Secrets

When Nathan was a child, he found her in a snow bank. He recognized her limbs, her body, her face—she was sleeping soundly. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he decided he would tell no one. Instead, he traced her features with his glove and lay down next to her, his little secret. He named her Emily.

He searched for her, missing the coolness of her touch, her otherworldly independence. Nathan checked piles of leaves in the fall, beach dunes in the summer, grass clippings in the spring. Emily always found him. She winked from the lichen of maple bark. She danced in the nighttime shadows of his bedroom wall. She sent him beautiful music in gusts of wind. She used raindrops to write his name on windows.

They were in love in the winter, when he prayed more than any other boy for snow days. He walked deep into forests and threw snowballs against tree trunks until she appeared. Emily told Nathan stories about the centuries before they met—eons spent lonely and unnoticed. You found me, she said, and that made me real. He kissed her at dusk, when the tawny sun came through the treetops, and she waited until he turned away before melting.

Nathan could feel her everywhere. Emily watched him talk to the girls in his classes, his summer jobs, his nights on the town. Emily loved the way their shoes clopped on cobblestone walkways and how they laughed for him. They were sounds she had never heard before: they had quickly come into her world and they fascinated her.

When he was old enough, Nathan chased Emily down unlined roads in his red pickup truck. Nathan followed her across Europe, where he lugged a blue backpack and felt invincible. Emily could not save him from heartbreak in Lyon or robbery in Bristol, but Nathan did not expect her to.

And when Nathan said he was in love with the girl from his university, Emily said she would wait for him. His decades were her heartbeats. So they lived their lives apart, for the first time since they met. Nathan held hands with his wife, pushed his children on swing sets, celebrated anniversaries in candlelight. Nathan told them stories by their wood stove. There are secrets in the sunlight and snow, he told them, staring into the fire.

Nathan watched his family grow, until one morning when he did not recognize himself in the mirror. He pressed his face to the cool bathroom window and breathed Emily’s name on the glass. But she did not come. Nathan imagined her playing muse for artists who painted her in oil. He dreamed of Emily floating among the treetops with sparrows. Later, when Nathan’s wife died, he cried at the unfairness of it all, and he buried her in a cemetery littered with dogwood blossoms.

Nathan’s children could not understand why he sold their house so quickly, or why he spent his money on a tumbledown farm outside of town. They apologized for Nathan talking to himself too often, for walking with his arms and fingers outstretched, for getting lost in the forests around his home.

Nathan took to sitting on his front porch in front of the sunsets.

I was afraid I changed too much, he said to the night.

On his seventy-third birthday, Nathan’s children found him frozen in his backyard. He had surrounded himself with snow, as if that could keep him warm.