Roland drove by her house seven times before he admitted that he was obsessed.

Not seven times in a single day, the last time a woman took hold of his imagination that way, he had been twenty years younger; her name was Veronica and she did the most astonishing things with her mouth. But that week, he found reasons to take the truck by her rambling Cape Cod, sometimes in the morning, sometimes toward evening, and in between he picked up donations and cleaned out attics and basements for nine dollars an hour. It wouldn’t have been enough to support a family, but he didn’t have one. It was enough to pay rent on a crappy apartment and keep body and soul together, though.

But he never saw any lights on, never saw any movement behind the curtains. Maybe it was stupid but he was starting to worry. Something about her smile haunted him, her sad smile and those impossibly green eyes. On Monday of the following week, he parked the truck in front of her neighbor’s house and went up to knock. No story sprang to mind as to why he’d come; it was just a compulsion, inexplicable and unwise, like so many of his decisions over the years.

He started to knock but when his knuckles brushed the door, it creaked open and the softly haunted sound abraded his nerves. There was no need for him to check the place; this was an abandoned house. Even if it hadn’t been marked so, he knew; he could smell the loneliness seeping from the walls, the silence of empty rooms. He didn’t enter. Something told him that would be wrong, but as he stepped back to go, he saw a glossy brochure, half-stuck beneath the door, and that he picked up. At one point, he’d been expected to return the vehicle at the end of the day and turn in his keys and take the bus home, but he’d been driving for them so long now that they just found it easier to leave its care and maintenance up to him.

So he ambled back down the walk with the casually broken gait of one who’s been injured long ago, eyes on the delights of the rural resort at Lands’ End. Maybe that was where she’d gone. He turned the mailer in his hands, seeing her name. Mrs. Evan Winters. Well, that was wrong; she was springtime. She held it in her eyes. As he sat in the cab, breathing in dust and faint pine air freshener, stale chips and an open can of Coke gone flat about three hours ago, he made another reckless decision, the like of which he hadn’t made since he was a whole lot younger. But he wouldn’t let himself think about that, although he couldn’t seem to stop himself from finding the scar that bisected his brow with nervous fingers as he started the truck.

--

“No, I’m not shitting you,” Roland said, offering the keys to the dispatcher for what seemed like the hundredth time. “I’m leaving and I can’t have this sitting at my place.”

Judith was a woman in her forties, who might’ve been pretty if it hadn’t been for the discontented cast of her mouth, which no shade of lipstick could ever quite conceal. “What the hell, Roland? Are you quitting?”

“Don’t know,” he told her, and there was remarkable relief to that not knowing. He felt free for the first time in years, like an Australian Aborigine giving himself over to the Dreamtime, going walkabout with no plan, no goal, just knowing it was time to go.

She gazed at him, suspicious. “You’re not drunk, are you?”

“Nope.” He shook his head, tossing the keys onto her desk since she hadn’t taken them any of the times he’d offered. “Try not to make the whole world pay for what that miserable son of a bitch did to you when you were twenty-five, Jude. You might even be happy someday.”

And with that, he was gone, not staying to see her jaw drop, because something of that willow woman’s ability to pronounce secrets had definitely rubbed off on him. That was nothing he’d ever talked about with Judith, but he knew as he was leaving exactly what’d happened to her. He still felt peculiar, changed, but it wasn’t a bad thing. Instead it was buoyant, as if he’d only just realized he’d been wearing lead boots his whole life and had stooped, at last, to remove them.

He caught one bus to his apartment and packed a bag, somehow knowing he wouldn’t be coming back again. And then one more bus out to Lands’ End because he had to find the woman whose sad smile had turned his heart inside out, whose willow green eyes caught him so that he couldn’t go on without knowing what had become of her. Yes, she was probably twenty years older than he, perhaps more. And he didn’t expect…anything but answers. That was all he needed, if not all he wanted.

Tilting his head back against the vinyl bus seat, he found himself thinking of her. She’d possessed one of those gorgeously defined faces, where age simply pares away the excess, leaving the elegance of sculpted bones. There was fey fragility to her, someone almost too aesthetic for the workaday world. He closed his eyes and dreamt of virgin forests and being surrounded by gamboling sylvan nymphs while he waited vainly for their queen.

--

It was nightfall when he arrived, which was somehow right. The resort was an isle of golden light among wilding trees, a place that thrummed somehow with potential in a fashion he hadn’t contemplated for years. He came up to the front doors with his broken gait, although his knee no longer pained him. Nothing pained him more than regret and perhaps this would be the same sort of thing, but he pushed through, feeling the sense of reaching a threshold as he passed through the foyer doors.

The girl at the desk looked hauntingly familiar; perhaps he’d seen her in the brochure. But he didn’t dig it out of his pack to check. Instead he answered her professional comforting smile with one of awkward uncertainty. Just gazing around, he felt certain Lands’ End was a pricey place, well beyond his means. He read that her name was Sarah, so he smiled, wondering how crazy he’d sound if he said he was looking for Mrs. Evan Winters. Was she here? Had she ever been?

“Welcome to Lan Send,” she said, her smile growing just a shade, as if she knew his predicament and it amused her.

His gaze went right to a small, elegantly lettered sign affixed to the wall to the right of her head. It read HELP WANTED and in tiny, childish letters beneath, someone had scrawled ‘Please,’ in pencil. For some reason that made his smile widen, so he pointed and said, “You have a job opening?”

“Oh.” She sounded as if he’d surprised her, which he thought didn’t happen too often. “Yes, as it happens, we do. The bellboys never seem to…” And he found himself thinking of the drummer from Spinal Tap without knowing why. “ Well, a bad business.” Her tone became brisk. “We do have a position vacant. Would you like an application?”

“Yes, I would.” So he took the form on the clipboard to one of the striped chairs adjacent to the foyer, feeling as he filled it in line by line, as if he were selling his soul to a higher, or lower, power.

Somehow, remembering the woman’s eyes, it was worth it.

• Dreamtime, Going Walkabout
• Selling His Soul