So I got away all right. After Walter’s funeral, I packed up the house in Monlith, bade farewell to the place and all it had put upon me. What a relief it was to get out of there, the house sold, and a new home in Levant ready and waiting. In the pictures it was my dream home: a rustic cabin on a lake. The land needed work. There were some rotting trees, overgrowth, et cetera. I’d bought it sight unseen for a song. The place had been under foreclosure for six years. Times are tough, yes. And there I went. I tried not to think too much of the house back in Monlith, what the new owners were doing inside of it, how the porch had withstood the winter. And what my neighbors were saying. “She just took off, like a thief in the night.” That wasn’t true, though. I knew that. I was a good woman. I deserved some peace at last.
I thought some more about a name for this me. In the end, I settled on Blake. It was the kind of name parents were naming their boys those days. It had a twinge of pretension to it in that sense. Blake, as in the shaggy blond boy on the skateboard, the boy eating ice cream from the container, the boy with a squirt gun. Blake, clean your room. Blake, don’t be late for dinner. Given these associations, the name was sneaky and a bit dumb, the kind of boy who would write, It wasn’t me.
Strange, strange what the mind will do. My mind, Charlie’s mind, sometimes I wondered just what the mind was, actually. It hardly made sense that it was something contained in my brain. How could I, simply by thinking that my feet were cold, be asking Charlie to shift his chin to cover them, which he did? Were we not of the same mind at such moments? And if there was a mind I shared with Charlie’s, was there a separate mind I kept for myself? Whose mind was now at work, thinking of the note, imagining, debating, and remembering things as I walked down the path through the birch trees? Sometimes I felt that my mind was just a soft cloud of air around me, taking in whatever flew in, spinning it around, and then delivering it back out into the ether. Walter had always said I was sort of magical that way, a dreamer, his little dove. Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way. I think it has something to do with sharing a bed. The mind, untethered during sleep, travels up and away, dancing, sometimes in partners. Things pass back and forth in dreams. When I dreamt of Walter now, he was young again. He was young still in my mind. I still expected him, at times, to come through the door with a bouquet of roses, carrying in the sweet smell of his cigars, his hands on the rustling cellophane so tender and strong. “For you, my dove,” he’d say. And if not roses, then a book he thought I’d like. Or a new record, or a perfect peach or pear. I missed his thoughtful gifts, little surprises pulled from the pocket of his overcoat.
I suppose my cabin in Levant was Walter’s final gift to me. I’d used the insurance money to buy it, and to move. Profit from the sale of the house in Monlith would keep me fed until I died. And there was also money in savings. Walter had planned well for retirement. He was always scrimping and saving, which made the little gifts he gave me all the more lovely. Roses were expensive, after all. “These cost an arm and a leg,” he said. “I hopped home like a cripple.” He’d have found my cabin cheap and small. He liked big, wide-open spaces. He loved it in Monlith, the plains, the metallic hills of rock, the cold river. I missed Walter. The big house became preposterous without him. When the cabin in Levant presented itself, it was a relief. I felt I needed to hide a little. My mind needed a smaller world to roam.
I thought of that dead meadowlark in Monlith again. It was yellow bellied, beautiful, like a jewel against the pale, frozen gravel. A gift. Strange, strange. Had Charlie thought it would cheer me up? I’d left it there where Charlie had dropped it, and took him by the collar and steered us back home, straining my shoulder, but there was no other way, the leash was ruined. After that, I read books on how to train him. Between packing up the house and signing more papers and so on, Charlie and I bonded and I taught him to obey me. He attuned himself to me and I to him. This was how our minds melded. The books confirmed that a dog should never sleep with its master. At first, we abided by this rule, but when we drove out east, staying in those roadside motels along the way, he crawled in and I couldn’t stop him. I worried that the move would traumatize him. A little comfort did us both a lot of good. The open road is such a lonely place. In Levant, we did tend to sleep together, Charlie even nestling down under the covers with me when it was cold. But in the summer, he’d be at the foot of the bed, or off the bed entirely, splayed out in the cool shadows of the dining table downstairs. He was better on the leash now, though I rarely used it. I carried it with me when we went for walks, in case we came upon some wild animal, and Charlie was moved to attack it. I knew that he could be vicious if he wanted to, if someone was threatening me, if something bad happened. That was a comfort, too. Charlie, my bodyguard. If there was a madman on the prowl, Magda’s killer, whoever, Charlie would attack. His head hit only about midthigh, but he was stately enough, broad shouldered, seventy-eight pounds of muscle and fine pale-brown fur. I’d seen him gnash his teeth and growl only once, at a rattlesnake back in Monlith. It took a lot to rile him up. I heard there were bears around Levant, but I didn’t believe it. I’d seen dead foxes on the road. Also rabbits, raccoons, opossums. At dawn, apart from birds and small rodents, the only other souls out were the gentle whitetail deer. They hid behind trees, stock still as Charlie and I passed by. Out of respect, I tried not to look at them in the eye, and I’d trained Charlie to leave them alone, too. It must be nice to think you can become invisible just by standing still. They were beautiful deer, some as big as horses. What a nice life they must have, I thought. It was so quiet in the woods, sometimes I could hear them breathing.
Blake must have come through in the last twenty-four hours, I figured, since Charlie and I had been there the morning before, and there’d been nothing, no note. As we headed home, I saw no strange footprints, no white fringe or confetti from the ripped-off edge of Blake’s spiral notebook. It had been a whole year now that I’d been in Levant, and those woods felt like they belonged to me and Charlie. Perhaps more than Magda’s murder, it began to bother me that there had been someone else out there, in my woods, touching my rocks, walking down the path I’d been wearing and widening through the birch woods. An invasion. It was like coming home late, going to bed, and waking up to find that at some point in the night, someone had been in your kitchen, had been eating your food, reading your books, wiping his mouth with your cloth napkins, staring at his strange face in your bathroom mirror. I could imagine what fury and fear I’d feel discovering that he’d left the butter out on the counter, a crust of bread, to say nothing of a bloody knife in the sink, or a knife that had been used and washed and set in the rack to dry. Nobody will ever know. . . . It could drive a person crazy if something like that happened. You might never sleep again, might never again feel safe in your own home. Imagine all the questions you’d have, and only yourself to ask. The intruder could be in the house still. My God, he could be crouched behind the kitchen door, and there you’d be, standing in your socked feet and bathrobe, agog at the knife glinting in the rack. Had you used it to chop onions? Had you forgotten that you’d wandered down for a midnight snack, left the knife out, et cetera? Were you still dreaming? Was I?