8. Afon
AFON
Somehow, the cabin has changed since I left an hour ago.
It's quieter.
I've been alone up here for the better part of a year.
Before Caroline showed up, I went days without hearing another human voice.
Weeks, sometimes. But the silence was the point.
The only alternative was continuing to be a man whose scarred, bloodstained hands had done things that no amount of silence could make right.
In the silence, I could be no one.
But now, the silence is all fucking wrong.
It has a Caroline-sized hole in it.
Wolf can feel it, too. He's standing in the middle of the living room staring at the couch where she slept, tail low, ears rotating like satellite dishes searching for a frequency that's gone dead.
"She's gone," I tell him. "That was the plan."
Wolf looks at me and tilts his head to the side as he lets out a confused whine.
"Stop it," I scold.
He keeps looking.
I hang the Remington back on its rack and shrug off my jacket.
The fire's gone cold while I was out, so I kneel at the hearth and start rebuilding it.
My hands know the work: ball the newspaper, arrange the kindling, pile on two freshly split sections of birch.
They've done it ten thousand times. But my mind is still back in the Bronco as I idled in Pike Hollow, watching Caroline step out onto the gravel…
Go home, Caroline. Please.
I strike a match and hold it close until the newspaper catches. I watch the flame curl through the kindling. A slow heat begins to rise to my face, but I'm so damn cold inside. It's a cold that no fire can touch, no matter how much I feed it.
I stand and wince as my knees pop and twinge. When I look over, I see that Wolf hasn't moved from his post by the couch, and his head is still rotated forty-five degrees sideways.
"I said stop it," I snarl.
He lies down with an enormous, theatrical sigh. Melodramatic fucking animal. I wish he'd keep his damn opinions to himself.
I go to the kitchen with no real purpose or plan. I wash the mug she used this morning, then dry it and put it back on the shelf next to my own. When that's done, I look around for something else to do.
I could eat, but I'm not hungry.
I could check the trail cameras, but I know already I won't find anything.
I could examine and re-examine every inch of the property, looking for more signs of intruders, of weaknesses, of gaps in my castle walls. But why bother?
I don't give a fuck if they come for me.
Either they'll die or I will, and either way, my problems would be over.
Plus, I know that Caroline is now safe. I left her at the foot of the mountain, where normal people live normal lives, not up here on this snow-blasted rock face, where there's no telling what might happen next.
What demons might rise up and come lurking.
Grimacing, I stomp out of the kitchen and into the bedroom.
The bedspread is unmade. She left the quilt thrown back, the pillow still dented where her head was.
Her scent lingers under the woodsmoke, so jarringly wrong that my nose wrinkles up.
It doesn't belong here. Too feminine and dainty, too sweet and floral.
Nothing about her belongs here, which is exactly what I told her. I was right.
I drop on the edge of the bed and sigh.
The photograph is where she said it was—under the book on the nightstand, its corner peeking out. I pull it free and hold it in both hands.
Gervasii's arm slung around my shoulder.
Yelena laughing at something. I don't remember what.
Some joke Gervasii made, probably. He was always the funny one.
The one people wanted at their table. He could walk into a room full of strangers and leave with a story he'd tell for years.
I was always the quiet shadow behind him.
I didn't mind, because being in his orbit meant being warm, and I'd been cold for so long before that I didn't even know I was freezing until he showed me what heat felt like.
The restaurant behind us was Yelena's favorite.
A Georgian place on Brighton Beach Avenue with clay pots of lobio and khachapuri the size of your head.
The owner knew us by name. We went every Sunday after church—back when we still went to church.
That, of course, was before I stopped believing in anything that required kneeling.
My thumb traces the edge of the photograph. The crease down the middle runs right between Gervasii and me, bisecting the image neatly. Him on one side. Me on the other. Yelena caught in between.
That crease wasn't there when the photo was taken. It came later, from being folded and unfolded in shirt pockets and nightstand drawers across a dozen apartments and safe houses and, finally, this cabin—the last stop on a very long road that leads nowhere.
Wolf has wandered in. He's standing in the doorway and watching me carefully, one eyebrow lofted.
He has very expressive facial expressions for an animal with no capacity for higher reasoning, though Caroline would probably argue that he's got more emotional intelligence than I do. She might not be wrong.
"I was wrong, wasn't I?" I ask him. "I shouldn't have reacted that way."
Wolf's tail thumps once against the floorboards. Agreement, or a muscle spasm. With him, it's hard to tell.
I set the photograph on my knee and look at it for a long time. We were so fucking young back then. And so stupidly happy that the camera managed to catch me smiling before I remembered all the reasons I had to frown.
"But she had to go. It wasn't safe here for her."
He whacks the floor with his tail again in response.
"Don't give me that shit. She's Bill's daughter. Do you understand what that means?"
He doesn't, of course. He's a dog. But he must understand some aspect of it, because he waddles closer and rests his huge head on my lap. His eyes are wide, dark, liquid, and unblinking as he gazes up at me.
"There's too much shit there to unpack. It's for the best that this is how it went. Let her go scurrying back to a life that makes sense to her, because the devil knows mine stopped making sense to me a long fucking time ago."
The thing is, I made her a promise. And for all my many sins, breaking vows isn't one of them.
But hardly any time at all passed between the promise and me hurling her out my door like I was a bouncer 86'ing her from a bar.
Like he can hear what I'm thinking, Wolf's ear twitches.
It wouldn't be hard to stay here. The silence doesn't bother me, and the judgmental dog is easily ignored.
I have lots of practice in ignoring my mistakes, too.
Give it a year and I'd be fine. If you gave me five, I'd barely even remember the name Oglethorpe.
I'm good at this shit. Silence and avoidance are the only two skills I ever truly mastered.
But Bill didn't send her that letter so she could sit in the dark forever.
"He wanted her to know," I say. "That's why he wrote it. And he trusted me to fill in the rest, because I'm the only bastard left who can."
Wolf lifts his head off my knee and stares at me. His brow furrows into those deep Rottweiler wrinkles.
My gaze falls again to the photograph. I look at Yelena this time. If she was here, she'd be laughing in my face. You stubborn fucking goat, she'd say. Hiding in the mountains just makes you vertically superior, not morally. She did always have a way with words.
The least your dumb ass can do is give the girl what her old man wanted her to have.
I set the photograph back on the nightstand, face up this time. No more hiding it under books like contraband.
"She came a long way," I tell Wolf. "It's only proper."
I check my watch. If I leave now, there's plenty of time. I can fill her in on what she doesn't know and still wrap it all up in time for her to catch the noon bus back to the city and the rest of her life.
"Fine," I snarl. "Fine. But don't you say a word about this, you hear me? I'm doing this for her, not you. So just… just shut up, goddammit."
I jerk to my feet and stomp back into the room.
Wolf follows, sticking out his tongue and thumping the walls with his baseball bat of a tail in approval.
I glance back at him and growl in distaste as I snatch my keys off the kitchen table and loop my Remington strap back over my shoulder, just in case.
Fuckin' dog. Always thinks he knows better than me.
The sun has melted the snow down further, so little rivulets run down the road, making me take every turn slower lest I slide the Bronco into a ditch.
Because my eyes are streaming from the rush of cold air in my face, my first glimpse of Pike Hollow from above as I descend the mountain is a blurry watercolor of streets and buildings.
It takes another twenty from that first sighting before I've finally finished descending the hairpin switchbacks that mark the road up the mountain. Finally, I can open up the engine on the straightaway and go roaring into the town.
I pull onto the main road and gun it toward the bait shop. I'm already phrasing the story in my head, excising all unnecessary detail.
But when I arrive at the bus stop, it turns out that the whole damn trip was unnecessary.
Because the bench is empty.
I park the Bronco and step out. The engine ticks as it cools. The swirling wind pushes a Styrofoam cup around the gravel lot in a lazy orbit. Across the street, the bait shop is dark. The post office is dark. The laminated bus schedule is still tacked to its post, flapping in the breeze.
Caroline is nowhere to be found.
I check my watch again. It couldn't possibly have taken me that long to get down the mountain, right?
No, it's 10:52. The noon bus isn't for another hour.
She should still be here, sitting on this bench, furious with me, composing elaborate revenge fantasies about the stubborn asshole who threw her out into the cold.
"Caroline?" I call out, even though it's pointless. The whole town feels emptied, hollowed out, a set that's been struck after the final performance.
I cross to the bait shop and cup my hands against the window.
Inside, I see rows of lures on pegboard, a dusty cash register, a rack of yellowing newspapers.
No people, though. The security camera above the door blinks its red light at me.
I'd be shocked if that ancient piece of shit is actually capable of recording anything.
I try the door. Locked.
I'm starting to feel a dull sense of dread in my stomach.
I circle the building. Out back, there's a dumpster, a stack of pallets, and a coil of garden hose frozen solid. None of it provides any indication about where Caroline might've gone.
Could she have hitched a ride? I surely fucking hope not. The girl is impetuous, but there's a difference between that and stupid. Her father must've drilled Never trust a stranger into her head from the day she was born.
I'm standing in the middle of the road, turning in a slow circle, when something catches my eye.
It's gone as soon as I saw it, though. I channel all my years of hunting and slow my breath, my pulse, relax my vision to its widest extent and wait for the sign to appear to me again.
At first, it's just the same hazy miasma of snow-covered buildings, gray asphalt, brown mud.
That pop of color I saw a moment ago isn't visible.
Slower. Slower. Breathe. Empty yourself and wait…
There.
Right over there, where the gravel slopes down toward a drainage ditch, something caught the pale yellow sun and winked at me. I charge over and peer down into the ditch. Half-submerged in the grey slush at the bottom of the ditch is a granola bar wrapper.
I've seen it before. It was in the pocket of her jacket the night I carried her inside—I pulled it out when I was checking her for injuries. She'd smoothed it flat and tucked it away like she intended to dispose of it properly later.
I pick it up. It's damp but not frozen through. Recent.
I start to search around. The snowmelt can hide a lot, but not everything, especially if she was here recently. Eyes on the ground, I make my way back to the bus depot bench.
Directly across the street, I find tire tracks. Long wheelbase. A van or a truck of some kind.
And alongside it, boot prints. Multiple sets, overlapping and smeared, heels and toes digging deep at various points. Something happened here. A struggle? And is that…?
Oh, fucking hell.
A parallel set of lines gouged into the slush.
The kind that heels make when someone is being dragged.
Just like that, the air leaves my lungs.
I stand there with the granola bar wrapper in one hand and the Remington in the other. The world contracts to a single, white-hot point of clarity that burns away everything else. The silence I came here for is gone. The peace? Gone. The redemption? Long fucking gone.
All of it. Gone. In an instant.
Because I know those drag marks. I've seen them before, in other snow, in other places, in a life I was supposed to have left behind.
I already know where the tracks will lead me, but I follow them anyway, just to be sure.
And sure enough, they meet up with the tire marks. The path heads north, toward the highway.
I guess the life I thought I'd left behind has decided to keep me with it, for a little while longer, at least.
I stride back to the Bronco and open the driver's door. I set the Remington on the passenger seat, then smooth the granola bar wrapper flat against my thigh and fold it once before tucking it in my breast pocket.
Then I start the engine and follow the tire tracks north.