Out of the Woods Read Free Page A

smallish-looking state road that seemed to split off from Route 1, the Maine coastal road, at about the right latitude (if that was even the word I wanted), although it seemed to disappear once it arrived in New Hampshire. No matter, there was another one going in more or less the same direction. A lot of them, in fact. They crissed and crossed and do-si-doed all over the place, but eventually some of them evidently intersected with Interstate Route 4, which would take me directly into Woodstock. There were also a lot of alternative, even thinner lines that might or might not provide a shortcut, and a few roads that seemed to change their names simply for the hell of it before popping up in unexpected places. I thought about writing down a route but decided against it. It looked simple enough. And I wanted an adventure.
    This day, after all, was not only an end but also a beginning—of a new life in a new world. I needed to get to where I was going according to my own lights, along a path I had chosen, not one generated by some witless computer program, or traced out by helpful strangers.
    Later I would learn about route delusion and disorientation behavior and a whole lot of terms scientists use to characterize the bizarre ways people make an utter hash of getting from one place to another. At the time, however, I tossed the maps onto the passenger seat and pulled out of the parking lot, blinking away the last of the tears. You’ll be fine, wiser heads had told me when I asked them how they got through this day. You’ll cry, but then you’ll feel light in a way you haven’t felt in years.
    I had doubted that second part, but as I slipped out of Brunswick onto the highway that would in turn tip me onto the coast road, I sensed it, that first stirring of exhilaration. It was a fine day, there was plenty of it left, and I was headed into a brand-new life, one in which, for the first time in many years, I had no idea what would happen next.
    My husband, Lee, had died when Zoë was six, and in the beginning, and for many years afterward, life was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. I don’t mean to say there wasn’t a rich complement of joy and deep satisfaction, along with the usual hardships of single parenthood, to accompany the archipelago that grief requires us to navigate, only that the way was straight and the direction clear. I had a child to raise and a living to make and I did these things cocooned in the warmly reassuring diurnal rhythm of playdates and sleepovers, of tête-à-têtes with other mothers, of teacher conferences and bake sales—and with little concern over the parts of life that might be missing.
    But after my daughter entered high school, the soft focus and narrow spectrum through which I was used to viewing the world shifted sharply. Her new school politely made it clear to the freshmen parents that their involvement in their children’s academic careers was essentially limited to attending school events and writing large checks on a regular basis. My daughter passed into that seemingly endless phase of adolescence during which an adult’s presence was mainly required at times of intense unhappiness. More and more vacations and weekends were spent at other people’s country homes or on the kind of educational jaunts meant to impress the jaded eyes of the college admissions committees in the rapidly advancing future. Soon, too soon, she would be gone.
    I had begun to sketch out the outlines of my response to that inevitability about ten years before, though I didn’t know it then. One of my two stepdaughters had been married at her mother’s house in Barnard, a small hamlet about ten miles north of Woodstock. I was struck by the beauty of the place, a country of green hills and old barns and grazing cows, and by the faint breeze of memory it stirred of childhood visits in summer and at Christmas to the hardscrabble speck of a town