Balsam

Illustration by Liz Priddy based on a photo by Julia Fredenburg

A little awkward, she thought, the morning after your lover has fled, to have breakfast with his mother. A little awkward that the apartment you occupy is attached to her garage, that you haven’t found a job in this little tree-rimmed town full of eclectic approaches to keeping body and soul together. A little awkward that you have no immediate place to go, now that her son has gone.

The idea of the little town in the Maine woods had seemed an adventure a few months ago. Now, of course, Abbie was lost in those woods and having breakfast with her one friend for five hundred miles, a terrain that she envisioned as a forest tract rather than the actual road system that had delivered her here. Abbie had left everything behind, however modest that everything—job, apartment, neighborhood she liked, a handful of friends—had been, and almost none of it could be picked back up again all that easily. She was wishing for a compass, an ax, a protective woodsman, a train ticket home, a home to go to at the other end of the train ride.

Mimm didn’t seem surprised that Travis was gone. “He’s never done this exact thing before,” she said, “but it’s a familiar event, anyway. I thought it was different this time, his coming home, because he’d found you. He had a nice thing going at the lumberyard, a real job. Last time he took off, he stole my VCR and I didn’t hear from him for two years. Then he calls from New York—he’s been tending bar, he’s got a girl—you. ‘Can I bring her home, Mom?’ he asks. ‘I want to start again.’ So I cleaned out everything I had stored in the garage and put it down below. I don’t even have room in there for my car anymore.” Mimm looked at Abbie’s cell phone between them on the kitchen table. “I wouldn’t expect a call anytime soon.”

Abbie wasn’t breathing any more than she had to. She felt as if she were on pause, subduing an urge to flee since there was no place to flee. Bewildered by the turn her life had taken.

“You can stay here,” Mimm said on her way out. “Really, stay here until you can figure out what next. I told him there would be no rent until the new year. Same deal holds true for you. And if there’s no job then, there’s no rent until there is.”

Abbie’s phone was on silent, and when she flipped it open there were no missed calls.

The snow began that afternoon. The air filled with a shimmer of tiny flakes, like a skywide swarm, so fine that when it began it seemed more like a disturbance in the air than anything as definite as snowfall. First it blotted out the horizon, then it ghosted the trees away. By the time it stopped in late afternoon, inches had fallen and she had to shovel, doing her walk, then Mimm’s driveway.

There was one thing she had going for her, she thought, if she really were going to spend the winter in Clemency, Maine: she didn’t mind the cold. Gloveless most of the winter, coat often left undone. Slim, she didn’t look particularly well adapted for the cold, but Abbie shoveled bare-handed and hatless, her own warmth rising from the collar of her jeans jacket. The snow that had begun to fall again landed on her face, bright and cold, and made her take a full breath. Her brown hair, short and curling a little with the damp, darkened as the snow crystals that fell on it melted. She shook it free of snow, combing her fingers through it, enjoying all the small sensations that went with the new snow. Since waking up to find the note that said he had taken the car...