The Hollow Year
First Chapter

Chapter One

The Fenwick woman died at 4:47 in the morning, which Enid noted on the chart the way she noted everything: without flourish, in the same handwriting she used for blood pressure and bowel movements. Time of death, 4:47 AM. Peaceful, family present. The family had not, strictly, been present — the daughter had gone down to the cafeteria for coffee at 4:40 and come back up at 4:52 to find her mother already gone, already arranged, already made to look like someone sleeping rather than someone finished — but Enid had learned a long time ago that there was a difference between the truth and the thing that let people keep living inside their grief without it swallowing them whole, and it was not her job to decide which one a family got to keep.

She stayed until 4:52 anyway. That was the part she never wrote down. Some habit in her, old and unexamined, would not let her leave a room until someone else had come to take her place at the bedside — as if a body needed a witness the way it needed, earlier, a pulse.

By the time she signed out it was ten past five, and the sky over the parking lot had that particular flat gray that Maine got in the first week of October, not dawn yet but no longer entirely night either, a color with no name that Enid had always privately thought of as between. She drove home along the lake road with her radio off, because six years of night shifts had taught her that silence was easier to drive through than other people's music, and because the fog came up thick off Amity Lake in the mornings this time of year, sitting low over the black water like something that had crawled out and hadn't decided yet whether to go back in.

She did not look at the lake as she passed it. She never did, particularly. It was just there, the way the hardware store was there, the way the Congregational church with its crooked steeple was there — a fact of the town's geography, not a thing that required her attention. If she'd been asked, that morning, whether she was afraid of the lake, she would have said no, and meant it, and been telling something that was true in every way she had access to.

---

The house was cold when she came in, which was normal — she kept the heat low, told herself it was about the oil bill, knew somewhere underneath that it was really about not wanting to feel too comfortable in a house that had never quite stopped being her mother's. She put her keys in the bowl by the door. She took her shoes off in the mudroom, the way she'd been taught to as a child, though there was no one left in the house who would have noticed if she hadn't.

It was the smell that got her first, before she could have said what was wrong. Coffee. Someone had made coffee in this kitchen sometime in the last several hours, and the pot was still faintly warm when she laid her palm against it, and for one full second — she would think about this second a great deal, later, turn it over and over like a coin worn smooth — she stood in her own kitchen with her hand on a warm coffee pot and felt something in her chest do the thing a held breath does when it's finally released. Oh good, she thought, with no shape to the thought at all, no name attached to it. Oh good, he's up.

Then she looked around the kitchen, which was empty, and had been empty for as long as she'd lived in this house alone, which was eleven years, and there was no one there to be up.

She stood very still.

This was, Enid would come to understand, the precise shape of the thing that would define the next several weeks of her life: not an absence with edges, not a door standing open where a door should be closed, but a feeling with nothing underneath it. A held breath let out. A relief with no cause. She had felt something like it perhaps four or five times before in her adult life — always in October, she would realize much later, though she did not clock that yet — small dropped stitches in an otherwise ordinary week, moments where her body registered a comfort her mind couldn't source, and she had always filed them the way she filed most things she couldn't immediately explain: under tired, under low blood sugar, under think about this later, and then never thought about them again, because the mind is a good and merciful editor and does not, as a rule, linger on sentences that don't parse.

She poured the coffee out. She made a fresh pot for herself, black, and stood at the window over the sink drinking it while the fog outside burned slowly off the yard, and told herself, in the specific brisk internal voice she used on frightened hospice families at three in the morning, that she had likely made the coffee herself before her shift and simply not remembered — she'd worked eleven hours, she was allowed to lose a detail — and this explanation held for approximately as long as it took her to finish the cup, at which point she noticed that there were two mugs in the drying rack, not one, and she did not, in eleven years of living alone, own a set of mugs that didn't match.

---

She slept badly and woke at one in the afternoon with the specific dry-mouthed disorientation of someone who has slept through the good part of a day and into the bad part of it, sun too high, light coming in wrong. She lay in bed a long moment looking at the ceiling, at the water stain shaped like nothing in particular that she'd been meaning to have looked at since spring, and had the thought, clear and complete and entirely unbidden: I should call Caleb.

She was most of the way through dialing before she stopped and asked herself, with the same clinical distance she brought to everything, Who is Caleb.

Not who's Caleb — she knew, in the way you know your own name, that Caleb was her brother, two years younger, that he had a scar across the second knuckle of his right hand from a table saw incident in his twenties that he'd never fully explained and that she'd never fully believed the explanation he did give, that he worked, on and off, doing lake maintenance for the town — dock repair, the boat launch, the little green pump house by the public beach — and that the last time she'd seen him had been, she was almost sure, two Sundays ago, at their mother's, where he'd eaten most of a roast chicken and made their mother laugh so hard she'd had to sit down.

The trouble was not that she didn't know who Caleb was. The trouble was that when she tried to locate the actual, specific fact of him — a fixed point, a piece of paper, a photograph she could hold up to the light — there was nothing under her hand. She sat on the edge of her bed with her phone in her lap, thumb hovering over a contact that read CALEB (CELL), and could not, for the life of her, remember the last time she had actually dialed that number and heard it ring, as opposed to simply knowing, the way you know the sun will come up, that she could.

She called it. It rang four times and went to a generic carrier voicemail, the flat automated woman's voice, the person you are trying to reach has a voicemail box that has not been set up. Not his voice. Not a full box. A number that behaved, in every technical sense, like a number that had never once been used to actually speak to anyone.

She told herself it was a new phone. People got new phones.

She told herself this the whole drive over to his apartment, above the hardware store on Main, up the outside stairs that always smelled faintly of cedar because the store sold firewood on the sidewalk in the fall, and she was still telling herself some version of it, thinner now, worn at the edges, when a woman she had genuinely never seen before in her life opened the door in a college sweatshirt and said, not unkindly, "Sorry — were you looking for Marcus? He's at work till six."

"This is—" Enid heard her own voice do something she didn't ask it to do, go up half a register, too fast. "This is my brother's apartment."

The woman — twenty-two, twenty-three, kind eyes, entirely unbothered — looked at her the way you look at someone who has clearly gotten a house number wrong, patient and a little amused. "I've lived here two years," she said. "You sure you've got the right building? There's another one over on Birch that looks kind of similar."

Enid stood on the landing with the smell of cut cedar coming up from the sidewalk and looked past the woman into an apartment she had been in — she was certain of this the way she was certain of her own hands — dozens of times. Different couch. Different everything. A framed photo on the far wall of two people Enid had never met, arms around each other, someone's actual family, occupying with total unremarkable confidence the exact wall where Caleb had hung, she would have sworn to it in a courtroom, a corkboard covered in half-finished sketches for a boat he was restoring.

"No," Enid heard herself say. "No, you're right. Wrong building. I'm sorry."

She went back down the outside stairs slowly, one hand on the rail, the way you walk down stairs when you don't entirely trust your legs to remember the job on their own, and she did not go looking for the other building on Birch, because some very old, very quiet part of her already knew there wasn't going to be a Caleb at the end of that search either, and that part of her was, for the moment, considerably stronger than the part that wanted to keep asking questions.

---

She sat in her car outside the hardware store for eleven minutes — she checked the clock, because checking things was what she did, it was the only tool she had that had never once failed her — and did not cry, because crying required knowing what you'd lost, and what she had, sitting there with her hands on the wheel and the engine off, was not grief. It was closer to the sensation of reaching for a stair that wasn't there. The lurch. The half-second of pure animal wrongness before your body understands that the floor has simply declined to be where it was supposed to be.

She thought: I will call Mom. Mom will say I'm being ridiculous. Mom will put Caleb on the phone.

She did not call her mother yet. She sat with her phone in her hand for a long while instead, watching the light change on Main Street, watching Mrs. Aldous — no relation to Tom, just an unfortunate coincidence of a small town's finite supply of last names — sweep the sidewalk outside the diner with the unhurried thoroughness of a woman who had swept that same stretch of pavement every day for thirty years and would go on doing it, Enid understood suddenly and with no evidence whatsoever, whether or not there was anyone left in this town who remembered why.

The lake was three streets over. She could not see it from where she'd parked. She found herself, all the same, aware of it — the way you're aware of a held breath, or a low hum in another room, or a coffee pot gone quietly cold on a stove no one remembers standing at.

She put the car in drive. She did not go toward the lake. She told herself this was because she was going to see her mother, and that was even true, as far as it went.

It would be some time yet before Enid understood that this was the first decision she made that October that was entirely her own — the small, ordinary, unremarkable choice to turn the car away from the water — and that whatever had been quietly making her decisions for a great deal longer than that had, for one moment, let her.

The Hollow Year