Bug

Prologue

The platform was crowded the way it always was at six. I was thinking about a meeting I'd had that afternoon, going back over what I should have said. The wind was coming up off the harbor and I had my collar turned against it. I remember pulling my gloves out of my coat pocket and finding only one.

The inbound side was busier than ours. A line of people three deep, faces turned the same direction, waiting. I wasn't looking at anyone. I was looking past them at the wall of the station, at the tile, at nothing.

That's when I saw her.

A girl on the opposite platform. Eight, maybe nine. Dark hair. She had on a yellow sweater, the kind with a hood, and she was holding something — a piece of bread, I think, or part of a roll. She was tearing pieces off and putting them in her pocket. I remember thinking, that's an odd thing to do. I remember thinking she must be saving it for something.

Then she looked up.

She looked across the tracks and her eyes found me. Not the way a stranger's eyes find you. Not curious. She held my gaze and her mouth started to move, like she was about to say something or call out, and her free hand came up a little, just lifted from her side, like she was going to wave.

The inbound train came in then. Long and gray and loud, the brakes letting out their long exhale, and the whole opposite platform disappeared behind it.

I stood there waiting for it to pass.

When it pulled out she was gone. The platform across from me was nearly empty. A man with a briefcase. Two women talking. No yellow sweater. No child.

My own train came a few minutes later. I got on. I found a seat by the window and watched the city slide by, brick and brick and brick, and after a while I stopped thinking about her. By the time I unlocked the apartment door and called Liz's name into the kitchen, I had forgotten her completely.

I would not think about her again for seven years.

Chapter One

I woke before the alarm with the feeling that I'd left a stove on somewhere. That kind of waking. The body sure of something the mind hadn't caught up to yet.

It was still dark. The window was open and the air coming in had cold in it — September cold, the kind that arrives one morning without warning and then stays. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and lay there a minute.

I had been dreaming. I knew that much. There had been water in it, I thought. A flash of something yellow. A child, maybe — the shape of a child standing somewhere, doing something. I tried to hold on to it and the harder I tried the faster it went. By the time I sat up there was almost nothing left. Just the feeling. That low, offcenter feeling you get when a dream has been about something important and refused to tell you what.

I sat on the edge of the bed and pushed my hair back. The clock said five forty. I had set the alarm for six. Twenty minutes.

I could have gone back to sleep. I didn't.

I made coffee in the dark. The kitchen window faced east and the sky was just starting to come up gray over the Absarokas. I stood at the counter with my hands around the mug and watched it brighten.

The house was quiet the way it always was. I had lived alone long enough that I noticed quiet only on mornings when something had unsettled me, and this was one of those mornings, so I noticed it. The refrigerator humming. The boards under my feet when I shifted my weight. A car somewhere on Second Street, going slow.

I thought about the dream a few more times while the coffee cooled. Each time there was less of it. By the time I rinsed the cup there was only the yellow left, and even that was more of a feeling than a color. I put the cup in the sink and told myself it was nothing.

People had dreams. That was what dreams were for, presumably. To use up the leftover pieces of the day.

I got dressed. I made the bed. I checked my phone — nothing — and put it in my back pocket. The cat we used to have would have been on the bed by now if he were still around. I noticed I was thinking about him, which I hadn't done in months, and decided not to follow that thought any further.

By seven I was outside. The light had come up properly. The cottonwoods along the river were starting to go yellow at the tips. I walked.

The walk to Claire's was twelve minutes if I took my time, and that morning I took my time. The town was just starting to come awake. The bakery had its lights on. A man in a Carhartt jacket was hosing down the sidewalk in front of the bar that had been a hardware store when I first moved here. I nodded at him and he nodded back. I didn't know his name. He didn't know mine. We had been nodding at each other for years.

The river was running low the way it always did in September. I could hear it from two streets away. There was a smell off it — wet stone, cottonwood, something cold and clean underneath. It was one of the smells I had come to Livingston for, though I hadn't known that when I moved here. I had moved here for other reasons that had since stopped mattering, and the smell of the river had stayed.

Claire's was on the corner of Second and Callender, in a brick building that had been a dry-goods store in the 1890s and then a doctor's office and then a number of things nobody remembered. The sign was crooked. It had always been crooked. Ageless Antiques in gold lettering, the second word leaning down toward the curb. I had given up mentioning it.

The bell over the door rang when I came in. Claire looked up from behind the counter and took her glasses off.

"You're early," she said.

"I couldn't sleep." "Mm." She set the glasses down on a stack of papers and came around. "Coffee?"

"Please."

She poured from the pot she kept going behind the counter and handed me the mug with the chipped rim that had been mine since the second week I knew her. I sat on the stool by the register. Claire leaned against the counter on the other side and folded her arms.

"Why couldn't you sleep."

"Strange dream."

"Strange how."

"I can't even remember it. That's the strange part. I woke up sure of it and now there's nothing."

"What can you remember."

I had to think about it. I drank some coffee and looked past her, at the wall behind the counter where she kept the things that weren't for sale. A pewter cup. A small framed photograph of her grandmother. A postcard of a moose somebody had sent her in 1974.

"A kid," I said. "I think there was a kid in it."

"Yours?"

"I don't have one, Claire."

"In the dream."

"I don't know. Maybe. There was water somewhere. And something yellow."

"Something yellow."

"I said it was strange."

She made the sound she made when she was deciding whether to make fun of me. It was a small hm through her nose. I had been hearing it for a long time.

"Sara," she said.

"What."

"You came over here at seven in the morning to tell me about a dream you can't remember."

"I was already up."

"Mm." "Don't mm me."

She smiled and pushed off the counter and went back to whatever she had been doing before I came in. Sorting through a small stack of postcards, it looked like. I watched her work for a minute. She handled old paper the way some people handle babies.

"How was the weekend," I said.

"Quiet. Bob's grandson was in for Saturday."

"How old is he now."

"Six. He told me a long story about a frog. I understood about half of it."

"Sounds about right."

We talked for a while about Bob's grandson and a leak in Claire's roof that she was pretending was not getting worse and a book I had been trying to read that I was not enjoying. The dream faded out of the conversation the way it had faded out of my morning. By the time I finished the second cup of coffee I had almost forgotten it. Almost.

"I should go," I said.

"You haven't been here twenty minutes."

"I know. I have to actually work today."

"On what."

"That woman from Bozeman. The one with the orchard."

"Right. Her."

"You sound like you don't believe she existed."

"I believe she existed. I just don't know why you're writing about her."

"Because somebody should."

Claire shrugged. It was a fond shrug. She thought my work was strange and she loved me anyway. I drained the mug and set it on the counter and slid off the stool.

"Come for dinner this week," she said.

"I will."

"You always say that."

"I will this time." "Mm."

I walked out into the morning. The light was higher now and the cottonwoods were doing what cottonwoods do in September. I had the whole day ahead of me. The dream was gone, or close to it. There was only the smallest catch left, the way there's a catch in a thread after you've pulled it free.

By the time I got home I had forgotten about it entirely.

I worked out of the back bedroom, which I had been calling the office for nine years even though it still had a bed in it. The bed was for visitors who never came. The desk was under the window, where the light was good in the morning and gone by three.

I had a stack of photocopies on the desk and a yellow legal pad with about half a page of notes. I sat down and looked at it for a while before I started.

Her name had been Elsa Vinge. She was born in 1893 in a sod house outside Bozeman and died in 1971 in a hospital bed in Billings, and somewhere in the middle she had planted an orchard. That was what I knew about her. That, and a few letters her grandson had sent me after he saw a piece I had written for the regional historical quarterly. He thought I might be interested in his grandmother. People sent me letters like that sometimes. Most of the time the grandmothers had been ordinary in the ways that grandmothers had been ordinary, which I never minded. Elsa was a little less ordinary than that. She had planted an orchard alone, in a place where nobody had thought apples would grow, and she had been right. The orchard was still there. Her grandson had sent me a photograph of it.

I worked for two hours. I made notes about the climate of southwest Montana in the 1920s and about what kind of apples Elsa had ordered from a nursery in Iowa. I made a list of questions for the grandson. I drank another cup of coffee. The light moved across the desk the way it always did and I moved with it without thinking about it.

Around eleven I sat back and rubbed my eyes.

It came to me then, the dream. Not the whole thing. Just one piece of it I had not been able to find that morning. A flash of the child's face. Half-turned, looking at something I could not see. Dark hair. The yellow at the edge of my vision.

It was there for a second and then gone again.

I sat looking at the wall behind the desk. The wall was the wall. There was a framed map of Park County on it that I had bought at an estate sale years ago and a photograph of my mother at twenty-six that I kept where I could see it. Nothing was different. The light was the same. The dream had been a dream.

I made a note about Elsa and the apples and went back to work.

I worked through lunch and into the afternoon. The light moved off the desk around three and I switched on the lamp without thinking about it.

By six I was tired. I made a sandwich and ate it standing at the kitchen counter and watched the light go down over the Absarokas. The mountains had been blue all day and now they were going purple at the edges and black in the cuts. I had lived here long enough to know which peak was which and what the weather was going to do tomorrow from the shape of the clouds behind them. I had not known any of that when I moved here. I had learned it slowly, on purpose, because I had wanted to belong to a place and that was how you did it.

After dinner I sat on the porch with a glass of wine and read for a while. The river was loud at that hour. A train went through town, the way one did most evenings, and the sound of it carried up to me from across the valley. When it had passed I went inside and washed the glass and set it upside down on the drying rack.

I went to bed early.

I lay there in the dark a while before I slept, looking at the ceiling. The window was open and the air was cold. I thought about the day. I thought about Elsa Vinge and her apples. I did not think about the dream.

When I slept, I did not dream. Or if I did, I did not remember.