The Wayfaring Stranger

Joe moved in in the first week of August, less than two weeks after Anna’s father had quietly gathered his things in the early hours of the morning, and left. Her mother didn’t cry over him (at least not that Anna saw), and after a couple of days she borrowed markers from the neighbor, and she and Anna sat at the kitchen table drawing up flyers advertising room and board, for the little box room that overlooked the untidy communal yard.

It was Anna who first opened the door to Joe, who stood on the doorstep clutching two battered leather bags, an old man dressed in crumpled corduroy. He had white hair and a shy, dreamy smile. Anna had never seen her mother warm to anyone so fast. Joe spent most of his time sitting at the rickety picnic table out in the yard, scribbling in a small, black leather notebook that he carried around with him at all times. He was a fixture out there, sitting with his head bowed and white hair lifting in the breeze, oblivious to the stray cats fighting nearby or the children playing and shrieking.

Anna’s mother was always coming out while he sat out in the yard, with fresh lemonade, with cookies, with coffee. She would walk down to see him and his blue eyes would light up, and he would smile his dreamy smile. He called her Mrs. Miller, even though she told him to call her Kaitlin, and sometimes he stammered it – “M-Mrs. Miller”. She smiled so much while she was around him, always fussing as though he were a child, and Anna could tell that she wanted to smooth his hair and straighten up his clothes. Once, when her mother was walking back up to the house, barefoot and glowing like the sun with her belly round under a yellow dress, Anna caught Joe staring after her, with sadness and a kind of longing.

She would have been jealous of her mother’s affection, but she was fascinated by Joe too, and most of her time in those last months of summer was spent sitting in the dirt by the picnic table, poking at ant nests with a stick, and hoping he would notice her. Most of the time she was disappointed, as he was so absorbed in his little notebook, but occasionally he would look up at her and smile. He called her “Amma,” teasingly, as though he couldn’t remember her name.

“My name’s Anna!” She would protest, every time, but secretly she was thrilled by the joke, and by his brief attention. She had asked him what he was writing, but he would never say, and the one time she crept up behind him to try to see he slammed the notebook shut, and looked at her with so tight lipped and cross an expression that she ran inside and hid in her room, feeling ashamed.

Sometimes when the weather was particularly warm they would have dinner in the yard, and her mother would light little citronella candles, and they would stay out talking until it got dark. Anna learnt a lot about her mother on those nights – that she had wanted to travel – that she had received a college scholarship to study Math that she had never taken up.

“You could still study, travel,” Joe said earnestly. But as a single mother with a 10 year old and a baby coming, it was clear that those things were not in her future, and they sat quietly for a while as the sky darkened, and bats began to flit overhead.

Joe stayed out in the yard as the weather grew colder, turning up his collar and hunching over the table to keep warm – but eventually he had to come inside, and the kitchen table became his new haunt. It was around this time that he started to go out, for whole days at a time, which he had never done before. One night, he didn’t come home. She didn’t say anything about it, but Anna could tell her mother was very worried. She kept looking at the clock, and out the front window, and she was stiff and irritable. Eventually, as they were preparing dinner the following evening, they heard the front door open and close, and then there Joe was in the kitchen, clutching his scarf with both hands, looking sheepish and anxious.

Her mother’s obvious anger seemed to dissolve with relief, and she and Joe were wary and solicitous around each other for the next few days, and oddly tender, like lovers after a fight. Joe didn’t go out again after that.

A few weeks later, while Joe was writing at the kitchen table and her mother was in the yard talking to a neighbor, there was a knock at the front door, and Anna answered. Two men were there, all smiles, wrapped up in identical looking coats and scarves. Who was in the house? they wanted to know, was there an adult they could talk to about Jesus? Anna said no one was home, but took the pamphlets, and waved them off as she closed the door and they crunched back out into the icy street. She turned around, and Joe was in the hallway, standing straight and stiff, his face white.

“Anna,” he said, “If anyone asks about me, you must say you’ve never heard of me”. He spoke fiercely, his shy smile gone. “Do not tell anyone I’m here”, he insisted. She nodded nervously, clutching the pamphlets to her chest.

“I won’t!” she squeaked. She was a little scared of him.

The follow night, she was woken by a soft thump, the sound of something falling. She sat up in bed in the dark. It smelt of snow. Anna padded out into the hallway, and found that the front door was wide open. Outside, the world had been transformed. The first snow of the winter had fallen, and the street and cars, houses and trees were coated in a muffling layer inches deep. A drift of snow had blown into the hallway, and the apartment was freezing cold. Anna went to close the door, and noticed dark marks in the snow leading to the door. They were in the hallway too.

She shut the door and then followed them back through the apartment, dark drops on the creaking wooden floorboards, leading to Joe’s tiny room, where the door was ajar. Anna went in.

Joe was lying on the floor by the bed, lit up by the dull moonlight. His shirt was soaked in blood. “Mom!” Anna screamed. “Mom!” He was gesturing to her, and she moved robotically to kneel at his side, although she was terrified. There was an open shoebox beside him, and he pushed it towards her.

“This is for your mother,” he breathed painfully. Then he reached awkwardly into his coat, gasping with the effort, and took out the little black notebook, held closed with a black band, and now stained with his blood.

“Take it,” he said, pushing it into her hands, and closing them over it. “Keep it hidden, keep it safe.”

“Joe,” Anna sobbed. She could hear her mother getting up, calling her name.

“Give it back to me,” he said, but he was still pushing the notebook into her hands. “Give it back to me.” And then with a sigh, he died.

The shoebox contained $20,000, and a photo of a man in his 20s, which must have been Joe – blonde haired and smiling, and very handsome. He was in bright sunlight, surrounded by palm trees, and he had his arm around someone - an older woman in a patterned sundress, who was shading her face with her hand. Anna’s mother was distraught. She sobbed at the funeral, at which they were the only attendees. Joe had the best coffin and the best headstone, paid for with some of the money. Anna wanted to tell her mother about the little notebook, but she was so heartbroken that there never seemed to be a good time, and eventually she hid the notebook in her secret place in her room, in a little cavity behind a loose brick in the wall. She didn’t look inside.

She often heard her mother crying at night. Things all changed when Teddy was born. Then her mother was all smiles. She barely put the baby down, he was on her hip at all times, gurgling and laughing, while she cuddled and played with him, and laughed back in delight.

He grew into an adorable little boy, blonde haired and blue eyed, a sweet and dreamy child more interested in carefully piling up blocks and drawing shapes than playing with any other children. His teachers loved him, even though he showed no interest in schoolwork and no shame or guilt for not paying attention, doodling on his test papers instead of answering the questions.

Anna was 10 years older than him, so they had nothing in common, and she was jealous of how much her mother loved him. He couldn’t say her name properly when he was little, and called her ‘Amma’. Every time she heard it, she thought of that night, the smell of blood and snow, and Joe gasping for breath. So she was irritable and cruel with the little boy, and though they lived in the same apartment, they had little to do with each other.

When she left for college at 18, she didn’t plan to visit often. But when she had only been there for six months her mother called her. “Some men have been here,” she said, her voice high and trembling. “They were asking about Joe! They were looking for his notebook – that little black notebook that he had…”

Anna travelled home immediately. She let herself in, and put her bag down in the hallway quietly. She could hear her mother in the kitchen. Anna walked silently down the hallway and into her bedroom. The brick was harder to dislodge now that she was older and her fingers were bigger, so she sat patiently for a while, inching it out. Finally she put it down on the floor, and reached into the wall.

There was her little keychain, and the Valentine a boy had given her when she was 12 – her first ever. But there was no notebook. Anna sat on the floor by the wall, stunned and anguished. A noise from the doorway made her turn.

Teddy was standing there watching her, and he had the notebook in his hands, the pages open. “I saw you get something from there once,” he said, in his sweet childish voice. “So when you left I looked inside.”

She leapt to her feet and to his side, and snatched the notebook aggressively from his hands, making him jump. Anna looked at the open pages. They were covered with equations, far beyond her understanding, and accompanying notes, in Joe’s neat handwriting. But now, also, there was writing in a childish hand, in green pen, drawing clumsy symbols. “You wrote in it?” she said angrily, and looked up at her brother.

He was smiling nervously, shyly, as if to appease her, his blue eyes wide. “It’s like a language,” he said, looking at her sheepishly, looking for her forgiveness. The resemblance hit her suddenly, and hit her hard, and she was back in the box room, 10 years before, as Joe pressed the notebook into her hands, saying, “Give it back to me, give it back to me”.

She handed it to the boy almost automatically, her head reeling, and he took it and hugged it to his chest for a second. “Do you know what it’s about?” she asked him.

He held the little notebook reverently, and looked up at her with that dreamy gaze, as though looking at her from far away. “It’s about time”.