He shook his head. “Those guys, they never win. They don’t have any chance at all. Just keep gambling and losing, gambling and winning, and when they win it’s hardly enough to make up for the losses. Nobody up here knows what it’s like to be out of debt, they must owe thousands most of the time, and they’ve gotta know there’s no way they’ll ever get out of it. It’s a remarkable thing, what they do.”

He had stopped the car and was looking at me. “But you won’t have to worry about any of that,” he said. “We’re here. I’d rather walk up the lane if you don’t mind, it’s a little tricky driving, especially in the spring when the ditches tend to flood. It’s not so far.”

“Of course,” I said. “That’s fine.”

I wasn’t in a hurry now, was in fact grateful for the chance to walk, to see gradually this — whatever it was that had been pulling at me. I was also a little apprehensive, afraid almost, wishing I had left it as a dream.

Walking up the lane, it was as if I were being inhaled by it, the trees beside it were enclosing me, drawing me up, and if, like Lot’s wife, I had looked back, I felt I might see them in a semicircle behind me, closing off the way back, holding me there. There were birds and squirrels, I could hear them all, and yet it was the most silent place I could remember.

The sensation grew stronger as we walked on, but I could not identify what it was, not yet, until we reached the top of the lane and ahead of us was a space, a small piece of land, with just bushes and weeds, and beyond that an enormous willow hanging heavily over a gray stone cabin; it seemed to me, from that perspective, that the tree was protecting the cabin, and the cabin itself was small and solid-looking. Two of its windows were broken, and I felt as if I must be a different person, seeing this, feeling suddenly — what was it? I searched, looking for a name for it — wanted? New? Feeling that this was home.

This was the ending, here. Like driving head-on into a brick wall, knowing it was over, reduced to the core of person that does not think or know, no chance given for regret or sorrow or second thoughts, in the brilliant last moment. The landscape whirled and beckoned and I was whirling too, light-headed and out of myself, and Abra was dying then, although she did not know it.