"You must be freezing!"

"I'm always cold," she says, and pulls her hand away. "Bad circulation. I was born that way."

"What's your name?" you ask, because it seems like a good way to apologize.

She says "Ashley," you think, but when you repeat it she corrects you. She has to say it twice more before it dawns that what she's saying is Aisling, only she's pronounced it the Irish way, correctly.

By the time you've repeated it to her satisfaction, you're wondering how she meant to walk all the way out here with no sidewalks and no sight. And who on earth would let her try it. She can't be more than seventeen. Even if you weren't sure from her skin, she doesn't have on the purple wristband the café uses for over twenty-one.

"What does your house look like?" you ask.

"It has a big porch," she says. "The front lawn is overgrown but there's a slate walk. The trees kind of clear out around it. When the echoes get sharp you're nearly there."

Of course, you think, but then you deserve it for asking what the place looks like, don't you? And up ahead you can see a break in the trees, a place where the headlights stop catching on crossed black trunks.

"The driveway's not plowed," you say, pulling up to the curb. There's a tromp line through the snow which must mark out the route of that slate path, and-as promised-a big deep three-season porch that wraps the front of the ramshackle, light-colored farmhouse like a grin.

"We don't have a car," she says.

There's no porch light, and the light pole in the stand of birches by the street looks like it hasn't worked in years. White paint shags from the cast iron like the bark of the young trees that surround it, all clearly delineated in moonlight amplified by snow.

She opens the car door while you're still wondering if you should get out and help her, but the stiffness in her neck says she wants to do this for herself, and she doesn't seem to have any problem finding the path through the snow. Her cane seems to waver before her like a snake's tongue tasting the air.

"Thank you," she says. She shuts the door and moves forward confidently. Caught on the horns of your dilemma, you opt to drape your hands over the steering wheel and watch, just watch. To make sure she gets into the house, that's all.

She climbs the snowy steps without mishap. The lights in the house don't come on when she rattles the porch door open and steps inside.

The door is shut behind her before you realize you never told her your name, and she never asked it.

You keep a musician's schedule, but when you wake up early the next afternoon you haven't overslept. You've still got a couple hours of daylight and it's Tuesday, so no gig tonight, though you're supposed to be driving to Boston on Thursday and Albany Friday night. The memory of the girl and the steps haunts you all through cold spaghetti breakfast, too much coffee, a shower that washes the stiff stage sweat from your hair. At least you don't reek of cigarettes, the way you used to after a gig back when you started.

It's not until you're wrapping the robe around your shoulders that you realize the steps Aisling climbed last night had not been shoveled, and that while there were footsteps leading towards the house, there hadn't been any leading in the door.

You're skinning into jeans, wool socks, a thermal top and flannel shirt before you realize you've made a decision. More coffee tumbles, black, into a travel mug, and with a jingle of metal you lock the door behind you.

It's crisp clear winter as you descend the wooden steps, ice melt crunching under lace-up boots, but the air breathed through the alpaca scarf your sister knitted is warm and smells of lanolin. You scrape the windows of the Toyota, saving gas and the environment by choosing not to warm it up before you climb in and drive away. It starts on the second attempt, grinding and complaining, but bumps out of the driveway easily enough, as if it were just following its nose.

You remember the way, and twenty minutes later you're pulled up in front of Aisling's house.

In daylight, it looks even more disreputable. The gutters along the edge of the porch roof sag. One has frozen saplings sprouting. You pull the Toyota over into the snow bank until the tires crunch on ice and get out. Even though this is the country, city habits die hard. You lock the doors behind.

It's cold enough that the snow squeaks under your boots, and the sun hasn't yet made a brittle crust on top. You stride through it, noticing two sets of footprints-one big and one small, one boots and one sneakers-and stop by the front porch door. Footprints lead around the side of the house, off towards the oak wood, but on the steps only two trails break: one up and one down.

The ones leading down cross over the ones leading up.

You fish a miniature Maglite out of your pocket and shine it through a grimed louvered window, though you already suspect what you're going to see inside. Boxes, torn and waterstained. Mouse droppings. Blown leaves curled like brown dead spiders. There are footprints in the dirt on the boards, but they stop right inside the door and turn around.

A ghost-story chill chases around your shoulders, or maybe that's just the wind sneaking between your scarf and your hat. Deep in the woods, the metallic call of a cardinal blurs through naked branches: wheet, wheet, chipchipchipchipchipchip. Nobody lives here, and hasn't in years.

You catch yourself looking over your shoulder and shake your head. No one is sneaking up behind you and you'd be sure to hear them crunching if they were. Still, when you step back from the window, you hunch your shoulders at more than the cold.

The trail leads around the left side of the house. You stuff your gloved hands into your coat pockets and rub the sleek case of your cellphone with leathered fingertips. You'd call 911, but what would you tell them? I dropped a girl off here late last night and I'm not sure she was really blind? You're not even sure if she was really here.

If you call, you won't have to find what you might find in a snowdrift. But then if you call and there's nothing, what will that look like? Better to go check for yourself, just to make sure.

Maybe somebody was waiting here for her. There's the other set of footprints. Maybe there's a carriage house around back, an in-law apartment or something, and that's where people live.

Sniffing deeply, you can imagine you smell woodsmoke. But when you come around the corner into the back yard, there's nothing but those two sets of tracks, still laid over one another, one big and one little. They cross the yard diagonally, past a trio of blueberry bushes in torn wire cages, and vanish among the trees. The snow is well-trampled, too: you don't think these are the marks of only one passage, or even just a couple.

You glance over your shoulder again. Then, shoulder squared, eyes front, you start forward, whistling the jaunty cardinal's song back at him.

You hope to see him flicker through the trees-red wings would be a welcome distraction from a world of white and black-but the only movement is the pall of your breath hung on the air, the way it curls to either side when you move through it. A hundred yards into the trees, just the other side of a snowy scramble over a humped stone wall that must once have marked a field boundary, the paths diverge-larger booted footsteps back towards the road, smaller sneakers deeper into the wood.

"Two roads diverged in a snowy wood," you mutter, conflating two poems, but Frost isn't here to correct your misquotation and, furthermore, it amuses you. The problem is, neither of them looks particularly less-traveled. But you're guessing that the smaller feet must be Aisling's, which means you should go that way. Deeper into the woods, in the fading afternoon.