One

I’ve found the place. It took a long time, but here I am. At last. It doesn’t look familiar at all. I’m both relieved and disappointed.

I wonder when the last time someone, a person, was here. How long did it sit, untenanted, waiting?

No. Not waiting. It wasn’t waiting for anyone. I can see that. Its doors don’t open properly now. They’re not really doors anymore. The one at the back of the house is a measured gap, letting in smaller animals, birds and insects, squirrels and mice. Letting in curling limbs of snow that whirl on the warped linoleum, or leaves that clatter and swish. Letting in the tendrils of nightshade that curl up around the frame. The front door is closed, barring light and air and creatures, though some of the windows are smashed, and they’re portals, too, for the life that wants in. The rest just admit light, letting the seeds root and grow in crevices between the floor and the wall.

The buildings aren’t waiting. They’re sighing, sinking, leaning back into the ground, letting themselves ease slowly into the soil. They’re not surrendering to the seeds and the roots, the bird and mouse nests. They’re opening up, offering themselves. They’re not waiting at all. They don’t need anyone. They don’t need me.

Taylor Lake is just over an hour from my hotel, which sits in a corner of a commercial park just outside of Halifax. This morning, I programmed my destination into my cellphone’s mapping app and headed out onto the highway to the South Shore. Taylor Lake is just east of New Russell, which is more of a dot on a map than it is a town, and New Russell is just north of the quaint village of Chester. Of course, it shouldn’t be called Taylor Lake at all. I don’t know if it was ever labelled Gaugin Lake on the maps, but it was once called Gaugin Lake by everyone who knew it. I’ve heard that the old folks in New Russell and New Ross still call it Gaugin Lake. I’ve also heard that they won’t go there.

I turn off the paved road onto a well-graded gravel road that loops around the lake. Cottage country. The way is marked with handwritten, passive-aggressive signs admonishing drivers to slow down or else four-wheelers will no longer be allowed on this road. Sweet, self-consciously rustic cottages dot the forest on either side of the road. A few have lawns, but most are tucked within a cleared and tidied patch of the natural forest. My research has told me that this is one of the few areas that still boasts original Acadian forest: tall oaks, pines, stout sugar maples instead of the adolescent firs, the brittle spruce, the thin, weedy-looking red maples that cover the rest of the province. I’ve heard there is even ironwood growing in this forest. The bulk of the province was clear-cut by the logging companies in the last two centuries, and the forests are relatively new, populated with young, fast-growing tree species. But not Gaugin lands. And the Gaugins were here a long, long time. They were the ones to snatch this bit of forest from the Mi’kmaq.

The people in these cottages likely don’t talk about the Gaugins. Or maybe they do. Maybe it’s a joke, an insult. “God, Gordie! If you don’t wash that pickup truck, people are gonna start to think you’re a Gaugin!” Maybe they’re a bedtime story to scare children. “Turn out that light right now or the Gaugins will come and take you!” Who knows. But if the Gaugins had not been here, had not been what they were, these people wouldn’t own the most valuable lakefront property on the mainland of Nova Scotia.

When I reach the back of the lake, the farthest point from the paved road, I park my car. My app tells me this is the place here, through the forest. Newspaper articles pointed me in the right direction, and satellite photos from the mapping site let me piece together the directions. You can see it, a faint clearing, the buildings themselves greyish rectangles. Now that I’m here, I can see what once might have been a road of sorts. It’s a parting of the big trees, and it looks like the ATVs and snowmobiles, under threat of expulsion by the community watch, have kept the trail open. I take a picture and I start my hike in.

After about four kilometres, the trail veers right, but I need to keep on straight, almost due north. I walk for an hour. It’s June and the blackflies are vicious. I’ve coated my skin and clothes in Deet, but they still manage to tangle into my hair, chewing at the skin until trickles of blood alert me. Blackflies have a pain-numbing compound in their saliva. I won’t feel the bites until later.

I stop to pee, crouching low and holding the seat of my pants away from the stream. My guess is that I can’t be more than a kilometre away. The forest seems untouched. Nothing is familiar.

I am checking my position on the phone when I finally spot the house. When I first notice it, it startles me, as though it might be a wild animal and I’ve just interrupted its dinner. But it’s just a house. Just an old, old house made of weathered boards. Two brick chimneys rise from its roof, and its windows stare blindly out at the forest surrounding it. The front door is tightly shut, but the glass in the window next to it is smashed.

I stare at the house, and something heavy and slow unfolds in my belly. I don’t recognize the place—not at all—but still, I’m staring at it, and I feel a slow, creeping dread coming from somewhere deep down within me. My guts shift. I have to shit. I go back to the trail and find a clearing, some place I won’t step when I return this afternoon, or when I come back later this week. My bowels empty and I feel lighter, cleaner. I am ready to go back and take some pictures.

I start with the house itself. I start at the front, the approach from what must have been the road. Later, I will need to compare these photos to pictures run in the newspapers twenty-five years ago. I work systematically, capturing the front of the house, the sealed front door with its rotted step, the broken panes of the main-floor windows. Then I take a picture of the chimneys, the pitch of the roof, the unbroken glass of the attic window. I keep my mind on the pictures themselves—the light, the depth of field, the composition. I cannot bring myself to think about the rooms beyond. Not yet.

Then I move around the side of the house. There is a thick mass of shrubs on the northeast side. Juniper, and caragana gone wild. Now, in the early summer, it is covered in yellow blossoms. Without thinking, I pluck a flower and put it into my mouth, savouring the delicate yellowness of its flavour. Now when did I learn to do that? Who first put a caragana blossom on my tongue?

An apple tree past its prime has sloughed off a heavy bough, probably the winter before. It lies, grey and dejected, under the early green leaves and tiny nubs of fruit. Here and there, withered petals still dust the earth and roots.

Beyond the shrubs, more buildings. I’ll attend to those soon enough, but first the main house. Here, where the wall faces north, I can see that the boards were once painted white. Who painted them? Whose job was it to do that? How often did it have to be done? I wonder if there were maybe flowers then, too. (Of course, there had to have been a vegetable garden. I will try to figure out where it might have been.) Was there time for tending flowers? Or was that too frivolous? Maybe painting the house was practical, rather than decorative. Painted wood doesn’t weather as fast as bare.

On this side of the house, most of the windows on the ground floor are broken. Upstairs, the dormer windows are intact. I photograph everything, then I move around to the back, to the east side. More white paint, more broken windows, a back door. This one is open slightly—enough to admit wind and birds and rodents, maybe a very svelte raccoon, but not wide enough for anything bigger.

The paint is all gone on the west side. The boards are weathered and cracking. One is missing, and I wonder whether the darkness that I see in the space where it should be is the inside of the house, or just the inside of the wall.

The outbuildings now. I count six. The largest is a barn. It is caved in, its roof a broken, sagging mare’s back. It will not be safe for me to go in and get pictures. Two of the smaller outbuildings have also collapsed, but three are still standing. One even has a door on its hinges. They all have windows. What was kept out here? Food? Tools? Did children or more peripheral members of the family sleep here?

A rusted hulk that used to be a station wagon is rotting behind the buildings. And that’s it. All that’s left of the Gaugin home. The Gaugin farm. Compound. Of course, there are others. Other homes rotting away in this forest. Or there were. There were at least two long-abandoned places on the lakefront, but those have been swept away to make room for modern cottages. This is the main one. This is the one I have come to photograph. This is the one the reporters came to photograph almost three decades ago.

It’s time to start hiking back to my car.

I feel relieved as I walk away from the house, but also a little frightened, as though something in the woods might be staring at me, crouched to pounce. I walk quickly, but I don’t let myself run. Or look back. I’m relieved to be leaving.

But today’s trip is momentous. Today is an occasion.

Today is my first time back here in twenty-eight years.

Three hours. Three hours surveying and photographing the house, the yard, the outbuildings, then Emma hiked back to her car, drove back through the forest dotted with comfortable cottages. Just three short hours. Somehow, that felt cheap. It should have been longer. It should have cost her more.

Emma took her time driving back to the hotel on the edge of Halifax. Before she pulled out onto the highway, she plugged her phone into the stereo. She cranked the music up and sang along to her Workout playlist. She was sure that drivers passing her must have thought she was having a great time, but really, she just wanted to make so much noise she couldn’t think.

As she crossed the hotel lobby, the guy at the front desk said hello. He smiled at her when he said it, holding her gaze for a long second. He had dark, almost-black hair and light eyes. His cheekbones were sharp, his chin small. He was slight—thin, and not much taller than her. As she stepped into the elevator, she wondered whether she’d remembered to say “hello” back.

The electronic lock accepted her key card with a demure click. She stepped into her room, bolting the door behind her. She was thinking about the house, the way it seemed to be inhaling through its broken windows. She felt a rush of accomplishment. There. She’d made her first trip. She’d found the site, recorded her impressions of the place. She had taken pictures and made notes. She’d done that much.

That was the thing about places. They were simply there. You could always go find them, if you knew where to look. You didn’t have to ask permission, wait for an answer that might just fell you.

As she stood in the entrance to her bland hotel room, her mind trailing over all that she’d seen, the shift crept over her. Familiar but always jarring. She tried to hold it back and redirect her thoughts—to dinner, to her parents, to her apartment at home. She was trying not to think of the house, of going back there, but it was too late. She felt the quaking in her thighs and the tightening in her chest. She pulled off her coat, shirt, bra, trying to get enough air into her lungs. She knew she should sit down, focus on her breathing, start one of the exercises her therapist had given her, but she was past all that now. She couldn’t hold still. She walked to the window, back to the door. Fought the urge to put her shirt back on and run into the hallway, back down the stairs, out into the parking lot. She didn’t know where she would go from there. Somewhere. Away. So instead, she rooted through her bag, her hands jerking uncontrollably until she found the pills. She took one, but there wasn’t enough saliva in her mouth to swallow it dry. She didn’t dare try to pick up a glass, so she ran to the bathroom and gulped water directly from the faucet. She looked at the clock, marking the quarter-hour it would take for the drug to kick in.

Distantly, she felt a burning in her arm. She looked down. There was blood above her elbow, blood under her fingernails. She’d been scratching at the blackfly bites, grating away the skin. She made herself drop her hands to her sides, made herself stop pacing the room, made herself concentrate on her fast, shallow breaths.

When the drug eased into her bloodstream and the world began to feel muffled and soft, she got into the shower. Small leaves fell out of her hair as she shampooed it.

When she got out, she stared at the outline of herself in the bathroom mirror. Her reflection in the steam was like her anxiety under the Lorazepam—still there, but soft, indistinct.

She should call her mom. She pulled on the thick hotel bathrobe and sat on the bed, squeezing her rope of wet hair into a towel. Turned on the TV, hoping the sounds would mask the droopiness in her voice.

“Sweetie! How was your flight?” Emma’s mom asked as soon as she picked up. Julia never answered the phone with a simple “Hello.”

“Fine. Got in last night, and I managed to find the site this morning. I got some good pictures, I think.”

A pause. Damn. Julia could hear it in Emma’s voice. “You okay?”

“Yup. All good.”

“Did you meditate, or did you go right for the pills? Can you find a drop-in yoga place near your hotel?”

“I’m fine. Everything is fine. I’m just tired from the trip and a long day outside. Don’t worry, OK?”

Emma could hear her mom breathing lightly. “I can still come out, you know,” she said. “I’ll stay out of your hair, but I’ll be close if you need me.”

“Mom. Don’t fly out here. I’m a grown-ass woman. I can go on a research trip without my mommy.”

Julia laughed a little. Emma told her she had to go, had to start sorting her photos, and they said good night.

“I can look up drop-in yoga studios in Halifax, if you want,” Julia said, just as Emma was about to hang up. Julia did that so often—blurted out a question or a comment after she’d already said goodbye—that Emma knew to wait a few seconds before ending the call.

“I know how to google, Mom,” Emma said. “Why else do you think they let me into grad school?”

“All right, all right, as long as you promise to look.”

“Cross my heart, hope to die,” Emma said. “Stick a yoga mat in my eye.”

Yoga. Not something Emma would have ever seen herself doing when she was younger—in high school, for instance. It wasn’t really even something she would keep up now, except for Julia. It was their thing, their mother-daughter thing. “Bonding through bending,” Emma’s dad called it.

The first yoga class they’d attended together, Julia hadn’t even told Emma where they were going. “Wear comfy clothes,” she said as she ushered Emma out to the car.

“Why?” Emma asked. “What are we doing? I don’t want to go out.” She needed a shower. She hadn’t washed her hair for a couple of days. All she wanted was to eat popcorn and binge-watch TV until bedtime.

“Don’t worry, we’re not going out-out,” Julia had replied. “You’ll see.”

She’d driven the two of them to the rec centre in their neighbourhood, a long, low building with chipping grey stucco. It was the kind of place that usually hosted Scouts and Brownies, or potluck fiftieth-anniversary parties. Emma turned to stare at her mom before she got out. What was this? Some kind of support group? She couldn’t seem to find the energy to tell Julia she wasn’t going in.

“Come on,” Julia said, getting out of the car. Obediently, Emma followed her inside.

In the smaller hall just off the dated lobby with its chipped pine panelling, a woman was laying out yoga mats on the floor. Julia strode toward her.

“Mom,” Emma said in a low voice. “No. This isn’t my thing.”

“How do you know?” Julia replied as she selected side-by-side yoga mats in the front row. “You haven’t even tried.”

At first, Emma had felt self-conscious, especially up at the front of the class, so near the compact, well-muscled yoga instructor. But doing the beginner poses was so new, so unnatural, that Emma had to turn her whole attention to moving and holding her body. And it was soothing, that kind of effort. It felt good to let everything else get pushed out of her head for a while.

“That wasn’t bad,” she conceded as she and Julia climbed back into the car afterward.

“So we’ll come back next week?”

“Maybe,” Emma said. “We’ll see.”

Julia nodded, and Emma could see a sliver of worry lift from her, too. It stung, suddenly, to realize how much Julia felt, how much she tried to carry for Emma.

“Okay, Mom. Next week.”

In her hotel room, Emma flipped aimlessly through the television channels for a minute, then turned off the TV. She grabbed her phone again to do a quick search for local bars and restaurants. She wanted to be in a noisy place all of a sudden. She wanted the buzz of people talking and just being normal all around her. But there was nothing but fast food in this neighbourhood—nothing except the little bar off the lobby downstairs. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and took the elevator down.

In the corner of the bar, two thick-necked men in suits were watching a baseball game on TV. One of the businessmen turned and gave her an appreciative smile, almost a leer, really. She repressed the urge to flip them the bird—who knew how long they were staying here, how many times she’d run into them again—and gave them a tight smile instead, and then scanned the bar for a spot outside their field of vision.

Emma didn’t see a waiter or a bartender. She picked an armchair next to the fake fireplace and thumbed through the menu on the table. She decided it had been long enough since she took her pill—she could have a beer. She had just begun to wonder how to order when the guy from the front desk rounded the corner.

“What can I get you?” he asked.

“I thought you worked the front desk,” Emma said.

“What, I can’t do both?” he asked. He had the rounded-vowel regional accent.

“You can do anything you put your mind to, I guess.”

He smiled. “We were short-staffed this afternoon. I was just covering the desk.”

“Ah.” There was a pause, and Emma realized he was waiting for her to order. “What’s a good beer?”

“That one,” he said, pointing at a pricey local selection.

“Let’s do it,” she said. “And some fries.”

He nodded and disappeared, taking the menu with him.

Emma stared into the gas-fuelled flames of the fireplace next to her while she waited. She breathed slowly as she went over the day’s trip in her mind, trying to match the image of the crumbling house and outbuildings with something from her memory, but there was nothing. When she pressed her thoughts far, far back, she remembered the scratchy velvet-like fabric of a couch patterned with gold- and deep-green-coloured flowers. The feel of bare wood stairs under her feet. She recalled a bigger hand tugging on hers, leading her out to play in the even deeper green of the shrubs and grasses. There was a softness to these memories, a comfort. The ghost of an old feeling, one she hadn’t lingered on in—how long, really? She couldn’t remember. She braced for the shift to come over her again. It didn’t.

The bartender-waiter-desk clerk plunked the beer down on a cardboard coaster in front of Emma, startling her. She murmured a thanks, and he smiled in reply.

“You’re not going downtown tonight?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m here to work,” she said, and immediately realized she sounded horribly prim. She took a swallow of the beer to avoid having to elaborate. But he wasn’t going away. He was still smiling at her.

“People from here usually leave to work out west, not the other way around,” he said. “What do you do?”

She considered an outlandish reply. I’m a locations scout for adult films. Or I’m here to invest in bio fuels made from lobster carcasses. She wasn’t even sure what reaction she hoped for by saying something like that—did she want him to go, or stay? Instead, she offered the truth. “I’m doing some research on old South Shore families.” Well, part of the truth, anyway.

He nodded. “Sounds interesting.”

She raised her eyebrows. “It does?” She remembered to smile a little. She sometimes forgot to smile when she was joking. It unsettled people.

He smiled back, stuck out his hand. “I’m Glen.”

“Emma,” she replied and considered giving him her last name. She wondered which last name to give him. But she didn’t offer either. Just Emma.

“Nice to meet you, Emma,” he said. He had a nice smile. “Your fries will be up in a minute.”

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Quotes

THE WOODS ARE DARK

One