Spring in Millhaven
Seasons continue regardless of what happened in them.
Return || Healing || Community
She went back to Millhaven in April. Not for a story — she had given Gina her word — but because she had unfinished business of the kind that doesn’t appear in filed pieces or federal records. She drove the familiar road from Portland in the rain that was Millhaven’s default weather and felt, entering the town, the particular quality of return that visits places where significant things have happened: not nostalgia, which is soft and golden-edged, but recognition, which is clear and a little sharp, the acknowledgment that this place and this moment in your life are permanently associated.
She had coffee with Dale Pritchard, who had testified in November and who was, she could see, somewhat lighter for it — not dramatically, not with visible transformation, but the way rooms are lighter when you move the furniture that has been blocking the window. He had retired from a part-time county job she hadn’t known he had. He was doing woodworking. He showed her a bookshelf he was building for Mrs. Okafor’s library. It was beautiful and precise and the joinery was perfect. She said so. He thanked her without the defensive deflection of a person expecting criticism. Something had settled in him. She was glad of it.
She drove past KWRN, which was still on the air and which Marcus ran with the same equable competence he had always brought to keeping the machine functioning. The booth looked smaller than she remembered. The receiver sat on the desk. The 104.7 MHz frequency was quiet. She stood in the parking lot for a while, in the April rain, looking at the window of the booth lit yellow from inside, and thought about the first night: the rain, the static, the heartbeat, the voice. Don’t look for us. They’re already watching the tower. The tower still stood, in the forest, guarded now by a federal evidence seal. The frequency was clear. She was still looking. That was all right. That was, she had decided, simply who she was.