“Now what do we do?” Gwen asks.
March takes the keys from the ignition. “Now,” she tells her daughter, “we walk.”
“Through the woods?” Gwen’s froggy voice cracks in two.
Paying her daughter no mind, March gets out of the car and finds herself shin-deep in water. Sloshing through the puddle, she goes around to the trunk for her suitcase and Gwen’s backpack. She’d forgotten how cold and sweet the air is in October. She’d forgotten how disturbing real darkness can be. It’s impossible to see more than a foot in front of your own face and the rain is the kind that smacks at you, as if you’d been a bad girl and hadn’t yet been punished enough.
“I’m not walking through this.” Gwen has gotten out, but she’s huddled beside the car. The mascara she applied so carefully while she waited for her mother behind the funeral parlor is now running down her face in thick, black lines.
March isn’t going to argue; she knows that doesn’t work, and in all honesty, simple logic never convinced her of anything when she was Gwen’s age. People tried to tell her she’d better behave, she’d better take it slow and think twice, but she never heard a single word they said.
March grabs her suitcase, then locks up the car. “You decide what you want to do. If you want to wait here, okay. I’m walking to the house.”
“All right,” Gwen allows. “Fine. I’ll go with you, if that’s what you want.”
Gwen gets her backpack. No way is she staying out here all alone. Not for a million bucks. Now she understands why her mother, as well as her father—who also grew up here, right down the road—never come back. The reason they’re finally visiting is actually pretty horrible; if Gwen allowed herself, she’d have a mini-breakdown right now. She’s shivering so badly that her teeth are actually chattering. Wait till she calls Minnie Gilbert, her best friend, to tell her: My teeth were chattering like a skeleton hanging on a rope, and I couldn’t even have a goddamn cigarette because there I was, right next to my mother. All for the funeral of some old woman I’m not even related to.
“Are you okay?” March asks as they make their way down the road.
“Perfect,” Gwen says.
Thursday is the day of the funeral and Gwen may faint, especially if she wears her tight black dress, which is scrunched into a ball at the very bottom of her backpack. Judith Dale was the housekeeper who raised March—whose mother had died when March was little more than a baby—and although Mrs. Dale came out to visit in California once a year, Gwen can no longer picture her face. Maybe she’s blocking it out, maybe she doesn’t want to think about nasty things like death and getting old and being stuck in a horrible place like this with one’s mother.
“Do you think the casket will be open?” Gwen asks. Finally, the rain is easing up.
“I doubt it,” March says. After all, Judith Dale was one of the most private people March has ever known. You could tell Judith anything, you could pour out your soul, and it wouldn’t be until much later, perhaps even years afterwards, that you’d realize she’d never told you anything about herself and that you didn’t even know what her favorite dessert was, let alone who she loved and what she believed in.
Now that the rain is ending, they can hear things in the woods. Mice, probably. Raccoons come to drink from the puddles.
“Mom.” Gwen says when something flies overhead.
“It’s nothing,” March assures her. “An owl.”
Not long ago there were mountain lions roaming these woods, and black bears, who came down to the orchards to eat their fill in October. There were moose who would charge anything that moved. Even when March was a girl, the sky was still so clear children in town were often disappointed to discover they couldn’t reach up and pull the stars right out of the sky.
“Are we almost there?” Gwen asks. Her idea of exercise, after all, is to ride on the back of someone’s Honda.
It is now dusk, that odd and unreliable hour when you see things which don’t exist, at least not in present time. It is almost possible for March to catch sight of the ladder her brother, Alan, left beside those sugar maples. That dark shape in the woods may be the bucket Judith Dale used to collect blueberries. And there, by the stone wall, is the boy March once loved. Unless she is very much mistaken, he has begun to follow her. If she slows down, he’ll be beside her; if she’s not careful, he’ll stay for good.
“Why are you running?” Gwen complains. She’s out of breath, trying her best to keep up with her mother.