Something Had Gone Wrong

from a novel-in-progress

Something had gone wrong.

Gracie had arrived just when she said she would, on the final ferry of the day, the winter light dimming over the course of the two-hour journey east, and she unable to enjoy the drama of the ocean, the air too bitterly cold for standing on deck, the filthy windows cloudy with trapped moisture. A more avid lover of the natural world—her husband, Erik, for instance—would have braved the weather anyway, but when Gracie had to choose between beauty and comfort, she opted for the latter. Camping or a flush toilet? The world’s greatest invention wins in a landslide!

By late afternoon, the question of the view was moot anyway, the day dark as midnight. Gracie meant to listen to This American Life on her iPod, but the metal door to the passenger deck bounced open and clanged shut in a way that rendered Ira Glass hard to hear, though she did gather that the episode—a rerun?—concerned how crappy junior high school was. Well, yes. Who was going to argue with that? The heater was no help. It blew in noisy gusts that left Gracie overheated, even as her toes chilled. Her little-piggy digits would be a matter of concern if she didn’t get warm soon. Once she had thoroughly lost the narrative thread of the podcast, the wind came up, adding motion sickness to her woes. The ferry roller-coasted over the waves, a ride that would have thrilled her son, Jeremy, back in the day, and maybe even now that he was seventeen. Finally, she felt the bump of the ferry against the dock. Thank you, Lord, she mugged, if only for the deity in her brain. The edges of a joke about Noah arrived, then vanished before she could imagine a way to get any yuks out of a fellow passenger. She might have tried the man with the lightbulb-shaped bald spot on the back of his head. When she first settled onto her molded plastic bench, he had given her a brisk nod of the “I acknowledge your existence; now please don’t talk to me” variety. Not that she’d actually have said anything. She was voluble in her brain. Friendly but polite otherwise. Or maybe simply anxious about confrontation. The locals, so far, had not made a good impression on her.

At the mainland pharmacy, where she’d stopped to get the hairstyling gel she’d forgotten to pack, she stood in the aisle next to a woman with Pre-Raphaelite locks. “I love your hair. What do you use?” Gracie jutted her chin to the shelves of products before them.

The woman beamed at the compliment, picked up a bottle, and said, “Oh, this. I used to have ______ hair before I found it.” Gracie’s smile collapsed at the N-word, but her mouth could not form the needed reprimand. Who, oh, who, had actually voted for Trump? people had asked after the election. Here, perhaps, was someone, a member of the alien species that Gracie had, up till now, seen only on the TV or computer screen, yelling their terrible yells, posting their terrible posts. She did turn, though, and leave the store. Her way of saying, “That is unacceptable.” She was going to be alone for the next week. No one would be looking at her, the gel more habit than need.

Now that they had arrived, there was a wait to disembark. First, a few rattly pickups drove off the boat and heaved up the short hill from the dock. Then, some cars. Gracie hoisted her overnight bag on her shoulder, picked up her purse with its laptop, and followed the walk-on passengers—all ten of them—into the wind (whoa, it was cold) and the snow-packed parking lot, garishly bright thanks to floodlights attached to two large shuttered garages. Gracie’s scarf whipped up, as if to slap her in the face. The only other light came from a small shack on piers, likely the ferry terminal.

Gracie looked hopefully around, then checked her watch. 4:30 p.m. The appointed hour. Sarah Norway, the caretaker for a house on the northern tip of the island, was supposed to meet her. Her name seemed solid and long-suffering. Gracie anticipated someone galumphing out of her car, bothered at having yet another chore to do, and Gracie, despite her age, falling back (as she inevitably did) on girlishly excessive expressions of gratitude. Within five minutes, the two passengers who hadn’t left on their own had absconded with people in beat-up vehicles: a station wagon with wood paneling (who knew those still existed?) and a black sedan whose rust seemed to have been patched with pink metal. A car with vitiligo, Gracie imagined the pharmacy woman thinking, if the woman even knew the word, which she surely didn’t. (Was that an elitist thought? Was Gracie meeting racism with elitism? Like the fucking educated bitch she was?) “Island cars,” people called them. For the most part, they would not pass inspection on the mainland, though how Gracie knew this, she couldn’t say. This was her first visit to an island off the coast of Maine. And maybe to an island. Could that be? Fifty and never once been on an island? Well, there was Manhattan. Which didn’t count. She’d gone to Barnard to study art history and then to NYU for her art-appraisal certificate. And she’d visited the Cape. Not an island, of course, but a place with an awful lot of water.

The ferry reversed course and started to chug back to the mainland.

Gracie was here to appraise the art collection of a wealthy summer resident. The plan—made months ago, confirmed via email last week, and then again yesterday—was for Sarah to stock the fridge for a visit of up to seven days. “There will be milk, sandwich meat, toilet paper, and other supplies while you appraise the heart,” Sarah had written. A typo? Or was she really confused about Gracie’s errand?

Gracie had forwarded the email to her husband with a “Look what I’m going to do!” message and a grimacing yellow gumdrop, the best of the emojis that her computer offered, the expression implying a silly “Yikes!”

“Toilet paper!!” he emailed back. “Excellent!!!” He’d missed her point or was sick (and why shouldn’t he be?) of how much time she spent appraising (her own) heart. Stay in the marriage? Leave? It was a question she’d been asking since her honeymoon twenty years ago. She could not manage a convincing argument for either option and so dithered, like a foolish Edith Wharton character. She knew she wasn’t happy, had never been, Erik’s many virtues trumped by how difficult she found him. He could not go a day without snapping at her. Was her dissatisfaction fair or a character flaw, a sign of her own impatience with impatience? And what, in any case, should be done?

Gracie would have gladly forgone sandwich meat for a prompter pickup. She was anxious to see the art, especially the work of J. Morrison, a painter she had followed for years, her minor interest morphing into a more serious passion over time. Just a few weeks ago, the island collector—his name was Don Treadmill, and he tended toward work by those who lived or had painted in Maine—had purchased J. Morrison’s three most famous pieces, as exuberantly noted in the Port­ land Press Herald. Upon his death, Treadmill planned to donate the entire collection to an as-yet-unspecified museum. Presumably the Farnsworth or the Portland Museum of Art, though one of the private college museums—Colby, Bates, or Bowdoin—was also a possibility. Gracie had never met Don Treadmill, her boss having done the legwork there. Treadmill was a philanthropist/developer, whom people disliked in the way people always disliked developers. A whiff of something crooked or rapacious about him, his projects too often for luxury digs and hotels, though his politics were liberal and his causes irreproachable: hungry children and refugee rights. He might have thought of some other way to be fondly remembered, like not kicking longtime tenants (the mom-and-pop pizza parlors or family stationery stores) out of the buildings he acquired. His sons had suggested selling the art and letting them have the proceeds. But fancy updated kitchens in the children’s newly bought second homes would not immortalize their father in the same way. Even if they agreed to engrave “Treadmill” in marble over the stovetop spigot, a convenience that ensured no one had to move toward the sink for the water to fill a lobster pot. Still, the sons had finally convinced their father to let Gracie do both a donation and estate appraisal. Just in case he changed his mind. After all, the tax implications were different.

The trip was a present for Gracie. Ordinarily, her boss (and sole confidante), Dvinia Clark, would have made the journey. She was the one who handled the most valuable collections and the richest of clients, but she knew Gracie wanted to see the art herself. Knew, too, about her fondness for J. Morrison’s work. Gracie had recently gone to the Portland auction where a representative of Don Treadmill acquired “the triplets,” the nickname for the three Morrison paintings, each of a spooky girl who, interviews made clear, was some version of the children that J. Morrison and his beloved wife, Victoria, never had.

In the past, Gracie struggled over departures, not liking to leave Jeremy for too many nights, usually keeping appraisal visits to day trips or a quick overnight to New York. But Gracie knew he’d be delighted to have her gone, she the main source of his unhappiness, a nag (in his mind) about homework, computer time, curfew, and college applications, and she, quite frankly, was sick of how he barked at everything that came out of her mouth, even though her current parenting was so light touch as to border on negligence. Anything more—like insisting on family dinner—meant a blowup. And the blowup her fault. She made him too anxious to eat at the table, something wrong with the way she tried to make conversation, the thing she’d valued most about the noisy family in which she grew up. She had no trouble chatting with friends or strangers, but with her husband and son, talk was often a challenge, rarely flowing naturally. It was developmentally appropriate for her son to be irritated by her, Gracie knew, par for the course, and there were times when he liked to joke with her, yet she could use a break.

She had her own developmentally appropriate emotions with which to contend. Just this week, she’d received an email asking if she’d like to join a study on menopause and anger. “No, thanks, you fucking bastard,” she wanted to email back, a response she imagined would go unappreciated.

While on the island, Gracie would be sleeping in a guest bedroom at the Treadmill summer “cottage.” The suite had a spacious bathroom, bedroom, and anteroom, the latter equipped with an espresso maker, small refrigerator, and wine bar. Apparently, rich people were incapable of walking downstairs for a beverage. Perhaps such treks, in a large house, were simply too dehydrating. It made the home’s private gym with its spanking new exercise equipment all the more puzzling. As a visitor, Gracie had the luxury of criticizing the conspicuous consumption while enjoying it, an irony not lost on her. Long before she started the drive north from Boston, the tufted headboard and sheer drapes she’d seen in photos of the Treadmill bedroom beckoned to her. “Just stepping on the island will drop your blood pressure ten points,” Dvinia had said, but really it was the bed that made Gracie relax as she contemplated the travel. She was a hard worker who dealt with her troubles—the marriage that felt wrong, the son who couldn’t stand her—by working even harder. Somehow, though, resting in the Treadmill bed seemed like an okay thing to do, almost like a job requirement. (Treadmill bed: the oxymoron just now occurring to her.) And, oh, yes, a shower-stall-size sauna sat behind a pergola on the ocean side of the property. Dvinia advised against its use—possibly dangerous when alone—yet Gracie would most emphatically need to be defrosted soon. She put exploring the sauna on her mental to-do list, then stamped her feet on the ground, hoping to encourage some blood corpuscles to visit the narrow and unwelcoming capillaries in her toes.

She headed for the ferry terminal, supposing she could warm herself there, but just as she did, the shack’s light went dark, and a solitary figure, so bundled against the cold that Gracie couldn’t determine gender, stepped out of the building, down a few stairs, and across the snowpack into the parking lot’s remaining car. A prick of worry at the car’s departure. But it was only 4:45 p.m., too soon to be concerned. Sarah Norway was likely only running late. An inconsiderate day to run late, though.

An unwelcome memory of a person failing to show up long ago: The first time she’d had sex—later than most, in her senior year in college— she arranged to meet the boy for lunch a week later. He didn’t arrive. How this hurt her. She was looking forward to seeing him, had thought about him all week. And yet he cared so little for her that it slipped his mind entirely. (She had actually assumed—stupid, stupid—that the sex meant they were getting together, that sex, in general, meant something.) She’d told him off when she’d seen him next and afterward felt humiliated. How stupid to get angry. It just showed she cared. Well, she did, but worse to reveal that and to be sharp-tongued in public. Men finding her underwhelming was her life’s chorus, her son now joining in. Bad relationships, bad marriage, bad affairs (or sort-of affairs, really complicated things with male friends, and not even “good” affairs with all needs met, and bad, of course, to have had affairs), and bad mother to a son. “Maybe you’re not reading this all correctly,” Dvinia would say. “You don’t have affairs if you can’t get men to like you.” Possibly there was another way to write the narrative? Gracie dearly hoped she was right.

Sarah Norway was not a man standing her up, of course. It just brought back memories and made her eyes—again, stupid, stupid—tear. She pulled her scarf across her nose and turned back to the ocean, the lights at her back haphazardly highlighting the ripples of water. The depressingly early New England dark had its upside. Overhead, stars were spilled like salt on the black tablecloth of the sky. In the Boston suburbs, where she lived with Erik and Jeremy, she often forgot to look up, and when she remembered, the city lights obscured the view. Now, the stars whispered their message: Yoo­hoo, Gracie, we’re up here. And Nota bene: We are the real world. We are what you are supposed to be noticing. Like her family, the stars wanted to remind her that she did everything wrong. This very thought, if overheard by Jeremy, would have been met with venom. You are not the victim, he’d snarl. Meaning, of course, that he was the victim.

And he’d have a point, as it was the marital fighting during his childhood (at times explosive) for which Jeremy was now, and understandably, paying her back.

Erik, for some reason, was getting a pass.

She pulled her phone from her bag. No cell connection out here, as she well knew, but she looked out of habit. Jeremy chastised her for this reflex, though when she woke him for school, he was invariably in bed gazing at his phone like a lover. Perhaps he was dreamily lingering over an early morning confab with his girlfriend, he already having managed the true-love relationship that had eluded her for half a century. More likely, here was a piece of technology that meant that no matter the current residency requirements of his life, he had a way of getting the hell out.

“Fuck, it’s cold,” she said out loud and to no one. (She swore too much. Another thing her son didn’t like about her.)

Conveniently, she had a warm coat, not the stylish British tan wool one with black piping that she generally wore when she saw clients. Dvinia had advised her on clothing for this trip, emphasizing that if Gracie got something, it would serve her well in Boston too, this winter predicted to be as bad as the last. Dvinia was lovingly parental, and Gracie accepted her attentions as if she’d been denied loving parents herself, which she hadn’t. She felt inordinately hungry for care, all the same. Gracie shouldn’t make the trip to the island in one day, Dvinia had insisted. She should stop in Freeport, spend the night, do some shopping. Here was the company credit card, the coat a deductible expense.

“I went into L. L. Bean and asked for the warmest women’s coat they had,” Dvinia said of her own stop just a few weeks earlier, when she’d gone to visit friends for a Maine Christmas. “They came out of the back room with a sleeping bag with arms.”

Gracie had laughed.

“It’s the ugliest coat in the world, but it’ll keep you warm. Ask for it.” Gracie had. Now, she felt like a sexless, if grateful, hag. She would have been almost toasty, if not for the problem of everything the coat did not cover. Her face stung. Her fingers and toes were icy despite her gloves and boots. She could feel a chilblain forming on a left toe, an intermittent problem for most of the winters of her life, for which only now she had a name. Last winter, a doctor examining one of her wounded toes remarked that her flesh was “dissolving.”

“I feel like a Dickens character,” Gracie enthused, though she’d been almost sobbing when she limped into the office. “Little Nell?” Gracie smiled.

The solution, he said, either unamused or poorly educated in the humanities, was to move south.

“I live here,” Gracie said. “I have a job here and a family. The chain I forged in life, you know?” Why did she feel it necessary to lob another Dickens reference at him?

He appeared to think being clever was a form of one-upmanship, rather than of trying to get a laugh, something Gracie had attempted as a generous effort. She was trying to entertain another person, after all. She was trying to give him pleasure.

“Well, then,” the doctor said. “I prescribe warm boots.”

She had such boots, though at the moment, they weren’t helping. She’d be limping with sores by the time she returned home. Might have to wear slippers at work. Not an effective look for Dvinia’s South End gallery, even though, most days, Gracie was in the offices out back, working on her computer.

Slippers! Shallowly enough, Gracie actually cared about fashion

until things like the cold reminded her of the mammal she was. Damn. It was so damn cold. Where was the stupid caretaker? She hated the self-involved way her husband projected fury onto strangers—in other cars, at the end of phone lines, at airline ticket counters—who had inconvenienced him, yet here she was doing it now. Perhaps the woman had simply had a heart attack and was lying dead on her kitchen floor. Perhaps she had a quite compelling reason for not being prompt.

By 5:00 p.m., Gracie wondered if Sarah Norway wasn’t coming. By 5:15, she knew she wasn’t. What was Gracie going to do? She couldn’t stay here all night. Where could she go? There was not a building in sight beyond the garages and ferry terminal.

If her phone were working, she’d have called her husband, and he’d have provided advice and comfort, even though they’d fought (thank goodness not in front of Jeremy, who had left for school) this morning. About what, she couldn’t remember. She rarely could remember the content of their disputes, only the fierceness. Despite their troubles, Erik was a reliably good guy, never holding a grudge, a determined optimist always announcing things were on the upswing when they obviously were not. If she were to reach him, he’d immediately call the police, or whatever rescue system the island had, to fetch her, offering reassuring words all the while. Were he able, he’d undertake the errand himself. His generosity was really why she’d married him. It was on display from the start, and at that point, she had yet to date a generous man. (“It’s repulsive to see the way you just wait on him,” her sister had said about her previous boyfriend, who sat like a king as she hurried a meal to him. If anything, Erik was the type to hurry a meal to others.) But without a cell connection, she could not get his help. She shivered once. Then again. As soon as she noticed this, her shaking became more dramatic, in a way that felt half real and half performance, but if she was exaggerating, who was she exaggerating for?

Sarah had said quite clearly in the email (yesterday) that she’d see Gracie tomorrow (as in today). What could possibly be going on?

If Gracie started walking, maybe something would appear around one bend or another. Only, wouldn’t there be a vague halo of light if there were a home within walking distance? She could make out nothing, just dark and more dark. What was she supposed to do? Her sense of alarm rose.

And rose.

An internal refrain (ohGodohGodohGod) started up only to be shut down by a counterpointing ditty (Don’t be so dramatic so dramatic so dramatic). Maybe the ferry terminal was open? Surely it was heated. Once, Dvinia had had a client who kept a small Renoir in his summer home in a modest Maine fishing village. He never locked the door, hadn’t even installed an alarm system for his absences till the insurance company insisted. Perhaps the ferry-house employees were similarly lackadaisical about security? Gracie climbed a few rickety open-tread wood steps and pressed hopefully at the door. Locked. She jangled the knob. If she could find a way in, there might be a landline, or if not that, at least enough warmth to get her through the night. She was wearing gloves, so if she found a ladder, she could punch in the window, though the image that arose when she imagined this—a jagged piece of glass slicing the inside of her wrist, like a suicide’s razor—made her almost pass out. But without a ladder, even if the window were broken open, Gracie couldn’t jump high enough to reach the sill, do a pull-up, and drag herself (the gigantic coat protecting her from the glass) through the opening.

She’d have to walk and hope to discover something. Maybe a passing car? Her brother had had a friend who’d gotten lost in a snowstorm, the MapQuest directions (this being back before everyone had GPS) guiding him down the wrong road, no cell service available, the weather trapping him and his family, the mother having to nurse her infant and then her ten-year-old to keep them alive. Eventually, the father decided to walk for help. He died in the snow, though the rest of the family was discovered later that very day. An unhelpful story to have in mind, but Gracie couldn’t avoid it. It was like thinking of hiking tragedies (as she had, during her honeymoon) while on a narrow Alpine path, the very I­am­frightened thought pattern that might make one stumble. The ohGodohGodohGod started up again, this time a little louder. Might tonight be the night she died?

Jeremy! He’d lose his mother when he was still young. In another, less fortunate country, a mother’s untimely death would be just the tip of the woe-iceberg; a single death was nothing to write (one’s-bombed- into-oblivion) home about, when you were going to suffer through so many more. Here, though, raised with first-world comforts, he would have license to fall permanently apart.

Gracie had always supposed she’d die from cancer—it was what her family did, in the way that other families went camping or had barbecues—but also always feared being in a plane crash. She worried about random shootings, but mostly for her loved ones, her son at high school, that most dangerous of locations, and her husband in the state transportation building where he worked as facilities manager, the location clearly double jeopardy, being both a mall (well, a food court) on the ground floor and a government office above. Freezing to death— or something as absurd, say, as being pelted to death by Campbell’s Soup cans, an Andy Warhol–inspired notion that suddenly presented itself to Gracie as a real possibility—had never been part of her calculations.

And, oh, would Jeremy remember her only in terms of her faults? It was all he focused on now, and she’d have no chance to redeem herself. The time she’d yelled at Erik on a sidewalk during a family trip to Toronto, the time she’d stormed out of the car at a stop sign, unable to listen to Erik snapping at her any longer. (And why did Jeremy see just her reaction, never Erik’s commentary, never the thing that so angered her in the first place, as if she were a ball of fury that erupted for no reason?) The time—oh, of course she shouldn’t have done it!—when she hauled off and slugged Erik repeatedly on the arm. It would be the film loop in Jeremy’s head as a police officer announced: “At first we thought we had simply found an oversized frozen burrito by the side of the road, but it was actually a woman in an extraordinarily ugly coat. We have traced her to this address.”

That frozen burrito read you a lot of great picture books!

Her whole life she had meant to be a good person.

But she couldn’t imagine all this. No, no, no, no, no. At least she had the flashlight on her iPhone. She futzed a little, trying to remember how to access the feature, her annoyed son’s voice in her head. Had her own generation been so impatient when parents had trouble learning something? Though what did her generation know that their parents hadn’t already learned first? Once she figured out the swipe that allowed her to turn the light on, she had the hour’s first moment of comfort. The illumination was far more powerful than she’d expected, providing her a clear view of what was ahead, a road of snow framed by small hills of snow. Still, better than making her way in complete darkness.

She parked her overnight bag at the base of the ferry-terminal stairs. No point in traveling with the weight. She slipped her purse with her laptop over her right shoulder and headed up the hill to where it ended. Since neither the right nor left revealed anything but more darkness, she turned left. She knew from maps that Treadmill’s property was in that direction, if miles away, the island shaped like a string bean with the house at the northern tip. She wondered if walking on the side of the road would prove a danger, a passing car more likely to hit than stop for her. Surely, someone would come by. After all, it felt like the middle of the night but wasn’t. People would be up and about, finishing their workdays. It wasn’t the season for lobstering, but something must be going on. Buoy painting, trap mending, dusting of the pantry pickle jars?

The important thing was to focus on the end goal—not the job (the appraising she liked so much, the measuring and figuring and cataloging, the neatness of it), but the J. Morrison triplets. She’d seen reproductions in books and the originals from afar at the Portland auction. Those eerie portraits had moved her so in her late twenties and early thirties when she had wanted children but kept miscarrying. Later they offered hope, when she read more about J. Morrison and learned he actually had had a child. She’d read about J. and Victoria and their daughter, then looked up details about the marriage. It seemed a version of what she’d hoped for herself—the parents true soulmates, real friends, the kind of people who, had they lived in contemporary times, would have posted a Facebook picture with a “marrying you was the best decision I ever made” caption. How she wished she felt the same, instead of the press of her error. She and Erik were two puzzle pieces who could not be made to fit together, no matter how hard they tried, there being a mix of goodwill and fury on both sides. Divorce likely wouldn’t solve the problem, since it wouldn’t offer a viable partner (that seemed impossible, everyone feasible already married) but a sexless, unaffordable, depressing life: two crappy apartments, instead of a moderately nice house bought when the market was down. The logistics seemed mind-boggling, though Gracie regularly perused rental and real-estate listings. Maybe this? Maybe that? She couldn’t figure out how to make it work. And yet it was there, out in the world, the life she wanted. She somehow still believed this. Who didn’t imagine a happy ending? She’d get to it.

Offering her hope, the J. Morrison triplets would be at Treadmill’s among the Neil Wellivers and Joyce Tennesons, the John Marin, Lois Dodd, and minor Marsden Hartley. Treadmill owned a Philip Barter, two Charles Sheelers, a Paul Strand, and a Fairfield Porter. J. Morrison had been friends with Porter, and Gracie romanticized them and their forebears, the various Maine art communities where they’d summered—on Monhegan and North Haven, in Lincolnville, Ogunquit, or Cape Split, the children playing outside the open door of the studio, maybe people meeting up for cocktails at five. All those city people with their summer idylls, and their artistic visions to meet her at the end of this walk. It would be worth it in the long run. So she got cold! So she got very cold. Hardly the worst that people could suffer.

She trudged forward, slipped and righted herself, knew not to stuff her hands in her pockets. Years ago, her father had fallen when his hands were in his pockets. He hit an icy sidewalk nose first, his smashed-up face something she tried (unsuccessfully) to forget. Her father (a mathematician and statistician, whom everyone called brilliant) had been a powerful figure in her childhood, and anything that made him seem vulnerable and human shook the order of things, suggested there was not, in fact, a smart person directing operations on the small planet of her family. She and winter had been at war ever since, though her girlhood feelings about snow were previously fond. A memory of a power outage, when her family piled up the sled with groceries and went down the street to have dinner with the Graysons, the family with whom they routinely socialized. Another of building a giant snowball, and Gracie (the baby!) being placed gloriously on top with all her siblings surrounding her, in case she fell. Still another of convincing all the kids in the neighborhood to collaborate on a snowman village. Her own sociable childhood was a version of what she’d wanted for Jeremy, but it hadn’t worked. As a parent, she’d rarely built snowmen with him and had only occasionally gone sledding and skiing. When her son demurred on activities—he wanted to play on the computer—she eventually acceded. The outdoor activities tired her, if she was honest. Really, she wanted her husband to do it. He was the athletic one, both of her men long and muscly, though she was the one who did due diligence at the gym. She was good at searching the Boston Globe for puppet shows and story hours and children’s theater and making sure each day had one adventure. Erik actually liked skiing and hiking, but he liked staying home, fiddling alone on a carpentry project, even better.

What if something really did happen to her out here? Jeremy’s memories of her would not be fond. Currently, the family was recovering not just from this morning’s fight, but a terrible fight two weeks ago, when Gracie had completely flipped out at Jeremy because he’d said that his classmates had all received better holiday presents than he, and this greediness, his disappointment, given the hundreds she’d spent on him, given his general adolescent laziness and focus on first-person-shooter video games, made her crazy. He’d made the complaint as they were leaving a New Year’s Day party, where he would not engage with anyone. She went in one car, so she could stop at work, he with his father. She’d pulled over to send angry texts: You are so right, I forgot to get you a sports car and heated garage, a private chalet, hot­air balloon. Then she called from work, Just checking in to say hi, and see if there was anything I could bring home for you? A pony? Erik had finally gotten on the phone, in his own crazy (and familiar) rage at her: Would you just stop it? She hung up on him. Then Erik called, saying Jeremy had gone into the bathroom, locked the door, and swallowed some fertilizer they stored above the washing machine. He spit it right out, though, having the restraint Gracie didn’t. Gracie immediately reversed directions, raced home: Sorry, sorry, sorry. And Jeremy: You make me want to die. I want to commit suicide because of you. And then a day later, his conclusion: It’s okay to want things. True enough. Why had she gone so nuts? He could want things. Who didn’t? Oh, how she wanted the things she wanted. How she wanted to say, “Best choice of my life,” as she posted her wedding photo online. Was Jeremy now always going to feel guilty about desire, because of her?

And adolescent laziness? Wasn’t that really depression?

She was a good parent 95 percent of the time, but what did that matter? The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Everyone made mistakes—there were large yellow bird puppets who assured children of this very fact on public television—but not mistakes that made a teen want to hurt himself. It seemed impossible, but it was true. She was the third-person enemy in that most challenging of first-person games, Getting through Adolescence without Cracking Up.

Would this be his strongest memory of her? Her getting so mad?

Would he never leave therapy, first to process her rage on that day,

and then the shattering fact of her death, even if she was (or so he routinely told her) a terrible parent? Had she damaged him forever?

She remembered a friend telling her that she didn’t feel like a good parent unless her daughter said “I hate you” once a day. How that had cheered Gracie up!

She rehefted her purse on her shoulder. It seemed to grow heavier as she walked. Gracie’s thoughts about Jeremy were tangling with some about her college roommate, a young woman whose father would come visit on occasion and take everyone out for dinner. He seemed so warm and loving, full of funny stories, but her roommate talked about him as if he were a self-important idiot, all pretense, always telling you what la-di-da people he managed to meet in his work as a financial adviser. Gracie found him entertaining and liked his “brush-with-fame stories,” especially when they were about actors or artists or writers. She was such a sucker for that. Now, she had a vision—so clear it was almost a hallucination—of Jeremy at a TED conference, standing on a bare stage, saying to an understanding audience, “And then I realized, ‘It’s okay to want things.’”

Speaking of wanting things, Gracie really needed to pee. The options here seemed limited. She was hardly going to lower her pants and squat, per hiking etiquette. However, losing all control and wetting herself would make her colder. Once, her father had been unable to find a parking spot near the South End theater where she was in an after-school play, arty ambitions always. He’d dropped her mother and siblings off, then circled the streets looking for a space. In the end, he had to park far away. He peed himself rather than stop for a restaurant bathroom because he didn’t want to be late for her performance. But this couldn’t be true, could it? Her father, so proper, who always wore a suit to work, even when an entire generation had decided to let that formality go, letting himself sit, with the stink of dried pee on him, all through The Importance of Being Earnest? And why not just find an alley to relieve himself? He was too proper for that, yes, but also too proper for peeing on himself. Something about this memory seemed scrambled.

She heard a car coming down the road. Rescue! But when she turned, the road was empty, a tunnel of white. Yet she had quite clearly heard a whooshing sound. Her boot prints were already gone, as if they’d been immediately filled with snow, but it wasn’t snowing, so maybe it was sugar? Or maybe there weren’t boot prints in the first place, because she was walking on a road that had been plowed and not in actual snow? Her toes ached with cold.

Was Gracie getting confused? She knew she was out in the cold, but somehow she wasn’t shivering. She used to bake in blizzards, when the power didn’t fail. Maybe that was why she was thinking of sugar? She tripped over something, grabbed at the air, as if for the handhold of an imaginary railing. She fell all the same, a cartoon bubble blooming out of her mouth, the word Whoops suddenly aloft. She hit the ground knees first, palms next, her phone flying out of her hand and into the center of the road, the purse tangling around her elbow, the crack of her computer hitting the ground—broken? Snow worked its way into the gap between her gloves and coat sleeves. An ice bracelet. She hadn’t thought she could get colder and now she had. For a moment, she thought of the road as bed and a nearby chunk of ice as pillow, and lay down. Well, this is restful. Then, she pushed herself to her knees and crawled for the phone, which was at the bottom of the cone of light it projected into the air. She stood, feeling momentarily dizzy, but not fretting. Her blood pressure tended to the low. At night, she sometimes swooned when she got out of bed to pee. She didn’t have to pee now. How could that be, when she did before? Had she wet herself and not noticed? That didn’t seem possible.

It was okay to want things, and yet everything bad in her family life was about her wanting things. No snapping. A family outing with her son and husband, for less of the financial burden to fall on her. Oh, to arrive in a vacation city with them and not immediately hunker down in the hotel room in front of computers! All these wants had precipitated crazy fights. And, of course, wanting love, male attention in general, had triggered the two times she had wandered from the marriage. Could what she wanted, what she wanted right now—to see those paintings with everything they’d come to represent for her—be terrible for her family life? Disastrous even?

She lifted the phone to see what she had stumbled over, but she saw no stones or logs or clowns holding ankle-height limbo sticks. Something upsetting occurred to her. She forgot what, then remembered. As much as it pained her to do so, she removed a glove and started to type with a single finger into the Safari browser on her phone: “Symptoms of hypothermia.” But there was no service on the island. Of course. She knew that. So she should stop typing, but for some reason she didn’t. Not until she had typed every last letter. She had never, never, never felt so cold. Thank God for the phone’s flashlight.

The road ahead was still just an empty tunnel of snow, hugged by hillocks of more snow. Snow on the ground, the trees. Firs? She’d never been good at naming anything horticultural, despite living near an arboretum. Spruce? She had another upsetting thought. Out of the dark, something dark, a voice-over announced, as if she were not in her life, but in a film of her life.

What is it? she asked the narrator, and he said, “Your phone. You forgot to charge it.”

Surely not, she thought, but in a vague way, if you can think in a vague way. She had a memory of being teased (by her siblings) about being (in the morning, when she was so slow to rise and dress for school) a slow loris, after a fish that had the slowest metabolism of all living creatures, but later she learned the slow loris wasn’t a fish at all. It was some monkey-like thing with a toxic bite. Could that be right? Could what be right? the voice-over in her head said, as if it, too, were confused, and just then the iPhone’s flashlight went out, leaving her in the dark room of the night. She’d see the J. Morrison paintings, she knew, if simply because the fairy-tale belief that the story of her love life would have a happy ending suddenly sprinkled over her, like silver glitter thrown at a party. Oh, it was crazy how much she wanted that!

But the only glitter was high in the sky above her, and Gracie’s phone was dead.

Read more from Issue 16.1.