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By Root 889 0

The father downstairs was strange to me and unlikable, but the one I knew from the postcards was still here, with me, in my heart and on my high closet shelf. With one thing less to think about, I got back into bed and tried to go to sleep. I did, too, for three hours, until the phone woke me up. It rang and rang and rang ― my parents didn't have an answering machine, which seemed about right, because I don't think the phone had rung once since I'd moved home ― until it finally pulled me out of bed and downstairs, where the phone was. I picked it up and gave the usual greeting, and in response I heard a man whose voice I didn't recognize say, "The Robert Frost Place, Sam. At midnight," and then hang up. I put the phone back into its cradle, then walked into my father's room. I was prepared to wake him, but he was already awake. The lamp on the end table was on. There was a box of wine on the end table next to the lamp, red wine dripping from its spigot onto the floor. My father was sitting in his chair, a glass of wine in one hand, the open box of letters in his lap. He was staying up late, drinking box wine, worrying about the missing letters, the way another father might stay up late, drinking coffee, worrying about his missing son or wife.

"Dad," I said, "did you hear the phone ring?"

"Yes," he said, then drained his glass. He placed the glass under the spigot, filled his glass only halfway, and then gave the box a disappointed glance that let me know it was empty.

"That was someone telling me that he was going to burn down the Robert Frost Place. In so many words."

"Peter Le Clair," he said automatically. "Ten State Route Eighteen, Franconia, New Hampshire." He looked at me sheepishly and nodded. "I should have remembered that one."

Part Four

16

New Hampshire was pretty. For one thing, it started snowing immediately after I crossed the state border, which gave me the feeling that it never stopped snowing in New Hampshire and that if I turned around and looked back at Massachusetts, I'd see a solid line of weather ― on one side blizzard, on the other side nothing but palm trees and warm breezes. But I didn't look back to check. I kept my eyes straight ahead, on the road, because it really was snowing hard and you could hardly see a thing with all the trucks barreling northward, the snow whooshing and blowing in their wake and into my windshield. It was like driving behind a fierce and terrible tsunami with Quebec plates. Then one of the trucks got caught in a rut of snow, veered to the left, through traffic and off the highway, and jackknifed into a ditch, after which all the cars panicked and started skidding here and there, and it was like bumper cars that had lost their poles while going seventy, in the snow, with some horrible visibility. It was a real mess, and I knew if I stayed on the highway much longer, I'd soon be in a ditch myself or worse, so I took the next exit.

It was magical off the highway, still snowing hard but no semis and no high speeds and so more heavenly and not nearly as blinding and hazardous; all in all, it was a much better-looking New Hampshire. I went through about twelve towns, lovely towns full of white clapboard houses and snow-covered town greens and sensible white boxy Congregational churches and covered wooden bridges, and even a gristmill or two paddling their way through icy streams, not getting much done for all their paddling, but still plucky and hopeful. I wished that I wasn't just driving through and also that I'd learned to paint so I could be an artist and live in New Hanpshire and paint pictures of the towns. They were that handsome. I drove by an inn in Red Bell, and there were a half-dozen cars parked out front, all of them with out-of-state plates, people obviously on vacation. I'd never been on vacation myself, not really, and now I knew why people did it. People went on vacation not to get a break from their home but to imagine getting a new home, a better home, in which they'd live a better life. I knew this because as I drove, the hole that was me