Caroline #2
Normally, I'd love nothing more than to continue sniping at him until he lowers his defenses enough to give me the full, unvarnished story I came for. But I'm so cold that all the vocabulary I've ever learned is abandoning me in my moment of need.
"Fine," I say, scooting toward the wall. "But let the record show that I don't like it, either."
"At least we agree on something," he mutters.
"And," I add as he shuffles menacingly closer, "we're instituting protocols."
He arches a brow and waits for me to explain.
Moving as fast as my zombie fingers will allow, I grab the spare blanket he abandoned on the tarp, roll it lengthwise into a sad wool snake, and plop it down the middle of the mattress.
Afon looks at it. "What is that?"
"That's the wall. I'm West Berlin, you're East Berlin. You stay in your sector, I stay in mine, and nobody defects."
"You cannot be serious."
"Do you want me to die or not?"
Another exhale. I'm worried he's not taking enough inhales to match the rate at which he's expelling irritated air.
But I guess that's his problem, not mine; I have enough of my own to deal with right now anyway.
He kills the lamp, then makes his move. The mattress dips so deeply that m whole frame is going to fold like a lawn chair and turn this into a casket for two.
But, miraculously, it holds. And then the deed is done. Sort of.
Afon Satyrin is lying next to me, on his back, gazing up at the ceiling.
Even with the Berlin Blanket, the heat hits me immediately.
The man radiates like a substation. Within ninety seconds, my side of the bed is habitable once more. Within five minutes, the shivering downgrades to occasional aftershocks. My toes wriggle, confirming that they do in fact still exist.
"Better?" he asks the rafters.
"Marginally," I lie.
That's a whopper. It's so much better. It's catastrophically better. My entire nervous system is sending up flares of gratitude, and I'm choosing to interpret them as a thermal response and absolutely nothing else.
We lie there. The wind keeps up its one-woman show against the roof. Wolf, sensing detente, hauls himself up off the floor, turns two circles, and flops down across the foot of the bed, pinning my feet in the best possible way.
"Your dog is on the bed," I report.
"He goes where the warmth is. He's smarter than both of us."
"Speak for yourself. I've made exclusively excellent decisions this week."
A pause. "You hiked into the Catskills with one granola bar."
"It was a large granola bar."
"You concussed yourself on my lawn."
"That was the tree's fault."
"You called a man with a rifle a coward in a confined space."
"And look how that worked out," I brag, before my brain can intercept the words at the border. "I got kissed."
For the next while, I can feel him deciding whether to pretend he didn't hear that last bit. "Go to sleep, Caroline," he says finally, but it's softer than the last hundred times he's said it. Worn at the edges, like the photograph on his nightstand.
I don't go to sleep.
Neither does he.
Minutes pass. Maybe an hour. The fire in the stove dwindles, and the wind drops, briefly, into one of those eerie lulls where the whole mountain seems to be holding its breath, and that's when he says one more thing.
"You should never have come looking for me."
I go very still. Even my mouth, the eternal traitor, has the sense to stay closed.
"I knew it the moment I saw your face through that window.
" It's dark in here, but I can still see his outline well enough to know he's gazing straight up overhead.
"I looked up from the sink just in time to see your face for a split second before you fell, and I thought—" He stops.
The mattress shifts, a small crunch, his weight settling.
"I thought, There she is. Like I'd been waiting.
Like some part of me had been standing at that window for months, waiting for you to walk out of those trees. "
Thock. Thock. That's my heartbeat now.
"And I knew," he continues, "that I wouldn't be able to let you go.
I tried. I drove you to that bus stop and I told myself it was finished.
I was halfway back up the mountain before I admitted I was lying.
I have lied to interrogators and bosses and priests, Caroline.
I have lied to men holding guns to my head.
The only person I've never managed to lie to is myself, and the lie I wanted most was She'll be fine. Soon enough, you'll forget her."
The darkness is making this confession possible. In it, we can be anyone, anything. Even the hardest things of all to become: ourselves.
"That's why I'm reluctant to tell you the story," he concludes.
"Not because I'm a coward, despite what you may think.
But because, once you know everything, you'll get up and you'll walk back out of those trees, and this time it'll be forever.
And I'll deserve it. I don't know if I'm ready for that. "
I don't say anything. For once in my perseverating, magna cum laude life, I understand that words would be the wrong tool for the occasion.
Instead, I reach across the Berlin Wall.
My hand finds his forearm first, then travels down over those scarred knuckles, and I slide my fingers between his. For one terrible second, his whole hand goes rigid, and I think he's going to pull away, retreat to the tarp, go outside, and chop the entire forest down rather than let me have this.
Then his fingers close around mine. He laces us together over the rolled blanket and holds on.
The wind picks back up. Wolf sighs against my feet. Then, holding the hand of a man who carries my family's secrets inked on his ribs, I finally fall asleep.
I wake to gray light and an empty bed.
The sheets beside me are cold as the grave. The Berlin Wall has been folded and returned to the duffel, like our whole night and all it contained has been tidied away. Wolf is still on my feet, snoozing happily, but the hut is otherwise empty.
"Afon?"
Nothing.
I sit up, and that's when I see him.
He's at the tree line, maybe thirty yards out, standing in snow up to his shins. Dead-still in a way that no living thing should be able to manage. The Remington is up, stock welded to his shoulder, barrel level and unwavering, aimed at something deep in the trees.
As I watch, he fires.
And runs.