Entry 12

I couldn’t tell if it was compliment, a warning, or a piece of advice.

August 30

The group was given two hours after breakfast to relax before our first gathering mid-morning. It was to focus on what Phillip, who we now understood was the retreat’s facilitator, though its organizer remained unknown, called “The Spirit’s Path.” I expected it to be as vague as it sounded. Taking the time to stroll and reflect, I found Claire on the flat stretch of lawn behind the lodge. Proving my first impression of her, she had a yoga mat unrolled and had bent herself into some pose I couldn’t have named, though I recognized the concentration of someone counting silently. I hadn’t sought her out exactly. I told myself I was walking around to pass the time while the others had all gone to the cabins.

“You’re staring,” she said, without opening her eyes. I thought I’d been silent, but she knew I was there.

I apologized and she laughed, unfolding out of the pose with an ease that made me feel every one of my forty-two years.

“Sit,” she said. “You don’t have to twist yourself into anything.”

The grass was still damp, though the sky was clear, and I remember noting that nothing at this retreat ever seemed to fully dry—not the grass, not the towels, not the low fog that sat over the tree line in the morning like it was reluctant to leave.

Claire talked easily, the way some people speak about themselves without ever telling you anything. She had come from a city, she said, though she wouldn’t say which. New York most likely, given where we were, but it could also be Philadelphia, or Chicago for all I knew. She said she’d been doing retreats, seeking, whatever word suited the three days, for longer than she remembered. Perhaps her parents too her on them when she was a child.

“You get a feel for which ones are meaningful,” she said, “and which ones are just a weekend away with strangers.”

“And this one?”

She considered the question. “This one’s real,” she said. “I knew it the moment I arrived. Didn’t you?”

The answer was no, I had not known that, but I told her I wasn’t sure what real meant.

It was somewhere in the small talk that followed that she mentioned Harlan had always needed his coffee within minutes after waking up. She said it as an aside, the kind of detail you’d only know about a man you’d shared a kitchen with before. I hadn’t told her about the hurrying after him to the lodge that morning.

I asked her, as evenly as I could manage, how she knew that about him.

She blinked, and for just a moment the warmth in her expression went cool. Then she laughed and said something about Phillip mentioning it, or maybe Remy, she couldn’t recall, wasn’t it funny how retreats made everyone’s stories blur together.

It wasn’t funny. And it wasn’t the first inkling I had that these people, all strangers to me, knew each other somehow.

We talked another ten minutes about nothing, about her knees, and my knees, and whether the fog ever burned off before noon.

When I stood to go, she looked up at me and said, “You’re very observant, XXX.”

“It’s my nature,” I replied.

“It’s a good quality to have, especially in such a dangerous world. Stay that way.”

I couldn’t tell if it was compliment, a warning, or a piece of advice.

My hands were worse that night. The dryness at the knuckles had spread across the backs of both, a faint white cracking at the joints, like old paint on a fence. I told myself it was the well water, hard and surely heavy with minerals. Or the air itself, oddly dry compared to the dampness of everything around us.

But first … The Sprit’s Journey. When I began to know what Phillip had meant, and to understand vaguely why we were here.

– Anonymous