13. Kinsley #2
Maybe he needs it closed. Maybe the cave is not cruelty. Maybe it's what holds him together, and I am not a renovation. I am a wrecking ball in a pastel trench coat, and the kindest thing I can do is let him rebuild his walls without me inside them.
I wait an hour. Then two. The fire burns low and I feed it the way he showed me, two split logs angled against each other with kindling tucked beneath like a bird's nest, and I blow on the embers until the flames catch and throw their unsteady light across the ceiling. The cabin ticks and settles around me.
He doesn't come back.
I check the window above the kitchen sink, pressing my forehead against the cold glass.
The storm has passed. The sky is clearing in ragged patches, and through the gaps I can see stars so bright and numerous they look fake, like someone punched holes in a black curtain and held a floodlight behind it.
The mud in the yard has frozen into rigid peaks and valleys, and beyond the tree line the ridge drops away into nothing.
No headlamp. No movement. Just the mountain, enormous and indifferent, holding its secrets the way he holds his.
By the third hour I've made a decision.
I get dressed in the only clothes I have left that aren't completely destroyed.
My leggings are stiff with dried mud but functional.
The oversized flannel of his that I've been living in hangs past my thighs, and I roll the sleeves four times until my hands are free.
My sneakers are still damp from the first night, the canvas dark with watermarks that will never come out, but I lace them tight over my swollen ankle and test my weight.
The pain is a bright, clean line from heel to shin.
Manageable. I've walked on worse in four-inch heels after fourteen hours of conference prep, although the terrain was carpet and the worst hazard was a rolling desk chair.
I write him a note. It takes me three tries because my hands are shaking, not from the cold this time, but from the full-body tremor of doing something that terrifies me and knowing it's the right thing anyway.
I use the back of a receipt I find crumpled in my jacket pocket and a pencil stub from the kitchen drawer, the one next to the drawer, not the one with the medals and the photograph and the obliterated faces. I don't open that drawer again.
Jakob. I need to get to town. The road is clear.
I need cell service to call my family and let them know I'm alive.
I need space to think and I think you do too.
I'm not running. I'll be at whatever counts as a main street.
Come find me when you're ready. Or don't. But know that I would have stayed.
K.
I lay the note on the kitchen table, anchored under the salt shaker, and stand there looking at it for a long moment.
The table where he took me. The wood is rough under my fingertips, scarred with years of knife marks and heat rings, and I can still feel it pressed against the backs of my thighs, can still feel his hands gripping my hips hard enough to leave prints.
I unbar the door. The oak beam slides out of its brackets with a sound like a long exhale, and the cold hits me the instant the door swings open.
The sky is enormous. I've never seen a sky this big.
In Chicago the buildings crowd out everything above the eighth floor, and even on clear nights the light pollution turns the darkness into a sick orange haze.
Here the Milky Way stretches from one horizon to the other in a dense, glittering band that makes me feel very small and very temporary and strangely, fiercely alive.
I step off the porch and onto the frozen ground.
My ankle holds. I pick my way across the yard, past the woodpile with its neat, obsessive rows of split oak, past the stump where his axe is buried blade-first in the grain, past the spot where the boarded-up windows still show claw marks from the bear.
The logging road begins at the far end of the clearing, and in the starlight I can see where the rescue crew's ATVs churned the mud into frozen ruts that run downhill like railroad tracks.
The road is passable. Barely. The mudslide debris has been bulldozed to the shoulders in great dark heaps of earth and broken timber, and the center is a narrow lane of packed gravel and frozen clay.
I start walking.
The descent is steep enough that my good ankle does most of the work while I baby the bad one, and I fall into a rhythm that's almost meditative.
Step, shift weight, step, wince, step, shift weight.
The trees press in close on both sides, enormous Douglas firs that block the starlight and turn the road into a tunnel of shadow and frozen air.
Every few hundred yards I pass evidence of the mudslide.
A large boulder sits in the road like it grew there.
A tangle of uprooted saplings draped across the shoulder, their root systems splayed open like grasping hands.
The remains of a guardrail twisted into a shape that makes no geometric sense, the metal bright where it sheared.
The silence is total except for my breathing and the crunch of my shoes on the gravel and the occasional creak of a branch overhead bending under its own frozen weight.
I keep walking. The road switchbacks twice, and at each turn I pause and look back up the mountain, half-expecting to see his headlamp or hear the heavy rhythm of his boots on the gravel behind me.
Nothing. Just darkness and the faint smell of wood smoke drifting down from the ridge, proof that the last forty-eight hours happened and weren't some fever dream conjured by a burned-out marketing coordinator who drove off a cliff.
A mile down, the road straightens and widens, and the trees pull back to reveal a small turnout where vehicles can pass.
Parked across both lanes, angled like a barricade, sits a rusted Ford pickup with a cracked windshield and a bumper sticker so faded I can't read it.
The engine is off but the cab light is on, a sickly yellow glow that illuminates empty beer cans on the dashboard and a cracked rifle rack mounted behind the bench seat.
Two doors open simultaneously with the groan of hinges that haven't seen oil since the Clinton administration.
Two men step out.
The one from the driver's side is tall and rangy, all sinew and bad posture, with a stained Carhartt jacket hanging open over a thermal shirt gone gray from too many washes.
He has a thin, mean face and a wad of chewing tobacco bulging in his lower lip that makes his jaw look broken.
The passenger is shorter and thicker, built like a fire hydrant someone wrapped in camo fleece, with small, deep-set eyes that catch the cab light and throw it back flat, the way an animal's eyes reflect headlights on a highway.
They look at me and then they look at each other and the tall one grins. It is not a friendly grin. It is the grin of a man who has been waiting for something and just watched it walk directly into his lap.
"Well now." The tall one spits a stream of brown juice onto the frozen gravel and wipes his chin with the back of his hand. "You must be Billsberry's little houseguest."
The short one laughs. It's a wet, compressed sound, like something caught in a drain.
He leans against the truck's fender and crosses his thick arms over his body and his flat little eyes crawl over me from sneakers to borrowed flannel, pausing at places that make my skin contract.
He doesn't say a word. He doesn't need to.
My ankle throbs. The road behind me stretches uphill into darkness. And the mountain, the whole enormous, indifferent mountain, is between me and the only man on earth who would come if I screamed.