1998

The Traveler

When Ava was small, Clotilde told her stories of ghosts and ruined castles and lonely moonlit roads. Most children would have been afraid of such tales but Ava welcomed the shivers of fear and trembling possibility they sent up her narrow spine. She preferred the gnomes and changelings and lonely, misshapen creatures because they seemed more familiar to her than the beautiful princesses and handsome princes that wove themselves in and out of Clotilde’s rambling tales.

“Tell me a story,” Ava would say, climbing sleepily onto Clotilde’s lap, and Clotilde’s girlish face would go still and then brighten as the words came to her.

They owned few books in those days, not because they were poor but because Clotilde liked to travel light. She preferred rented rooms furnished with the cast-offs of other people’s dismal lives to possessions of her own.

“I’m a traveler!” she always said, and when Ava was older and asked her morosely, “But why?” Clotilde’s face, still girlish, softened for a moment. “Because when you leave one place and move to another, you get to start over. You get to become whoever you want to be.”

To help in this metamorphosis, Clotilde sometimes changed her name. Over the years she was Dharma and Abrielle and even (ironically) Magdalena. But it was the name Clotilde that she most often used.

“Clotilde was the Queen of Sardinia!” she exclaimed, grinning sheepishly at whatever man was currently in her life. “Besides, the name means ‘famous in battle.’ ”

Clotilde saw no more harm in changing her name than she did in moving every six months. “What’s in a name?” she liked to say.

Ava, who had been born Summer Rayne Dabrowski, inevitably responded, “Everything.”

Around the time she was in third grade, not long after they moved to Cincinnati and just before they moved to Cleveland, Ava had jettisoned Summer Rayne in favor of Margaret, after the name penciled into her well-worn copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Margaret Anne Govan. And later, not long before she started high school, she had abandoned Margaret in favor of Ava, still foolishly believing, like Clotilde, that she could leave her girlhood behind just by changing her name.

“Tell me a story,” she would say when she was still small enough to believe in Clotilde’s tales. “Tell me a story about my father.” And she would snuggle down in her narrow bed and wait for Clotilde to begin, wait for the words to form behind the smooth mask of Clotilde’s girlish face, and come tumbling out of her sly rosebud mouth.

“Once upon a time there was a handsome prince of the Underworld, and he fell in love with a beautiful princess. But she was betrothed to someone else, and when her father found out that she had been tarrying with the prince of the Underworld, he had the two of them locked up in a tower behind a pair of huge paneled doors.

“ ‘You cannot live apart,’ cried the angry king. ‘Let’s see how you shall live together, day after day, night after night, with only each other for company!’

“And although the two were given water, slid through a panel in the massive doors, they were denied food.

“ ‘Live on your love for each other!’ roared the cruel king.

“ ‘Give us bread!’ they wailed, shut up in their tower tomb. ‘We are hungry!’

“Their pitiful cries went on for days and weeks, becoming ever weaker and more pitiful as the days went on. Finally they stopped. When the villagers crept close there were no sounds but the growls and slurps of voracious eating, the sharp clatters of teeth against bone, the sound of flesh being torn and devoured.”

It was one of Ava’s favorite stories. Years later she would remember it and, closing her eyes, would see the youthful images of her parents entombed behind paneled doors, waiting like tragic ghosts for her to come and free them.

When Will Fraser called and suggested that she spend the summer in Woodburn, Tennessee, Ava thought the idea preposterous. What little she knew about the South had come from bad cinema and the stories of Flannery O’Connor, and it had always amazed her that someone as cultured as Will could have come from the land of monster truck rallies and corn bread festivals.

It wasn’t the first time he’d invited her. They had gone to college together at Bard, and had kept in touch over the past seven or eight years through emails, phone calls, and the occasional visit. Communication between them was sporadic and due mostly to his efforts. Ava considered them to be casual acquaintances. He’d come to Chicago several times on business and had looked her up. Each time he’d asked her to spend some time in Tennessee, she’d laughed. She had made the mistake of telling him that she wanted to be a novelist—he had a manner that invited confidences—and he insisted that his sleepy little hometown would be the perfect place for her to write her first novel. He didn’t seem to understand that, unlike him, she had to work for a living. She had school loans to pay and a job in a prestigious Chicago ad agency that it had taken her some time and effort to land.

But this time when he called, things were different. Her life was undergoing a series of cataclysmic upheavals. In less than six months her estranged mother had died of a brain aneurysm, her career had stalled, her affair with her boss, Jacob, had wound down to its inevitable conclusion, and most disturbing of all, she had received a condolence letter out of the blue from a man purporting to be her father. Coming one on top of the other, these events had left her shaken, confused, and understandably depressed.

Sunk in a dense fog, she hadn’t had the strength to pretend that things were fine when Will called.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“I’ve been better,” she said truthfully.

On his last trip to Chicago a few months before, she hadn’t seen him. He had called and left a message saying he was in town, but she had planned a rendezvous with Jacob that night and so pretended she hadn’t gotten the message in time, calling Will later to apologize. She felt guilty for weeks about standing him up, and yet the truth was, they had only known each other for a short time in college. He was two years ahead of her in school, and was friends with her first love, Michael. In those days Will was a tall, dark-haired boy, very well mannered but shy, with a slight Southern accent.

“Another trust-fund baby,” Michael had called him dismissively and it was true. There were plenty of those at Bard, although Will didn’t seem like old money. He shopped at thrift stores like the rest of them and drove an old battered Volvo station wagon. The truth was, Ava hadn’t really paid much attention to him; she had been so caught up in her tumultuous love affair with Michael, and Will had simply been a quiet backdrop to all of that. A silent witness.

Once she and Michael had quarreled in a bar several miles from campus and Michael, in a fury, abruptly left, taking the car and leaving her stranded at two o’clock in the morning in an unfamiliar part of town. Will, who had been watching from the bar (he had grown accustomed to their violent arguments and no longer intervened), insisted on driving her home. She was dismayed to find herself crying, and raged against Michael on the ride home while Will listened silently. He insisted on seeing her up the rickety stairs of her Victorian apartment building to her front door.

“Would you like me to wait?” he asked.

“No. Thank you.” She knew Michael would return later and there’d be another row, and she didn’t want Will to see it. She was embarrassed suddenly that he’d already seen so much of their dysfunctional relationship.

“All right. Good night.” He touched her briefly on the arm and a faint tinge of color appeared along his brow. Ava realized then that he had a crush on her.

“Good night,” she said.

She never told Michael how she’d gotten home and he never asked, but a few weeks later he mentioned rather casually that Will Fraser was engaged to a girl he’d gone to boarding school with. After that, there was a wariness between Will and Ava whenever they met, something that Ava noted at first with mild regret and later didn’t notice at all. By the time Will and Michael graduated a year later, the two had drifted apart and Ava rarely saw him.

She saw Will briefly at graduation. He was standing on the lawn among a small knot of friends and family. He’d grown very thin and pale, and when she remarked on this to Michael he smiled unpleasantly and said it had something to do with the fiancée. A broken engagement or something like that.

“Women,” Michael said, shaking his head. “God knows why we put up with you.”

“You’ve got spinach in your teeth,” Ava lied, and while he hurried off to check, she strolled over to congratulate Will.

He smiled when he saw her and introduced her to his family. His parents had died in a car accident when he was a child, and he’d been raised by two great-aunts, Fanny and Josephine. They smiled politely at Ava. They were both elegantly dressed, with pale skin and clear gray eyes. Very attractive, both of them, although they must have been in their sixties. The smaller one, Fanny, smiled shyly and took Ava’s arm.

“So you’re Ava,” she said. She wore a silk dress belted tightly around her narrow waist and a short little jacket.

Josephine, the taller one, let her eyes flicker coolly over Ava. “Goodness, Fanny, don’t clutch her so.” She was dressed in a gray suit that matched her eyes, and she seemed rather reserved, like Will, only in him this reserve came across as shyness, while in her it seemed cold and distant. “You’ll have to excuse my sister,” she said to Ava. Sistuh. “As you can see, she’s never met a stranger.”

It was an odd thing to say, and yet spoken in that beautiful accent it sounded like music.

“What lovely hair you have,” Fanny said.

Ava smiled. “Thank you.” It was her best feature and she was rather proud of it. She had left it down today, and it fell in red-gold waves around her shoulders.

“Aren’t you chilly?” Josephine asked, noting her sleeveless dress.

Ava laughed. “After Chicago, this is nothing,” she said.

“So you’re from Chicago?”

“Pretty much.”

“Ah,” Josephine said in a tone that could have indicated surprise or disapproval or resignation.

A faint bloom of color appeared in Will’s face. He raised his head and looked around the crowded lawn. “I wonder what’s happened to Uncle Maitland,” he said.

Somewhere south of Owensboro the landscape changed, became more rolling and green. Great clouds of yellow pollen hung in the air. The light in Chicago had a sharp, clear quality but here it came in at odd angles, filtered by tall trees and masses of greenery lining the roadway.

They had thrown her a going-away party at work, a Deliverance theme party complete with dueling banjos and white-trash martinis. Colleen, drunk, had stood up and given a nice little speech, ending with the warning, “And whatever you do, don’t get off the expressway! For Christ’s sake, stay on the expressway.” Everyone at work thought of the South as a place of hillbillies and moonshine, and Ava had to admit (although only to herself) that she felt the same way. Perhaps this was why she had forced herself to get off the expressway just north of Louisville, and, buying a map, proceeded to drive bravely along curving picturesque county roads past small-frame farmhouses and tall-steepled churches and mobile homes with elaborately attached decks and discarded appliances rusting in the yards.

Beside her, buckled safely into the passenger seat, Clotilde rested quietly in her enameled urn like a genie waiting for someone to come and rub her lamp.

They passed a wide field and a weathered barn with See Rock City painted on its sagging roof. There was something insubstantial and airy about the shimmering light and the varying shades of green, like a landscape from a dream or a long-forgotten fairy tale.

“It’s so green,” Ava said to Clotilde.

A hawk circled lazily above the tree line. Far off in the distance, a rim of blue mountains rose into the hazy sky.

She had told Will everything: about her mother, about Jacob, about her job that she detested. She unburdened herself to him like she once had about Michael, droning on and on while he listened quietly. It was the alcohol, she told herself later, that had made her so garrulous. That and the fact that she wasn’t sleeping well.

“You can quit your job and move down here and write your novel,” he said when she’d finished, and she’d laughed disparagingly. He had continued in a placid voice as if trying to soothe a fussy child. “No, really. Woodburn is a sleepy little town. Nothing much ever happens around here. There are no distractions, and you can stay with Josephine and Fanny. They live in an old house near the town square, and you’d have a suite of rooms to yourself. You wouldn’t be disturbed. It’s a large house. I tease them that they should turn it into a bed-and-breakfast one of these days.”

“Do you live with them?”

“No, I live at Longford.”

“Where’s that?”

“The family farm. Out from town. I inherited it when I turned twenty-one. I’d ask you to stay with me but I’m renovating the house and it’s pretty primitive right now.”

“Shouldn’t you ask your aunts before you offer to move me in?”

“Actually, they were the ones who suggested it.”

“Really? Why?”

He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “they remembered you from that day at Bard, the day I graduated. ‘Your little friend Ava,’ Fanny calls you. ‘The one with the lovely hair.’ I told them you were looking for a quiet place to write your first novel and they said, ‘Oh, tell her to come down here. She can stay with us.’ ”

“That’s very generous of them.”

“You sound surprised.”

“It’s just that I got the feeling the stern aunt, the tall one …”

“Josephine?”

“Yes, Josephine. I got the feeling she didn’t like me.”

“That’s just her way. The Woodburns are Scottish, and they tend to be reserved.”

“And you’re a Woodburn?”

“On my mother’s side. My grandmother Celia was Josephine and Fanny’s sister.”

“I can’t quit my job,” Ava said. “I need to work to eat.”

“It’s free room and board. Think of it as a writing retreat. One of those communes where artists spend the summer.”

Despite her gloomy mood, Ava was flattered by his enthusiasm. He was kind and considerate, the sort of man she didn’t usually fall for. Unfortunately, she and Clotilde had shared more than their hair color; they both had bad judgment when it came to men. Ava was determined to remedy this in the future.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you have to lose?” he asked.

The road rose slightly, following a low ridge. A line of pink-blossomed trees with fringed leaves swayed in the breeze. On the other side of the highway, trailing vines mounded over distant pines and telephone poles, and dangled from utility lines, creating a series of undulating green hills. The whole landscape was lush and alien; Ava had the feeling that a seed tossed haphazardly from the window of a speeding car would take root in the rich soil and blossom to monstrous proportions.

What do I have to lose? she thought. Nothing. Everything. She turned her head and glanced at the ceramic urn in the seat beside her.

“Isn’t that right, Mother?” she said.

She had moved back to Chicago after she graduated from Bard. She knew the city; she and Clotilde had landed there her sophomore year of high school. They’d lived at first in a ratty walk-up in Rogers Park before moving to a more promising neighborhood on the outskirts of Wicker Park.

By then her nomadic lifestyle with Clotilde had paled. They were always starting over, always fleeing some creditor or landlord, always packing their meager belongings into the car in the dead of night.

“I’m a gypsy!” Clotilde would crow, her long red-blonde hair falling around her shoulders, her silver-ringed fingers clutching the steering wheel.

Often fleeing some jaded boyfriend, too. By now Clotilde herself had begun to pale. Ava fantasized about getting her driver’s license and driving away from her mother, leaving her stranded in some gray-skied industrial city. But then they had landed in Chicago and Ava had refused to leave until she had finished high school. She took a test, was accepted at a good Catholic school, got herself a scholarship, and for the first time in her life Ava had friends and did things normal kids did; she went to movies and parties and even dated a little. Chicago began to feel like home.

But living in Chicago after college graduation was different. For one thing, Clotilde had moved away, hooking up with a ski bum who was headed to Durango, Colorado. And the friends Ava had made in high school had gone away to college and settled elsewhere or else they’d stayed, married, and started families. Ava kept up with one or two friends from Bard who had left New York and moved back to Chicago, occasionally meeting for drinks in a small sports bar near the Loop; it was through one of them that she had landed her first job, as a writer for a local entertainment magazine. This led to a stint at a start-up public relations firm, which led to a position as a junior copywriter with a small ad agency, which eventually led to a job as a copywriter with a large, well-known agency. Each professional advance was accompanied by a raise in salary that bumped her standard of living accordingly so that by the time she landed at the large agency and met Jacob, she was living in a fifth-floor one-bedroom on Lakeshore Drive, the kind of apartment she could only have dreamed of living in during her days with Clotilde.

But regardless of her promising career, she was always broke. She never seemed to save any money. With each step up the professional ladder, she felt more and more trapped, knowing that she’d never be able to go back to living on what she’d made before. Knowing that she’d never be able to do the thing she most wanted to do, which was to stop working at the ad agency and write novels full-time. She’d wanted to be a writer her whole life, ever since third grade. On career day, all the kids had stood up and said that when they grew up they wanted to be astronauts and firemen and ballerinas, and Ava had realized, in a sudden flash of insight, that she could be all three (well, maybe not a ballerina, that wasn’t her style). She could be whatever she wanted to be just by using her imagination and writing stories. From that point forward, she had never questioned her destiny, studying creative writing at Bard, and sending out an endless stream of unpublishable short stories to various literary magazines.

But after college she found that making a living as a writer was difficult. Freelance work was unreliable, magazine work was competitive, and the pay, at least for beginning writers, was poor. She had been lured into advertising by the promise of a steady paycheck and the hope that a higher salary would enable her to save enough money to eventually quit and write novels full-time. But that wasn’t how things worked out. First there was the car payment and then the new apartment and the new furniture. And always there were the clothes and shoes and handbags necessary to convince everyone, to convince herself, that she was a professional woman. Her writing began to take a backseat to her ad agency work until it became more of a hobby than a career.

To make matters worse, she was lonely. She and Michael had finally broken up her senior year of college, having given the long-distance relationship one year before calling it off. Although she dated sporadically once she moved to Chicago, none of those affairs lasted longer than six months.

And then she met Jacob.

She hadn’t even liked him at first. He was difficult to work for. He was loud and brash and told inappropriate jokes, so she was not surprised, one day over lunch eight months after she’d joined the agency, when he suggested a sexual rendezvous as casually as if he were pitching a proposal to a client. She wasn’t surprised at Jacob but she was surprised at herself. She accepted.

No one in the office guessed that they were sleeping together. Ava was attractive enough, with a trim figure and large, dark eyes. Still, she was not a bombshell. She was not the type anyone would have pictured Jacob with. She did not wear low-cut blouses or her skirts too short. She did not color her hair. Her face, in some lights, could be almost plain. Perhaps it was the fact that none of the other women in the office thought he could find her attractive that drove her into Jacob’s arms.

Or maybe it was just that he was coldly inattentive, and Ava had a bad habit of falling for unpredictable men who gave her very little attention.

Jacob was in his mid-forties, divorced, with two children. Ava told herself that the affair would be nothing more than a brief fling. A brief respite from her loneliness until she moved on to something more promising.

The sex was good at first, and later less so. At the office they were cordial but professional. He made sure they were never alone together; there was never any hint of impropriety, no fevered glances or hurried embraces in the conference room, no stealthy touches in the corridors.

After nearly a year, the unthinkable had occurred, the thing Ava had promised herself would not happen; she had begun to fall for him. It amazed her that she could fall for someone whom she didn’t really like, that she could wait all night for his phone call, listen for the sound of his voice in the hallway, the tread of his footsteps on the stairs. Whatever slight confidence she had once displayed around him was gone. Now she found herself listening jealously while he flirted with other girls, feeling ugly and awkward. Jacob’s spirits seemed to soar the longer the affair went on, while she grew more and more despondent. She realized now the mistake of sleeping with someone she worked with, someone she had to take orders from. She fantasized about leaving but she’d only been at the agency a short time, and she needed a position on her resume that had lasted longer than twenty months.

If Jacob guessed that she was unhappy he gave no sign of it.

“Take your hair down,” he said once, when they were alone. Her hair was long and thick, and she wore it up at work or pulled back into a sleek ponytail. “You look like one of those pornographic Victorian postcards,” he said, running his hands through the long curls.

Ava said she wouldn’t know anything about that.

He laughed. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I have an early-morning meeting.”

Her friend at work, Colleen, was always trying to fix her up. Because Ava had never talked about a boyfriend, because she had never brought a date to any of the office functions, the rumor was that she was gay. Colleen refused to believe it.

“How about that guy in the building next door to you?” she asked Ava one morning over coffee.

“The one who sits in a lawn chair in the snow reading Dostoyevsky?” Ava had not heard from Jacob in several days and she was irritable and depressed.

“Yeah, him. He seems like your type.”

“Just because I read Russian novels doesn’t make him my type.”

“Was he wearing a wedding ring?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then I’ll restate my question. What are you waiting for?”

“For all I know he could be a serial killer.”

Colleen considered this. “Not in that building,” she said.

Through the glass walls of the soaring atrium, Ava could see the towering skyscrapers of the Loop silhouetted against an ashen sky. They sat at a small table near the entrance to the coffee shop, stirring their lattes.

“How’s Dave?” Ava asked, trying to change the subject. She had run into Jacob on the elevator this morning, and he’d seemed more distracted than usual, giving her a swift, puzzled glance, as if he didn’t recognize her.

“Who?”

“Dave. The guy you’re dating.”

“Oh, Dave,” Colleen said, waving her hand dismissively. “I’m bored with Dave.” Colleen seemed to have a new boyfriend every week; she changed men the way some women change purses, a different one for each outfit.

She ducked her head and gave Ava a sly smile. “Guess what?” She crossed her arms on the table and leaned forward, glancing around to make sure she wouldn’t be overheard.

“What?” Ava asked, sipping her coffee.

Colleen giggled and put one hand over her mouth. She smirked at Ava, lifting her eyebrows comically.

“Come on,” Ava said. She stared at Colleen irritably over the rim of her cup. “Tell me. It’s too early in the morning for guessing games.”

“I’m sleeping with Jacob.”

Ava sputtered and choked, spitting coffee all over the table. Colleen’s eyes widened. She leaned over and thumped Ava on the back. “Are you okay? Did you swallow wrong?” She took a napkin from the metallic container and mopped up Ava’s spilled coffee. “I know it’s crazy but I couldn’t help it,” she said, avoiding Ava’s eyes. “We were having lunch together and something happened. Something totally unexpected. He says he’s had a thing for me since the beginning but hasn’t been able to bring himself to tell me. We spent the whole afternoon at the Hyatt Regency. We didn’t even come back to the office.”

Ava coughed into her fist. She said, “Our boss Jacob?”

“It’s a huge secret. You’re the only one who knows, and you can’t tell anyone.”

Two days later Clotilde died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. Ava flew to Colorado to make the final arrangements, which consisted of having her mother cremated and donating her few possessions to the local Goodwill. There was no memorial service. The ski bum had long since disappeared, and Clotilde had been living alone in a small duplex off the main street and working as a desk clerk at the Strater Hotel. Ava found a boot box filled with Clotilde’s important documents: several tax returns, an affidavit signed by two people with the unlikely names of Doobie Moonshine and Skye Rain, and her own birth certificate. Her birth name was listed as Summer Rayne Dabrowski, and her father was listed as Frank Dabrowski. He was a shadowy figure known only to Ava in myth. He had left when she was still a toddler and, according to Clotilde, had died in an ice-fishing accident on the Detroit River when Ava was ten years old.

Her mother was listed as Margaret Anne Govan, aka Dharma Dabrowski.

There were also photographs: several of a chubby blonde Ava and Clotilde on a beach, in front of a merry-go-round, or posed (dangerously close) to the edge of a scenic overlook. There was one of Clotilde with a handsome, long-haired boy (her father, Ava guessed) and one of Clotilde in a multicolored granny gown standing in front of a purple bus decorated with peace signs.

Also enclosed was an envelope containing Ava’s baby teeth and several locks of bright blonde baby hair tied up with a ribbon.

All the meaningful highlights of Clotilde’s short life distilled into a reliquary the size of a shoebox.

It took about a week to tie up all the loose ends of her mother’s death, and when she returned to Chicago, Ava went immediately to the office. She sailed past Jacob’s receptionist, closing the door behind her. He was sitting with his feet up on his desk, and when he looked up and saw her, an expression of alarm spread swiftly across his face. (She wished then that she’d carried something in her hands, a letter opener or a three-hole punch, anything he might view as a potential weapon. She was enjoying the look of fear on his face, his mouth stretched into a grimace, eyes darting like a cornered rodent.)

She told him that it was over between them, that she knew about Colleen, and that if he ever told Colleen about the two of them, she would see to it that his partners got a full report of his activities. She told him she expected their working relationship to go on as before, cordial and professional, and she intimated, without ever actually saying it, that should this not occur she would certainly look into filing a sexual-harassment suit that would probably prove fruitless but would, no doubt, open him up to a career-ending scandal and expose him as the worthless son of a bitch that he was. He listened, speechless (the only time she had ever seen him speechless), while she spoke, his only signs of distress a faint flush of color along his brow and a furtive squint to his eyes as he glanced from her to the door and back again. When she had finished speaking she turned and left, leaving the door open behind her.

She floated along the corridor as if in a dream. Halfway to her office she was overcome by a feeling of relief so intense she thought her knees might buckle.

Several weeks later, Will Fraser called her and asked her to come to Tennessee. She was sitting by her apartment window wrapped in a blanket, her slippered feet slung over one arm of the chair, a glass of red wine and a book in her hands. It was a Saturday evening, and a fresh blanket of snow lay over the city. The lights of the apartments across the way gleamed wetly, and the distant lake was a pale, vaporous fog. She was reading Wuthering Heights and daydreaming of a savage, other-worldly lover, wondering at Emily Brontë’s ability to tell such a brutal, magnificent tale.

When the phone rang she almost didn’t answer it. But she was glad later that she had, glad for the confession Will allowed her, although she could not shake the feeling that there was something else required of her, some act of contrition, some sacrifice.

The feeling of relief she’d felt after leaving Jacob’s office had not lasted, of course. It had swelled into a feeling of hopelessness and despair, a sense that, up to now, she had wasted her life on things that weren’t important. A childhood spent being the responsible one, making sure the rent was paid and the bill collectors were kept at bay, had formed her. Had crippled her. She had planned her escape from her mother all those years ago, had followed that plan persistently, and yet here she was at twenty-eight, sitting alone in her expensive apartment with her expensive furniture wondering what purpose her life had. It was ridiculous, really, and pathetic.

Perhaps it was grief over her mother’s sudden death swamping her finally, guilt and regret that they had not spoken in more than a year. Who knew how swiftly and unexpectedly death could come?

Or perhaps it was the letter.

It lay crumpled in a ball on the floor, and she leaned over and scooped it up. Will was telling her tales of the quirky inhabitants of Woodburn, trying to entice her with stories of his cousin, Fraser Barron, who dressed up as Edgar Allan Poe and did recitations of “The Raven” at cocktail parties.

“He must be a lot of fun,” Ava said.

“You have no idea.”

She smoothed the letter on her lap. It was written in a childish scrawl. I was so sorry to hear about your mother, he had written. She loved you very much. He had signed it, Frank. Not Love, Dad or Your father but just plain Frank, exhibiting a refreshing lack of sentimentality. She could relate to that; respected it, actually.

She picked up the flap of the torn envelope, looking at the return address. 1645 Hennipen Street, Garden City, Michigan. Her father, who she’d thought dead all these years, had lived only a few hours away.

She felt a stab of anger at Clotilde for lying to her, for depriving her all those years of the fiction of a living, loving father.

Will repeated his offer of a change of pace, a new beginning in Tennessee. He seemed to be weighing each word, coaxing her along like he would a timid bird with bread crumbs. “Just come for the summer,” he said.

Ava was surprised to find that she was weeping. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

She stopped for gas at a cinder-block convenience store, a short, squat building with a hand-lettered sign out front that read Guns. Bait. Day Care. The store looked old but the pumps were new. Ava swiped her card and then stood waiting for the tank to fill. She stretched her arms above her head and leaned back slightly, gazing across the road at a field of soybeans. Or at least she assumed that they were soybeans. A man in overalls at the last gas station had told her that soybeans were the staple crop in this area.

The green fields, the glittering road, the hard-baked grass of the clearing all seemed flattened and diminished beneath the weight of the noonday sun. Cicadas sang in the stillness. Far off across the fields, a distant fringe of forest stood outlined against a bleached sky. Ava ran her fingers through her short, spiky hair. Behind her a screened door slammed, and a moment later a woman’s voice said, “Oo-ee, it’s a scorcher. I’ll bet its 90 in the shade and here it is only May. Hot as road tar in July, as my daddy used to say, and he should know, he lived through enough heat spells in his time.” Ava turned around to see who the woman was talking to and was surprised to see that it was her.

“Excuse me?” she said nervously.

“Hot as a June bride in a feather bed,” the woman continued, chuckling softly and patting her top lip with a Kleenex. She was an elderly woman in a flowered dress with a large black purse shaped like an anvil strapped to one arm. “And he should know, ’cause he got the sunstroke on a day like this, working on the barn roof with his brother, Dooly.” Ava glanced anxiously at the store. The woman appeared to be unsupervised. There was no other car at the pumps, and no one had followed her out. She opened her purse and dropped the Kleenex inside, then snapped it shut. She reminded Ava a little of the deranged Bette Davis character in that old movie about the elderly sisters.

The woman tilted her head up at the sky, remembering. “It was a hot, sunny day in nineteen thirty-six, a Tuesday, I believe it was, or no, no, a Thursday. The wind was from the southeast, and he and Dooly were up there on the barn shingling in the heat. All of a sudden Daddy stood up and took off his hat and said, ‘Dooly, there’s a goat in the horse trough,’ and then he fell off the roof. His eyes just rolled up in his head and he went over backwards like a snake-handling Pentecostal. Would have killed himself, the doctor said later, if he hadn’t gone all limp before he fell.”

The woman, whose eyes were bright and curious as a little sparrow’s, had moved up close enough to the car to see Clotilde strapped into the front seat. “That sure is a pretty vase,” she said.

Ava stopped pumping gas. She screwed the cap on and closed the lid with a thud. “How close to Woodburn are we?” she asked.

“Woodburn? Oh, about thirty-five miles, I’d say. You have business in Woodburn, do you?”

Ava hung the nozzle back on the pump and didn’t wait for a receipt. “I have to go now.”

The woman folded her arms across her stomach. She smiled. “You aren’t from around here, are you,” she said.

A few miles down the road Ava began to sneeze, so she put the windows up and turned on the air-conditioning. She passed a sign that read Woodburn—30 miles and she realized she would be arriving early. She’d have to stop in one of the small shops in town to kill some time, to pick up a gift for the aunts.

“Try to arrive by Toddy Time,” Will had told her. “That’s around five o’clock.”

“What’s Toddy Time?”

“Cocktail hour.”

She’d been surprised, this far south in the Bible belt.

He laughed. “You do realize this is the home state of Jack Daniel’s?”

She glanced at herself in the mirror, running her hand through her spiky hair. She’d never worn it short before and she was still getting used to the look. She had cut it the night Will called, the day she got the letter from her father, going into the bathroom and clipping great handfuls while tears streamed down her cheeks. When she finished, her head felt lighter; she could see patches of scalp glimmering through the wispy curls.

“My God, what have you done to yourself?” Jacob said when he saw her.

“I’m leaving,” she told him. “Consider this my two-weeks’ notice.”

“Leaving to go where?”

Gripped by a sudden desire to make herself seem less pitiful, she said, “I’m spending the summer at a writers’ colony.”

He said carelessly, “I didn’t know you were a writer.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

He didn’t come to the Deliverance Party and Ava was relieved. Later she drank too much and pulled Colleen aside and told her everything.

It was the last bit of unfinished business she felt she had before leaving Chicago.

She took her time heading south, driving first to Detroit and then meandering down I-75 in her used Saab. She spent the first night in a bed-and-breakfast outside of Cincinnati, where she lay awake listening to the clattering din of the crickets. She finally fell into a restless sleep but awoke some hours later to one of her night terrors, lying motionless and sweating until the spell passed. A trail of moonlight lay across the bed. She could hear the steady ticking of a clock somewhere deep within the house but she could not sleep again, tossing and turning until the clock chimed six and the first rosy fingers of daylight pushed themselves through the blinds.

As she prepared to leave, she thought of the characters in Russian novels who always said a prayer of protection before a journey. Even Tolstoy during his period of late-life despair would, she imagined, have prayed before fleeing his estate. Organized religion was something else Clotilde had thought unnecessary for Ava to experience, although she had espoused a kind of new-age spirituality: crystals and karma and past-life regressions.

As if this life hadn’t been traumatic enough. A sudden defiance swept Ava. She bowed her head and prayed aloud, “Lord, bless this journey and keep me safe from harm.” And holding the vase aloft and giving Clotilde a sly grin, she said, “And bless this one, too, and forgive her her many sins. Amen.”

Another road sign appeared, announcing Woodburn—20 miles. She passed a group of cows standing motionless beneath the shade of a spreading tree. A shimmering pond reflected the metallic-colored sky.

Despite Will’s reassurances that she would like Woodburn and she would fit in fine, Ava felt like a stranger in a strange land. And it wasn’t just the dappled quality of the light, the small shotgun houses with their overgrown lawns and cement statuary, and the railroad crossings standing like sentries in the dusty little towns that made her feel this way. The people, too, seemed odd, almost frightening, with their overt displays of friendliness. Chicago was a friendly city, but people didn’t wave to one another as they drove down the streets, and they didn’t reveal their family histories to strangers at the gas pump.

She thought of Will, whom she hadn’t seen in years, a man who was almost a stranger to her. She pictured Josephine, the tall stern woman with the piercing eyes whom she had met at Will’s graduation. She thought of the bridges she had burned, the career she had left behind in ruins so she could pursue some wild dream she might never be able to attain.

For the first time since leaving Chicago, a vague sense of misgiving bloomed in her chest.