She left a trail of broken wineglasses through the house. I followed them to the attic, up to the children’s playroom and chest full of costumes that hadn’t been worn in years. She left me a trail of her own blood to follow, all the way across the floor to the dumbwaiter. Did she go up or down? Was she hiding in the low hanging clouds or was she crumpled up in a heap in the cellar. She always liked her wine, Ms Millie, ever since her first beau succumbed to the allure of the pond’s murky depths while the two of them skinny dipped with a bottle of Jack. She remembered the stillness of the water, the quiet of the trees crowded around the shore to gawk.
She learned she was pregnant shortly after that, carrying her brood even before she climbed out of the water. The boy’s last plunge. After that she was secluded away in a cabin on the Gunflint Trail with an aunt for nine months, and after they were out, perhaps even before, she drank and partied like a girl ready to throw it all away, and she did. The Gateway District offered her unsafe haven, where I rescued her, if that is how you look at it. She wasn’t looking for kindness or saving though, and maybe that’s where I failed her. I hid the bottles, schooled her children, paid for home visits by the doctor because they wouldn’t let her back into town.
Wine glasses crushed to diamonds beneath my pacing steps. Where does a lost woman go when she doesn’t want to be found. I see her in the moon, I see her in the water, I see her swaying in slow dance with the limbs of trees.
