The Lowland

visitor: one who had refused to leave.
    He thought of the two homes that belonged to him. The house in Tollygunge, which he had not returned to since his mother’s death, and the house in Rhode Island in which Gauri had left him, which he imagined would be his last. In Tollygunge a relative managed the house on his behalf, collecting the rent and depositing it into a bank account there, drawing on the income to oversee any repairs.
    He would never go back to live there, and yet he could not bring himself to sell it; that small plot of land, and the prosaic house that stood on it, still bore family’s name, as his parents had hoped it would.
    A doctor and his family lived in it now, the bottom floor serving as his chamber. Perhaps ignorant of its history, perhaps having heard some version of it from neighbors. No group would go out of its way to admire it, two hundred years from now.
    At the end of the tour he added his name and phone number, his e-mail, to a list for the historical society. He accepted another postcard from Elise, announcing a plant sale the following month.
    After their brief exchange she had paid him no special interest that afternoon, always speaking to the group. She had not approached him, as he hoped she might, when he had lingered alone in the upstairs hallway, in the part of the house that had felt most familiar to him.
    He concluded it had been for the sake of the historical society that she’d invited him, that it had meant nothing else. But a few days later, she called.
    You’re all right?
    Why do you ask?
    You seemed shaken the other day. I didn’t want to intrude.
    She wanted to invite him to something else. Not a play or a concert, something he might have turned down. She said she remembered him mentioning, at Richard’s funeral, that he liked walking along the bike path. She belonged to a hiking club that got together once a month, to explore tucked-away landmarks and trails.
    We’re meeting at the Great Swamp next time, so I thought of you, she said, before asking if he wanted to come along.
    3.
    The ginkgo leaves, yellow a few days ago, glow apricot now. They are the only source of brightness this morning. Rain from the night before has caused a fresh batch of leaves to fall onto the bluestone slabs that pave the sidewalk. The slabs are uneven, forced up here and there by the roots of the trees. The treetops aren’t visible through the windows of Bela’s room, two steps ground level. Only when she emerges from the stoop, pushing open a wrought-iron gate, to step out into the day.
    The block is lined with row houses facing one another. Mostly inhabited, a few boarded up. She’s been in the neighborhood a few months, because the opportunity arose. She’d been living upstate, east of Albany. Driving down every Saturday to one of the green markets in the city, unloading the truck, setting up tents. Someone mentioned a room in a house.
    It was an opportunity to live cheaply in Brooklyn for a while. There was a job she could walk to, clearing out a dilapidated playground, converting it into vegetable beds. She trains teenagers to work there after school, showing them how to shovel out the crabgrass, how to plant sunflowers along the chain-link fence. She teaches them the difference between a row crop and a cover crop. She oversees senior citizens who volunteer.
    She lives with ten other people in a house meant for one family. They are people writing novels and screenplays, people designing jewelry, people whose computer start-ups have failed. People who’ve recently graduated from college, and older people with pasts they care not to discuss. They keep to themselves, operating on different schedules, but they all take turns feeding one another. There is one set of bills, one kitchen, one television, rotating chores. In the mornings they sign up for slots to use the bathrooms. Once a week, Sundays, those who can make it sit down to a collective meal.
    People still talk about the shooting a few years ago, in the middle of the day, outside the drugstore on the corner. They talk about a fourteen-year-old boy, whose parents live across the street, who was killed. Most people get their groceries from bodegas or run-down supermarkets. But now there’s a coffee shop with an espresso machine, wedged among the other storefronts. There are fathers in suits, walking children to school.
    One of the houses at the end of the block is shrouded with