Leann was twelve that winter — it was a year when storms rolled in relentlessly, all season long. The lake where I walked the dogs froze solid — the ice heaved and cracked like a giant, living thing. Our housekeeper at the time had a girl Leann’s age and I remember she used to bring me her report cards to exclaim over. I had tried to provoke a friendship between the girls, but it was a disaster. I should have known that twelve-year-old girls cannot be friends when one’s mother washes the other’s bed linens. Many of Leann’s clothes made their way into Daniela’s closet and cast off shoes and coats of mine traveled to Colombia into the hands of our housekeeper’s extended family.
The housekeeper — her name escapes me — would bring Daniela with her during school vacations and the two girls would sit stiffly in front of the television. It was also the year Mark started his own business and the winter we lost so many trees to the weather — one afternoon a twenty-foot hemlock had simply fallen over in the backyard. From the window where I was watching, the tilting of the tree was so slow, such a remarkably tender movement that I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. It had fallen with a soft rustling of limbs and feathery needles, landing in the rose arbor, near the edge of the porch. To this day, a stump remains where the tree was, in the middle of a circular spread of mulch — its absence makes an ugly disruption in the tree line and reveals the gabled corner of a neighbor’s roof. I had looked at it just that morning. Odd, these memories, considering their intense banality.
What we heard that winter evening was a sound, a distant but near sound — I thought immediately of the ice shifting in the park and then the Labradors rushed the front window, howling. Leann was doing her homework on the coffee table in front of the television — a bad habit we had allowed her to fall into. She barely looked up. We had the sliding door cracked to help the fireplace draw, and the next thing we noticed was the smell — dark, viscous, strange.
It had a texture, that scent, and a slickness: I could imagine how it might slide between my fingers, or feel beneath the worn treads of my sneakers.
“Oil,” Mark said immediately, and I thought: heating oil, leaking tank, hideous expense.
“Motor oil,” he said and then stood up and went to the drawer for a flashlight.
I followed him outside. The flashlight played across the driveway: illuminating the bluestone gravel, a band of grass, a stripe of picket fence.
The car was hunched against a tulip tree that sat on our property, directly beside the mailbox — it was at an angle, tilting up the banked earth, the hood in accordion pleats. The driver’s door was open and there was the faint chirping noise of keys left in an ignition. It was confusing at first, because a passerby had stopped already and so the numbers were wrong — two cars and just one person.
He turned to us, this man, raising a hand against the flashlight, and said, “Have you phoned the police?”
“What happened?” I asked this question. I was wearing pajama bottoms and a sweater of Mark’s, my hair fastened on top of my head. It was a Sunday evening and I was settled in, expecting no excitement.
“Whoever wrecked the car ran off. Drunk, no doubt.” He said this slowly and certainly, as if he had worked it out, decided it. He was the sort of man who exuded that kind of surety; he would have been a financier, an insurance executive.
