winter and stepped outside, locking the back door behind me, and carried the suitcase to the train where Mike stood with a smile on his face. "I've never worked as a conductor," I said, and he just said, "It's easy, you'll like it. Stick around long enough, you'll be helping me drive the train." Then the tall man—Ray—reached over, grabbed my suitcase, and walked it to the caboose.

"He'll put your suitcase on your bunk," Mike said. "It's Ray's turn to get some shuteye, anyway. Come on up to the front with me." I followed him to the shiny black locomotive that rumbled so deeply I could feel it in my chest, and he helped me up into the cab, where I sat surrounded by dials and gauges. He shut the door and said, "One thing I need to tell you: We don't know when we'll be back. We don't know what time we'll be back, where we might wind up next week or next year. And if you do come back, you may feel as though you've been gone a year but may have been gone two. Or three. And when you decide to step off, we can't ever come back for you again. So, are you sure you're ready for this?"

I turned to him and said, "I've never been sure I've been ready for anything." Mike nodded and smiled. He pressed himself into his seat, began twisting knobs, pulling levers, and checking the dials. There was a snap of brake lines disengaging, Mike slowly pushed on the throttle, and the train inched forward. I watched my house, the house in which I married and raised a family, roll past the windows. I watched the back porch on which your father and I used to watch sunsets recede from view, and soon it was gone as the locomotive rumbled past the trees next to the house.

I looked out over the culm field where you used to play and the hill where your father was buried. I saw old coal mining equipment half-hidden by clumps of weeds. I saw that abandoned red semi-trailer sitting alone in that clearing of birches and pines, and when the end of the railroad tracks came into view, I pointed out the front window, and Mike just smiled and pushed hard on the throttle, and the locomotive surged, pushing me back into my seat. We came to the end of the rails and, instead of plummeting down the embankment, we passed over it, as new rails instantly appeared before us, appearing out of thin air, as if the universe laid the path ahead for us, rail by rail. The trees shimmered like silver, and their leaves changed from summer green to autumn orange and back again.

The train was moving so fast it seemed we'd fly off the rails, but it held firm and rumbled deep and loud. We passed through hillsides and over rivers, rails and bridges appearing and disappearing like ghosts. We passed through towns that were familiar, but not familiar at the same time, seeing buildings that may have existed once and buildings that may soon exist. And even though it was supposed to be daytime, the sky was filled with stars, and we were soon rolling down an incline, past an old lemon tree orchard with a bright red cottage, and then into a dark forest that closed up around us before opening up into a bright, endless field of golden wheat, and Mike looked down at his map and said, "Kansas again."

And we just rolled along.

It has only been one year for me. I've seen minarets in Turkey and glaciers in the Andes. I've walked on Siberian steppes and through Parisian alleys. I've listened to operas in Italy and shamals in Iraq. And I've helped so many onto the train. So many people with sadness far deeper than mine could have ever been, so many people looking for escape somewhere and anywhere. So many.

Someday I know I will step off the train for good, maybe back in Pennsylvania, maybe in the dusty streets of West Texas. When I do, it will be my time to do so, and when I do, I will miss Mike and Ray and all of the friends who ride the train day and night. I get so sad when I think about that day, so I'll put that out of my mind for now. There are just too many things to see and do, so many lives yet to live.

I hope all of you and your husband have a wonderful Christmas. I hope you know how much I love you and how much I look forward to seeing you again. I hope you are not worrying about me and that you know I'm safe and quite happy. I hope when you hear the bell or horn of a locomotive that you will blow a kiss my way, and I hope that you know that even in the deepest sadness, the darkest moments of loneliness and fear, you will see that there is beauty, there is happiness and there is friendship that, if you look hard enough, will make its appearance, if even for the briefest of moments.

All my love,

Mom
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vincent C. Martinez was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and obtained his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He currently lives in the southwestern United States.

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To explore other available works by Vincent C. Martinez, please visit the official Vincent C. Martinez website and follow him on his official Twitter feed.
