I found a decent tree, a dead sugar maple. I would chop it in the woods, heft the pieces into the bed, drive home, and split it. The work would take all morning, maybe all day, and it was harder, more demanding work than sitting at a table and snipping buds off plants. My back would ache in different places tonight.

But the good thing about chopping wood, your mind wasn’t bothered by anything. I could forget missing Lisbeth, missing Mama. What they were doing in California, why she hadn’t called for months—he hadn’t let her—even the missed spring, I put it out of my mind. It was just me and the ax.

It felt good not thinking, listening to the ax’s song. I got warm for a moment. But I heard something. I stopped, buried the ax in the log. I heard a voice calling, not birdsong.

Mama.

That was my first thought. A voice, calling in the woods. What else do you call for?

“Hello?” I stepped off the cow path, let my eyes rove the landscape: hills, speckled with dead leaves, a little snow clustered in feathery patches.

Something detached from a log, becoming not a part of the woods, but a hand, raised up as though I had called his name.

A man lay in the leaves, a hatchet beside him. His right foot was turned to the side, and he held it with his other hand. He looked familiar, in the way all men did: bland features, broken capillaries on his cheeks from the cold or bad shaving. Long dark hair stuck to the side of his face.

I approached him slowly. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“I guess not. I guess I twisted my foot.”

“What are you doing here?” I didn’t look at his foot. I looked at the hatchet beside him. I looked out of the corners of my eyes and couldn’t see a truck, a friend of his. But where there was one man, there were certainly others. I saw notch marks in the log felled beside the man. The marks looked fresh, like the nibbling of a small beast. “A white birch?” I couldn’t help myself. “That burns way too fast. That’s a bad tree to use for firewood. If that’s what you were doing.”

He just looked at me, then tried and failed to stand. “Can you help me? Drop me off in town? I think my foot’s broken or something.”

What was the trick, what was the scam? But nothing in the woods seemed out of place. No branches were broken off along the path. I saw no cigarette butts in the snow, heard no rustling. There was no one else around. Cold whistled in the trees like a drunk.