CHAPTER SEVEN
Four Days Until Christmas
Sergei
Sometimes I forget that other people find the tone of my voice abrasive and my stoic demeanor off-putting. Out in the field, Lutz used to say that I could make pancakes and sausage over a campfire seem terrifying. I don’t notice. This is just how I am. But it doesn’t seem to bother Barrett.
“So, your parents took you away before your country could take you from them.” It’s a statement more than a question.
“I couldn’t appreciate it at the time, but I stopped speaking to anyone. Long enough that my parents thought there was something wrong with me.”
“I mean, there was something wrong with you.” Barrett glances up with a smile. “But silence gets a bad rap. Honestly, it’s a safe response when you don’t know what else to do. And often times it can speak louder than words.”
“Apparently, loud enough.” I tilt my head, studying the board while the sweet smell of her hair drifts across the space between us. “I stayed out in the woods because it felt familiar. My parents didn’t like that, either, even though that’s all I did back home.”
“Is that why you went to Canaan?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Wait.” Barrett peers at me over the chess board. “Was this basically a school-sponsored way for you to run away?”
I let out an unexpected laugh, grateful for her levity. Unbeknownst to many, humor—especially the dark variety—helps me through difficult situations. It seems that she might be the same way.
“Kind of,” I admit. “It was two months before the school realized that I already knew how to speak English.”
“What!” Barrett shrieks, the sound of which forces another smile across my cheeks.
Barrett gasps. “Do you need a minute? Are you OK?”
I furrow my brow in confusion.
“You just laughed.” She moves another pawn. “I need to make sure you’re not going to have some kind of cardiac event. We’re kind of stranded, in case you forgot. I don’t think an ambulance could get here quick enough.”
“It would appear not,” I agree. “But you should probably lose your humor if you’re worried about being stranded with my corpse.”
“Fine, consider me just another potted plant. No wonder your cat wants to chew on me so badly,” she says just as Edie jumps up on the sofa next to her. “Did your stint in the Midwest help any?”
“I just ended up in the woods there, too. Even in Canaan, the forest felt the same. That’s where I met Evie.”
“Brett mentioned that you were friends.” Barrett arches her brow. “That’s pretty wild.”
I nod. “I didn’t know who she was. She ran after me on a trail and said we had a class together.
After that, she wouldn’t leave me alone.
Every day, she tried to do something that would make me talk, laugh, even get angry—making faces, yelling crazy things, even trying to kiss me before I could turn away. Just kid stuff.”
“That I would’ve paid to see.”
“If you think that’s entertaining, you should’ve seen the places she convinced me to go. Sporting events, parties in some stranger’s barn, and what’s that event called where everyone dresses up for a party at school—House Warming?”
Barrett pauses, her fingers on the head of a bishop. Moments later, her eyes pop and her mouth breaks into a wide grin. “Homecoming?”
“Is that what it’s called? I didn’t know what home they were talking about.”
“Is that what made you decide to flee to the Arctic? Too much socializing and school spirit?”
“Has anything as terrifying ever happened to you?”
Maybe it’s too forward of me to ask. I can talk about the dark parts of my life with relative ease. It is what it is. Other people tend to have a more difficult time doing so.
“No,” she sighs as she moves her bishop.
“Nothing truly terrible has ever happened to me.” But then she hesitates.
“Except for when Bowen almost took Brett from me. I think that’s the most scared I’ve ever been because I knew what he was doing, but I still couldn’t stop it.
” She glances out the window with a distant look.
“You saw him for what he was.”
“A monster in the woods like Colson was talking about?”
“My parents didn’t like me hiding away in the forest, but I always felt safest there because my father used to tell me that the real monsters are people who hide in plain sight. But—” I shoot her a look over the board as I contemplate my next move, “we also didn’t have werewolves in Russia.”
“Oh? What was in your woods then?”
I slide a pawn across the board. “Mysterious humanoids. You call them Sasquatch or Bigfoot, but where I grew up, they’re called things like, yeti, Snow man, or Almas...”
“You’re a mysterious humanoid,” Barrett smirks, “and you like hanging out in the woods. Be honest, is that just what people call you when you sneak up on them out on the hiking trail?”
“You tell me,” I retort. “You’re the one who tried to fight this humanoid for your luggage in the middle of an airport.”
It’s not the first time someone has referred to me as a monstrosity of sorts. My stature is the first thing everyone notices, followed by my subdued disposition.
“Can you blame me?” Barrett cries. “You barely said two words and then started walking off with my suitcase!”
Her sudden animation at my perceived criticism is entertaining.
“If you recall, I gave you a compliment later that evening and you didn’t take that very well, either.”
“Nuance,” she replies, “because your compliment is one often used to subjugate women and reduce us to having one purpose.”
“Would you have thought differently if you knew I don't want to have children, either?”
“Is that a full-of-shit statement?”
She has a response for everything.
But then Barrett grunts with a shake of her head. “Ugh.”
“What?”
She scrunches up her nose. “It’s my New Year’s resolution. I’m trying to stop cursing. It’s not going well. Anyway, was what you just said a lie?”
“I said it, no?”
“People say a lot of things for a lot of reasons. They’ll say something like that, and then suddenly have an existential crisis about the future of their genetics.
I see it all the time with my clients. And others will just say they can ‘look past’ such things as though they won’t matter in the future because they’ll just disregard your feelings later after vows are exchanged and finances are combined—when you can’t leave. ”
Clearly, she crosses paths with a lot of liars.
I glance around the room. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“It's quiet.” I smile at her. “Isn't it nice?”
She smiles back, realizing what I’m getting at.
“Why should I ruin this? Lutz and Brett can have the children. They invite me for dinner, I hold a baby, and then come home to Edie. It is simple. Having you here is—” I pause, trying to find the right word. “Different.”
“How so?” she squints at me.
“You’re like a sparkler.”
“A what?”
Fuck.
“Those things that explode when you light them. They sound like bullets. Pop! Pop! Pop!”
“Oh!” she chuckles. “You mean a firecracker?”
“Then what the hell are sparklers?”
“The sticks you light and sparks fly off the end.”
“Probably that, too,” I nod in agreement.
“I’ll take it,” she shrugs. “I’ve been called worse.”
“By who?”
The sharp tone of my voice makes Barrett startle, but she recovers quickly and reaches for her phone on the side table.
After a few seconds, she hands it to me with the tiniest of smirks.
A text thread is pulled up on the screen, and as I read it, I have to fight the urge to crush her phone in my palm.
She would never know, of course—subdued disposition and all.
CALEB (4:23PM): You can’t even respond to a text now?
CALEB (4:29PM): Let me guess, when a man calls you on your bullshit you instantly block him instead of admitting you’re wrong.
CALEB (5:18PM): Just another dumb cunt
CALEB (5:42PM): It’s a good thing I never slept with you. I’m sure it would’ve been a monumental letdown. No wonder you wanted to take things “slow”…
CALEB (5:49PM): I’m the one who should be angry at how this turned out. I had no idea you were such a fucking lib cunt. It’s just as well. Conservative women are much hotter anyway. Used up whore.
CALEB (9:32PM): I should fucking sue you for entrapment.
CALEB (12:13AM): Is your hair actually brown or is that a lie too?
CALEB (1:49AM): You might look good with dyed hair after all. Maybe red from all the blood that would come out of your skull if I used it for target practice.
CALEB (2:03AM): At least that way you wouldn’t die alone like you would otherwise.
There are two more, even more vile than the ones before. I tap the screen a few times and hand the phone back to her.
“There.”
She takes the phone and glances at the list of texts, now devoid of that fucker’s name.
“You deleted them?” she asks with astonishment. “But, what if...”
“What if what?”
“I don't know, what if I need them for evidence? What if I need to know whether he's going to come after me? What if these texts are what will tell people what happened if this situation escalates?”
“It won’t. Besides, your silence already said everything you needed to say.”
Barrett blinks, her mouth ajar as she tries in vain to make sense of it. But I know she won’t.
“You don’t know that,” she finally says.
“Yes, I do.”
“How?” she presses, becoming more and more irate.
“Because you’re here right now,” I reply. “You already listen to people talk all day about the terrible things that happen to them, yes?”
Barrett squares her jaw. “Yes, but it’s not the same. I can compartmentalize at work. That is, if I even have a job once I get home.”
“Why would you not have a job?”
“My fucking asshole of a boss—damnit.” She lets out a huff.
“My boss is incompetent and gaslighting me like he didn’t know anything about this trip and wants to have a meeting when I return where he’s probably going to reprimand me just so he can save face.
And I can’t even stop cursing as part of this New Year’s resolution, so I should probably just forget it.
So anyway, to answer your question, as a trauma therapist, I have to be numb to some degree in order to be effective. ”
I square my shoulders and rest my elbows on the edge of the table. “Are you numb right now?”
Barrett takes a deep breath, but says nothing. And she stays like that for a solid two minutes.
“No, I’m not,” she finally says, this time in a much softer tone. “But part of me wants to be.”
“Why?”
More silence as she moves more pieces across the chess board.
“Because, at some point, I do have to leave here. I want to get home to my family for Christmas. I’ve never missed Christmas. But I already miss Brett, and I don’t need another reason to be depressed about leaving.”
“Why would you be depressed?”
Barrett continues staring at the board, as if concentrating on her next move. But so am I. And when she finally moves her next piece, I move to rise. As soon as she takes her hand off her knight, I reach down and take her queen.
“Checkmate.” I look down at her with amusement, not even trying to hide the condescension. “You talk for a living, but you can barely speak now.”
She snaps her head up, her eyes turning as dark as the storm clouds looming outside.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll be glad when I’m no longer inconveniencing you.”
I glance out the window, shaking my head with nonchalance. “No.”
“No?” she challenges. “So, this is a normal thing for you? You often bring women up here in snowstorms?”
I step around the table and stroll toward the kitchen, glancing over my shoulder as I go. “Never.”
“Never?” she calls after me.
I slow my pace, coming to a halt at the countertop. Then I turn around, crossing my arms.
“No.” I reply. “I like my space.”
“But I'm in your space.”
“I like you, too.”
It seems to catch her off-guard, though she tries hard to hide it.
“Even so,” I continue, “I'm used to long winters with no one to talk to. Very long winters. I love the silence. And it seems like you do, too.”
And, with that, I turn and continue to the kitchen where I start preparing a couple of Chai lattes for each of us, which Barrett will gladly drink without protest. She is like a roadmap that I’m reading in real-time, figuring out the best path to where I need to go.
And it can’t be rushed. She doesn’t know it yet, but the destination is already set and I don’t divulge my next move.
Especially when it counts.