Once the Shore (20 page)

One late afternoon, however, when he entered the stable, Mihna was there. She was wearing her star-shaped sunglasses. In her arms she carried a large bundle of hay—timothy grass—and she walked down the aisle throwing handfuls of it into the stalls. One of the ponies dragged his portion to a far corner, eating in private. When her arms were emptied of timothy, Linn retrieved another bundle in the empty stall they used for storage. Mihna remained beside Comet, running her fingers through his mane, combing it all to one side.

Linn approached her and, after offering her the hay, he touched her hair, the way she was doing with the pony. She let him. And in this allowance, in touching her, which he had not done, it seemed, in years, he began to cry. He wanted to tell her that when she was older she might understand but he didn’t, thinking the words powerless, as he himself felt.

“We have a new neighbor,” Mihna said, without looking
at her father, throwing hay into Comet’s stall. “She lies in the forest. I used to see her. But she ran away.”

Her daughter spoke of a pretty face, a woman’s breath the size of a cloud. She lay in the woods, Mihna said, enjoying the whiteness of the ground like an enormous bed. Mihna hadn’t recognized her. She asked if it might be someone he knew.

“There’s no one, Mihna,” he said. “I would know. I would’ve heard.” It was true. The neighbors would have spread such gossip.

“Come see,” Mihna kept saying, tugging his sleeve.

“You shouldn’t go there,” he added. “I’ve told you. Not by yourself.”

“She has the same dress as Mama’s. The one in the picture. She doesn’t get cold.”

“You shouldn’t wander alone,” her father insisted.

“I like her very much.”

“Stop it,” her father said.

“Mama gave her the dress.”

He grabbed the rest of the hay from her daughter’s hands and threw it into Comet’s stall. He kneeled in front of her and pulled her sunglasses away, dropping them onto the floor. He gripped her shoulders. “You must understand, Mihna,” he said. “You must be patient. You’re no longer a child.”

Linn didn’t realize he was hurting her until he saw her wince and bite her lips. He let go, apologizing, and she held her arms and said, “She doesn’t speak.”

That night, as Mihna lay in her bed, Linn searched his bedroom. He opened the closet, her scent now faded, and pushed aside each article of clothing on the rack. He moved on to the dresser, sifting through sweaters, pants, a nightgown Nara used to wear when she was younger. He looked underneath the bed, at the boxes they had stored there, taking each one out and lifting their cardboard tops, removing the sandals and a bathing suit she wore to the sea. There were gardening gloves in another box, new and unused, for she bought several pairs when the store had sales. There were clothes she had saved for Mihna, when she grew older, jodhpurs, paddock boots, and T-shirts.

He searched for an hour. He did not find the dress. He tried to imagine where it could have gone. They had donated clothes several years ago. Perhaps, by mistake, she had packed it in there. Or it wasn’t a mistake at all. Perhaps it was a dress she no longer needed and she had asked him first and he had agreed. Or perhaps he was the one who had gotten rid of it. He could not recall. It all seemed possible.

He rested on the edge of the bed with his hands on his lap, staring at his reflection in the dresser mirror: his stooped posture, his thick gray hair. In this reflection her clothes lay scattered on the floor and the bed. He saw himself pick them up, one by one, and begin to refold them, feeling their years and their seasons, their colors faded, the fabrics worn.

Mihna, who could not sleep, rose from her bed and pressed her nose against the window. The snow had started again, large flakes of it falling lazily like autumn leaves. She did not know what time it was. The house lay quiet. She exhaled, her breath on the glass expanding. She leaned back and waited for the condensation to recede. When it did so, a silhouette appeared in the distance, under the wide arms of the camphor tree. She blinked. It was still there. It did not appear to move.

Barefoot and in her pajamas, she left her room and walked down the hall, toward her sleeping father. She paused there, the sudden urge to go to him returning, but she remembered his face this afternoon when he had grabbed her shoulders—his frustration, his weary eyes—and she was sorry. It was shame she had felt, but for what she could not articulate. She approached the front entrance of the house and twisted the knob slowly. The door creaked and the winds hurried past her. She listened for her father but he did not wake. She bent down and picked up her boots.

Outside, she let her eyes adjust to the light of the moon. Still warm from her bed, it was not as cold as she expected. The silhouette was still there, motionless. For a short distance, crossing the field, Mihna walked barefoot, enjoying the snow between her toes. When her feet grew cold she paused to put on her boots, all the time keeping her eyes focused on the dark object lest it vanish if she looked away.

It was her father who had told her of spirits and how she could detect them. They were carried by wind. When a car accident occurred, they had, just then, run across the street. When the ponies whinnied one had tickled their noses. In the autumn a leaf fell when they walked under a tree. In the winter they pestered pedestrians by causing them to slip on ice. In the spring they caused people to sneeze. In the summer they broke the electric fans, holding on to the blades. She had once sat in front of one, her hair blowing, waiting for the motor to stop. His stories were endless.

He had never said they were visible, just that they made themselves known by their action, by what they left in their wake.

She was a few meters from the tree when she saw that it wasn’t what she expected it to be. It was, rather, Comet, sniffing the snow. He had, as he sometimes did, gotten out of the stable.

Mihna raised her hand to pet the old animal and she watched his breath flame white out of his nostrils. “What are you doing, Comet?” she whispered, and the pony, without provocation, shook his mane and began to trot away. “Comet!” she called to him, as quietly as she could. She clicked her tongue. She whistled softly. He wouldn’t listen. She began to follow him, all the while saying his name. The pony trotted across the field. At the gate, he lowered his head and bit down on the latch and lifted. He then pushed the door open with his nose and vanished into the forest.

She began to run. The moonlight faded. She did not think of the dimming of her vision or the branches cutting her skin. She did not think of the woman she had twice seen. She did not think of her mother’s death or her own approaching departure as she ran deeper into the woods.

She thought of the pony, the beat of his hooves, his tail fluttering several meters ahead of her. It hung there, suspended, like a wing, and then it rose toward the trees and she chased it and blinked and then it was lost.

The child did not see the trail curve away, and her foot caught the air and she fell. She remained silent and did not cry and in the dark there was a sound like thunder, the snow following.

 

When Mihna was born, her mother used a blanket as a sling, tied across her body, the knot sticking up over her shoulder like a red flower. In this way she carried the infant in front of her chest. This proved to be useful during feeding, Nara simply lifting up her shirt, Linn looking away. She would tease him about this, his avoidance, what he thought of as courtesy and what she thought of as distance. “You’ve seen it before, Linn,” she teased him, as the warm gums of her daughter clung to her.

There were also the days when she turned the sling around so that the child hung across her back, the blanket used as a seat. Mihna would hold her mother at the base of her neck
and she fell asleep with the lulling rhythm of Nara’s gait as they traversed the fields. This was spring. And Nara, her body no longer a host, woke every morning with an abundance of energy, her voice loud and confident, her eyes sharp. At night, in bed, she would run her hands along Linn’s stomach, as if a part of her had to be in motion always, even in sleep. She cooked furiously and started a garden behind the house, Mihna either on her back or in front of her chest.

And it was with her child in the sling that she sat under the camphor tree in the afternoons. She would reach up to break off a leaf and crush it with her fingers, its scent hovering about them as she followed the curve of the hills, the sky dropping behind the ridges. To Mihna she sang folksongs she remembered when she herself was young. “Look for me in the camphor tree,” she hummed, “wait for me under forsythia, be with me beside camellia.” And to this melody the child slept in the shadows of the broad leaves, her ear pressed against her mother’s breasts, listening to the song reverberate from within.

“Look for me in the camphor tree,” she used to say to Linn, heading outside for the day, carrying Mihna. “Look for us there.” It had been in jest. But after the lessons or cleaning the stable he looked each time, up into the tree, covering his eyes from the sun, wondering if the branch swaying was his wife’s leg or whether a certain leaf was in the shape of his daughter’s head.

They had been happy then, though thinking of it now, it
was her happiness first and not his, one that she had offered to him and one that he received. It was her time, hers alone, always, with the child, and he, later on, the visitor.

He recalled all this when he woke, and for an instant he did not know where he was. Light played along the ceiling, the shadows of branches from the backyard like waving hands. He was convinced he was outdoors, that he had somehow slept out there, but his vision focused and he rose from the bed, the room returned. A thought occurred to him then: perhaps it had been in haste. Perhaps they could stay. The years would unfold of their own accord. But such thoughts were short-lived as he heard the telephone ring, then a message. It was the hotel owner, who spoke of bringing contractors to the grounds next week. Linn entered the hallway. At Mihna’s door he heard the silence of sleep.

After dressing and pouring hot coffee into a thermos, he crossed the fields, as he had done all his life, his father before that, and went to the stable. At its entrance he saw the door open and Comet’s stall empty. He shook his head, in part due to amusement, in part due to annoyance. He set the thermos down against the wall and turned to look out across the fields.

The snow from yesterday had stopped, though whatever tracks they once showed were now filled. He saw his own footprints, nothing more. The sun shone with warmth and he shut his eyes as it washed his neck and he felt it slipping down
his shirt and across his chest. He yawned, not yet having had the coffee, and set out toward the hills.

 

It did not take long for him to find Comet in the forest, lying down at the bottom of a small cliff, the pinto pattern brilliant against the trees. Linn whistled but was ignored, so he went to the animal, bending branches.

The pony had stumbled upon a clearing and was whinnying softly. He lay with his belly against the snow and his front legs tucked underneath him. He was holding something against his shoulder, his neck wrapped around it and craned toward his belly. But it wasn’t until Linn stepped closer that he saw it was Mihna lying curled against him. She lay with one knee raised, dressed in her striped pajamas, torn at the knees, her feet covered in a pair of untied boots. Snow clung to her hair and her body as if it had grown out of her. On occasion the animal shifted his legs and licked her, melting the snow. She lay looking down at a photograph of Nara, wiping away the pony’s breath from it. A barrette lay beside her hip. Nearby there was an unfinished house made of snow, the child’s gloved fingers imprinted onto its walls. Whether she noticed Linn he could not tell.

He did not to go to her immediately. He stood there at the edge of the clearing, uncertain of whether to go any farther. This land he knew. He had lived here all his life. He had never left. Yet it seemed to him then that he had arrived in a foreign
land, in some forgotten country where an entire people had already gone, what remained left for the seasons. He neither recognized the clearing nor the trees.