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By Root 992 0

dishes she assembled on the kitchen table (two place settings for breakfast,) the dull sheen of an unpolished silver spoon, the oily yellow of the butter, the blue tinge of the milk. Waiting at the parlour window, from which the guest house was visible, she became absorbed by the dusty, disintegrating tassels on a worn velvet curtain. What could be the purpose of tassels on parlour curtains? The shadows of the leaves on her mother’s oak tree trembled on the carpet at her feet. What exactly was the purpose of that tree? While she was pondering such questions she saw Oran Gilderson emerge from the guest house along with his servant, who carried a valise in his hand. Without looking in the direction of the house, Gilderson walked as briskly as his age would allow toward the quay where the skiff in which he had arrived the previous day was anchored. A murky blend of anger and disappointment was awakened in Annabelle by this sight. This was followed by a sense of distress so overwhelming that she was affected physically, could barely manage to remove herself from the window. For the first time in her life she went back to bed in the morning and stayed there until midafternoon.

This was to be the beginning of a spate of days so disorganized that Annabelle would not have been able to fully recall them in the future, had she the inclination to recall them, which would be far from the case. She lit no fires, she cooked no meals. When she ate, which was rarely, she picked up an apple in passing, or a crust of bread, perhaps some cheese. She made no drawings, and beyond fixing a particular match to a page in her scrapbook, she did no work of any kind. Weeds were appearing in her vegetable garden, flowers in the parched plots bordering the house died of thirst in the dry autumn heat. The bed into which she flung herself at any hour of the day or night remained unmade.

She neither dressed nor undressed, wearing the same blue cotton shirtwaist she had put on the morning of Gilderson’s departure. As the days progressed, the stains under the arms of this dress darkened and the cuffs at her wrists became more and more soiled. She did not wash; her fingernails became filthy and cracked. It was as if she had forgotten about her body and its functions altogether, as if her physical self had become simply a bothersome bundle that, as the result of an evil spell, her racing mind was required to haul around with it wherever it went. And in this racing mind sat Gilderson, as grim and pompous and unpleasant as ever, but tenacious—the idea of him like a warm hand glued to her shoulder as she moved from place to place. She was always moving from place to place because except for the few hours when she fell into the delirium that she now called sleep, she could not stop walking.

She walked through all the rooms of the house, up and down the halls, up and down the stairs, including those that led to the attic where Marie had once lived. She walked in and out of the guest house. “Lonely man, lonely man,” she whispered, looking at the faintly greasy dent his head had left in the feather pillow on the unmade bed. She walked around and around the circumference of the island, pausing only to glare at the distant lighthouses she had in the past been quite fond of. She began to play counting games: mentally cataloguing all the door latches on the island, for example, latches attached to the doors of the buildings that still stood, then picking through the collapsed wreckage of those that had gone down during one of the previous winters and finding a surprising number of latches there. She repeated the process with hinges and porcelain knobs, and then with panes of glass, broken (in the case of fully abandoned buildings) or otherwise. This inventory required a great deal of concentration; these phenomena, after all, had all been rejected by Gilderson, just as she herself, she now believed, had been rejected by him. Her table remained set for breakfast: two knives, two spoons, two forks, two folded linen napkins, her mother’s best cups and saucers.

The curious