Chapter 6
The cabin was quiet in a way it hadn’t been quiet since I arrived.
Dante had left at ten. Camera retrieval on the north ridge, maybe three hours, maybe four. On the table: a box of colouring pencils, still in their paper sleeve. A neat stack of printer paper beside it.
He‘d left them there this morning without comment. The same way he did everything. Set them down on the wood and went back to his laptop and let the objects be what they were, which in this case was an invitation with the weight of a dare.
I’d looked at them from the chair for an hour.
Clover was in my lap. Both of her eyes — the old black button, the new brown one — pointed at the ceiling with an air of patient neutrality, like she had also been observing the pencils and was reserving judgment.
I had told myself several times that I was going to use them in a minute.
The minutes had stacked. None of them had produced a hand extended toward the table.
I got up.
I made coffee instead. Three minutes on the camp stove, the filter over the mug, the water poured slow and even the way he poured it.
I drank half the mug standing up. Washed it.
Set it upside-down on the shelf to dry. My reflection in the window above the basin looked like a woman who had successfully completed a task and was now ready for the next one, and the next one sat on the table fifteen feet away and hadn’t moved.
I crossed to the table.
I picked up the pencils. The paper sleeve was the old-fashioned kind — twelve colours, cardboard, the brand name faded at the corners where someone’s thumb had worn it.
He‘d bought them somewhere. A general store in another town, probably, one of the ones Pete’s wasn’t anymore.
I pulled the pencils out and spread them on the table and looked at them.
Then I put them back in the sleeve by colour.
Warm on the left. Cool on the right. Black at the far end because black wasn’t a temperature, it was an absence, and absences belonged in their own category.
The whole operation took four minutes. I knew because I was counting.
When I was done, the pencils sat in their sleeve in an order so correct it looked like a display in a shop window.
I stood at the table with nothing left to do.
The paper was still blank. The paper was going to stay blank if I didn’t sit down, and sitting down required a decision, and I had been avoiding the decision for ninety-seven minutes.
I sat down.
The chair creaked. I slid a single sheet of paper out of the stack and squared it on the wood in front of me. White. Eight and a half by eleven. The surface faintly textured, the kind of paper that took pencil well. My hand hovered over the sleeve.
I picked up the black one.
Black was safe. Black was the pencil you used for pretending you weren’t drawing anything serious, because black-only drawings were just doodles, the kind of thing you produced while on a phone call, the kind of thing that didn’t count.
I drew a line.
Vertical, down the centre of the page, about four inches long.
Then a circle at the top for the head. A horizontal line across the middle for the shoulders, wide — wider than the head, because the shoulders were the point.
Two legs. Two arms, at the sides, not raised, because he didn’t raise them.
He stood with his hands where his hands went.
I added the dots for the eyes. Small. Dark. I drew them close together and then corrected — they needed to be slightly further apart, because his face was wider than I had initially drawn, the jaw heavier. I adjusted the head, making it more square than round.
The mouth took me three tries.
The first was a straight line and it was wrong because it looked severe, and he wasn’t severe.
The second was a slight smile and it was wrong because it looked friendly, and he wasn’t friendly exactly, he was something else.
The third attempt was a line that curved up just barely at the corners, the kind of smile you‘d miss if you weren’t looking for it, and that was it.
That was accurate. I sat back and looked at the page and the stickman on it and my chest did the quiet complicated thing it had been doing on and off since breakfast.
I drew a smaller stickman beside him.
I didn’t think about it. The hand just did it, the pencil moving of its own accord, and I watched the smaller figure take shape on the paper — thinner, shorter, hair long on one side. I didn’t draw a face on her. I couldn’t. The face was too much.
Between them, I drew a heart.
Not a careful heart. Not the kind you outline and shade and fuss with. Just a quick shape, two humps at the top, the point at the bottom, a thing a child would draw without calculating the proportions. It came out slightly lopsided. It sat between the two stickmen like it had always been there.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then my hand did another thing I didn’t authorise.
It wrote two words beneath the heart, small, in the same neat printed letters I used for everything.
My Daddy.
I stopped breathing.
The words sat on the paper. They were just ink.
Graphite, really, black and slightly smudged where the side of my hand had dragged across them.
Two words, eight letters, a possessive and a noun.
I stared at them and my chest went enormous — there was no other word for it, enormous, the whole cavity of my body suddenly too small for whatever was trying to occupy it, the ribs stretched tight around a feeling that had no proper size.
I could hear my own breathing. It had started again and it was too loud.
My hand moved.
The black pencil came down on the words hard, harder than pencil needed to be used, scribbling in fast tight strokes across the letters, back and forth, back and forth, until the shapes were buried under a dense black smear and the pencil tip was blunt and the paper had dimpled under the pressure.
I kept going for longer than I needed to.
I went over the smudge twice more after the words were already gone, scribbling at nothing, scribbling because stopping felt worse than continuing.
I put the pencil down.
I turned the paper face-down on the table.
***
The paper was accusing me.
I could feel it. Not in any way I could explain — it was paper, it weighed almost nothing, it had no emotional mass a rational adult would concede to — but I could feel it the way you feel a mirror in a dark room. A presence that reflected something back at you whether you looked at it or not.
I stood up.
The chair scraped. I registered the sound and moved past it, across the cabin, toward the bed.
My hands were already doing the next thing before my brain had caught up, which was how the best decisions got made — the body ahead of the thinking, the thinking trailing along behind with its objections, too late.
I knelt by the bed and slid the shoebox out.
I brushed the lid clean with the heel of my hand and set it on the floor, and opened it. Everything was where I had left it nine days ago. The photos on the top. The report cards in their folded envelope. The birthday card with the cartoon cake on the front.
Clover was on the pillow behind me.
I reached back and picked her up. Her fur was smooth from where my hand had been on her all morning, which was a thing I noticed and then didn’t let myself notice further, because noticing meant pausing and pausing meant losing momentum and I was running on momentum alone now.
I put her in the box.
She looked up at me from the cardboard with her lopsided startled-by-good-fortune expression, and I folded the flaps of the lid down fast, and I heard — I imagined I heard, I did not hear — a small squeak of protest.
“Sorry, Clover.”
The lid wouldn‘t close flat. Something inside was sitting too high. I pressed the lid down with my palm and got it seated and held it there.
Tape.
I didn’t use his. That mattered. I got up and crossed to my bag and unzipped the front pocket and pulled out the small roll of black electrical tape I kept there because I always kept electrical tape, because I fixed things, because the window latch at The Timberline had taught me and every shabby room before it had taught me and my own hands were the only hands I had ever been able to rely on to fix what was broken.
I tore off a strip with my teeth. Pressed it across the seam of the lid.
Tore off a second. Ran it perpendicular, forming a cross. Smoothed it down with my thumb.
The box was closed.
I carried it to the table and set it beside the face-down paper and did not look at the paper. I would not look at the paper.
Nine days.
That was what I kept coming back to as I moved.
Nine days of someone else‘s camp stove and someone else’s blanket and a wooden chair I had slept in the first night because accepting a bed felt like accepting a collar.
Nine days of good coffee placed on the nightstand before I was awake. Nine days of his typing as a lullaby.
I packed what little I had. A change of clothes, the flannel I wasn’t wearing, socks, my toothbrush from the bathroom shelf. My notebook, which he had given me.
The contract was in the front pocket of my bag. I felt it through the canvas when I lifted the bag onto the table. Folded in quarters. Signed.
I was not going to think about the contract.
I zipped the bag.
In the corner by the desk, the scanner muttered.
The same low static it had been muttering for nine days.
I had stopped hearing it the way you stopped hearing a refrigerator.
Now, standing in the middle of the room with a bag on my shoulder and a shoebox under my arm, I heard it again, and it sounded like what it was: someone else’s equipment, in someone else’s cabin, tracking someone else’s frequencies.
Not mine.