The Absconding
First Chapter

THE ABSCONDING

Chapter One: The Call

The trick to repairing two-hundred-year-old paper is to stop thinking of it as paper.

Paper remembers. Fold it once and it will always want to fold there again, decades after the crease should have forgotten itself. Wet it and dry it wrong and it puckers forever, holding the memory of water in its grain the way a body holds the memory of an old injury, flaring up on days that have nothing to do with the weather. Del had given some version of this speech to every intern who'd ever stood beside her at the bench, hands hovering, afraid to touch anything. You are not fixing what happened to the page, she told them. You are negotiating with it. The page always wins in the end. Your job is just to make the losing gentler.

She had been doing the job long enough, thirty-four now and eleven of those years spent at a bench like this one, that she rarely thought about it in words anymore. Her hands simply knew: how much moisture a nineteenth-century rag-paper letter could tolerate before the ink began to feather, how long to leave a sheet under blotter and weight before you risked cockling it worse than you found it, which tears wanted Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste and which ones wanted to be left alone entirely, honest about their own damage. The Champlain Valley Historical Society paid her to sit in a windowless room on the second floor with a humidifier, a lightbox, and other people's histories, and most days she thought it was the best job in the world, because nothing on her bench had ever once asked her a question she didn't already know how to answer.

That Tuesday morning it was a bundle of letters written by a Vermont infantryman named Elam Priddy to his wife, Sarah, across the autumn of 1862 — water-damaged along the bottom third by some flood in somebody's basement a hundred and sixty years after the fact, the ink gone the soft rust-brown of old blood. Elam wrote about camp food and a mule he didn't trust and how much he missed the sound of Sarah moving around downstairs while he tried to sleep. He wrote like a man who fully expected to come home. Del had the humidification chamber running low and slow, coaxing the worst-cockled sheets flat one at a time, and she was close enough to the last letter in the bundle — dated eleven days before a creek in Maryland called Antietam, though Elam didn't know that yet, and neither, this particular Tuesday, did Del, because she made it a rule never to look ahead in a collection before the conservation was finished — that she almost missed her phone buzzing against the steel table.

She heard it the second time. Glanced over the way you glance at a fire alarm you assume is a drill.

WADE PRUITT.

She hadn't seen that name light up a screen in years. She hadn't spoken to Wade, in fact, since her mother's sixtieth birthday, three years back, when he'd stood in Constance's kitchen with a paper plate of cake balanced on one palm and told Del, gently, that she ought to call home more. She remembered thinking, at the time, that it wasn't really his business to say so, and being annoyed at him for the rest of the party in a way she'd never quite gotten around to apologizing for.

She lifted her hands off the humidification chamber before she picked up. An old reflex. You didn't touch fragile things with hands that might start shaking, and some quiet, competent part of her seemed to already know, a half-second ahead of the rest of her, exactly why they might.

"Wade," she said. "Hi."

"Del." A pause, the particular kind a careful man takes when he's laying his words out in order before he lets any of them go. "How are you keeping?"

"I'm okay. Working." She almost asked why he was calling, and didn't, because some animal part of her had already started bracing for the answer.

"That's good, that's good." Another pause, and then, in a different voice, the one he must have used his whole career for exactly this: "Del, I'm awful sorry to be calling you like this."

Down the hall, someone laughed at something — Priya, probably, on with a donor. The chamber hummed on beside Del's elbow, patient, doing its slow work on Elam Priddy's letter regardless of what happened next in the room. She would remember that sound for a long time afterward, the ordinary continuing to run on its ordinary gears right up against the second everything else stopped.

"It's your mother," Wade said. "Earl Dunmore went by this morning with her mail — she hadn't picked it up in a couple of days, and that wasn't like her, so he went and knocked, and when nobody answered he walked the property. He found her out by the hives, Del. I am so sorry. It looks like her heart, is what Dr. Reese is saying, but they'll want to do the full workup — that's just how it's done, not because anybody suspects different."

Not because anybody suspects different. She would turn that phrase over so many times in the weeks to come that it would wear a groove in her, smooth as a creek stone. In the moment it went past her the way everything else did, sound arriving a beat behind the room, the way it does underwater.

Something in her chest dropped away and didn't come back. She thought, absurdly, of her mother's hands — not her face, not anything that made sense to grieve first, just her hands, broad and sun-brown and always a little swollen at the knuckles from the stings she never fully stopped getting no matter how many years she'd kept bees. Del hadn't seen those hands in fourteen months. She realized, with the particular cruelty grief has for timing, that she might never see them again at all, and that this had apparently been true for hours already without her knowing it.

"When," she heard herself say, though it barely mattered.

"This morning, they think. Early. Doc figures she'd been out there a few hours before Earl found her."

"Before dawn?" Del said. "Why would she be out at the hives before dawn?"

A silence on the line she didn't like the shape of.

"I don't know, hon," Wade said finally. "You know how she was about those bees."

She did, or she had, once, a long time ago, back when knowing her mother had still felt like something she was good at.

They talked a few minutes more — practicalities, the kind grief hands you like tools before it hands you anything else, because tools are at least something to hold. The medical examiner's office in Montpelier. A funeral home in Rutland that had handled things for the family once before, though Del found she couldn't now remember whose funeral that had been, only that there had been one. Wade said the house wasn't going anywhere, and neither were the bees, and none of it needed deciding today. He said it twice, actually — the house isn't going anywhere — as if he thought she might need to hear it a second time, or as if he needed to say it a second time himself.

"Thank you for calling," Del said, because it was true and because she couldn't yet locate anything else true to say.

"I didn't want you hearing it from someone who didn't know her," Wade said. "She was proud of you, Del. Whatever else there was between you two. I want you to know she talked about you plenty."

Del said something back. She wasn't sure afterward what.

She sat a long while after the call ended with the phone still warm against her palm, long enough that the humidification chamber finished its cycle on its own and clicked over to standby, long enough that the letter from eleven days before Antietam lay flat and finished on the felt and nobody came to take it out from under the weights. She noticed, distantly, that her hands actually were shaking now, the thing she'd braced against a few minutes too late, the way you always did. She looked around the room she had spent eleven years of her life inside — the flat files, the bone folders lined up like surgical instruments, the good north light she'd fought the facilities department two full years to get installed properly — and none of it looked like it belonged to her anymore. It looked like a very careful, very controlled museum of somebody else's old life.

When she finally stood, it was to go find Priya and say the words out loud for the first time. My mother died this morning. Somehow saying it was the part that made it real, more real than Wade's voice had managed, as if grief required a witness before it would fully consent to arrive. Priya came around the desk and hugged her hard, said all the right things, said don't think about Elam Priddy, said do you want me to drive you home. Del heard herself decline the ride and promise, vaguely, that she'd only be gone a few days, and agree to everything else without feeling much like the person doing any of it.

She drove home to her apartment on the west side on some kind of autopilot she was grateful for and didn't examine too closely, and stood for a while in the middle of her own living room before she remembered why she'd come. A bag. She needed a bag. Two hours to Sorrel Falls if the interstate stayed clear, longer once the road narrowed down past Danby into the kind of two-lane county blacktop that didn't care how fast you needed to get somewhere. She pulled a duffel from the closet and stood over it for a full minute without putting anything in, because she found, standing there, that she didn't actually know what a person packed for this. Nobody had ever handed her a system for it.

It was while she stood over the open bag, holding a sweater she didn't remember picking up, that she opened her phone without quite meaning to and found herself, three taps later, in the last text thread she'd ever had with her mother. Fourteen months old. She hadn't looked at it since the day it arrived, because looking at it had felt, at the time, like something she could put off.

Call me when you get a minute, it said. Nothing urgent. Miss you, Del-bird.

She had meant to call back. She remembered meaning to, quite clearly — there had been a hard deadline that week on a manuscript collection, and then there had been another week after that, and somewhere in the space between one week and the next, calling her mother back had quietly stopped being a thing she was going to do and become, without her ever deciding it, a thing she had simply failed to do, the way unanswered things always did if you let them sit long enough in a drawer. She had told herself, more than once over the past year, that there would be time. She had believed it the ordinary, unexamined way you believe the sun will come up.

She put the sweater in the bag. Then the phone, screen down, on top of it, as if that would keep it from saying anything else.

Outside her window the light was already going long and gold across the lake, the ordinary end of an ordinary Tuesday for everyone in Burlington who wasn't her. Del zipped the bag, found her keys, and locked the apartment door behind her with the specific, deliberate care of someone doing a small task correctly because she couldn't yet trust herself with a large one. In the car, she sat with her hands on the wheel for a moment before she turned the key, trying to remember the last thing she had actually said to her mother — out loud, in a voice, not through a screen — and finding, with a small cold shock that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with shame, that she couldn't.

Then she started the engine, and pointed the car south, toward Sorrel Falls.

The Absconding