11. Erin
ERIN
I’m on my second cup of coffee at eight thirty-seven when the text comes through.
David Perry
Are you free today?
I’ve been awake since six, sitting at the kitchen table in the long gray sweater I’ve been meaning to return to the cabin for three weeks.
I’ve had multiple opportunities. I have not once taken any of them.
Behind everything I’ve tried to think about since the porch light timed out last night, a sentence has been running quietly: I never asked anyone to come back since Claire.
The warmth in my coffee has vanished and reappeared on my cheeks. I stare at the text for a while.
I type yes , backspace, type I can be , backspace, type yes a second time and send it before I can talk myself out of it.
His reply comes back inside thirty seconds.
David Perry
Pick you up at ten. Cleo’s at Laura’s. Dress warm.
I shower. I put on jeans and wool socks, and I leave my hair down because the morning is cold and there’s no clinical reason today to put it up.
The sweater stays on. I spend a moment on the sweater — on the fact that it came from a dresser in a cabin I’ve been to exactly twice, that I’ve carried it home in my bag on two separate occasions, that it has never made it back.
I’m ready by nine-fifty. Hot cider in thermos, tissues, check.
I clear the sink, wipe down the table, rearrange the pillows on the sofa.
I stand at the window and look at the lane and then go sit on the couch.
I stand back up when I can’t stand it. I look at myself in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door.
The woman looking back at me is a little flushed, which is a reasonable reaction to the cold, or to something else. This isn’t a date.
Right.
At nine fifty-eight, I hear the truck on the gravel.
He’s already loaded the cooler in the bed when I come down the porch steps.
A canvas quilt sits on the backseat, old, the corners worn soft.
He takes the bag with the cider and tissues and sets it next to the quilt.
He opens the passenger door. He offers me a hand, and his eyes are on me, steady.
I climb in. He shuts the door, goes around, and drives.
I don’t ask where we’re going. We pass the diner, Joan’s window lit and the pie case visible from the road, and Lito’s car in the clinic lot, which means he came in early again.
Then Main Street falls away, and Cedar Hollow falls away, and I watch the lane become the county road and the county road become the highway, and I leave it alone.
He goes south through the canyon, the road narrow between the rock walls, and then out into the wide open valley where the mountains take up the whole top half of the sky. The road straightens into a long clean line. Heat on low, my hands in my lap.
I watch the ridge line, the white peaks, the flat cold light lying across the valley floor.
Six weeks in Cedar Hollow and I’m still not used to the scale of the country out here, the way the town is just a crease, small and human, pressed into all that rock and sky.
I find it steadying in a way I didn’t expect when I came.
You can’t be the most important thing in a landscape this size. I’m glad for that.
At the last switchback coming out of the canyon, his hand drops to the gearshift.
The back of it — bare, nicked across the knuckles, a small flat scar along the index finger I’ve been not-looking at for weeks — brushes the surface of my knee.
He doesn’t move it. I don’t move my knee.
His eyes stay on the road. Neither of us says anything.
I’m aware of the warmth of his hand through the denim, and I’m aware of the leather cord just visible at the collar of his flannel, the gold band catching the light. The valley opens up around us, and I don’t say a word for the next hour and twenty minutes.
Grand Lake is still. The edges are beginning to ice at the margins, a thin scallop of white against the dark water.
Old-growth runs along the far bank and climbs up into the mountain shadow until the trees disappear into the gray.
He finds a pull-off above the waterline without checking his phone.
He lifts the cooler down from the bed of the truck, shakes the canvas quilt out over a flat shelf of rock, weights the corners with stones. We sit.
The sky above the ridge is enormous and clear, the blue that only happens when the temperature is in the low twenties and there’s no humidity to soften it.
The cold comes off the water in a thin, steady breath.
The smell is pine and cold rock and clean air, and I breathe it in and quiet the sigh at the back of my mind.
Fourteen months of stale, recycled air in sealed buildings.
And then, there’s this. I breathe it in again.
He hands me a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Block print across the top: TURKEY. NO MAYO. NO TOMATO. His just reads TURKEY.
I blink at the label, my brows furrowing, before I shoot him a questioning look.
He just shrugs. "Joan tells me things."
I open the sandwich. He pours from his thermos, his coffee black, and mine too.
He settles on the rock beside me, close enough that the warmth of him is present on my left side, and we eat.
The lake is placid, the surface broken by the occasional fish and bird.
The spruce on the far bank make a small rustle in the wind.
The ice at the edge ticks once as the temperature keeps dropping, and between those two sounds there is a considerable quiet.
I finish my sandwich, drink my coffee. We both have the cider next. I’m aware, sitting on this quilt on this flat shelf of stone with the peaks going white above the rock, that I have nowhere else to be today. I don’t want to be anywhere else.
His hands are easy on his thighs. He is actually resting.
He finishes his sandwich, folds the wax paper into a careful square, tucks it in his jacket pocket. Then the tissues. He smiles. "Thoughtful," he says, and a few of them go into the pocket too after he wipes his hands.
He puts both hands flat on his thighs and looks at the water.
I know this quality of stillness now. I’ve been sitting with David Perry’s silences long enough to understand they’re not empty.
They are the front porch of what comes next.
I wait. The mountain shadow has been moving down the far bank for the better part of an hour. It reaches the waterline now.
"I… I haven’t been here," he says, "since Claire."
He starts slowly. Eyes on the lake, voice flat and careful, each word lifted before it’s set down.
SAR training in Skagit County before Cleo was born, a weekend hypothermia refresher he’d blown through the first time because he thought he already knew it.
A woman in the back of the room called him on the rewarming protocol in front of the whole class.
She was right. He sat through the recertification.
They got dinner in the parking lot after, because he’d embarrassed himself and he owed her that at minimum.
She was a chemistry teacher. She had a laugh that carried two rooms, and she read everything aloud — novels, trail maps, the fine print on a granola bar, whatever was in her hands.
He married her three years after the parking lot, after she’d made him retake the hypothermia certification twice more, for reasons she called professional development.
I hold my coffee cup in both hands and I listen.
In the clinical register I can’t quite switch off, his respirations are slow and even.
His hands are open on his thighs, settled.
I’ve been watching hands for nine years.
What they do under stress, what they do when someone is lying, what they do when someone is afraid.
His right now are just hands, resting on cold rock by a lake. I let that sit.
And there it is. The same care that is in the wooden fox in his breast pocket on a Friday, the beanie tugged down over Cleo’s forehead, the sandwiches, this day. His tenderness is not a layer on top of something harder. It goes all the way through, and he doesn’t advertise it.
The lake is flat and cold in front of us. A small sound comes off the far bank, a bird or a branch, and then the quiet closes back over it. He doesn’t look at me. I don’t look at him.
"Erin."
He says my name and stops. Just that. The same deliberate crossing-toward as the cabin last night. He looks at the water. I wait.
"Cleo came early," he says. "Thirty-four weeks. Placental abruption. Northwest Memorial." A pause. "I was on the wrong side of a SAR call. Didn’t make it to the hospital for eight hours."
Something catches in my chest.
It’s quick and cold, lower than breath, a stilling, like a hand pressing flat on something before it can move.
I hold my face where it is. My fingers tighten on the cup.
He is watching the lake. He doesn’t see it.
I don’t know what the cold thing is. I push it to the back of the afternoon and I breathe, steady, and I listen.
"Claire was okay," he says. "They kept them both nine days.
Cleo was two pounds fourteen. Small, but she was strong.
We took them home." A pause. "Claire’s heart didn’t come back from the pregnancy.
Her cardiologist said it happens, after a complicated delivery, the muscle under stress for too long. She fought it for two years."
The lake is very still.
"It was a Wednesday morning," he says. "I made her coffee. Left it on the counter, went out to load the truck." This pause is different. Weighted in a direction I recognize, the pause before the hardest part.
"When I came back in, Cleo was on the kitchen floor beside Claire, shaking her shoulder." He is quiet a moment. His jaw moves, barely. "She was calling her. 'Mama. Wake up, Mama.' She kept saying it. And Claire was —"