"Turn left at the Dunkin' Donuts in White River Junction," her grandmother said, two hours in. "We're getting coffee. This is not optional."
The farmhouse was exactly the way Claire remembered it, only smaller, the way places from childhood always are. It sat at the end of a long gravel drive under a pair of enormous maples, white clapboard gone silver at the corners, with a red barn behind it that no longer held any animals and a woodstove in the kitchen that had been burning, more or less continuously, since 1962. A neighbor had kept the stove going while Grandma Ruth was away. The kitchen was warm when they came in, and smelled of cedar and ash and old books, and Claire stood in the doorway with her bag on her shoulder and felt something in her chest unclench for the first time in years.
She slept twelve hours the first night. She woke at ten in the morning to sunlight on the snow outside the window and the smell of bacon, and lay there for a long time, under the green quilt she had brought from home, not quite believing that nobody needed her to be anywhere.
The days had a slow, simple shape. In the mornings she helped her grandmother with the stove and the dishes and the bird feeders, which had been ransacked in her absence by what Grandma Ruth insisted was a single, extremely fat squirrel named Harold. In the afternoons they read. The farmhouse had books in every room, stacked on windowsills and stair landings and the back of the toilet, and Claire worked her way through four of them in a week. In the evenings they played gin rummy and listened to the radio, and her grandmother told her stories about the family that no one had ever told her before: about her grandfather Walter, who had proposed on a frozen pond and fallen through the ice up to his knees; about Claire's great-grandmother, who had worn the sapphire at her wedding in a borrowed dress during the worst year of the Depression; about Greg as a little boy, who had been shy and serious and had once spent an entire summer trying to teach a crow to talk.
"Did it work?" Claire asked.
"The crow learned to say hello. Your father learned to say about four more words than he had before. I'd call it a draw."
On the thirtieth of December, they drove to Burlington. The campus was quiet, the students gone home for break, the paths between the brick buildings shoveled into narrow white canyons. Claire walked down to the edge of Lake Champlain and stood looking out at the ice and the gray mountains beyond it, the wind so cold it made her eyes water, and thought, I could live here. I could actually live here.
"Well?" her grandmother asked, back in the car, the heater roaring.
"It's freezing."
"I warned you."
"I love it," Claire said.