Entry 13

 

“We’re all strangers here,” she said. Then she smiled again again and turned back to the roses.

September 4

The Spirit’s Path turned out to be a walk.

Phillip gathered us on the lodge porch at eleven and, without explanation, led us down the slope behind the lodge along a row of white stones set into the grass at even intervals. Someone had painted them, and someone repainted them often, because not one was chipped. The stones ran past the cabins and the shed and ended at a split-rail fence where the lawn gave way to the woods.

“This is as far as the path goes,” Phillip said. “For now.”

He asked each of us to name one thing we would be willing to leave behind. Not a bad habit, he said. Something we loved.

Claire said her name. Harlan said his sleep, which he had already told me he’d given up years ago. Benita said her mother’s house. Remy said the city. Larry said a future. Eileen, last before me, said, “Everything, dear. I’m old.” They answered quickly, the way a congregation gives its responses in church. No one hesitated, no one laughed, and no one asked what the question was for.

When it came to me, I said, “Nothing.”

Phillip smiled. “Everyone leaves something.”

He walked back up the path and the others followed him. I stayed at the fence a while longer, looking into the trees. I couldn’t see more than twenty feet in. The air coming out of those woods was cooler than it had any right to be in the middle of summer.

Benita found me that afternoon. I had been avoiding her, as I’ve said. Her cheerfulness required an audience, and I didn’t care to be one. But she came upon me at the edge of a flower garden behind the women’s cabin, a place I hadn’t noticed the day before. It was well kept. Climbing roses along the back, old ones, heavy and blown open in the heat. Phlox and bee balm in front of them, a stand of foxglove, and a border of something low and white I couldn’t name. There was no hose, no watering can, no wheelbarrow. Nothing to say who tended it.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said.

I said it was.

She stepped in among the roses and began pinching off the spent blooms with her thumb and forefinger, dropping them into the pocket of her skirt. She did it without looking.

“You know your way around a garden,” I said.

“I know my way around this one.”

“Have you been here before?”

She straightened and looked at me, and the cheer went out of her face entirely. “We’re all strangers here,” she said. Then she smiled again, turned back to the roses, and began talking about Japanese beetles as if I had never asked.

The scent was very strong. I hadn’t noticed it until then. Roses, and under them something powdery and sweet, and I placed it before I could stop myself. Rose talc. My grandmother’s smell. The smell I had last met in a dream, standing before a tree with her face in it.

I left Benita to her beetles.

That night, alone in the cabin bathroom, I picked at a hangnail on my right thumb. It’s an idle habit. The skin came away, and the whole side of the nail with it, in one clean piece. There was no pain and no blood. I stood under the bare bulb looking at the pale strip of nail in my palm, and I knew that whatever was happening to my hands had nothing to do with dry air or hard water.

I wrapped it in a tissue and put it in my pocket, as if it were evidence I might need to show someone. I couldn’t have told you who.

The next morning I learned that Benita had said those same four words to Eileen before I ever arrived. Eileen told me herself. But that belongs to the next entry.

– Anonymous