Back then, she hardly dreamed at all.  It was as if there wasn’t room enough in her head.  She was so busy running.

She had been eleven days on the road when she saw the strip of meadow bordered by woods spilling down the hill to her left.  “Wow,” she said, without intending to.  She said it in a whisper.  This was late in the afternoon.  As far as she could recall, it was the first word she had uttered that day.

She continued driving.  After a quarter mile she signaled, pulled over into a truck turnout, and stopped.  She sat in her car, blank-headed, the engine running.  She made no effort to organize her attention.  She made no effort of any kind.  It felt good to her, just sitting there.  Another car shot by her on the highway, upsetting the silence and disturbing the composure of the weeds.  And then another.  Each time, the silence put itself back together.  The world beyond the windshield, visible, recognizable, was like a text she could not read.

She was, she understood, still caught up in the glow and delirium that had carried her clear across the continent nearly to the coast, less than an hour to the east.  She was sitting in a strange car, acquired three days earlier in a trade for her old one, in . . . the name of the town escaped her.  On the other hand there was the surprise of this stillness, which felt also familiar in some way, like the reappearance of something she had once known but had forgotten.

It was early summer.  A fat fly buzzed past her window.  Somewhere in the distance a crow called.  Five quick calls—wank wank wank wank wank—then quiet.  A minute passed with neither a repeat nor an answer.  It disappointed her, this deficit of noise.

She turned the car around and slowly accelerated back onto the highway, heading west now.  All the rush and the momentum were gone.  Instead she felt a wariness, an anticipation laced with something like dread, as if traveling in the opposite direction required an about-face of emotions.  She drove, watching the hills to her right, which appeared improbably dark to her now from this other angle, the sunlight slightly in her eyes.  But whatever doubt this may have provoked did not deter her.  She had the feeling she had made a decision, though she didn’t know what that decision was.  It was as if that field had spoken to her, its voice oozing up from the earth through the stems of its grasses and weeds.

The road wound left, then right, drawing her back beyond where she remembered.  A sliver of the meadow flickered between the trees, and all at once it loomed into view on her right.  There was no traffic behind her.  She slowed.  Where the shoulder of the road widened, she pulled over and shut the engine off.  For a moment she sat, as if to prepare herself, then got out of the car and stood, leaning against the fender.

There it was.

“OK, what?” she said, again in a whisper, for she was speaking really to the meadow, a thing one does not do out loud.  She looked at what there was to see, taking in long and careful breaths and moving only her eyes, as if inhaling and seeing were the same thing.

The meadow was what meadows are.  Grasses intermingled with grasses.  Crowds of weeds had come into flower—particles of yellow and lavender and orange shimmered over the surface like live and colorful dusts.  As she stood, gazing,  the weight of the afternoon sun had its effect on her, and she felt herself yielding to the odor and the heat, the press of all that vegetation.  On the highway behind her a truck roared by.  She watched the wake of its passing churn across the meadow.

A short distance beyond her car, a gravel road began its ascent from the highway.  On tiptoes she traveled it through the meadow with her eyes, shielding them from the sun.  The road wound, avoiding the bordering woods.  Along its route there were sections she could not see as it dipped or veered to disappear among the taller grasses.  But it was a road.  It went somewhere.

She started walking.  The road at first climbed steeply, then leveled off.  Turning around, she noticed that she could no longer see her car.  As she walked, her sandals slipped at times in the dry gravel and took on stones and raised dust that clung to her ankles like a new skin, but she kept on.  The day was hot, though she could see the sun was already dropping in the sky.  How far she walked was hard for her to judge.  At one point she was dismayed to see the road veering toward the woods.  But soon it cut back again, keeping to the meadow. 

In places the meadow was rocky, and the tall weeds gave way to clumps of brush, changes she noted uneasily.  The weeds, the grasses, the bushes all were nameless to her.  She walked tentatively, like one making her way through a field of incomplete thoughts.  She kept the splayed fingers of one hand pressed to the skin just below her neck, as if afraid of losing something there—a scarf or a piece of jewelry, though she was wearing neither.  What she did hold there, beneath her breastbone, was a certainty—that she had done the right thing, coming back to see this, whatever it might turn out to be.  Perhaps it was this that she was afraid of losing. 

Had someone stopped her, had someone asked her where she was going, she wouldn’t have known what to answer.  There was something she needed to see, and soon enough she would see it.  This was all she knew.

Finally she reached the crest of the hill and understood then that she had been walking a driveway, for there before her was a house, the gravel road looping to the right to end in the patch of meadow that had taken over its front yard.  She approached cautiously, though it was soon clear that no one lived there and that no one had for a long time.  The house—a two-story, squarish structure with a fat brick chimney at its center—sat solidly under a cluster of tall evergreens.  The surrounding meadow, sprawling in full sun, had been almost too bright for the eyes, but the house, shaded by the trees around it, seemed of another world.

At the edge of what she imagined had been the yard, she paused, gazing at this unexpected house, trying to recognize in its appearance some trace of the feeling she had carried with her all the way up the hill.  But she wasn’t sure whether—perhaps beyond a faint sadness—she felt anything at all.

She continued her approach until the gravel of the driveway ran out, swallowed by weeds whose stalks lay bent and flattened in tire tracks.  Someone had recently driven there.  Slowly she advanced along the front of the house, peeking in windows.  Through panes of glass filmed over with neglect, she saw bare rooms, their walls and ceilings dulled by the years.  A velvet of dust covered the floors and window sills, which were peppered also with dead flies.  Everything about the house, inside and out, appeared a bit removed, as if she were seeing it through a vapor of grey.  Or no—as if she were not seeing it, but somehow remembering it.

On the clapboards beneath one of the windows, someone had stapled a real estate sign.  There was what appeared to have been the agent’s name and a phone number, but the sign had been vandalized and both were unreadable.

Ducking under the limbs of the evergreens, she wandered around to the back of the house, where one of the windows had been broken.  On the floor inside she could see sneaker prints, small ones, trafficking through the dust.  It was what happened to old houses—children invaded them.

A sound she did not recognize drew her attention down toward the meadow, which sloped away behind the house, ending in a bog.  There, by a hummock of grass and rock, she thought she saw movement.  She stood, distracted, waiting to see it again, whatever it was.  The sound had been like the guttural cry of some large bird.  She watched for something to take flight.

The bog was entirely quiet.  Stumps and skeletal trees the color of metal stuck up out of the swampy ground.  Between them a tiny black stream meandered, its water moving so slowly that the stream seemed not to be flowing in one direction or the other but rather lying, black and impenetrable, like a ribbon of some substance not of this world.  Nothing moved.  Nothing made a sound.  She stood, her body twisted toward the bog, her hand pressed to the skin at her neck.

In time the breeze picked up a little, setting the limbs of the spruce in motion and rustling the grasses.  She stirred then.  She continued her walk around the house.  And then, before starting back down the drive, she walked around again.

By the time she got back to the highway, the sun was close to setting.  As she was opening the door to her car, she noticed a mailbox on a rotted wooden post lying in the weeds at the foot of the driveway.  Next to it, tilting toward the drainage ditch, was a real estate sign.  The agent’s name was missing, but there was a phone number.

This was how it began.

* * *

To start with, she pitched a tent in the grass—in the front yard, right by the house.  The grass in places came almost to her chin.  She prepared the ground by stomping it all down in a great circle, a task she performed with energy.  At the end she was grinning and out of breath, which was when her eyes fell on the real estate sign.  Prying with a screwdriver, she popped the staples off, collecting every one of them in her hand.  The sign and the staples went into a plastic trash bag.  And that was that.  The ground she had trampled was soft and dry, perfect for camping, though she noticed there were ticks.

Scavenging beneath the evergreens, she collected armfuls of dead wood—branches as thick as her wrists.  She worked without pause, cutting the branches to length with a camp saw, and stacking them by the house.  That evening in a pit she built a small fire.  The flames threw a flickering glow on the tent and on her car and on the house looming over her in the night.  Moving between the fire and the house, she was startled more than once by the size and sweep of her own shadow ranging across the front wall—a thing connected to her, but apparently with a life of its own.

The very next day she started in, tackling the kitchen first.  She had noticed a certain smell to the house, and whatever that smell was was coming from the kitchen.  It took her the better part of a day, scrubbing down the walls and the floor, the counter, the sink, the cookstove.  Something had made a mess in one of the cabinets—some small animal, having found its way in through a hole in the wall.  The work was hard.  The place had only a dug well, and someone had stolen the pump.  She had to carry all the water in in buckets.  When she was finished, she had one more thing to do: she cut her hair and died it black.  She crawled into her bag that night, her hair still wet, wrapped in a towel.

Officially, she didn’t own the place yet.  But it was OK with the sellers, her moving in.  They were happy to have someone living there, the agent had told her, “what with kids now breaking into the place.”  Kids breaking in meant the jimmied window in the back, which as far as she could see hadn’t amounted to a lot.  A few of the walls had graffiti on them—just silliness, kids’ names.  Bill  +  Sophie.  Grace loves Mark.  In an upstairs bedroom she found a candle on the floor and some new-agey-looking symbols of the occult drawn on the wallpaper.  Like some preteens had held a seance.

She worked her way through the house that first week, cleaning and painting rooms.  On the third day she went into town and bought a gun.  Town was fifteen miles away.  It was where she got her groceries, her cleansers, her paint.  The gun was Italian-made—as far as she knew, the kind the Mafia used.  The thing weighed a ton.

She liked the house.  She talked to it as she worked.  She felt evidence around her of a personality, stern but not unfriendly.  The house had eleven rooms—a room for every day she’d been on the road.  There was one in particular she had her eye on: a corner room in the back on the second floor, overlooking the bog.  The paint was barely dry when she spread her air mattress and sleeping bag out on the floor.  The house had not a single stick of furniture, nor had she brought any of her own.  Furniture had been the least of her worries, in her rush to leave behind the horror that was her husband.

The nights were cool and, it seemed to her, without boundaries.  Mists oozed out of the blackness, blanketing the meadow and the bog.  She lay inside her bag, her hand on a flashlight, her eyes on the grey of the ceiling.  Noises crept at her out of the dark, frantic little rhythms, scratchings and scurryings.  Mice, or maybe squirrels.  The house creaked and creaked again like a ship, slumping one way or the other in the wind.  On the floor beside her   head lay her Italian-made gun.  And every so often, tearing through the night, there would erupt from the bog a terrible sound.  She waited in the silence, her attention fixed—it was her impression—on something behind the night.  She felt it then, in a way that would not leave her—the world might not be what she’d thought it was.

Late one night in the second week, close to sleep, she noticed a different sound separating itself from the silence—the growl of a car or truck engine laboring up the hill.  She froze, listening as it seemed to approach along the curve of the drive.  A blue-white glow traveled the ceiling and walls of her room, as if the moon were rising out of the grass in her front yard.  The vehicle seemed to stop in front of the house, the engine idling.  She listened to the resonant rumble of the exhaust.  Whatever it was was big.  She heard no voices, no truck doors opening or slamming shut.  The house lock was a flimsy doorknob-button type anyone could have kicked through.

After what seemed a long time, she heard the engine rev again.  The light swept again along the ceiling as the vehicle apparently backed out and returned the way it had come.  She listened until the sound lost its shape, as did her memory of it, except for the certainty that it had been there.

She asked a contractor to look things over, which he did wordlessly.  She followed a few steps behind him as he methodically circled the house exterior, then entered and peeked into rooms.  He took no notes.  Whatever calculations were going on in his head he kept there.  Finally he turned to her.  The house would need a new roof, he told her cheerfully.  The windows wouldn’t stand up to winter.  The place would have to be rewired, or else, one of these days, it would go up in flames.  Then there was that rotten patch on the sill where animals had been getting in.  He paused then, perhaps measuring her reaction.  Otherwise, he added—almost in a different voice—the house looked solid.

The assessment did not faze her.  She had enough money.  It was, in fact, about all she’d brought with her, escaping from her so-called husband, taking only what had been hers anyway, though the distinction likely hadn’t registered with him.

She could well imagine the way it had gone, once he learned that she’d left him.  His eyes narrowed.  He hardened, fell silent as if he were thinking, but it would not have been thoughts going through that head.  Day might settle into dark without him moving a muscle.  Until at last something broke him out of it, and then the hunt began.  He would devote everything to it, tracking her down.  He would not give it up.  And if he were ever to get his hands on her, that would be the end of it.  She knew—hands that could crush things hands had no business crushing.  A glass jar.  An electric razor.  A woman’s neck.

But he would not get his hands on her.  He would have to find her first, and he would never find her.  The way it was, she could barely have found herself.  She had that in her favor, that her desperation had made her so improbable.  It pleased her, perhaps even more than being free of him: the pain it would cause him, his failure to find her.

She bought a table and chairs, some dishes, curtains for the windows.  There was much work to do in the house, and she was eager to do it, but for some reason she could not keep herself there.  She was instead gripped by an impatience, a longing to see what was outside.  She kept glancing through windows.  Again and again in daylight she wandered the meadow, and at night its sounds, its stillness weighed upon her heavily.  The way it felt, she was more than a little in love with it, threading her way amidst the singing of crickets along paths she didn’t know, the threads little by little connecting her, stitching her to these patches of ground.

From the beginning she had trouble sleeping.  She at first suspected the camping mattress, which seemed, in a way she couldn’t explain, to leave her vulnerable to the floor.  A real bed would be better, she reasoned, contemplating the problem while standing up, her feet where her head had been.

But there were dreams, of a kind she had never experienced before.  They troubled her, not for their content, but for the ease with which they passed as episodes of her waking life.  Had she really gone into town during a thunderstorm on some errand?  Had someone spoken to her there about the need for secrecy?  She had dreamt these things, she at last decided.  But the memories unsettled her.  She wondered about other events in her life.

In one dream she was seated at a table in what appeared to be a room without walls.  Everything in the room glowed unsteadily, as if by the light of a fire.  She sat with one hand in her lap, the other resting on the table, holding a crude bowl in which there was liquid.  There was the expectation of a meal.  As she lifted the bowl from time to time, the liquid shimmered, but she did not drink.  Someone was seated across from her . . . . who, she did not know.  But whoever it was—the face hidden—was afflicted with a terrific hunger.  In the dream the meal never arrived.  She ate nothing.  There was only the waiting.  There was only the intent and the need of this someone looming before her.

Within the dream she felt an undercurrent of longing, a promise of something to be fulfilled.  Even when she awoke, the feeling did not leave her.  She rose immediately then and stood by her mattress, her eyes bewildered by the newly painted walls.  Her bedroom, by the ghostly sweep of her flashlight, looked oddly insubstantial.  Before she knew what she was doing, she was descending the stairs to the kitchen, barefoot.  There she poured a glass of water and drank it.  The kitchen—also freshly painted—had a remote, vacant look to it, like an imitation of a kitchen.  She poured another glass of water and drank that too.  She struck a match and lit the kerosene lamp by the sink.  She rummaged then through the cabinets and her styrofoam cooler and fired up a burner on top of the range and made herself a generous breakfast, which she ate by the flickering light of the lantern as if feeding an impatient heart.  Before long dawn eased its way in around the edges of the new curtains.  She watched as she sat at her kitchen table, both hands wrapped around a cup of tea.  Within a week she had purchased a bed.  But the dreams persisted.

By day she wandered out into the meadow, where even in full sun her dreams haunted her.  Some of the dreams she could not remember, though they took hold of her with such energy that she felt herself alive in two worlds—a meadow world and a shadow world.  She kept out of sight of the highway on her walks, which was not difficult, for her attention was more often pulled in the opposite direction, to the back side of the hill.  Her excursions soon wore paths from the house into the meadow and from the meadow into the bog, where again and again she was drawn without knowing why.  This landscape drowned unto stillness—it was after all what had brought her here, though of course she did not understand what that meant.  Three, four, five times a day, she ventured to the soggy edge of the bog to stand amidst the whine of insects and gaze into the black waters wetting the tips of her shoes.  Her eyes were quick, trying to look at everything at once, so certain was she that she would see something there.

The contractor sent a man over to work on the windows.  The man was young and muscular and bronze-skinned.  He told her on the first day that his name was Dale.  He brought the windows, a few at a time, along with lumber in the back of his truck.  In his every move he was followed by a gangly and energetic dog the color of cinnamon.  First thing each morning Dale set up his table saw, which he plugged into a generator, also in the bed of the truck.  He worked quietly and efficiently, moving counter-clockwise around the house, beginning with the windows in front on the first floor.  Whenever he needed to cut lumber, she noticed, he would cut everything at once, then shut the generator off, for which she was thankful.  He was forever measuring, it seemed to her.  Sometimes she would hear his hammer or his drill, but mostly he was so quiet in his work, she hardly knew he was there.

Every day at noon he mounted a boulder at the edge of the meadow and ate what appeared to be sandwiches out of a brown paper bag.  Now and again she paused at the window and gazed at him distractedly.  She was alone, after all, and aside from the house and the meadow and the bog, what else was there to look at?  As he ate, his legs straddling the rock—she observed—he divided his attention equally between the sky and the meadow and the dog that lay at his feet.  She had no idea what it was in his sandwiches, except for the onions, which she could smell from across the yard.  Anyway, he ate it eagerly and washed it down always with orange soda.

Dale wasn’t especially talkative, but whenever their paths would cross in the course of the day, he would be ready for her with some banality.  “Fine day, isn’t it?” he would say.  Or, “Better enjoy this one while we can.”  He never used the same expression twice.  Sometimes he would only smile.  She was moved by these little courtesies, which were clearly intended to set her at ease.  On one occasion he asked, “So how do you like the house?”

“I like it,” she said.

He looked at her in an odd way.  “Have you seen anything?”

“What do you mean?”

He shook his head.  “Oh, when we were kids we used to say the place was haunted.”

She heard herself laugh.  “Why?”

“Oh . . . .”  He shrugged.  “Rumors, you know.”

“I have seen children,” she said.  “Twice.  Both times they stood in a line at the edge of the meadow and threw stones at the house.”

“Oh, that’ll stop, once they get used to someone living here.”

There were places on the hill where the skin of the earth lay open.  Fingers of bedrock, unrelenting, had worked their way into the meadow.  Boulders, shaggy with lichen, ruminated among the grasses.  She felt herself drawn to these brooding landscapes of stone, where the meadow appeared less like a hayfield and more ancient and somehow necessary.

From one of her excursions in town, she brought home a book on the flora of meadows.  Sitting at the kitchen table, she opened it, and browsed.  For three days she forgot about cleaning and painting and lost herself in its pages.  Her walks took her hours—she paid attention to everything.  She’d never known there were so many grasses.  And that grasses could be so beautiful.  And the weeds.  Hawkweed, bellwort, lady’s slipper, bloodroot—all of them had names.  Their flowers—yellow, orange, purple, and pink—assumed distinct shapes.  They could be bell or funnel or trumpet-shaped or tubular or cruciform or stellate.  They might occur in clusters, round or elongated.  The author cautioned, however, that, in practice, the shape of any one particular flower might be difficult to determine.  The thirteen shapes he had listed were those recognized generally by botanists.  But the flowers one encountered in the field, he wrote, “might have other ideas.”

She was thrilled.  All of it was strange to her.  She understood, it would take time for her to come to know this world.  Meanwhile, this sensation of not knowing, this pregnant stupefaction, she did not want to miss.

She collected samples and kept a notebook, divided into sections headed Edible, Inedible, Toxic, Medicinal.  She had never in her life done anything like this.  Onto the pages, she taped—one sample to a page—sprigs of sedge and rush and grass.  The blank spaces around these samples filled up immediately with notation.  The writing in her own hand and the corresponding actual plant matter seemed to work a sort of chemistry together.  The notebook, bulging with words and vegetation, felt in her hand like a treasure in the making.  For the wildflowers, of course, she would require other notebooks.

In fact it was as she was jotting down a note alongside a sample of hair fescue—her thinking distracted at the same time by some unrelated reverie of speculation—that she lifted her eyes above the edge of her notebook and . . . saw something.  At the edge of the bog.  Where she was used to seeing only rushes and cattails.  Standing right close to the water on the opposite side of the creek was . . . . it took her a moment to figure out what it was she was looking at.  The trunk of a great dead birch, she decided, the whitish bark peeling away at the top and lower, revealing darker brown—but of an extravagant shape, the sheets of bark coming undone, like wings unfolding.

She could not take her eyes off the thing.  She was trying really to see it, to recognize what it was.  And then it moved.  As she was watching, it seemed to pivot, somehow fold, and . . . dissolve into the woods.

It was gone.

Staring at the spot, vacant now, she held very still.  She could barely breathe.  Her eyes bore down on the place where it had stood—hopelessly, as if in an effort to make a memory visible.  And then she was on her way downhill, breaking into a run, straight for the bog, until she was stopped at the edge of the creek just across from where the thing had stood, her thinking all flutter and deflection, trying to hang onto the image.  Could it have been someone, instead of something?  Some local person, crazily dressed, out for a hike.  A hunter, a surveyor, lugging some piece of equipment.  Had she seen a dead tree fall and sink noiselessly into the marsh?  Or had it been . . . . she didn’t even know how to ask the question.

* * *

One day, returning from one of her walks, she saw Dale straddling his lunch rock in the sun.  But on this occasion, he had no lunch in hand, only an orange soda.  It was barely noon.  The windows were nearly finished.

“No lunch today?” she said.

“Naw.”  He slid off the rock.  “Magic got to it first.”  He stooped and held up a shredded paper bag, grinning.  He said, “Didn’t even leave me the crumbs.”  He grabbed the dog around the ears and ruffled her fur, and the dog wagged her tail.  He spoke as though he were speaking to the dog.  “She don’t know any better, she’s just a puppy.  Aren’t you?”

“Here, I can fix you some.”

“Oh no, that’s O.K.”

“Nonsense, I’ll bring it right out.”  She stepped past him and headed for the kitchen, where the countertops, freshly painted white, were laid out like museum tables with sprigs of flowering plants.  There was barely room to set a slice of bread down, but she managed to throw together some sandwiches, which she brought out on a tray with chips and juice and cookies.

Dale had to tie the dog.

She set the tray in the grass and sat cross-legged next to it.  They both ate.  For awhile neither of them said anything.  Still, she was able to see him out of the corner of her eye.  She guessed he couldn’t be much older than twenty.

He asked finally how the painting was coming along.

“O.K., I guess.”

He gazed out over the meadow toward the hills to the south.  He said, “Are you, like some kind of biologist or something.”

She laughed.  “No, not yet anyway.  Just . . . living here with all this . . .”  She swept an arm out to include the meadow.  “I got interested in it.”

“Yeah.”  He nodded.  He seemed to understand.

Looking up at him on his rock, she had to squint against the sun.  She said, “So you used to say the house was haunted?”

“Some of the kids said they saw things.”

“What things?”

He shrugged.  “Spooks.  I don’t know.  Why, have you seen something?”

She hesitated.  “Yeah.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.  I couldn’t tell what it was.”

“Where?”

“Down there.”  She turned toward the bog.  “Just across the creek.”

He swiveled completely around on his boulder and stared toward the creek in silence.  It was a silence that gave her hope, as if the matter they were discussing was not just a joke, but there was some weight to it.

He said, “You ought to talk to my uncle.”

She looked at him.

“He’s a motewolon.  One who knows things.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You should talk to him.  He’s a good man, my uncle.”

She nodded.  “Thanks,” she said.  “Maybe I will.”  That was what she said, even though she knew she wouldn’t.

The lack of sleep must have taken its toll, for at last she fell sick.  For two days she kept mostly to her bed, her awareness roiling in and out of focus.  She did not know where she was.  Or, rather, her surroundings seemed to shift and exaggerate themselves crazily.  At times there was something resembling daylight and at times a darkness flooded back in, but for her it hardly made a difference.  She was driven by a particular fear.  There was someone, never far away, chasing her—someone she knew, but also did not know.  She hid in a wooden box.  It was not a coffin even though it looked like one.  At some point she understood, it was her pain who was chasing her.  There was nothing she could do.  She was tossing endlessly, suffering, in a tide of white heat.  Her hallucinations dragged her out into the meadow, where the sun seemed to weigh on her steps and even her thinking.  Finally exhausted, she sprawled on the wet ground, entangled in tall grass, unable to budge.  Her hand closed around something soft—a small pouch, like a bird’s nest, stuffed with a mix of needles and leaves.  She lay marking the passage of time with her breaths, holding the little pouch to her breast and squinting up at the broad and too bright sky, ready to meet a torment she could not name.  There was this comfort: she understood that she had come to an end.  And beyond that?  She wiggled her fingers and her toes to see whether she were still alive.  A shadow moved over her then, blocking the sky and casting a blackness over everything, after which she remembered nothing.

When all of a sudden she opened her eyes, someone was bending over her.  A man she had never seen before.  She lay utterly still in her bed, the room apparently illuminated by firelight, as in her dream.  But she knew that this was not a dream.  She felt pleasantly calm, even a little light-headed, as though, if she were to encourage it, her body might possibly ascend above the bed and float away out one of the windows.  She was not frightened by the sight of the man, though his expression looked grim, perhaps even angry.  He was speaking energetically, but it took her a moment to realize she could not understand the language.  She blinked, and he was gone.

The next time she opened her eyes, sunlight was pouring in through the windows.  A woman was sitting beside the bed, reading.  When she stirred, the woman glanced at her and smiled, slipped a scrap of paper into her book, closed it, and set it aside.  The woman leaned over and studied her face and then reached and caressed her forehead.  The sensation gave her such comfort, she could have cried.

“I think I feel better,” she said, because she could not keep silent.

The woman’s name was Grace.  She was Dale’s aunt.  The man who had earlier stood over her in her delirium was Dale’s uncle, Joseph—the one who knew things.

She was half-sitting, half-lying in a lawn chair in the sun when she heard the vehicle’s tires on the gravel.  She saw Dale’s truck rise out of the meadow grasses, lumber in her direction, and roll to a stop close by.  Next to Dale in the cab was Joseph.

As the two men got out of the truck, she tried to stand to greet them, but Joseph motioned her to stay seated.  He introduced himself and shook her hand.  His other hand held an orange baseball cap, which now he placed on his head.  He said something to Dale in his native language, then turned back to her.  “I’m going for a walk,” he said.  “I’ll be back.”

She nodded.

Still he stood there, saying nothing.  His eyes searched her face with such insistence that finally she grew tired and her own eyes closed.

For awhile in her chair in the sun, she drifted in and out of sleep.

Then he was standing before her.  It occurred to her that she might be dreaming.  “How was your walk?” she said, testing.

She had the impression he almost smiled.  He lifted his cap to run a hand over his head, then turned, squinting toward the bog and replaced the cap.

He squatted next to her.  He held up the little pouch full of leaves that she had found during the height of her fever.  He looked straight at her.  “Where did you get this?” he said.

She told him she didn’t know.  “It came to me,” she said.

He stared at the ground, adjusting the bill of his cap.  Then, as if to demonstrate something, he took a pinch of the flakes in the pouch, crushed them between his fingers, and let them drizzle as powder on the breeze.  “This is medicine,” he said.  “It’s what we used to cure you.”  He continued measuring her.

“Thank you,” she said.

He shook his head.  “Don’t thank me,” he said.  “You’d better not thank me.”

She expected him to say more, but he did not.  He stood up and looked past the house toward the bog.  He seemed to settle into himself.  She wondered why he had come.  He was standing, gazing toward the northern end of the creek, as if he might have expected something to appear there.  He stood for such a long time that she grew impatient.  She wanted him to tell her things.  She wanted him to teach her.

“So . . . ,” she said, “you think it’s friendly?  The ghost?”

He looked at her.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Casper.  The friendly ghost.”  He shook his head.

“I want to understand,” she said.

His gaze, when he spoke, was still directed toward the bog.  “It’s not a ghost,” he said.  “It’s a pisuwin.  A spirit.”

“Is it evil?”

“No.  Not evil,” he said.  “Not evil.  But spirits have appetites.  And you are like a child.”

She started at the word “appetites”, not knowing exactly what he meant.

“I can learn,” she said.

“No.”

She understood there was no point in arguing with him.

“Sister,” he said finally, though she must have been twenty years younger than he, “this is a local spirit.  It is attached to this place.”  He spoke facing the bog, in a voice so forceful he might have been addressing multitudes or trying to convince the very bog itself.  “Do you understand what I’m saying?  You must leave here.”

So he stood there, arguing—it seemed—for her soul.  And by the time he was done, she saw that he was right, though there were things he said by way of warning that thrilled as well as frightened her.

“Your choice is simple,” he said.  “You’re standing on the edge.  You can go one way.  Or the other.”

That night she did not leave the meadow as Joseph had advised.  Instead she went inside the house and locked all the doors and ascended the stairs to her room.  Feeling a new strength rising within her, she sat down on a chair beside her bed—the chair Dale’s aunt had used while reading—and waited in the dark.  She did not wait long.  She listened.  The night was silent but somehow not at rest.  An unsteady, troubled light from outside was agitating the darkness in the room.  She rose and went to the window and looked out over the meadow, which under the moonlight seemed a tortured fairyland.  She felt it then and turned from the window, and there descended around her a buffeting, like the beating of enormous wings.  She did not defend herself, nor was she afraid.  It was only that her body felt utterly slack, as though her heart, caught between beats, had lost track of itself.  The thing did not advance toward her, but seemed simply to increase, overwhelming her until she felt herself composed of nothing but particles of excitement.  The excitement lifted her like a wave, carried her, and then forgot about her.

Upon awakening the next morning, she found she was already up and dressing herself—as if having blundered into her own consciousness.  She recognized that she was fully alert, her attention fixed on an odor she hadn’t noticed before.  Even in her sleep she had known what the odor was.  There was no need to think about anything.  Wearing shorts, her sneakers laced up tight, she was down the stairs, out the back door, and onto the path that cut through the meadow to the bog.  The sun was just rising, glittering through the woods to the east.  Over the meadow’s surface, bees and hornets and birds already were fussing, submerging themselves and reemerging as if from cloud.

At the edge of the bog she paused, looking north toward where the creek disappeared in a stand of skeletal tree trunks.  It was as if she’d realized only now what it was she was going to do.  She didn’t know the first thing about bogs.  There was the chance that she’d drown.  Still she watched herself going ahead with it, as if pulled by something she couldn’t resist.  On her first step, she sank to her ankles.  Immediately she took another, trying to balance on clumps of sedge.  But the clumps were unstable.  A few steps further and she was in over her knees and teetering.  There was nothing to hold onto, her legs were scratched, and the mosquitoes had found her.  And there beneath her was the black water of the creek, looking like polished stone.  She leaned forward, let herself go, and slipped into it.  She was almost surprised to find it liquid.  She tried swimming, but her feet hit bottom, every step plunging her ankle-deep in muck.  Roots grabbed at her legs.  The water roiled with mud and particles as if she were bathing in a dark vegetable tea, from the surface of which arose the odor that had awakened her earlier.  She followed the creek north, half swimming, half wading, finally exhausting herself.  Somehow she found her way back.

The next day she did it again, and again the day after that, and then, it seemed, every day.  She got better at it.  She learned how to walk without getting wet, how to swim without touching bottom.  The sneakers came off and disappeared.  She lost track of time.  The bog observed her comings and goings through the eyes of insects and spiders and frogs, which she observed in turn.  Some of them, she discovered, could be eaten.  Turtles and beavers awaited her every approach as if it were the fulfillment of a prophesy, then slid heavily into the water, turned themselves into ripples, and moved off.  She didn’t mind that she was being watched.  She didn’t mind removing leeches from her skin.  She was part of something.  Little by little, she was leaking away.

She had looked at first in the water like an albino frog.  Gradually the tannin tinted her skin.  She was beginning her forays before dawn now, leaving her clothes at the edge of the bog, and returning by moonlight.  Sometimes she stayed out overnight.  Usually she didn’t go far.  Though the creek did branch, and sometimes she was distracted and lost her way.  One night, wandering dreamily in and out of the water, she came upon a lake flanked by hills.  Standing on the shore of that lake, she saw not a single light, except for those in the sky.  She sat down in the sand, and the stars poured themselves into her.  She didn’t know what the lake was called, nor any of the stars.  Anyway she had her own names for things.  The names came to her in dreams—dreams that were very much like her own days and nights.

She understood that her life had slipped out of its shape and become something else.

He came for her on foot, leaving his car on the highway.  The sun had set moments before.  She was standing at an upstairs window, her stare lingering on the band of orange silhouetting the western horizon of trees, when she saw him moving like a stain across the greying space of the meadow.  Even in such light and from such a distance, she recognized him immediately—the scissor-like motion of his limbs as he walked, the looming emptiness of him.  His grotesquely red shirt.  He was flexing his fingers, opening and closing his fists, unable to conceal even that as he came for her, lurching over the uneven ground.

The moment collapsed around her.  She was already down the stairs and all at once out the door and into the meadow, heading toward the bog, running.  She was fast, her feet in touch with something, as if the ground were only now awakening beneath her.  And what about the gun she had purchased?  Had she been thinking, she would have remembered.  It lay in the kitchen drawer under dish towels, where she had put it weeks ago.  But she was not thinking.

Hearing him stumble and curse some distance behind her, she paused and turned to see him descending the hill, coming straight for her.  At the edge of the bog, watching him, she slipped out of her clothes.  As he came at her, she faced him, the dusk congealing around them.  His pace slowed, perhaps because of her nakedness, something he hadn’t counted on.  Or it might have been that he saw the end was near.

He stopped.  There was, over the meadow where they stood, a nagging confusion of the light, typical at that hour, when night collides with day.  The air itself seemed restless.  From overhead, something fluttered and squeaked at him.  He waved it away with his large hands.

“Where you headed, Pet?” he said.

She knew better than to answer.

His eyes traveled the length of her.  “I do like your outfit.  Is that for me?”

She looked at him, wonderingly, as if seeing the whole of him for the first time.  There was so much she had forgotten.  His shirt the color of a cancer.  She could feel his world advancing, eating up the moments, shitting pieces of itself behind, making itself anew.  At some point, it occurred to her, everything she knew would be useless.

He stepped toward her—now onto wet ground.  She could hear it bubbling under his boots.

She took a step backwards into the sedge, and then another.

He lunged for her then but skidded in the muck at the edge of the creek, and she avoided him easily.  There he was, knee-deep in water, and she grinning down at him from the sedge.  She could feel the anger in him as he stood only a few feet from her, shaking his head.  She could see him coming apart.

She stepped back again, taunting him with a look

He lunged again in a rage, sinking immediately to his thighs.

“You’re only making it worse,” he said.

“Shh,” she said.  “Come.”  She slipped obliquely into the water.

His eyes locked onto her as he advanced, wading, until he was there, almost pressed against her.  He reached and caught her by the neck and hoisted her like a prize fish.  She could feel his fingers positioning themselves.

Knowing what she knew, she looked for the change in his expression.  It wasn’t long in coming.  Just a spark of bewilderment.  And then—for the first time between them—something like communication.  He looked as though he might be about to ask a question.  His body convulsed then, and he let go of her.

She sank into the creek and rose again to see the blood red of his shirt puddling and swirling in the black water.

It was the last she saw of him.  It might be said also it was the last she saw of herself, for she seemed from that moment to dissolve into a story that was not about her but about the ground and the black waters and the sky she inhabited.

The days and the seasons passed.  What she still knew about herself was this.  She no longer ventured into town.  Expecting nothing now, she kept her lopsided hours, stalking the night meadow and day meadow in clothes that dwindled eventually to rags.  Her gait was fluid, no longer entirely upright, for the bog was giving her the skin and bones of a salamander.  Airplanes continued patrolling overhead, halfheartedly keeping an eye on things, but she knew how to curl herself in a ball and lie, blocking their radars.  Heavy rains eroded the driveway.  No more vehicles ascended the hill.  When pressed, she would crouch in the grass and glare at berry-pickers.  And the children who used to come and throw stones at the house—now, when they saw her, they turned and ran.

After the second house of the morning—a three-story colonial with six bedrooms, two fireplaces and a Jacuzzi tub on the back deck—Clay’s inclined to set Klecko straight, re-establish parameters and price range.  He tells this to Michelle on the front lawn where they wait for Klecko, who’s stayed behind in the house to use one of the three bathrooms.  Three and-a-half counting the commode in the finished basement.  Take your pick.

“Please relax,” Michelle says to Clay.  “Please be patient.  We’re just getting started.  We’ll get to the shacks and shanties eventually.  In the meantime, let’s just go along with it.  It’s fun.  I think it’s fun.”

“Some fun,” Clay says.  “Maybe you should sit with me on the way to the next place.  I need help getting in the spirit.” 

“Poor guy.  You lonely back there?”  Michelle smiles through a fake pout and takes Clay’s hand.  “Seriously, though, wouldn’t that be weird?  Kind of rude?  Gerry alone up front chauffeuring us around?  We could switch, though.  You want to switch?  You want shotgun?”

“Forget it,” Clay says.  “I’m good.” 

“Ready, kids?”  Klecko says from the front porch.  When Clay and Michelle turn, he smiles and claps his hands three times in front of his face.  Like he’s killing bugs or trying to wake himself up.  Like a short burst of applause is in order.  Like he’s anticipating something great.  Like something great has already happened.

Alone in the back of Klecko’s Suburban, Clay’s out of the loop.  Up front, Michelle and Klecko chat about home warranties and buyers’ assistance programs, casement windows and pocket doors, high-efficiency furnaces and updated wiring, stand-alone garages and in-ground pools.  These are the kinds of things Clay imagines they’re discussing.  Problem is, between the noise of Niagara Falls Boulevard’s stop and start traffic roaring through the truck’s open windows—Klecko’s air conditioning is reportedly on the fritz—and the staticy, booming voices coming out of the rear stereo speakers, Clay can’t hear Michelle and Klecko.  Instead, it’s the Spike and Abe Show on AM 660, The Voice of Western New York Sports, a program which consists of the two hosts talking over each other and yelling at their call-in listeners, and even though it’s late July, the main conversation topics are football and hockey.  The Bills and Sabres.  The shtick is supposed to be that Spike and Abe are an odd couple.  Spike plays the excitable ex-jock who’s all heart, no head, and Abe plays the sarcastic, cerebral stats nut.  They zing each other accordingly.  Clay thinks the callers are the most interesting part of the show—Phil in Lackawanna, who wonders what the Sabres can do to amp up their power play, or J.J. in Amherst, who thinks the Bills should trade up and draft a quarterback—but Spike and Abe never let the callers talk for long.  They have their provocative riffs and passionate tangents to get to.  They have their hasty generalizations and snap judgments to pronounce.  Clay finds himself anticipating the respite offered by the not nearly frequent enough commercial breaks.

Clay could be assertive.  He could take matters into his own hands, request the windows be closed and the radio turned off, but he doesn’t.  Partly out of pride—he shouldn’t have to ask—but partly out of wariness, too.  Clay knows himself.  If he were included in the loop, it wouldn’t be long before he’d be looking for a way out of it.

Michelle knows Clay, too, and Clay knows Michelle knows.  She’s not maliciously ignoring him; rather, she’s giving him a pass, letting him off the hook.  She understands house hunting isn’t his thing, and she can tell he has misgivings about Klecko.  The man sports a handlebar moustache and juggles two cell phones.  He wears a leather newsboy hat, fingerless driving gloves and a white-gold man bracelet.  Call Clay shallow, call him unhip, but he’d feel more comfortable if Klecko looked more like a real estate agent and less like a bookie, or an undercover narcotics cop, or mob muscle.

Earlier this morning, in the parking lot of the Red Roof Inn where Clay and Michelle are staying, Klecko said, “Don’t call me Klecko, call me Gerry, short for Gerald, Gerald with a ‘G’,” and he suggested that the three of them all ride together in his truck.  Michelle accepted before Clay could answer.  If Clay were out to find fault, he could blame Michelle for jumping the gun, or he could blame himself for being slow on the draw.  Either way, what was sacrificed was the privacy necessary to speak frankly, to pow-wow, to compare notes and strategize between houses.  Of course, Clay understands, in theory, that everyone here is on the same team.  Klecko is Clay and Michelle’s agent, their advocate, not their enemy.  You don’t formulate strategies to deal with your advocates.  Still.  It seems Klecko might have a strategy.  Clay wonders if splitting up husband and wife between front seat and back seat is a commonly employed technique.  A trade secret.  A tactic.  Like what cops do with perps.  Clay’s seen the shows.  Two suspects, two interrogation rooms.  You play the scumbags off each other until one cracks.

After spending the rest of the morning tromping through a series of suburban McMansions in Sanborn and Wheatfield and North Tonawanda, Clay gathers from the snippets he overhears—no one says anything to him directly—that the plan for the afternoon is to get lunch and then hit Black Creek Village.  There’s a house for sale there that looks great on paper, and, what’s more, it’s within shouting distance of Clay and Michelle’s price range, so Clay feels like things are looking up.  Like Klecko and Michelle are finally ready to get real.

Clay’s been ready, has lived through more than his fair share of reality in the last few months.  He and Michelle are moving to Niagara Falls from Harrisburg because of Michelle’s new job, and Clay’s been nothing but supportive from the get go.  Michelle’s told Clay how much she appreciates the way he’s responded to all the upheaval.  The school district’s budget cuts and his resulting pink slip on the one hand, and on the other hand, Michelle’s burgeoning career, her great new opportunity.  She waxes as Clay wanes.  A lesser man, well, who knows?  A lesser man might allow jealousy to worm its way into his heart.  A lesser man might allow himself to feel like a lesser man.  Clay has this lesser man in him—who doesn’t?—but so far he’s managed to beat the lesser man down.  Clay’s tough-minded.  Clay’s forward-looking.  He knows he and Michelle are fortunate her new job came along when it did.  Her head registrar’s salary at the community college in Niagara Falls will be thirty-percent higher than what she earned as an assistant registrar in Pennsylvania.  Not that their budget won’t be tight—it will be until Clay finds work—but he’ll land something soon.  Clay’s not the kind of guy who won’t land something soon.  Things could be worse.  These days, things are a lot worse for a lot of people.  The reason Clay and Michelle can even think about buying a house is because prices and mortgage rates have dropped so low, and prices and mortgage rates have dropped so low because of underwater loans and foreclosures.  One person’s burst bubble is someone else’s golden egg.  When Clay reminds himself of this, of other people’s hardships, of those who have it tougher than he does, it makes him feel better, but not in an altogether good way.  Fact is, feeling better like this often makes him feel worse.

The restaurant Klecko pulls into has two signs in opposite corners of its parking lot.  One says “Whirlpool Diner,” and the other says “Breakfast–Lunch–Dinner 24/7.”  The buildings surrounding the restaurant look like they’ve been long abandoned, including, across the street, a weather-beaten Niagara Falls Tourist Information station.  The small booth is hugged tightly by weedy vines and covered with incoherent graffiti, and a half-dozen seagulls take turns hopping on and off its sagging roof.

There are empty spaces everywhere in the sizeable parking lot, but Klecko’s got his eye on one in the row closest to the door, between two other big trucks, and he’s hell-bent on backing his Suburban into the space.  As Clay waits for things to play out—when Klecko finally hits pay dirt on his fourth attempt, Michelle gives a little cheer—he realizes he was never asked what he’d like to eat.  Clay will usually eat just about anything—Michelle probably conveyed this fact to Klecko—but, still, some direct consideration would’ve been nice.  The gesture would’ve been appreciated.  On the short walk from the truck to the restaurant—Clay follows a few steps behind Klecko and Michelle—he wonders if he’ll be allowed to order for himself.  He wonders if he’ll have permission to get something off the adult menu.

As it turns out, instead of menus, the restaurant’s fare is scrawled in chalk behind the cash register.  The chalkboard is huge.  Nearly wall-to-wall, nearly floor-to-ceiling.  Pizza, subs, soups, pasta, fried chicken, pancakes, omelets, milkshakes, burgers, hot dogs, fish fries, curry bowls, Buffalo wings, chili, burritos, lo mien, egg rolls, open-faced turkey and meatloaf sandwiches, beef on weck, ribs and an all-you-can-eat salad bar.  Clay’s impressed.

“Lunch is on me,” Klecko says.  He places one hand on Clay’s back and the other on Michelle’s.  “You kids save your money.  I hear you’re in the market for a house.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Clay says.

“It’s not about have to,” Klecko says.  “It’s about want to.  The Whirlpool is my favorite place to take clients.  Can’t go wrong here.  The only thing they don’t have is sushi.  You want sushi, you’re out of luck.  You want sushi, I brought you to the wrong place, and I apologize.”

“I do love sushi,” Clay says.

Klecko’s smile fades but then reappears, even bigger than before, when Michelle reaches around him to slap Clay’s arm.  “Behave,” she says.

“Just kidding,” Clay says.  “Not about loving sushi.  I do.  But this looks great.”

“They have calamari,” Klecko says, pointing at the chalkboard.  “They have crab cakes.” 

After placing their orders at the counter, Klecko, Michelle and Clay claim a booth at the rear of the dining room.  There are plenty of open seats—Clay wonders where the lunch rush is, wonders what the lack of lunch rush might say about the place—but by the time they have their food in front of them, the dining area has filled considerably, and they all agree how lucky they are to have missed the log jam currently forming at the counter.

“Perfect timing if I do say so myself,” Klecko says.  He then bows his face to the table and closes his eyes.  Clay thinks the man’s going to say grace.  “I love food,” Klecko says before inhaling deeply.  “I love eating.”

“Amen,” Clay says.

“What do you have there?”  Michelle says to Klecko.  She’s already taken a bite of her BLT and has leaned over Clay’s plate to admire his shrimp fried rice.  “Looks to me like a UFO,” she says.  “Unidentified food object.”

“Ha! That’s good,” Klecko says.  “’Round these parts, this is what’s called a garbage plate.  A Western New York specialty.  You have your macaroni salad, tater tots, beef patty, red hot, white hot, and fried egg covered in chili sauce, cheddar cheese and diced onions.  This piece of white bread on the side is your flavor sponge.  You use it to mop up the juice.”

“I don’t use it to mop up anything,” Michelle says.  “No offense, but your lunch alarms me.”

“Actually, ma’am, I am offended,” Klecko says as he sticks two consecutive forkfuls of food in his mouth.  Clay and Michelle watch him chew and swallow.  “You’re being close-minded about the local culture, and I’m a native.  You’re casting aspersions at something near and dear to my heart.”  Klecko points the business end of his fork at Michelle and winks.  “Believe me, it’s good stuff.”

“Looks like you’re really enjoying it,” Clay says.

“So no kids yet for you two, huh, Clay?”  Klecko says.  “What are you waiting for, an invitation?  I’m kidding.  Maybe in the not-too-distant future, though, right?  Michelle tells me you’re looking for a house you can grow into.”

“Right,” Clay says.  He looks at Michelle, who grins sheepishly at her plate.  “Having a family’s in our plans.”

“That’s fabulous,” Klecko says.

“It’s exciting to think about,” Michelle says, rubbing Clay’s arm.  “We just want the time to be right.”

“Sure,” Klecko says.  “You want to have your ducks in a row.  Clay, your bride also tells me you’ll be looking for work when you guys land here.  For what it’s worth, I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with some leads for you.”

“Oh,” Clay says.  “Well, I appreciate that.”

“Not so fast,” Klecko says.  “I’m afraid I haven’t been able to come up with much.  If this were a few decades ago, I could set you up.  Right along the lake in Buffalo there used to be a lot of good jobs.  A couple of my brothers worked down there at the Buffalo Color plant.  At one time they were the largest supplier of indigo dye in the world.  You wearing blue jeans?  Chances are the blue came from Buffalo.  Or used to.  The jeans you would’ve been wearing thirty years ago.  Anyway, my brothers are retired, and I don’t know how active the plant is anymore.  A few guys I went to school with worked right next door at Airco.  Industrial gases.  They sucked air out of the atmosphere—with big hoses, I guess?—separated it into oxygen, nitrogen and whatever else—I want to say argon?—and then they sold the gases.  Genius, right?  Making money off air.  Pulling money out of the air.  Literally, right?  Anyway, again, my buddies are all retired, so I’m not sure about what’s what over there.  Seems lately everything’s going the wrong way, right?  Layoffs.  Downsizing.  I suppose the Chinese have us beat on air, too.  Air and its components.”

“It’s tough out there,” Clay says, “but I’m sure I’ll find something.” 

“Even right here in the Falls there used to be Nabisco,” Klecko says.  “Hooker Chemical, too.  One stretch along the Robert Moses Parkway used to be called Chemical Row because of all the plants over there.  Jobs, jobs, jobs.  Anyway.  Now they’re gone, gone, gone.”

“Actually,” Clay says.  “I’m a teacher.  So I’ll probably just apply to local school districts.  See how that goes.”

Michelle drops her hand onto Clay’s knee.  “Clay’s a great teacher,” she says.  “His students loved him.”

“Sure,” Klecko says.  He unwraps and slides a straw into his tumbler of Mountain Dew even though there’s one in there already.  “Gym teacher, right?”

“Phys. Ed., right,” Clay says.

“So how’s it work when teachers get laid off?”  Klecko says.  “What are the logistics?  They go by seniority?  Subject?  If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Right,” Clay says.  “Seniority and discipline.  In my school they cut back the librarians and art and music teachers to part-time, and they laid off a reading specialist and two phys. ed.  teachers.  Those were the logistics.”

“We’ll be a nation of obese, uncultured illiterates,” Klecko says.

“God bless America,” Michelle says.

“I used to love gym as a kid,” Klecko says.  “Used to look forward to it.  Climbing the rope?  I used to love that.  Kids need gym, right?  That break from learning.  All work and no play doesn’t work.”

“I wouldn’t say students take a break from learning in phys. ed.,” Clay says.

“It’s a different kind of learning,” Michelle says.

“Sure,” Klecko says.  “Aerobic, anaerobic, isometric, isotonic.  I don’t know if you can tell or not, but I workout.  I have to, right?” he says, and he points both forefingers at his plate.  “Look how I eat.”

“I’d rather not,” Michelle says, and she laughs.  “That sounded mean, didn’t it?”

“Hey now,” Klecko says, “remember that I’m the one paying here.” 

Clay figures there must be more than a couple thousand calories sitting on Klecko’s plate.  A whole twenty-four hours worth of food.  Eat that stuff every day, you’d have to run a few half marathons a week to break even.  Klecko doesn’t look too bad for his age—he’s got good arms and shoulders, a good chest—but Clay would advise him to spend less time on the bench and more time on the treadmill.  He could stand to mix in a salad once in a while, too.  Maybe skip dessert here and there, switch to diet soft drinks now and then.  And he should drink more water.  Everyone should drink more water.  That’s something that kids in Clay’s phys. ed. classes heard from him all the time.  Sure they had fun, but along the way they learned a little nutrition.  They learned a little anatomy, a little biology.  Not a break from learning by any stretch. 

“All right,” Klecko says.  “Getting down to business here.  The house in Black Creek Village we’re going to see this afternoon.”  He looks at Michelle and smiles.  “First things first.  Just to get this out of the way.  After all the testing they’ve done, nothing.  Absolutely nothing conclusive.  No issues whatsoever as far as that goes.  Second, most importantly, the price is right on this house.  I mean, it’s a steal as listed, and I know for a fact we have a motivated seller, so I bet we could even inch them a little lower.”

“Testing?” Clay says.

“All clear,” Klecko says.  “And, again, on top of that, a motivated seller.”

“Testing for what?” Michelle says.  “What’s all clear?”

“Hey,” Klecko says, leaning across the booth, wagging a finger at Clay.  “Didn’t you do your homework?  You were a teacher.  You should know better.”

“I didn’t know there was an assignment,” Clay says.

“Ha!” Klecko says.  “Seriously, though.  No worries.  This is ancient history.  We’re talking 70’s, early 80’s.  There was an industrial waste issue in the southeastern corner of the city.  A lot of hullabaloo.  Really bad for this area, all the negative attention.  Anyway, long story short, the EPA and President Carter stepped in and got it taken care of.  You two probably don’t even remember Carter, do you?  He was between Ford and Reagan.”

“Is this related to Love Canal?” Michelle says.  She looks at Clay.  “That’s over and done with, right?”

“Exactly,” Klecko says.  He rips a corner off his slice of bread and smashes it between his thumb and forefinger before putting it in his mouth.  “Here’s the scoop.  More than a hundred years ago, this guy Love started digging a canal from the Niagara River—he had big ideas about hydroelectric power—but he didn’t get very far.  Only about two miles inland before he ran out of money.  So humans did what humans do.  Made the best of it.  For the next half-century or so, the trench served as a dump.  A necessary evil.  Industry and the military used it for a while, and, of course, some of the stuff they dumped wasn’t great stuff.  Surprise, surprise, right?  The City got a lot of flack.  Hooker Chemical, too.  They’re Occidental now.  They either changed their name or were bought.  I’m fuzzy on the details.  The blame game, though.  I don’t play it.  People back then didn’t know what we know now, right?  Anyway, what got dumped got dumped, and people did what people do.  They lived their lives.  They built houses and schools, raised their children and fought wars.  In the 70’s, after a snowy winter and wet spring, some of the stuff in the dump started resurfacing.  No one’s fault.  Blame the weather.  Blame the passing of time.  Things happen.  Not everything buried stays buried, you know?  Anyway, people saw this suspicious stuff in their backyards, in their basements, and they panicked.  Can’t blame them, right?  The key is, though, that it was taken care of.  Those who wanted to move got to move on the government’s dime, and the chemicals were cleaned up.  That would’ve been it except that the media turned it into a whole thing, you know?  It portrayed the people in the neighborhood as victims, as symbols.  A person’s not a symbol, right?  One expert even suggested that what was really making people sick wasn’t the chemicals, but the stress caused by all the rigmarole.  The protestors, the TV cameras, the doomsday headlines.  Anyway.  Here we are in the 21^st century, right?  Lucky us.  Lord knows we have plenty of our own problems to deal with.  Last thing we need to do is look backwards, dredge up old ones.  That’s my take on things.”  Klecko picked up his Mountain Dew, nudged the two straws out of the way with his nose, and drained it.

“But what does this have to do with the house we’re going to see in Black Creek Village?” Michelle says.  “Black Creek Village isn’t Love Canal, is it?” 

“You hear anything I just said?”  Klecko drops his fork and reaches across the booth to cover Michelle’s hand with his.  There’s a smile on his face.  “I could’ve sworn you were sitting right there when I said Love Canal is gone.  Over and done with.  The houses were razed, and the disposal site was recapped and fenced off.”

“If I’m understanding correctly, though, you’re telling us that Black Creek Village is in the vicinity of where the dump was,” Clay says.

“Lookit,” Klecko says.  “It’s perfectly understandable for you to have questions.  If you didn’t have questions, there’d be something wrong with you.  I guess I’m just a little surprised you didn’t look to get some of this info on your own before today.”

“You gave us a list of houses,” Clay says.  “We didn’t think about cross-referencing their addresses with chemical dumpsite locations.”

“Let’s take a step back,” Klecko says.  “Let’s take a breather.  I sense you’re getting spooked about something you shouldn’t get spooked about.  Maybe that’s my fault.  You know what?  Rather than me running my big mouth anymore, I think the best thing I can do for you is get you over to the house.  A picture’s worth a thousand words, right?” 

“I guess we can’t really know what’s what until we see it,” Michelle says.

“Exactly,” Klecko says.  “And what’s nice about the location is you’re like three, maybe four blocks from the river.  There’s a boat launch right there at Griffin Park.  You guys have a boat?  You want a boat?  The price you’ll be getting on this house, you’ll be able to afford one.  You a fisherman, Clay?  You could catch your own sushi.”

“I am not a fisherman,” Clay says.

“I’m with you,” Klecko says.  “Boring as hell, right?” 

When they get up to leave the restaurant, Klecko has a plan.  He and Michelle will go to the cash register first, and then after a few minutes, Clay will go up to pay for his lunch separately.  “I have two coupons, see,” Klecko says as he hands Clay one of them along with some cash, “but there’s a one coupon per table limit.”

“So I pretend like I wasn’t sitting with you?” Clay says.  “I pretend like you and my wife had lunch together, and I was sitting by myself?”

“They don’t know who’s married to who,” Klecko says.  “We’ll meet you out in the parking lot.”

“To whom,” Michelle says.  “Who’s married to whom.”  She looks at Clay and shrugs.  “Want me to stay with you?  You and I can go up together.”

“Sure,” Klecko says.  “Either way.”

“Forget it,” Clay says.  “I have to hit the restroom anyway.”

“OK, good,” Klecko says.  “That’ll be good.  That’ll work out.”

In the men’s room, Clay pitches the coupon in the garbage.  Later, though, outside in the parking lot, he tells a different story.  “The cashier wouldn’t let me use the coupon because she saw me sitting with you,” Clay says.  “She crumpled it right in my face.”

“Wow,” Klecko says.  “That’s petty, right?  I mean, that’s ridiculous.”

“She was none too happy,” Clay says. “She told me I should be ashamed.” 

“Rules are rules are rules are rules,” Michelle says.

On the drive to Black Creek Village, Klecko leaves the radio off, the windows up.  Clay holds his hand up to the vent above his head.  Air conditioning’s working like a dream.

Klecko’s playing tour guide.  He points out the Summit Place Mall, where there’s a Save-A-Lot.  “This might be the closest grocery store to you guys,” Klecko says.  “And Sears and Bon Ton are still in the mall.  Everyone else left, but there’s a rumor that a group from Toronto might move in and try to do something.”

Klecko pulls into the parking lot and takes a whirl around the circumference of the mall.  As if Clay and Michelle were in the market for retail space.  Even if they were, Clay would pass.  The parking lot’s in bad shape—one big pothole—and Clay’s put in mind of a ghost town.  Things are too quiet.  Seagulls outnumber cars, especially behind the grocery store where they take turns dive-bombing the overflowing Dumpster.  Nearby, a stock boy in a red apron sits on the loading dock and tosses a chunk of his lunch to a fat straggler, who catches it in mid-air like a good pet. 

When they pass a parked security vehicle, Klecko waves, but the guard doesn’t wave back.  “That hombre doesn’t look too happy, but security guard wouldn’t be a bad job, right, Clay?”  Klecko says.  “If the teaching thing doesn’t work out right away, I mean.  You’d have to be viligant, though.  You’re the eyes and ears.”

“Vigilant,” Michelle says.  “Not viligant.”

“What’s viligant?”  Klecko says.

“Viligant’s what you said,” Michelle says.  “It’s nothing.”

“If you say so, Daniel Webster,” Klecko says.

“I’m the word police,” Michelle says.  She turns around and smiles at Clay.  “Right, honey?  Grammar, too.  I’ll get you for can and may.  I’ll get you for I and me.”

Klecko looks in the rear-view at Clay.  “You’re a lucky man,” he says.

“How are we doing?”  Clay says.  “We getting close?”

“Yep,” Klecko says.  “We just turned onto River Road.  The Niagara River’s over there on your left, and this is Griffin Park here.  I told you about the boat launch.”  Klecko pulls into the driveway of the park and does a slow loop around the parking area.  “There are a few walking trails here,” Klecko says, “and some picnic tables.  People come to exercise their dogs or to get some peace and quiet on their lunch hours.”

“What’s over there?”  Clay says.  At the edge of the park stands a high barbed-wire fence.  It runs from the road all the way to the water.

“Reclamation area,” Klecko says.

“Part of Love Canal?”  Clay says.

“Short answer, yes,” Klecko says.  “This is what I meant, though, about a picture being worth a thousand words.  I mean, look at this park.  Great, right?  A lot of neighborhoods would love to have a park like this.”

“But what it’s next to,” Michelle says.

“Lookit,” Klecko says, pulling the Suburban back onto the road.  “You kids are going to do what you kids are going to do.  I understand that.  But think about this.  You’re worried about ‘next to.’  This is the 21st century.  Where can you live where you’re not next to something?  Good people live next to bad people.  Good neighborhoods are next to bad neighborhoods.  Good countries are next to bad countries.  You can drive yourself crazy worrying about next to.”

Michelle doesn’t turn her head to look at Clay—Klecko’s talking, so this would be rude—but she does reach her hand back toward her husband, and she leaves it there in mid-air until he meets it with his hand, and then she squeezes.  Clay doesn’t know if she’s doing this for his sake or for her own.  The squeeze could be Michelle trying to reassure Clay, or it could mean Michelle’s looking for reassurance.  About how things will be OK if they love the house in Black Creek Village and end up buying it.  About how things will be OK if they pass on the house.  About how something better will be sure to come along.

“What’s great about this house you’re about to see are the windows,” Klecko says.  “They’re all dual-functioning.  Very convenient.”

“Dual-functioning?” Clay says.

“Sure,” Klecko says.  “You can see in them, and you can see out of them.”

“Groan,” Michelle says.  “Real estate humor.”

“Dual-functioning doors, too,” Klecko says.  “You can go in and out.  And all the stairways.  Up and down.”

Stuck in the lawn next to the For Sale sign is an Open House sign.  Surprising for an afternoon in the middle of the week.  “Indication of an owner who’s getting itchy,” Klecko says.  “This baby’s ripe.”

Michelle stands on the sidewalk next to Clay.  She cranes her neck back and uses one hand to shield her eyes from the sun.  “Is that a metal roof?” she asks.  “They last forever, right?  Forever’s a plus.”

Clay likes the roof, too.  He wouldn’t have had the guts to choose the color—it’s a bright green—but it really pops.  The surrounding houses have traditional black and brown shingle roofs, and Clay likes how the metal roof stands out.  He also likes the idea of living in a brick house.  If Klecko mentioned the house was brick, Clay doesn’t remember.  At any rate, the place definitely has curb appeal.

There’s one other couple touring the house, and they’re just finishing when Klecko, Clay and Michelle come in through the living room.  The couple has twin babies in tow.  The father hauls one in a carrier strapped to his back, and the mother has the other in a sling over her shoulder.  The open house host, a woman who looks to be in her fifties, can’t take her eyes off the babies, can’t stop smiling at them, not even as Klecko introduces her to Clay and Michelle.

When the other couple leaves, Klecko tries to make small talk with Eva, the open house host—Clay sees from the nameplate Eva wears that she and Klecko work for the same realtor—but Eva seems reluctant.  She smiles politely as Klecko talks—he tells her they’re fresh from the Whirlpool where he introduced Clay and Michelle to garbage plates—but she makes a point of strolling away from him to the opposite side of the room, where a coffee table is set up with a platter of cookies and a punch bowl.

“Tell you what,” Eva says when Klecko stops talking.  “Why don’t I take Michelle and Clay through the house?  Gerry, you can take a break.  Just hang out down here and greet visitors.  Feel free to help yourself to the refreshments.”

“Sure, OK,” Klecko says.  “These two are probably sick of my yammering anyway.”  He makes his way over to the table and plucks a cookie.  “Ginger snaps,” he says.  He picks up a cup of punch, dunks the cookie and then pops it in his mouth.  “I’ll hold down the fort,” he says. 

The house is nice.  It’s not perfect—the kitchen’s a bit on the small side, and Michelle’s not crazy about the layout—but there’s a newish furnace in the basement, a lot of storage space in the well-insulated attic, and on the second floor, Clay likes the size of the bedrooms, and Michelle likes the newly remodeled master bath.  There’s some strange wallpaper here and there, and one of the bedrooms has only one electrical outlet, but these are the kinds of things you can address after moving in.

“I don’t know if Gerry told you how good the asking price is,” Eva says as she shows Clay and Michelle the linen closets in the upstairs hallway, “but it’s pretty amazing.  With the money you’re saving, you could update the electric and get started on some of the cosmetic improvements you might have in mind.  Anyway, a house like this, it’s a real opportunity,” she says.  “That’s how I look at it.”

“It has a lot going for it,” Michelle says.  “I like the roof.  And that corner bedroom would make a great nursery.”

“There’s a little one on the way!  That’s wonderful,” Eva says.  “Congratulations.”

“No, no,” Michelle says, and she smiles.  “Not yet.  But it’s in our plans.”  She looks at Clay.  “It’s a factor in our thinking.”

“You’re concerned about the history with Love Canal, I’m sure,” Eva says.  “That’s understandable, of course.  Frankly, that’s why the price is what it is.  Location, location, location.  Were this house, say, ten or twenty blocks north, the price would be considerably different.”

“That’s a point,” Clay says.

“I think about it like this,” Eva says.  “What I said before about the house being an opportunity?  Part of what I mean is that whenever a house sells in this neighborhood, it helps the people who live around here move on from what was.  A new generation, you know?  Maybe that’s sappy.  But just by living here, just by getting up in the morning, going to work and coming home at night, you’d be participating in the ongoing healing process.”

“Interesting,” Michelle says.  “Food for thought.”

“Anyway,” Eva says, “my two cents.” 

When Michelle decides she wants to take one more pass through the bedrooms, Clay dismisses himself to look at the backyard.  He sneaks out the side door so as to avoid Klecko, who’s still hovering over the cookie platter, laughing into one of his cell phones and dialing on the other.

A few toys line the fenced perimeter of the yard.  A Nerf football.  A plastic dump truck and bulldozer.  A one-armed robot.  Clay turns around, heads through the side yard to the front of the house.  When he hits the sidewalk, he hangs a right.

While upstairs in the attic, Clay had seen through one of the dual-functioning windows another stretch of barbed wire fence.  This reclamation area is only a half-block away from the house.  When Clay gets close enough to read the sign behind the fence, “Glen Springs Holdings Company,” he inhales deeply, but he doesn’t smell anything other than cut grass and the faint smell of cigarette smoke.  A hundred feet from where he’s standing, there’s a guard house at the closed main gate, where two men in hard hats lean on a pickup truck.  Smoke break.  When they notice Clay, they stub out their cigarettes and get in the truck.  Their slamming doors startle a nearby rabbit, send it scurrying under the fence toward Clay, but when it gets to the sidewalk, it freezes, turns tail, and ducks back under the fence again.  It finally stops to hide behind what looks like a short, mushroom-shaped chimney sticking a couple feet above the ground.  A vent of some kind, Clay figures.  They’re scattered here and there over the freshly mown lawn.  Whatever’s buried here needs to breathe. 

The truck takes off slowly, following the tire tracks along the perimeter of the fence.  Maybe Clay should think about a new line of work after all.  How hard could it be?  Guarding a someplace no one wants to get into anyway?  He has both eyes and ears.  He can be vigilant.  Viligant, too, if need be.  He could be both.  What’s more, he could walk to work.

Back at the house, Klecko’s standing on the front porch, holding the Nerf football from the backyard.  Clay gets the sense Klecko’s been waiting for him.  When he gets close, Klecko tosses the ball at him, but the throw’s short.  The ball bounces off the top of Clay’s shoe.

When Clay’s retrieving the ball, Michelle comes out the front door.  “Hey,” she says to Klecko, “Eva’s looking for you.  She wants to know what you did with all her cookies.”

Klecko snickers and claps his hands in front of his face.  “I’ll touch base with Eva later.  You kids are probably just about ready to get back to the motel, right?  They have a pool there?  You could have a swim.  Then maybe a nap.  You guys have some thinking to do, right?”

After they’re all in the truck, though, Klecko announces he’d like to make one more quick stop.  He drives only a couple blocks before pulling into another park, this one made up of five or six ball fields.  The placard on the backstop of the first field reads “Welcome to Cayuga Little League.”  Klecko drives to the end of the lot, to the last field, where there’s a practice going on.  A gaggle of boys in sweatpants and crooked caps fielding grounders and pop-ups.  In the stands sits a spread-out group of parents, some watching the boys, others busying themselves with their cell phones.

Klecko gets out of the truck, and Clay and Michelle follow him to the fence.  Klecko bends over to pinch a long blade of grass and sticks it in the side of his mouth.  “I thought it would be good for you to see this place.  Someday maybe, right?  Little Clay Jr.  They have softball, too.  Little Michelle Jr.  They could walk to practice.  We were talking about ‘next to’ before.  I just wanted to show you something else you’d be next to.”

“Shortstop’s got an arm,” Clay says.

“Coach probably has him pitch, too,” Klecko says.  “He’s twice the size of the other kids.  The intimidation factor.”

Beyond the field, at the end of the parking lot, there’s a short pedestrian bridge spanning a small creek.  Klecko strolls to the bridge, and Clay and Michelle follow.  “This is 93^rd Street, and over there is Cayuga Boulevard,” Klecko says.  He spits the blade of grass over the bridge’s rail into the creek and then takes a ginger snap out of his pocket and pops it into his mouth.  “Got a few more cookies stowed away if either of you are feeling peckish.”

“I’m good,” Michelle says.

When Klecko looks at Clay, Clay raises his hands.  He means, “No thanks,” but Klecko thinks he means, “Yes, please,” and he flings a cookie.  Clay ducks, and the cookie soars into the creek.

“You sure you’re a gym teacher?” Klecko says.

“You surprised him,” Michelle says.  “He wasn’t ready.  No fair.”

“I didn’t want it,” Clay says.  “I’m still full from lunch.”

“Plus the sun was in your eyes, right?”  As Klecko laughs, one of his phones rings, and when he sees who’s calling, he rolls his eyes at Clay and Michelle before answering.  “Eva!” he exclaims into the phone.  “Been too long.  What can I do you for?” 

Michelle takes Clay’s hand and leads him a few steps further onto the bridge.  “Well?” she says quietly.  “What are we thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Clay says.  “We could always rent for a year.  Get the lay of the land before we put down roots.”

“Sure,” Michelle says. “We could do that.”  She drops Clay’s hand and pinches the bridge of her nose.  “We’d probably have to put some of our stuff in storage.”

“Or we could pull the trigger on this one,” Clay says.  “The price is right.”

“There’s what we can afford to do, there’s what we can’t afford to do, and there’s what we can’t afford not to do,” Michelle says.   

“OK, great!  I’ll be sure to pass along that message!” Klecko says into the phone as he turns back toward Clay and Michelle, and he shakes his head and smiles after hanging up.  “Sorry for that interruption, kids,” he says, “but Eva wanted to make sure I mentioned to you two that if you have questions about property taxes or schools, she has that info handy.  Guess who else has that info handy, though?  I do.  It’s in the truck, safe and sound in the glove compartment, and when I drop you guys off at the motel, you’ll have it in your hands.  That was my plan all along.  I am your agent after all.  Eva has her clients, and I have mine.”

“That info will be helpful,” Michelle says.  “Thanks.”

“You have to factor in everything, right?”  Klecko says.  “That said, you have any idea which way you’re leaning?”

“We need to talk it out,” Michelle says.  “Make sure we’re on the same page.”

“Listen.  I hate to be nosy, but I had one ear on you guys when Eva was talking at me, and I thought I heard the word ‘rent.’  Is that what I heard?” Klecko says.  “You’re not sure you want to be homeowners?”

Michelle looks at Clay, bites her top lip.  “We have a lot to discuss,” she says.

“Well,” Klecko says, “that’s a bit of a kick in the pants.”  He turns to face the creek for a moment before spinning back around.  “If Eva told you guys that you could work with her, that she could get you some kind of special deal apart from me, well, just to let you know, that’s dirty pool.  One agent moving in on another’s clients.  She shouldn’t have done that.  It’s unethical.”

“She absolutely did not do that,” Michelle says.

“She has a bit of a reputation for being forgetful,” Klecko says.  “For forgetting things like who brought who to the dance.”

“Who brought whom,” Michelle says.  “But no.  Eva didn’t say anything about us working with her.  She didn’t even give me her card.”

“Well, OK,” Klecko says.  “All right then.  That’s good to hear.  Sorry about talking out of school, but with Eva….  Well, there are just some people, you know?”

“So back to the motel now, right?” Michelle says.  “I’m whipped.”

“Sure,” Klecko says.  “I’ll get you that tax and school info, and then you kids can confer.  Maybe sleep on it.  I have to say, though.  Please hear me on this.  Renting?  Not a good move.  You might as well light your money on fire.  You might as well flush it.  Might as well stuff it into a barrel and send it over the Falls.”

“We shouldn’t think of our mortgage as debt, right?” Clay says.  “We should think of it as an investment.”

“You said it, not me,” Klecko says, and he nods as he passes another ginger snap between his lips.

“Also, don’t look now, but here comes your future,” Clay says.  “You should say that to us.”

“I know what’s holding you back,” Klecko says.  One of his phone rings, but he ignores it.  “You’re hung up on the past.  You’re still on Love Canal.  But every place has a past.  Focus on the present.  Black Creek Village.  Focus on the future.  What I was trying to convey by showing you those kids up there playing ball.  Your line of work, I thought you’d get it.”

“I do get it,” Clay says.

“Lookit.  It would be a mistake for you kids to think of your first house as just a house.  It’s more than that, right?  Isn’t it more than that?”

“It’s a sanctuary,” Clay says.  “You should tell us to think of it as a sanctuary.” 

“Or a haven,” Michelle says.  “I like ‘haven.’”

“Not bad,” Klecko says.  He flicks a ginger snap high into the air with his thumb, cranes his neck back and catches it in his mouth.  “You guys should get your real estate licenses,” he says as he chews.  “It can be rewarding work.  Not that different from teaching, Clay.  In the sense that you help people.  And you two as a tag-team?  You’d clean up.”

“Or a refuge,” Michelle says as she takes Clay’s hand in hers and squeezes it again, this time tightly enough to make him wince.  “You should tell us to think of our home as a refuge.”