Marrowfield

I.

I came to Marrowfield because of a letter my mother had hidden in a copy of *The House of the Seven Gables* she kept in her closet, fourth shelf up, behind a hatbox.

I was forty-six years old when I found it. She had been dead two years. I had been sorting her things slowly, the way you do when there is no one rushing you and no one helping you and the work is, on balance, not unpleasant.

The letter was dated 14 April 1976, three months before I was born. The salutation was *Dear Linnea*. The signature was *— Your Aunt Mae*. There was no Aunt Mae in our family. I had been told, my entire life, that my mother had no living relatives.

The letter, in its second paragraph, read:

*Linnea, the door is open the next three nights. After that you have to wait again. Please come, even if just to say goodbye. Marrowfield is not what you remember. It is much worse, and it is much better. Both are true, depending on which side of the road you stand on.*

I drove into Marrowfield county on a Thursday in October because the calendar said the new moon would arrive at 11:48 p.m. that night, and I had already, by that point, started to wonder.

II.

You will not find Marrowfield on a map. I want to say this clearly. I have looked. I have a friend at the U.S. Geological Survey. I have looked.

What I found, instead, was a road.

The road was paved for the first six miles. Then it was gravel. Then it was a track of beaten earth between rows of birch that had begun, as the sun set, to appear blue. The blue was not, I am almost certain, in the trees. The blue was in the air between them.

My headlights began to behave oddly at 11:30 p.m. The beams shortened. They did not dim — they shortened, as if the air ahead of the car were eating light, foot by foot, until I was driving with about eight feet of vision and could not see, for example, the figure of a tall thin woman standing in the road until I had nearly hit her.

I stopped.

She did not move out of the road.

I rolled down the window.

She said: "You are Linnea's son."

She said it the way a person says a thing they have been waiting to say for forty-six years.

III.

Aunt Mae was not, by then, anyone's aunt. She had been a sister — to my grandmother, who had died in 1978, before I was old enough to ask about her — and time, in Marrowfield, was a thing that did not pass but accumulated, like dust on a shelf no one wiped.

She told me this on the porch of her house, which sat at the end of the road, last on the left, with a black iron weathervane shaped like a rooster.

She told me other things.

She told me that Marrowfield had been built, originally, in 1741, by my mother's people, and that it had been, originally, an ordinary town. It had become what it now was in 1812, when the comet of that year had passed close enough to make the night sky white, and something had reached into Marrowfield and taken hold of it, and had not let go.

She told me that the town now woke for three nights every twenty-eight days — the three nights in which the moon was darkest — and slept the rest of the time, beneath what she called the *fold*, by which I think she meant something a physicist would have a different word for.

She told me that to live in Marrowfield was, in any meaningful sense, to live thirty-six nights a year.

She told me that everyone born in Marrowfield was given, at age eighteen, the choice to leave, and that those who left — like my mother — could never return except during the three nights, and could only return three times in their lives.

She told me my mother had used her three returns.

She told me this was my mother's last letter — the letter she had written before her last return — and that I had found it forty-six years late.

She told me I had two more nights.

IV.

I will not tell you everything I saw in Marrowfield.

I will tell you that I met my grandmother. She was forty-two years old, which she had been since the comet passed. She made me tea. She held my face between her hands and looked at me for a length of time I could not have measured if I had wanted to.

I will tell you that I met other people who I had been told, my entire life, did not exist.

I will tell you that the town had a lake, and that on the lake there was a small wooden boat, and that I sat in the boat with my grandmother, and she told me what my mother had been like at twelve. She told me my mother had been brave and a little cruel and had loved frogs. I had not known any of this. My mother, in my version of her, had never loved anything that did not reflect well on her.

I do not, I will admit, know which version is true.

I am inclined, now, to believe my grandmother.

V.

The third night ended.

I knew when the moon would return. They had a clock, in the town square, that did not measure hours but instead measured the distance, in degrees, between the lunar terminator and the point of first illumination. I watched the clock tick down.

When the clock reached zero my grandmother was holding my hand.

She said: "Choose."

She did not have to explain.

I had two roads. I could leave Marrowfield, and live the rest of my ordinary life, and never come back — because, like my mother, I would have used my three returns; this was the third. Or I could stay, and live within the fold, and wake for thirty-six nights a year, and have, in the end, not less life than the people outside, only a different schedule for it.

I am writing this letter from Marrowfield.

I am writing it on the morning after the third night, which, here, never quite ends; the sun is rising and the town is folding in around us and I am, by some understanding I cannot fully articulate, both inside the fold and writing out of it, which I am told is, for someone in his first month, normal.

I will give this letter to a man I do not yet know, who will, on the road back to the world, drive through a particular bend at a particular hour, and find it tucked under his windshield wiper at the next gas station, and read it, and think: *this cannot be real.*

He will be right.

He will also be wrong.

Both are true.

It depends on which side of the road he stands on.

— L. M.