Nine Days Missing

The hospital at Saranac Lake had a window that gave onto a parking lot and a hill, and Owen Mercer spent four days watching the hill go from white to grey and the parking lot go from grey to salt-stained, and he was told that nine days had passed since he left the city.

Nine days. He had been in the woods two. He had been in a bed in a house above Pierce Hollow for four. Which left three days unaccounted for, and the chart said dehydration and exposure and something the attending wrote as "altered mental status, resolving," and under the place for the patient's own account of the interval, someone had typed, at 4:10 a.m. on the second night: PATIENT STATES HE WAS DETAINED. PATIENT ALSO STATES HE WAS PUNCTURED. NO MARKS ON EXAM. RE-ORIENTED.

"Punctured," he said to the nurse on the night shift, whose badge read CORA REYES and who had the particular calm of a woman who had raised three children and buried a husband and was unimpressed by all subsequent events.

"You told the resident you were punctured."

"I said I thought something had bitten me. There were marks."

"There are no marks." She checked his IV to have something to do with her hands. "Listen, honey. You came in with your shoes on the wrong feet. You were talking about a house with no mirrors. There is no house with no mirrors."

"There are no mirrors in the house. That's what I said. It's not the same thing as a house with no mirrors, it's —" He stopped, because he heard himself, and because the distinction he was making was the distinction of a madman. "You've been up that road?"

"Everybody's been up that road."

"What's at the top?"

"Nothing." She wrote on her clipboard. "It was a TB hospital in the forties and a commune in the seventies and then a man from the city bought it and put up a gate, and my cousin Ron used to mow it before the gate went up. He says there's a house and a generator and not much else. He says the man pays cash and the man does not have a first name." She hung the clipboard up. "Eat your gelatin, Mr. Mercer."

Ruth came up on the sixth day.

She came in with her coat still on and snow in her hair and a bag of oranges she had bought at a gas station and never mentioned again, and she did not say any of the things he had spent four days preparing to deflect. She did not say what happened to you, or you look terrible, or the firm called and they are very worried. She sat down on the edge of the bed and put her hand flat on the blanket over his chest and left it there, and it was warm, and the warmth was so ordinary that he had to turn his face toward the window.

"You didn't answer," she said. "For nine days."

"There's no service up there."

"On the sixth day I called the police. On the seventh day a man called Sacks called me and said you had been taken ill and were being cared for, and that the closing had gone through, and that he was authorized to send me your belongings, and then a very nice courier came to Brooklyn and gave me your overnight bag." She looked at him. "Which had different socks in it than the ones I packed. You don't own that color of sock, Owen. You've never owned that color of sock in your life."

"What did the police say?"

"That you're thirty-one years old and you're allowed to go to the mountains." She took her hand off his chest and opened her bag, and took out a small grey notebook, and laid it on the blanket. "This came in the bag. Your writing. I read it."

"Ruth —"

"I read it four times," she said, "and then I typed it out, because I keep things, and you know that I keep things, and I have put a copy in a folder that I will not describe to you in this building." She looked at the notebook, and her mouth did something complicated. "You wrote that the client wrote your name in a book before you wrote it in his. You wrote that there are no mirrors in that house. You wrote that you are a notary of your own life."

"I don't remember writing it."

"You did write it." She took a breath, and then she said the most Ruth thing she had ever said to him, which was: "What's his name?"

"Voss."

"First name."

"He doesn't use one."

"Then we'll find it," she said, "and we'll write it down, and we'll put it somewhere he can't reach, and then whatever this is, it will have to be an ordinary problem."

They were married on the Tuesday by a clerk in the county office, because he had been told not to fly for a fortnight and she had a schedule she could bend exactly once, and because, she said, in the flat voice she used for things she had already decided, if you are going to have an episode in the mountains then you are going to be my husband while you do it. The clerk was a tall, tired young man who had married forty people that year and who read the vow for Owen when Owen's voice went out on the second line, which meant that a stranger's voice promised Ruth Kessler a thing that Owen Mercer intended.

In the corridor afterwards she held his hand and told him what she had found, which was that the ridge belonged to a holding company in Delaware which belonged to a trust in South Dakota which belonged to nothing at all, and that Sacks's firm had done the closing, and that the deed had been recorded in the county on the day before Owen went missing, and that no document anywhere in it named a human being.

"Nobody owns it," she said. "That's not a figure of speech. There is no person on the deed. There's a mailbox in Sioux Falls."

"Then who signed with me?"

"Whoever was standing in the room," she said. "We'll find him. But Owen — the county surveyor's office is in that town, and the woman I talked to there told me that her predecessor stopped doing surveys on the ridge in the eighties, and that when she asked him why, he told her that the ridge likes to be left alone." She put her hand in her coat pocket. "She said he said the exact words. The ridge likes to be left alone."

In March, her best friend started walking in her sleep.