Edie trailed Mr. Linnet down a muddy track that led out from behind his garage and followed him under a dark canopy of tree cover. She drew in long breaths, slow and full, savoring the lure of open air. She was relieved and enlivened to be out in the field again, clomping along in her thick work boots.
When she’d dug these boots out of her Mazda’s overstuffed trunk that morning, they were closer to worn-out than she’d remembered. The soles had rubbed down in angles so severe that she wondered how she could have failed to notice before now, how her spine and hips could have grown used to the janky slant they must have exerted over her whole frame, day after day, as she stooped and crouched over worksites. From the Mazda’s trunk, those boots had seemed to judge her these past months—mock her, even—as she sat in the tin can office, behind a straight-job desk. Like a chump. Like she’d sworn on her life she would never do.
Once the boots were in her hands again, she had sat on the lower rim of the open trunk for a long stretch of time, examining the ridges of dried mud in every crevice, preserved from many months ago, from her last dig. She’d run her fingernail along the underside of each ridge and flaked away delicate specks of dirt, watching each one fall onto the asphalt.
During their initial phone consultation, Mr. Linnet’s voice had betrayed all the hallmarks of a goodhearted layperson who knew he’d stumbled onto something curious but had no real idea what he ought to do next. By turns, he spoke with excitement and wariness. Edie knew and understood: this unexpected feature of his property had exhilarated his sense of adventure and good fortune.
Mr. Linnet had recently retired, he’d told her. He and his wife had fled the escalating construction sprawl in Knoxville, and, perhaps in a rush, they’d purchased this generous property, which stretched several acres in all directions from the newish, outsized McMansion at its center.
Atmospheric thickets, laden with blackberry cane, encircled the land closest to the house, but beyond those woods lay broad handsome meadows on every side. Each meadow was sectioned just right for selling off as a single-home plot, Mr. Linnet said, if life came to that. But she could hear the property development gears already turning in his mind as he spoke—he was picturing the bounty his investment would yield, whether they needed the cash or not.
Edie freed her pant legs from the snares of blackberry thorn that were slowing her down. A quick flash of pain shot through her hip, but she double-timed it to catch up to Mr. Linnet. When she emerged from woods into sunlit meadow, he was standing uphill from her in the high grass, fists resting on his hips, propping up the overhang of his torso.
Mr. Linnet gestured up the sloping stretch of the field, where at its center a single gigantic hackberry tree towered over a slight dark swell in the land. A vast web of raised pale gray roots surrounded the trunk and some odd-looking ground. Edie couldn’t look away.
“There she is,” he said. “She’s quite a beast. You can see what I mean. Big enough to swallow a house.”
Mr. Linnet had stumbled on the probable remnants of a homestead that some locals had claimed never existed. A young farmer and wife with no sense, no skill, no progeny. They’d lost what little they had, and then they’d left home to do it all again somewhere in the far west, where they could get land for nothing. Life had come to that, Mr. Linnet told her.
Edie drew closer to the tree as Mr. Linnet shared what morsels of the story he had been able to gather from his neighbors. To build the farmhouse in this location the young couple had picked what looked like a quixotic choice. Dead center of the wide slanted meadow, the house would have stood beneath the field’s lone tree—this hackberry, which would have been young then, so long ago, but must have promised to grow.
“Like a puppy with big paws, I guess,” Mr. Linnet said.
Grown the tree had done, beyond any reasonable expectation. The young couple must have watched their hackberry grow beyond their plans for pleasant shelter from the sun. But then maybe they watched it keep growing: beyond their best guesses, the reassurances of family and friends, the neighborly concerns of those who’d lived here longest, and in the end, beyond their worst fears. Who knew? Maybe they watched as the hackberry’s uppermost limbs arched across their roof like a great claw, while its uppermost roots pushed through the stacked stone of their home’s foundations, then right up through the floorboards, like a sea monster breaching the hull of their ship. But maybe by then they’d fled west and left the place to its quiet ruin.
Edie circled the perimeter of exposed roots, her eyes scanning the ground for root displacement, unexpected topography, unusual coloring. Assessing these first features, checklist-style, was just a reflex of her training. Her first inclination was to exert discipline when she could feel her hands tingling with their most natural, most elemental urge—to dig. All the signs looked obvious. A structure had stood here: most likely a house, built sometime, she would guess, in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
“Once you get your GPR down here, we’ll know more.”
Mr. Linnet had done some Googling, she could tell. The rapt silence of her concentration made him more animated, and out came tumbling his own research and theories. Edie was used to that reaction from the owners of land that held potential archaeological sites. On one hand, this kind of discovery made a place special, perhaps immeasurably so. On the other, such finds could stall years of development plans, at times blowing up financial commitments for multiple parties raring to go.
Here, at the starting gate of any field project, Edie had learned how to project herself as immovable yet understanding. Her mentors had drilled into her the truth that, as a woman in such moments, she would need to inhabit a presence much larger than her physical size. When she had first started out, that role felt like a character—she would imagine herself wearing a thick, bulky protective suit, of the kind you’d wear when handling hazardous materials. From inside this suit, she was unreachable. But by now, twenty years into sitework, all she had to do was to incline her chin a couple of inches at the right moment, until she could see the point sink into the authoritative men who towered above her.
When her father lamented that he had no photos of his only daughter’s life to show his friends—no grandbabies, no closing day on some modest, charming starter home—she’d sent him an enlarged, framed shot taken by a dig-mate. In the photo, she stood in front of a giant yellow bulldozer surrounded by men head and shoulders taller than she. Her face was calm and resolute, theirs bloated and baffled.
Mr. Linnet and his Googling didn’t make much of an adversary. In fact, she liked him. “Perhaps I’ll get the radar,” she said, nodding and standing back. “One step at a time. We can talk details tomorrow. I’ll look into getting a survey started, and then we’ll see.”
Mr. Linnet’s bright-eyed eagerness slipped. Edie warmed to him then. Maybe she had no need to act so inscrutable toward this man. After all, Mr. Linnet wasn’t a cutthroat developer churning up a field of ancient graves to build a Walmart. He had only bought a meadow. And now that meadow had turned out to hold more than he’d expected. Her training could be tough to modulate. But until now she hadn’t realized how much she missed those Walmart fuckers.
She shifted her weight toward Mr. Linnet and tried a smile. “Tell me more about what you’ve learned.”
*
Edie raced home from the Linnets’ property, hoping not to be late for her Skype date with a couple of her oldest friends. She had first met Sonia and Kenny when they were fresh out of undergrad. They had all signed on for their first field school excavation, deep in an obscure tangle of the Costa Rican interior. When she arrived as a field school virgin, Sonia was pure Willa Cather—a wispy, white-blond Nebraskan who spent every day of her time in Costa Rica sweating profusely as she worked, every exposed inch of her skin wrapped in bandanas and torn-up mosquito netting. Kenny, a Jamaican-born Londoner, was equally young and eager to dive into field work. Determined to conceal how citified he’d grown after two decades pounding English pavement, he’d resisted all the speeches they’d heard from their site bosses about staying hydrated. Halfway through the second day, down he went, smashing the beautifully prepared test pit he’d spent the afternoon making with painstaking rookie pride.
Sonia and Edie both adored Kenny from that day on, but Sonia was the one who’d made that love official. Edie was sure their marriage would tank—what else could two archeologists do but starve and fight and steal each other’s jobs? So far, though, they’d made it work, and now with two young sons.
Edie marveled at their unbounded willingness, the sheer effort involved in making a family life function at all. She knew she’d been lucky to score her current gig—Preservation Specialist. She oversaw numerous collections of regional artifacts newly brought together under one roof, after each respective collection’s funding had shriveled to nothing. At forty-three, Edie had found her first full-time, salaried position. Funded for a full year, with a (likely meaningless) promise for a second.
Officially lucky—the envy of most of her contract work peers, she knew—she felt guilty to be chafing so much against the job’s constraints. She had resolved to approach this year of staying put as a new kind of field research. A radical experiment in Wanting What Other People Seemed to Want. So far, though, she had no idea what to make of her findings. She was bursting to swap notes with Sonia and Kenny.
After barreling into her duplex’s driveway, she grabbed her bag from the Mazda’s front seat, toppling stacks of paperwork onto the floorboard. She ran inside and plopped onto the couch. A few moments’ scrambling on her laptop and the bubbly music played. Up popped Sonia and Kenny, heads craned over a small kitchen table. They looked exhausted and overjoyed to see her.
“Where are you located, exactly?” Edie asked, aware that she couldn’t seem to stop waving at them. That she could see their wonderful faces moving and speaking in real time, though she was in Tennessee and they were somewhere in Scotland, still seemed miraculous.
“God knows,” Kenny said, toasting her with his beer. “Another disastrous late-medieval campaign. You know, the long pikes.” He grabbed one of his sons’ toy lightsabers and pretended to jab the laptop’s camera. Puffy rings beneath her friends’ eyes told Edie that sheer exhaustion alone kept them from elaborating further. She had already received lengthy emails, bursting with detail about period battle implements.
“I’m going crazy with the boys,” Sonia said. “We’re in a hostel, for fuck’s sake.”
Kenny shook his head. “It’s not a hostel.”
Sonia opened a beer beside the one she’d already drained. “Fine. But it smells like one.”
Edie set her laptop on the coffee table and stretched out across the couch, relieved to hear the rhythm of friends speaking a language that had come to her like she was born to it. They were complaining about the dig: the absurd time pressure and the patchy work done by inexperienced students they’d hired. Technically, Kenny was running this job, and he’d hired Sonia. But they worked as a team whenever possible, meaning that whichever one of them wasn’t in charge this time worked for no more than the students did, which was next to nothing. Sometimes they worked for actual nothing.
Listening to them was like a lullaby. Soon Edie grew drowsy. Her eyes drifted away from the screen and around the room. Months into her lease, she’d made no progress unpacking. At one end of the room was a heap of duffels, cardboard boxes, and plastic crates. On the bathroom counter sat a faded, grungy toiletries bag that she hadn’t emptied for at least five years. She glanced down and realized she’d never taken off her boots. The duplex had come furnished, and now this rented beige couch had two big heel-shaped stripes of dirt smeared across its seat cushion.
Just then, two boys crashed into Edie’s screen, hanging over the shoulders of their parents and waving hello. They had grown—limbs longer, voices richer, both boys’ heads sprouting mini-dreads. Their father had chopped his, years ago now.
Kenny planted noisy kisses on their cheeks, told them to say goodnight, and wrangled them off screen, headed for baths and bedtime. Sonia watched them leave and then turned back to lock eyes through the screen with Edie. A twenty-year friendship relaxed into some moments of fond silence.
Then Sonia leaned closer. “How’s your hip?”
Edie cringed at the question. “It’s better now. It may get worse. Other joints may get worse. Not much else to say.”
Sonia nodded. “And the job?”
“It’s closer to my Dad. He likes having me around.”
Sonia waited for her to say more.
“The job’s important. These collections need a home. But I’m starting to feel like that boozy woman who runs the orphanage in Annie. The scheming one?”
“Miss Hannigan?” Sonia choked a little on her beer as she laughed. “Didn’t she lounge around in her lingerie? I see you won’t even take off your boots, even though you’re an office kitty now.”
“Actually, I was out today on a consult. Farmhouse, I’m guessing 1870s. But I don’t know how to tell this guy that we really shouldn’t dig.”
“Show him all your orphans,” Sonia said. “Most of them probably came from the same kind of sites, right? Who needs more loot from yet another American farmhouse?”
“I guess. No, you’re right. There’s no pressing need to pursue this. But then, I’m out there, on what could be a fresh site, standing beneath this tree—I mean, do you want to be doing this forever, working like the way you are?”
“Shit no,” Sonia said. “First chance I get, I’d teach, curate, whatever. Get my boys a real life. Kenny’s burned out too. But what are the odds we both find something together? And at the same time?”
Edie sat up and plunked her boots onto the coffee table, rattling a thermos with a fancy water-filtration lid—a gift from an old colleague. She watched it settle. “Sonia, do you ever hear from Jack?”
“Jack? There’s a throwback.” The voice was Kenny’s. He dropped back into view, slipped his hand around the crook of Sonia’s elbow. “Gone off the grid by now, I’d expect.”
Without warning, the faces of her friends froze. Sonia and Kenny remained arm in arm, smiling at the memory of another old peer. But from behind the unmoving digitized masks, their voices kept calling out to her: “Edie? You there? You off the grid too?”
*
Edie set out to find whatever she could about the farmhouse under the hackberry. Records were scarce, but she could verify that a young couple had lived on that land during the period that aligned with her preliminary impressions. But that was all she could pin down. And for several days now she’d been ducking Mr. Linnet’s calls, two so far that workday.
One major disadvantage of working this straight-time office job was that other people knew where to find Edie and expected her to be available. For some reason, this fact had shocked her to the core. She had expected the office to feel something like a tomb—that she could disappear into the quiet, temperature-controlled archives for hours at a time and that nobody would notice. But the outside world bore down in unexpected ways.
Grant applications were constantly due, their forms labyrinthine and maddening to complete. Each defunct collection which her archive had absorbed came with its own loose ends. Items of dubious provenance that she was expected to authenticate or purge. The fallout from former curators’ dropped balls. Petty disputes surrounding transfers of ownership. Because of the perception that her archives had actual money to work with, she was also inundated with calls from panicked archivists and small museum owners across Tennessee and the surrounding states, all hoping to score emergency funds to keep their doors open a little longer. These were Hail-Mary calls, she knew. Enduring them pained and discouraged her. Her own budget had already shrunk once during the seven months she’d been here. She had nothing to offer these small-town collections and their keepers.
She pictured them calling from aging rooms, surrounded by cases packed with neglected history. Displays of long-gone industrial items, mementoes of local personalities, totems of Depression-era life. Where could it all go? Because Edie was here to answer the phone, was she really the one to determine which objects should be preserved and which should be tossed? Or which ones should be kept in the ground? More and more in recent years, she had heard from curators and archivists: those in the field must dig less. During those Hail-Mary calls, she heard all those colleagues’ voices again.
Calls like Mr. Linnet’s were less frequent, but no less awkward. His was the only one so far that had led her to take any action. Sometimes she heard from local retirees heading down the genealogy rabbit hole. Putting them off could be a challenge—they were persistent. They just wanted, if she didn’t mind, to take a quick tour through every record and archive in existence. Plus, men like Mr. Linnet could be combative, even hostile, if they knew that her archive had received federal grant money. “You work for me,” they were apt to bark if they didn’t get what they wanted right away.
So far, though, Mr. Linnet himself had been patient and good-humored. But Edie was still dodging his calls. She didn’t want to discourage him from investigating further. She’d been hoping for some jewel to glimmer from the research, something that might clinch the interest of a grant committee or justify a spot in her own archive’s cases. But so far all she’d found was the life of a young man and a young woman, joined in an unremarkable marriage contract, who’d signed unremarkable land contracts. Nothing further.
Edie had tried on that life herself once, as a young woman just out of school, fallen into marriage and home. Lifetimes ago now, she thought of those scant years of youthful marriage as a narrow, arid strip of sediment somewhere inside her—all interstitial material. No real memories had lodged there for the long haul. Those stories had flaked away below her feet as she got up from them to leave.
Hoping to escape the office phone, she slipped out the archives’ back door and into the narrow strip of alley she shared with the pizza place next door. Unwrapping her sandwich as she headed for her parking spot, she looked up to catch her father leaning over the Mazda’s dusty hood, scribbling a note to leave on her windshield.
“Such a primitive gesture,” she called out, startling him. “Isn’t there an easier way to communicate?”
“Someone hasn’t been answering her phone all week.” He pointed to the archive building. “And that door buzzer’s still broken.”
She invited him to sit with her in her car while she ate, but he laughed off the suggestion. From dashboard to trunk, the ancient Mazda was weighed down by the accumulated detritus of her piecemeal life—nearly twenty years of contract sitework. There was no room for even a casual passenger. Instead they leaned against the driver’s side, and Edie ate her sandwich.
“You okay?” she asked, between bites.
For her father, the years since her mother left him had unfolded in the opposite manner to her own years of divorce. His marriage remained the only ground he knew. That abandoned city stood intact but emptied, a gaping strangeness from which all other life had vanished. For all her father’s love, Edie knew that when he wandered its echoing streets, she was no longer there either. He marveled alone at that city’s stillness, scanned darkened windows for some sign of whatever disaster had led its population to flee, or vanish. Answers were irrelevant. He would never stop searching.
She studied him while she chewed. Flames of psoriatic rash coated one arm from the wrist up past the sleeve of his T-shirt. More dotted the back of his neck. These patches had worsened in recent months, or else she was noticing them more keenly now.
“You taking your injections?” she asked.
“It’s bullshit. Too many side effects.”
“You could be doing better than you are.”
Her father turned sharp. “You seen a doctor at all?”
Edie stuffed her mouth with sandwich. For years, her joints had shown signs—it was hard to deny that she’d inherited some version of what afflicted him. But a life spent moving from dig to dig to dig—no insurance, no continuity—had been enough to shut down that conversation. Then, during her last contract dig before landing this job, she’d been alone out on a site when her hip and legs had ceased to function, without warning, stranding her overnight in a freezing trench on a far high cliff somewhere in the Alleghenies of southern Pennsylvania, a peak called Blue Knob. The finds from that dig had disappointed—scant bits of pottery and metalwork, same as previous sites covering the area. What she’d discovered there instead was her own terror—a new, blinding source of pain and helplessness.
“I knew it,” her father said, rapping his knuckles against the car door. “I thought the whole problem was that you were one of those poor, unfortunate souls toiling away with no benefits. Now you’re more than halfway through your contract, and still no doctor? That’s about something else.”
He pushed off the car and stomped away from her, grumbling under his breath. She watched him lumber down the alley, growing smaller against the high walls of the buildings. He waved goodbye without turning back, and in seconds, he’d turned the corner and gone.
Back in the office, just as Edie sank into her desk chair, the phone jangled, and before she could remember that she had resolved not to answer it again the rest of the day, she’d picked up.
Mr. Linnet’s voice bounded toward her, relieved: “Finally I caught you.”
Edie bridled a wave of pissed regret for having answered. She thumped her fist against the desk while trading a few strained pleasantries with Mr. Linnet.
But he was not going to be put off any longer: “So. What’s the good word?”
“Mr. Linnet, there are factors to consider beyond what items a dig may uncover. The cost of preservation, finding an appropriate destination for any artifacts. And for a site of this kind? The likelihood of unique finds just isn’t that high.”
“What do you mean, unique finds? Why wouldn’t they be unique?”
“In my own archive—in hundreds of archives and museums and collections—this farmhouse has been found plenty of times before.”
“Of course it hasn’t been found.”
“Some in my profession would say this house has been found far, far too many times. The territory’s more than covered. This story’s been told. Some would say, who gives a damn about one more mountain farmer and his wife?”
“But what are you saying? You don’t think it’s worth a professional’s time?”
“I’m saying I’m drowning in this stuff.” Drowning, but her throat had gone dry.
“Well, then, maybe I’ll just have at it myself. Rent a backhoe, get a metal detector.”
“No, no, no. That’s a bad idea.” Edie rubbed her forehead with her free hand. Her knee was bobbing up and down, clanking the underside of the desk. “Mr. Linnet, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, or how to look, then when you dig, you’re likely to wreck what you hoped to find.”
“Why does that matter? To hear you tell it, nothing worthwhile is down there anyway.”
Edie felt a current of rage shoot through her fingertips and her lips before she could hear her own voice, growing louder and sharper with every word: “Leave the fucking dirt alone.”
Nothing but stunned silence on the other end of the call. She was standing now, the chair rolled away from her desk and the phone cord taut.
She spat the words: “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
*
Edie retreated into the warrens of her archive. Laptop under her arm, she headed for the farthest, darkest corner. She wanted to be surrounded by rows of overstuffed, forgotten display cases and find a buffer from the world, here in this place that seemed like the definition of a dead zone.
But of course the wi-fi was plenty strong, and even as she lamented that fact, her fingers moved to her laptop’s browser unaided by conscious thought. She clicked through the row of open tabs on the screen again and again.
Research results for the Linnet property offered nothing new. She opened a fresh tab and typed a new search. Along with Sonia and Kenny, Jack was one of the few of her early cohort who seemed to survive the attrition that claimed one good colleague after another. They’d been too alike to be a couple—both were diehard nomads. Jack was known for loading himself down with specialized field gadgetry to a strange, cumbersome degree. Picks, trowels, thermoses, penlights, cords, duct tape rolls, obscure instruments of measurement—they all clattered as he approached a work site, warning everyone who was coming. Sometimes they’d lingered on a site long after dark, after everyone else had gone back to their motel rooms and RVs. She remembered once trying to suppress her laughter at the sounds of his gear clanging when he pressed his torso against her, the cold stones of a centuries-old city wall against her back.
Now she Googled Jack, something she’d never done before. And it was the easiest research result she’d found in years. Scores of photos, mostly taken by a pretty new wife, showed him smiling over a birthday cake, holding twin toddlers on his shoulders, grilling out on a patio. He’d been teaching social sciences at a prep school for three years.
She shut the tab. Before she could change her mind, she opened another and typed in the name—that beautiful young husband. The search results flashed in front of her, yielding nothing. She tried a variation of the name. Then his middle name. His name alongside his hometown, and then alongside their alma mater. How stunning to discover that someone could still disappear from view.
But then again, that short interlude of marriage and domestic ties had disappeared somewhere within her, silted over by her truer path through adulthood, but above the rich, foundational soil of childhood.
All the years she had worked in the field, she never felt estranged from the obsessive, awe-addicted kid she’d been. The one who had tried to make mummies from dead birds that she found in her neighborhood, burying them in glass vases from the kitchen cupboard so that years later she could dig up these “tombs.” Her mother—who valued a good manicure, a fine brooch—was horrified by her daughter’s act but swayed by her explanation. Both her parents had holed up as tenured academics for decades now—her mother in Nashville, her father in Knoxville. Each passing year, her life made less and less sense to them.
Sometimes she felt like she was being hollowed out, everything that wasn’t the job slipping away. Her sleep was thinning and fraying. Most of her friends’ respectable lives were in the rearview now, fading from her understanding.
The disastrous episode on her last contract dig site had only pushed her further down this strange trajectory. Several weeks into the job, she started hiking Blue Knob’s upper slopes. Officially, she was surveying for other potential dig sites, but in truth she was antsy and distracted. She ambled downhill through thick undergrowth of fern and blueberry. But on the climb back up, she had to stop more frequently than usual, resting her spine against tree trunks. By the time she released her assistants back to their motel rooms that evening, she knew she had to get off the mountain for a night.
So she drove North. At first, she was just trying to get out of there, but then by late afternoon she was driving into the Susquehannock National Forest, headed for the Dark Sky Reserve deep in its interior.
She found an open spot in the observation field and flung out an old flannel blanket onto the ground. A few dozen other stargazers surrounded her. Most kept their voices hushed, in deference to this protected stretch of sky. She wondered if they knew they were doing it.
True dark fell quickly there, shifting something inside, disarming her. That night was a new moon. Above, the star-fields of the Milky Way glowed with dimension and power, edged by luminous violet flourishes made from interstellar dust. Soon, she assumed that she must be inventing what she saw, but no, this was real. All around her, the galaxy shone so brightly that it was casting shadows on the ground.
Edie had studied the stories that, throughout time, humankind have told about the sources of awe they’ve been allowed to glimpse. She knew that the Milky Way was said to be a river, a road, a gateway to the afterlife. But if a gateway opened that night, it hadn’t pulled her aloft to heaven. Instead she lay pinned to the ground, riveted, by the shadow of a galaxy.
One night later, she was back up on that high cliff at Blue Knob, curled alone in a deep trench, half her body numb or stabbing her with needles of pain. No hope of standing, but she could prop herself up for short intervals. She had only a small flashlight tucked in her trousers’ back pocket. When she’d hopped back down into the trench before sundown for another look at an ambiguous piece of rubble, she’d left her phone on the hood of the Mazda, next to her backpack. The sky over Blue Knob was heavy cloud cover, no starlight. All night she shivered and watched her breath gush out in front of her, imagining—soon half-believing—that the plumes of hot curling steam from her mouth were the Milky Way’s spiraling arms.
Afterward was a bruised time. Even recovered, she moved gingerly through her days. The nights seemed lost. What had come most natural for most of her life—to go out and dig—suddenly became the source of troubling dreams. Then, many months ago now, in front of the hiring committee—half the archive center’s advisory board and several beleaguered archivists and academic librarians—she had heard herself arguing passionately on behalf of caution, of the vital need to pause many kinds of digging. Where will it end, she heard herself ask amid committee members’ nodding approval—what we find, where will it all go?
From where she sat now on the archive floor, she scanned the wall directly across the room. It was entirely hidden by crates stacked floor to ceiling, three layers deep. They were all waiting to be unpacked and their contents sorted, catalogued, and preserved. But there was no room in this facility for any of it.
Out in the field, no story in the process of being uncovered ever felt redundant. She’d always seen her job as a way to give the land a chance to speak its secrets. But she hadn’t listened as her own body had screamed to be heard. Year after year, she had never hesitated to throw her body into the story that the land concealed. But now that her body was calling the shots, she didn’t know what story was propelling her.
*
Edie fought log-jammed highways through the edges of Knoxville, determined to reach the Linnet property before dark. No one had answered when she called to apologize, but she set out anyway, racing the light.
She rumbled down the long drive leading through one of the undeveloped meadows, headed for their house. All the first-floor windows were lit.
As she got out and approached the front door, she smoothed her hair and clothes, which until now she hadn’t noticed were wrinkled. She took deep breaths and tried to summon her old guise, her impenetrable suit of authority. She scanned the Linnet house for signs of life, but no one appeared to be home.
When no one answered the front door, she drifted toward the side yard, where a golden light glowed against the lawn and rock-bordered flower beds that marked the edge of surrounding woods. Turning the corner, she saw that one side of the house was dominated by high floor-to-ceiling windows. Bright sparkling light spilled from a trio of intricate glass chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling of a formal dining room and adjoining den outfitted with stone fireplace, long white sofas, glass tables, bar cart crowded with decanters. Edie stared into this set piece of pristine domestic security. Every light was on, but the scene was empty.
She scanned the yard’s wooded edges for the trailhead that led to the back meadow and its giant hackberry. The tree had engulfed the life that that young couple had lived there. She didn’t envy them. She didn’t envy the Linnets, or Sonia and Kenny, or Jack holding his toddlers, or herself as a young wife. What Other People Seemed to Want.
She turned back toward the darkening yard. Chandelier light and the grilles of the Linnets’ windows cast a bright, geometric grid pattern against the grass. She fought to drive back the sensations of memory, but they flooded her chest, limbs, and face. She walked out among the squares of light and dark but what passed through her was the shadow of a whirling galaxy. Without thought, she moved to a flower bed and dislodged one of the rocks from its border. She held it in her fist and considered the press of time and space that had led it here, led her here. Then she pitched it high toward the house. The rock struck one of the upper window panes, and a quick, violent shatter sliced through the quiet.
She darted her head in all directions, expecting discovery but no one came. And then she made for the muddy trail beyond the lawn.
Every step she took through the dark tangle, the hitch in her gait increased. She’d brought no flashlight. She carried nothing. Pain throttled her hip as her boot caught on a root, but she didn’t fall.
On the open ground, her feet steadied. But she did not feel like the calm professional figure she’d made as she walked this field just days ago. Her hands were trembling—a rare occurrence for hands trained to work with calm precision, scraping delicate surfaces and tweezing out the smallest crevices.
The hackberry’s massive limbs made crooked black slashes across the final wash of light. Edie’s eyes were adjusting now. She knew what she was seeing.
She approached the tree, and as she lowered herself to the ground, she let the pain flash however strongly it needed. She knelt at the roots. Bending low to the soil, she ran her hand across its surface. She scraped away some initial debris, then plunged her hands into the rich, unmapped dark.
