Chapter 27
Carrie
But when he didn’t reappear for three weeks, everyone thought he had broken off the courtship. Everyone except Edith. She was sure he was lost somewhere, that he just needed to find his way back.
—Nora Morgan, May 20, 1918
I leave for the mountain trail as dawn whispers through the fields. Tendrils of breeze stir the exposed grass, stinging my skin where my hat doesn’t quite meet the collar of my coat. It’s cold enough to snow again. I can smell it on the air. But on this cool December day, the sky is lightening to a deep blue without a cloud to mar it. My breath hangs in foggy clouds as I hit the trail that will take me away, up the mountain.
If he is there, what will I say to him? That I believed Cora when she suggested that he might not be quite real? Perhaps I can say that I was concerned. When he didn’t turn up and never called back, it made sense to check on him. Yes, that’s what I’ll say. I reason it out, turning over different scenarios as I round the mountain path and the lookout over Woodsmoke. I pause for a moment, catching my breath, and brace my hands on the straps of my rucksack. Woodsmoke is peaceful today, a tapestry of brown and gray, the square in the center full of fidgeting little forms.
My eyes track right, away from the center of town to follow the winding road to Cora’s. She will be drinking her morning coffee and pestering Howard about some minor detail of their lives, and he’ll be indulging her. Am I doing this to prove to her that she’s wrong? There’s always been a bit of tug-of-war to our relationship, as though she is forever pulling at my loose threads, wanting to unravel me. Yesterday I prickled with it. She’s so sure that all those stories, all those tales passed down in the Morgan Compendium, are facts. I want to believe they are no more than fairy tales. Fables spun from thin air to explain away something unexplainable. But now, being back here and in the thick of it, it’s hard to hold on to that idea. The stories in the book feel all too real.
Guilt needles me suddenly. I should be spending more time with Cora. That’s all she’s ever wanted from me—just more. More of my time, more of my love. And I’ve always been so hesitant to give it. That’s why she’s so focused on collating the past, collecting these tales and hoarding them like jewels. She uses them to lure me in, I’m sure of it, and it might have worked when I was a child. But now I am older, and the mysteries of this place no longer thrill me or fill me with wonder. I’m no longer interested in exploring every inch of the mountains, taking field notes, and marveling at the heady freedom of such an ancient place. The hidden mysteries of the mountains used to fill me with wonder, but now I am older, I fear their sinister edge.
I turn to the rest of the world, with my back to the view, and consider the three trails that branch out from this lookout. I know which cabin Matthieu is staying in; there are only a few scattered throughout this mountain range. The ones that are known of, anyway. And the one he is renting from the Vickers is the closest; he can reach it quickly with his long strides each day. I pull my bottle out of the side pocket of the rucksack, sip on the water, and let it wash my uncertainty away. He will be there. He will be there in the cabin, and maybe he hasn’t been well. Maybe he will appreciate someone reaching out when he’s so alone up here in the vast, cold nothing. Cora has just unsettled me in her usual tug-of-war with me, and I’m off balance. I allowed her into my head, and for the briefest moment she made me question if the frost tale is real.
That’s all.
The walk takes longer than I thought it would. The path sometimes peters out into nothing but stones. The only way I know I’m on the right trail is from the broken branches on either side, where the encroaching wild has been pushed back. I picture Matthieu shoving back branches as he walks, keeping this path through the mountains his own. But there are patches where the wild has begun to steal pieces of the path, where no one seems to have passed in a while.
I remember when I used to tread this path with Tom and Jess. We would walk and walk, exploring the trails trickling like veins down the mountainside, marking them on our map and imagining we were the first explorers. Like sunlight on ice, the flashes of those moments dazzle me now, again and again. With every curve in the path, every place where the trees dip and sway, showing the view of the landscape far below, I remember.
The last time was a month before I was meant to marry Tom, a few days before I was turning eighteen. The three of us walked up to where the trees part, where we could see for miles and miles, far beyond the edges of Woodsmoke. We stood shoulder to shoulder and gazed out over the world.
“We don’t have to stay here, you know,”
I remember saying to them both.
Tom kept quiet, but Jess frowned, a furrow appearing between her brows. “Why wouldn’t we want to?”
she asked.
“Look how big it is, Jess. Look how much we still have to explore.”
I told Jess then that Tom and I planned to travel. That she could come with us, that this new future, this one without Woodsmoke at the center of it, was a possibility opening up to her too. Something new and wondrous and wholly attainable. She grew quiet, then mentioned university, the holidays, her summer job at the library. I dropped the subject after that, wondering why Jess didn’t get it, and why Tom was so quiet.
I think I told Cora that same night, cheeks still flushed like roses from the glow that Tom and Jess gave me just from being nearby, just from being alive. My fiancé and my best friend, the people I was going to conquer the world with. Cora grew still for a moment, then snapped on a smile. She offered Ivy the first plate of pasta she was serving up at the table, and Ivy muttered her thanks in return.
That certainty of belonging with the two of them, with Jess and Tom, is a ghost that haunts me now as I walk to find Matthieu’s cabin. After I left Woodsmoke, I chased that ghost, that deep sense of belonging I craved elsewhere. I searched for it down the many steps of Positano and in the cramped streets of the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona. I sought it out in tiny flats, in a two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Manchester, even in a rented cottage by the harbor in St. Ives.
But I didn’t belong in any of these places, or with anyone else.
No one else I met while I was gone gave me that glow, that certainty, that feeling like I was exactly where I was supposed to be—the feeling I’d had with Tom and Jess. I mourned the loss of us for too long. Always wondering if I should have stayed in Woodsmoke, if that sense of belonging was still there. Maybe it hadn’t died between us, maybe I only imagined it had. Maybe if I had stayed, Jess and I would still be best friends now. But then Ivy told me—in a call I took on a tinny landline in a bar in Crete—that Jess and Tom had gotten together. Seeing him the other night, with his shoulder pressed against the car window as if he couldn’t stand to be in the same car with me, just confirmed that the connection was long gone. I wasn’t wrong. It did die between us, and it was never meant to continue. I didn’t belong to him just as he didn’t belong to me, and I did the right thing to keep searching all those years.
I stop on the trail and take a minute to breathe. It hasn’t leveled out for a while, and the air in my lungs is burning. I place my hands on my hips as I feel the burn in my chest cooling, inch by inch. My legs are beginning to shake with each step, and I can feel my body slowing, needing rest. I drink more water and mentally measure the distance I’ve come and the distance up the winding path to the cabin. It’s not a lot farther. But I hope there are no more memories laying snares for me on the way.
Thirty minutes later, my chest is burning hard, a furnace I can no longer cool. Just as I am sure I will need to sit and take a break, the path stops. A clearing opens, flat and wide, with trees looming over it in an oval. In the middle, as though sprouted from a Grimms’ fairy tale, is the cabin.
It’s a single-story building built of wood and granite, wearing a chimney on top like a too-small hat. The windows are dark and seem to watch me as I hesitate on the edge of the clearing. There are raised beds, but whatever thrived in the spring and summer has been cleared away. Now the beds are barren and cold. I walk between them, weaving my way to the front door of the cabin, and let my knuckles rest on the wooden door. Cora and her superstitions nudge at me, beckoning me away from the cabin. I inhale sharply, pushing those thoughts away, and rap my knuckles against the door.
Silence greets me.
Silence yawning so loud it’s deafening. I knock again, louder this time, my mind a scatter of questions and answers:
He might not have heard—
Maybe he’s out—
Maybe he’s really sick—
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I close my eyes, leaning my forehead on the door, wishing for once my head was a quiet place. Then I hear it, a gentle click. And the door opens.
“Matthieu, I’m so sorry, I didn’t meant to disturb you, but—”
My words seize up in my throat as I look up. There’s no Matthieu. No towering man with kind eyes, capable hands, and an instant smile. There is only a doorway, open now, and darkness beyond. “Matthieu?”
When he doesn’t answer, when no one answers, I plant my boots on the threshold. Then, pushing aside every warning, every discordant alarm bell, I step inside the cabin.