Chapter One: The Letter from the Blue Forest
Evelyn
The letter was in my coat pocket, and I had not put it there.
I want to be clear about that, because later, when I tried to explain any of this to anyone, that was always the part they got stuck on. Maybe you forgot. Maybe someone slipped it in on the T. No. I had worn that coat for three Boston winters. I knew everything that lived in its pockets the way you know the inside of your own mouth: a bobby pin, two receipts from a Walgreens on Boylston, and lint. That was the full inventory. That was the whole ecosystem.
And then, on a Saturday morning at the very end of October, standing in line for coffee on Newbury Street with the wind coming off the river hard enough to make my eyes water, I put my hand in my pocket for my phone and touched paper instead.
Paper, and something cold.
It was an envelope, folded once and pinned shut with a leaf. Not a dried leaf. A silver one. Actual silver, thin as tissue, and so cold it hurt to hold.
“Ma’am?” said the barista. “What can I get you?”
I ordered something. I have no idea what. I stepped aside to wait with my back against the window and pulled the leaf out of the envelope, and my fingers went numb where they touched it.
The paper inside wasn’t paper either. It was too soft. Too warm. It felt, and I am aware of how this sounds, like the inside of someone’s wrist. When I unfolded it, the ink moved under my eyes and only settled when I held very still.
Do not arrive after sunset.
Do not enter the forest alone.
Do not open the thirteenth door.
Under that, an address. The Blue House. Old Quarry Road. Ashgrove, Vermont.
Under that, a signature.
Mine.
Not something like mine. Not a good forgery. Mine. The lazy E I’d never managed to fix. The V that leans into the a like it’s tired and wants to sit down. The signature I’d been putting on drafting sheets and rent checks and apologetic birthday cards since I was nineteen.
I stood there until the barista called my name twice and then gave up and put the cup on the counter, and it went cold, and I didn’t touch it.
I did not remember writing that letter.
That, by itself, wasn’t new.
* * *
Here is the thing about losing time: once it happens to you, you never fully trust a clock again.
Last year I lost three months.
Not in the way people mean when they say a year flew by. I mean it the way you lose a set of keys. One night in early October I went to bed in my apartment off Tremont Street, a twenty-seven-year-old draftswoman at a mid-sized firm in the Back Bay, with a sink full of dishes and a deadline on Thursday. And the next thing I knew, it was the twenty-second of December, and I was sitting in my own car at a rest stop on Interstate 91 with the engine running and snow on the windshield.
I didn’t know how I’d gotten there. I didn’t know where I’d been.
My rent had been paid. My plants were dead. My firm had fired me in November for not showing up, very politely, by email. My landlord had a stack of checks in my handwriting from somewhere I couldn’t account for. A neurologist ran some tests and found nothing. A psychiatrist said dissociative fugue in the tone people use for weather. A therapist in Brookline with a very calming cardigan told me that sometimes the mind closes a door to protect us from what’s on the other side.
I did not love that. I’m an architect. Almost. I have the degree and the student loans and not quite the license. I believe that every door in the world was built by somebody, for a reason, and that if you look hard enough at the hinges you can work out what the reason was.
I looked hard. I found nothing. Three months gone, clean as a cut.
Almost clean.
There had been one thing on the passenger seat of my car that morning at the rest stop. A sketchbook. Mine, the cheap black kind I buy in packs of three, except I didn’t remember buying it, and I definitely didn’t remember filling it.
Almost every page was full. And every page was the same man.
His face, over and over, in my pencil. Three-quarter view, looking down at something in his hands. In profile, laughing. Asleep, sitting up, his head tipped back against a wall. Looking up at something above him with an expression I’d never seen on a living person, like a man watching snow fall for the first time in his life. Dark hair that needed cutting. A sharp, tired face that looked severe until you’d looked at it for a while, and then didn’t.
I sat at my kitchen table in January and turned those pages one at a time, and somewhere around the twentieth page I started crying so hard I scared myself. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know why my hand knew the exact angle of his jaw.
I shoved the sketchbook into the back of my closet, behind a box of my mother’s papers I’d also never been able to open, and I didn’t touch it again.
I thought about it more than I told the therapist. Mostly around two in the morning.
* * *
I should have thrown the letter away. That was the sane option, and I knew it, standing there by the window with my cold coffee. Somebody from my old firm with a mean sense of humor. A prank. A symptom. I had an interview at eleven with a partner at a firm in Cambridge that did libraries, who had agreed to see me on a Saturday as a favor, and I wanted that job badly enough that I’d bought a new blazer for it.
I didn’t go to the interview.
I went home and sat on my closet floor and pulled out my mother’s box.
My mother had been dead nine years. She was not a woman who talked about the past. She was a woman who changed the subject so smoothly you only realized afterward that she’d done it, like a magician palming a card. The one thing I knew for certain about her side of the family was that her mother, my grandmother Maggie, had disappeared the summer I was five, and nobody had ever found her, and my mother would leave the room if you said her name.
I knew one other thing, now that I was looking. Ashgrove. I’d heard that word in her voice, once or twice, the voice she used for things she wouldn’t discuss. The way you’d say the name of a hospital.
The box had tax returns in it. The program from her funeral. A Christmas card from a cousin in Ohio I’d never met. And at the bottom, an envelope of photographs.
Most of them were strangers. One wasn’t.
A woman in a sun hat, laughing, one hand up against the light. Holding her other hand, a skinny kid of about five with a scab on one knee and a scowl that said she’d been told to smile and was refusing on principle. I knew that scowl. I still have it.
Behind them was a house.
It was made of blue stone. Not painted blue. The stone itself was blue, a deep slate color veined with something that caught the sun, three stories of it, all gables and chimneys and tall narrow windows, and behind it a wall of trees so dark they were nearly black. On the back of the photograph, in faded pencil: Maggie and Evie. The Blue House. July 2003.