“An old mill. They’re renovating it, turning it into condos and offices. I got the bricks for free.”
“Cool,” Nate said. “How’d you find them?”
Hattie sent me.
“Craigslist,” Helen said without missing a beat. “I thought we could use them for the hearth for the woodstove.”
“I thought we were going to use slate from the quarry in town,” Nate said, frowning a little. They’d visited the quarry, and Nate had loved the texture and gray-green color of the stone.
“We can still get that and use it for something else. Maybe the kitchen floor?”
“I think that might be a little pricey,” Nate said. He was already worried that they were over budget. The money they’d inherited from Helen’s father had seemed like so much at first, more than enough to build with and live on for at least a year. But there had been unexpected outlays: the price of lumber up here was higher than they’d originally budgeted for; the professional furnace and water heater install took a huge chunk of money; the ongoing expense of all the beer, wine, and take-out food because cooking in the trailer was depressing and difficult. The money was going fast. Faster than they’d imagined and planned for. Helen looked at the accounts and was sure they’d have more than enough to finish the house, but she worried that Nate might be right—if they kept going at this rate, they wouldn’t have much left over to live on. They hadn’t thought much about what they were going to do for income when the time came—it seemed so far away.
Of course, it didn’t help that Nate was splurging on hundred-dollar night-vision cameras. She shook the thought away, told herself she was being petty.
“Maybe we could get the rejected slate pieces for cheap, you know? The weird shapes that broke and aren’t square. I think it could work. We could do like a funky mosaic thing.” Her dad had done a floor like that for an artist friend of his and it had turned out beautifully.
“Maybe,” Nate said.
“These bricks—they were just so cool, and I love knowing that they came from a real mill up the road. Think about it. It’s like I pick one up and feel this instant connection to the past. I can practically smell the grease, hear the hum of the looms, feel the cotton dust in the air.”
Smell the smoke of the fire,she thought.
If installing the beam had helped Hattie come back, would installing the bricks draw one of the mill workers back? The burned woman with skin hanging off that the contractors had seen in the basement, maybe?
She shivered.
Nate smiled at her, kissed her nose. “I love you. I’m not at all sure that cotton dust is a thing, but I love that you imagine it is. And saving these bricks from the landfill by reusing them in our house—can’t really complain about that.”
“Cotton dust is definitely a thing,” she said. “Wanna help me unload these?”
“Sure,” he said.
She moved the truck up closer to the house and pulled down the tailgate, and they started pulling the bricks out, putting them in a stack next to the house.
“These are in pretty good shape. They’ll have to be cleaned up,” Nate said. “All the old mortar scraped off.”
Helen nodded.
“Some of them look like they’re from a chimney stack or something. They’re all black on one side.”
Helen said nothing, feigning ignorance as she continued to stack the bricks. At last, she said, “You were up and out early this morning.”
“Went for a walk. That heron was in the bog again. Such a beautiful bird.” There was that wistful look he got again, the one that reminded Helen of his deep love and respect for nature. “I got some good shots of it. I was thinking I’d print the best one, maybe have it framed? We could start a sort of gallery up in our library with photos of the local wildlife. Maybe even some of my sketches as I get better at it?”
“I love it,” Helen said, gathering an armload of bricks to bring to the house. “Did you see your white deer?”
He hesitated a moment, then said, “No.”
He was leaving something out, she was sure of it. And she felt oddly comforted, knowing that she wasn’t the only one who wasn’t telling the whole truth.
“But I do wonder if maybe there’s a group of them. I’ve been reading about these white Seneca deer in New York. It’s really interesting—there’s a population of about two hundred of them living on a protected reserve that was once an old army depot. They’re white-tailed deer, but they’re leucistic, which means they lack pigmentation in the hair. They’ve got brown eyes, not pink like true albinos.”
“Leucistic, huh?” Helen said. She loved how excited Nate got when he learned something new like this, like he couldn’t wait to share it. Mr. Science in action.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had something like that here? A whole population of white deer! I was thinking I could do a study, write a paper.”
Nate had been talking about one day writing articles and papers for scientific journals since she’d met him, but back in Connecticut he’d never had the time or found a subject inspiring enough.
