Chapter 38
Carrie
Edith burned the candle by the window, and the trapper came back to her. But not as a person, as a voice. Calling her. She followed that voice, stepping off the mountain paths.
No one has heard from Edith Tucker or the trapper since.
—Nora Morgan, May 20, 1918
Three weeks later, as we tip into March, I realize I’m ready to claim my home. The cottage is finished, and only a few small pieces of furniture are left to acquire. I move in, taking several trips from caravan to cottage, lugging my stuff across the glittering field.
There’s only a light frost today. The snow has melted away, leaving the glitter of ice painted on blades of grass. It crackles as I walk, and the scent of newness envelops me. Suddenly, I’m hopeful for spring, aware of what that means. The decision I’ve reached. The cottage isn’t going on the market, and I’ve made no plans to move on. I’m staying in Woodsmoke, perhaps not forever, but definitely for right now. I find it hard to deal in absolutes. But with every day, every moment I’m back here, I finally feel like my feet are on solid ground. As though I’m where I’m supposed to be.
And Matthieu, with his quiet ways, his solid presence since I returned, is a big part of this feeling. Not the only reason, but important enough that I can no longer ignore what it means. As we lay in the caravan the other night, limbs entwined, I realized it was time to carve out more space for myself. And doing that will mean also making space for him. By laying my cards on the table and asking him to stay in Woodsmoke with me.
The caravan was too small that night. He had to stoop to shuffle around the space, and as we clutched mugs of coffee the next morning, I pictured him preparing the morning coffee in the cottage. Heating the kettle on the stovetop, spooning the earthy granules into the French press, and carrying the hot mugs up the staircase to the bedroom at the front of the house.
In the afternoon, I close the door on the cottage, pocket the key like a secret, and drive into the center of Woodsmoke. There are only a few huddled figures around, and so less gossip than usual plumes in the air. A few half-familiar faces acknowledge me with a nod, and the butcher, who I went to school with years ago, even asks how I’m doing as I pass. I guess the gossip has quieted down now, and folks are accepting the fact that I’ve come back. It all feels so . . . ordinary.
So wonderfully ordinary.
I slip a second iron key from my pocket as I approach the shop. It slips inside the keyhole, and a soft click tells me I can enter. For the first time since I arrived, I step over the threshold of Ivy’s old candle shop.
I breathe in the scent of dust and lavender. My footfalls are cloying thuds in the hollow quiet as I cross to the counter and drop the key next to the till. It’s one of those old-fashioned ones, with the number 9 rubbed out from overuse. I place my index finger on the ivory circle, feeling the ghost of Ivy’s finger in the smooth indent from years of use. I picture her here, standing where I am now, giving me that knowing look before shooing a customer out to the bank around the corner. She only accepted cash, bills and coins, and sometimes she would write out a receipt by hand if someone particularly riled her, taking her time as they swayed impatiently from foot to foot. My grandma was a force of nature despite her sweet, reedy singing voice. You never, ever said no to her. Woe betide you if you did. I guess in that way she was just like her sister Cora, and like every Morgan woman who came before her.
Staring around the shop at the shelves lined with old stock, the patterned crimson rug in the center worn down to blush in some places from many feet, I feel more than nostalgia. It’s as though the shop has been waiting for me, and now it’s leaning in, inch by inch, with anticipation. Listening to the patter of my heart as it syncs with Woodsmoke again. I never could help longing for this slumbering town in my dreams, my nightmares. It’s followed me through airports and train stations, crisscrossing continents with me, trying to pull me back.
I’ve resisted for so long. I’ve walked the earth with the broken pieces rattling inside my chest, hoping someone, anyone, would be able to heal the pain. That another place would become my new home. Yet I’m here again, back in Woodsmoke, wearing my heart on the outside of my chest. And now there’s Matthieu. Even though I told myself, promised myself, that renovating the cottage would be the final chapter. The ending I’d been waiting ten years to write.
I haven’t been in this shop this winter because even entering it feels like beginning a new chapter. If I reopen the shop, if I change it into something full of things that I want to sell, then I’m making a statement. I’m staking out my place in this town full of secrets and old magic and memories. I’m proclaiming that these things are mine too. Until now, I haven’t been ready to even contemplate doing that. I heave a breath, lean my forearms on the counter, and gaze out into the middle distance.
Then I realize that a woman outside the window is watching me.
I blink, pulling myself up to stand straight and tall as she pushes open the door, the sharp breeze cutting the lavender-scented shop with the smell of car fumes and snow.
“Cora,”
I say, swallowing back my nostalgia, my faint stirrings of hope. “Thank you for coming.”
“I’m not accustomed to being summoned.”
“This won’t take long.”
Cora sighs, wilting slightly, and shuffles to the armchair by the window. It has been used for many years by long-suffering partners, and children have scrambled over it while their parents sniffed at the waxy pillars on the shelves. It’s been neglected for many months, sitting in this relic of a shop that no one wanted to claim. Until now.
Until me.
“I want to reopen the shop.”
Cora says nothing for a moment, merely staring at me, her left eye twitching, with moisture gathering at the outer corner. Then she clears her throat. “You . . . want to stay?”
I feel that secret smile tugging up the corners of my mouth. “I think so.”
“Well,”
she says carefully, her gaze sliding away as she blinks furiously. It’s the slightest slip of composure, so slight that it could easily be overlooked. But I notice. “This is a turn-up for the books.”
“Ivy used to say that,”
I blurt out before thinking. Before I can push the words back into my mouth.
Her left eye twitches again, but she says nothing.
“Anyway . . . I need you to sign off on the lease. She rented it from you.”
“She did.”
The familiar sense of treading on eggshells around Cora surfaces. Like there’s a layer of history between her and Ivy that I will never quite understand. “I can . . . pay you in advance? How do you want it to work?”
“We’re selling it,”
Cora says, her eyes swiveling to the shelves opposite. “You can purchase it, if you like. But not candles. Make something else. That was Ivy’s thing, and I think it’s time this town had something of yours in it. Don’t you?”
I think about the sketchbook I left on the kitchen table. Half filled this winter with pencil drawings of the mountains, of Matthieu, of the details I notice more keenly being back here. “I’m thinking of selling my artwork. I started . . . started sketching again.”
Cora’s eyes flare briefly. “At last.”
“It’s a start. I haven’t painted in a while, but the back bedroom at the cottage is a good space. I’ve been thinking, with the afternoon light, it might be a good place to set up an easel.”
“Ivy would have liked that,”
Cora says quietly, turning her gaze toward the window. She sighs, watching as a mother walks past, pushing a buggy and putting a snack in a red mittened hand reaching out. “She would have liked that very much.”
I nod, watching her. “I should have come back when she was alive.”
Cora stands, pushing herself up slowly, and the chair groans from her absence. “What’s done is done. She left you the cottage and the lease for a reason. She always knew more than she let on.”
Her features soften. “I want you to stay. Desperately. I wish you’d never left to begin with and created this—this hole. But what’s done is done. We all made our choices.”
She hesitates, placing her fingertips on a candle in the window display. “Just . . . do it differently this time. Carve your own path and don’t cling to the past. That was always my mistake.”
She walks toward the door, and I feel a weight settle between us. Like this is a door she will close behind her and I will never be able to walk through it and find her again. “Wait,”
I say. “I want to tell you about him. About Matthieu.”
She stops in her tracks before turning sharply. “You can start by forgetting him. Don’t make him the reason why you’re staying.”
“Cora, we’ve been over this—”
“He’s not real, Carrie.”
She closes her eyes, like she’s trying to explain something to a stubborn child. “He’s not real. He will leave with the frost and never return. It’s the curse the mountains carry. He will break your heart, shatter it, and this time you won’t be able to mend it again. This time it will haunt you, it will hound you, as you try to find peace, searching for him across the mountain—”
“Stop,”
I say. I rub my hands down my face. “Just stop. If we’re both letting go of the past, then the stories—that book—”
“—is the only true thing I have.”
Cora smiles sadly. “You can hate me for it. Sometimes Ivy hated it. You can curse the book and all the stories it holds. But one day it will be yours, and then you will understand.”
“I love him.”
Cora draws a jagged breath, and her hand flutters to her chest. “Then it’s already too late. You’re cursed. You’ve returned, and the mountains have cursed you for leaving. You’ll have to work out how to break it, before—”
“Cora, stop. Just stop. You could meet him. You’ll see then, you’ll see what he’s like. I’m not cursed. He’s been searching for clues about his brother who went missing, he’s been here to get some closure, some peace—”
“Has anyone met him, Carrie?”
Cora cuts in. “Anyone at all?”
I open and close my mouth, wanting to retort that of course someone other than me has met him. But the day Howard called in, Matthieu left before he reached the door. And at the ice-skating lake we went to, I can’t remember whether he spoke to a single soul. Or when we went to the builders’ merchant, when he disappeared for a time . . .
I frown, but say nothing, not wanting to let that seed of doubt take root. Then I remember. “Ivy,”
I blurt out. “Ivy knew him. He helped her with the cottage last winter.”
“Convenient that we can’t ask the dead.”
She sighs and kneads her temples with the tips of her fingers. “Look, my dear, Howard’s unwell. He’s slowing down, he doesn’t want me to notice, doesn’t want me to do anything it seems . . . but still. He’s not well, and I thought you ought to know.”
“What kind of unwell?”
“The kind where you should be dropping by each day.”
Cora sighs. She inhales, then blows out a breath, and suddenly I have a fleeting glimpse of the world inside her. What I see is a tempest, a whirl of torment and sadness, so different from the hard and aloof exterior she presents to the world. “We’ve missed you. It wasn’t just your mother or Ivy you left behind. It was me as well, dearest. And now you’ve been back for a few months, and it’s like you’re still gone. Still absent.”
“You’re right,”
I say, moving toward her. I hold out my hand, take hers in mine, and feel the papery cold of her skin. “I haven’t been over enough. I’ve been too wrapped up in the cottage and my own feelings about being back here . . . I’m sorry. I’ll come by. Tomorrow. I’ll come by every day for tea. I’ll bring Matthieu . . . if you like.”
She searches my features, as though trying to find something she’s misplaced. Then she nods, gently removing her hand from mine. She doesn’t mention Matthieu. “Eleven. Don’t be late.”
Cora leaves the same way she arrived, with a gust carrying the smell of frost and fumes from the cars snaking past outside. I watch her through the window as she walks stiffly down the street and feel the sharp little needles of guilt I always feel. The unnerving sense I always have with Cora that something has been left unfinished.
But as I turn back to the shop, back to the small slip of a space, to the walls and shelves and dust, I can’t stop the smile spreading through me. I can buy this space from Cora and Howard and make a living in Woodsmoke. I can paint and create and live in that cottage under the watchful eye of the mountain, finding my way through every season of the year. I feel like I’m starting more than a new chapter. It feels like a new book, a fresh story all of my own making.