The Man at the Window

It happened on the tenth day, at dusk, when the light off the lake had gone gray and the trees at the far edge had begun to lose their shapes.

I was coming back from the garden with an armful of cut flowers. The children were upstairs, Ada was in the kitchen, and the house was making its usual evening sounds. I came around the side of the porch, and I saw a man standing at the far end of the lawn, at the edge of the trees, where the old icehouse used to be.

He was not moving. He was looking at the house, at the upstairs windows, with the particular patience of a man who is waiting for a door he knows will open. He was not a gardener and he was not a neighbor. He was wearing a dark coat that was too heavy for June, and his hair was too long, and even at that distance I could see that he was not young and that he had no business being there.

I stopped. I thought about calling to him, and I did not, because something in the way he stood told me that he would not answer, and that if he answered it would be worse. I stood very still and watched him, and after a moment he turned his head — not toward me, toward the house — and I saw his face. It was a narrow face, handsome in a ruined way, and I knew in the same second that I had never seen it before and that I would know it again anywhere.

Then he stepped back into the trees, and the dusk closed over him, and he was gone.

I did not tell the children. I told Ada that night, in the kitchen, with the door shut, and I made the mistake of describing him well. I had not expected what it would do to her. She went white — not pale, white, the way paper is white — and she put her hand on the counter to steady herself, and for a moment I thought she was going to be sick.

“You saw a man,” she said. “Where?”

I told her. She shook her head, hard, once, the way you shake off a fly.

“There’s nobody there at that hour,” she said. “There’s never anybody there.”

“There was somebody,” I said. “I saw him.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “What did he look like, exactly? Tell me exactly.”

So I told her again, exactly: the dark coat, the long hair, the narrow face, the way he had stood and looked at the upstairs windows as if he owned them. And when I finished, Ada Crane, who had outlasted everything, sat down at the kitchen table and put her face in her hands, and I understood that I had described a man she knew, and that the man was dead.

“That would be Mr. Vance,” she said at last, into her hands. “Colin Vance. He was the caretaker here. He lived in the gatehouse.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead. Two winters now.” She looked up, and her face was the color of the gray light outside. “He died on the drive. The car went off the ice at the bottom of the hill, the night of the big freeze. He was coming home.” She paused. “He was the one who looked after the children before you came. Him and the other one.”

“The other one?”

“Miss Voss. Sara Voss. She was the nanny.” Ada’s voice had gone flat, the way voices go when they are carrying something heavy. “She drowned in the lake last June. The month after he died.”

I stood in the warm kitchen, among the smells of dinner, and I felt the cold come off the window glass like a hand laid flat against the room. I said, “You should have told me.”

“Told you what?” she said. “That the last two people who took care of these children are dead? Miss, I’ve buried three nannies’ worth of truth in this house. I tell it all at once, nobody stays.” She got up and went back to the stove. “You saw a man in the trees. Could have been anybody. Could have been the light.”

It was not the light. I knew it was not the light. But I let her have it, because I needed her, and because I had not yet learned that at Stillwater the people who need each other are the easiest to lie to.