Chapter Thirteen
Sarah is alone when sunlight breaks through the front windows, rousing her from sleep.
For once, it’s not snowing, but the sky is the color of an old soup bone.
She stretches in the enormous bed, disappointed there’s no sign of Caleb except the scent left on the sheets.
He smells like soap and fabric softener, simple masculine scents.
Unlike Elijah’s cedar-and-turpentine or the faded tobacco Jacob Vass left behind. Or the metallic tang of Ben’s blood.
She rescues her abandoned pajama top and pads to the bathroom.
When she comes out, there’s a knock on the door.
She was afraid it would be awkward but no, Caleb grins down at her holding a tray, this time carrying breakfast for two.
They drink coffee and eat muffins together in his father’s bed, her bare legs hooked over his.
After staring death in the face, this feels so easy.
It’s always easy, at the beginning, she reminds herself.
But she pushes the thought away as Caleb kisses her neck.
She’s unbuttoning his jeans when his cell phone rattles against his hip.
He groans and takes it out of his pocket. “Shit,” he says, glancing at the screen. “It’s Uncle Isaac.”
The name sends a bucket of ice water over Sarah’s skin.
Caleb rolls away and strides to the other side of the room.
Sarah clamps a hand over her mouth and tries not to giggle, tries not to even breathe for fear of setting the bedsprings squeaking.
Isaac can’t know she’s been considerably less than six feet apart from Caleb.
“Uh huh?” Caleb raises his eyebrows. “Both families? Okay. I need to stop at Murry’s for more plywood. See you as soon as I can.”
He hangs up and rubs the back of his neck. “Shit. I’m sorry. I have to go right away. I can’t give Uncle Isaac an excuse to swing by looking for me.”
He’s right. The moment is ruined, anyway. He shrugs his shirt back on and hurriedly buttons it up. “I’ll be back for dinner,” he says, leaning over the bed to kiss her.
She gets dressed, and then brings the dirty dishes down to the kitchen. Elijah wanders downstairs a little later, and she brews another pot of coffee and sits with him in his studio. It’s all very cozy and domestic.
If he had come into the main bedroom the night before, he says nothing.
He doesn’t mention her newfound intimacy with Caleb, and neither does she.
He seems pleased to have her attention, and to answer her questions about his painting.
Probably no one has ever shown this much interest in his work, not even Caleb, who would’ve been too busy at the motel all day to offer anything more than vague compliments.
Sarah curls up on the loveseat with a book, occasionally glancing up to admire Elijah’s progress.
Thick brushstrokes drag down the canvas, wet and gleaming and reeking of linseed oil.
Her head swims at the smell and vision. The impression is of black pines at night, bleeding from their branches.
This is what Elijah sees when he walks in the woods, and when he looks through the layers of plastic that should have been the sunroom’s back windows.
This is what Sarah sees too when she looks out at the woods, what Jacob Vass and the other men must have seen. Do you hear the screaming?
Elijah moves stiffly, although his eye looks less puffy today.
Sarah doesn’t want to let him out of her sight.
She saved his life, and now she feels responsible for him.
Caleb may have gotten rid of all the knives, but maybe one day Elijah will go into the woods and never come back, as his father did before him.
After lunch, the book slips from her hand, and the comforting scent of turpentine and cedar lulls her to sleep on the loveseat.
She’s woken by a light touch on her hand. The sky has dimmed, and Elijah has turned on a floodlight. She stirs and discovers Jacob Vass’s shearling coat tucked around her. It’s warm and heavy and smells faintly of tobacco.
Caleb crouches beside her, hair falling over his face. Her heart lurches at how humbled and weary he appears. He didn’t have time to shave today, and the stubble only emphasizes the deep planes of his face.
“Hi,” he says. He glances at Elijah, who’s mixing yet another shade of black. Elijah doesn’t seem to notice him, nor the frown that briefly creases his brow. “Want to help me with dinner?”
Sarah pushes the coat off and he helps her up. She follows him into the kitchen, her hand swallowed in his. There’s a slight tug in his grip, a sense of urgency she doesn’t quite understand, but she’s touched he wants to get her alone after a hard day.
Caleb browns the ground beef, and she puts a pot of water on the stovetop to boil for pasta.
Like the morning, it’s all very comfortable, like they’ve been cooking together for years.
His smile doesn’t reach his eyes, though, and there’s a tension in his shoulders that wasn’t there earlier.
She wonders if Isaac said something to remind him she’s supposed to be in quarantine, not laughing with him in the kitchen, playfully flinging strands of cooked spaghetti at each other.
“Is anything wrong?” she finally asks.
Caleb stops stirring the sauce and slumps against the counter. “This morning when I left, there were a couple of broken beer bottles on the porch.”
Sarah remembers the car engine she thought she’d heard last night, the clink of glass. A chill creeps across her skin, and she wishes she was wearing the shearling coat again.
“Then I went to Murry’s Hardware, and they wouldn’t talk to me. I mean, I get side-eye at the best of times, but they refused to serve me. I had to call Uncle Isaac to come and persuade them.”
“But why?” Sarah asks, although she knows.
“They know you’re staying here. They think I might have the virus, too.”
Sarah’s blood runs to ice water. “Oh God. I’m sorry.” It’s her fault, it’s always her fault. She’s brought this on their house. Opened a door and let all the hatred in. She doesn’t belong, as much as she fooled herself into thinking she did.
He shakes his head. “Nothing for you to be sorry about.”
Sarah sets out the plates, her mind and stomach roiling. Time is ticking by. How many days has she been here? Too many.
She could stay here, she knows. Tangled up with Caleb at night, playing house with Elijah during the day.
While the wolves outside howl for her blood and the virus closes in.
But it’s another prison, like the one she’d inhabited with Ben.
He whispers in her ear now, with the wind. What did I do to deserve this?
He’s never far from her thoughts. Literally.
The knowledge that his body is just in the garage haunts her.
She can’t pass the parlor without replaying how he’d sprayed blood in her mouth, which seems more intimate and violating than any sexual relations they’d had together.
He’s tainted Sweetside Manor with his memory.
She might as well still be trapped with him.
He wins.
She has to leave before she runs out of choices. If she stays here, she’ll never know who she is without Ben.
You already know who you are, Ben whispers in her head.
Caleb’s truck is the only way out. Sarah ambles to a drawer and pulls out three forks and spoons, all of which are tarnished. Everything in this cursed house is old or dead.
“Come away with me,” she says, turning to Caleb.
“What?”
“Come away with me. The motel’s closed, there’s nothing for you here. We could pack our stuff tonight and get in your truck and go.”
He laughs. “Go where?”
“Anywhere. I’ve got my laptop, I have a roster of clients. All I need is wifi. I can work anywhere. Even in a parking lot outside a coffee shop if I have to. We could get on the Trans-Canada Highway and find someplace new to put down roots.”
He shakes his head. “It’s a nice dream, but I don’t think so. What am I going to do for work? And during a pandemic?”
“You said you don’t really need to work.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t want to. A man likes to be useful.”
She pictures him hammering boards over a window, the inhabitants inside spitting or swearing or begging for mercy. She swallows. “You managed a motel for most of your adult life. That’s good for something. You’re smart, Caleb. You’ll figure out how to survive outside Sweetside.”
“What about Elijah?”
The more she thinks about it, the more excited she gets.
There’s no reason to stay in this tiny, insular town where they’re all outcasts.
“He’ll come with us. We could go somewhere and start fresh, where no one knows us.
Where no one cares what I look like. Board up the house, or sell it, or give the keys to your uncle, whatever.
We could disappear and leave this all behind. ”
He shakes his head again, dousing her hope. “I can’t— Elijah can’t leave this house. You don’t understand.”
Sarah slams the silverware down on the table. She feels it now. The storm brewing inside her. The wind whispers in her ear. Yes. Let it out. It feels good to show your anger, doesn’t it?
“This fucking house, the motel, Elijah—they’re holding you back,” she snaps.
“I can’t leave Elijah.” His eyes are pleading, and Sarah hates herself for causing him distress. But at the same time, a perverse pride blazes in her chest that she’s capable of such cruelty.
She gestures in the direction of the sunroom. “I care about Elijah, too! But it’s not healthy how much you hover over him. He’s a grown man; he’s got to learn how to stand on his own two feet. And so do you.”
“He’s all I have. He’s family.” Caleb picks up a spoon and returns to the sauce.
Sarah puts her hand on his, stopping him from stirring.
“I could be your family, too.”
His eyes meet hers for a single heart-stopping second.
“But obviously you don’t care enough about me to even talk about it,” she says.
She releases his hand and stalks out of the kitchen. “Aren’t you going to have dinner?” Caleb calls out.
“I’m not hungry.”
She is hungry. Very hungry. But she continues stomping up the staircase. She wants to hurt the house. She wants to hurt Caleb. She wants to leave bruises.
She flounces into her room and locks the door behind her.
Crossing her arms, she glares out the window above the bed.
Elijah is hurrying across the backyard toward the woods.
He sees her, and waves happily. Her face softens and she waves back.
Elijah would leave Sweetside with her without hesitation, if she asked.
About five minutes later, the stairs creak. Caleb’s footsteps, no longer so confident.
He raps on the door. “Sarah?”
She says nothing, only prickles with irritation while watching the spot where Elijah disappeared.
“Sarah, please.” Caleb jiggles the doorknob. “Don’t be mad. I’m sorry. It’s just a lot to think about.”
She still doesn’t answer, imagining him running a hand through his overgrown curls, frown lines marring his forehead.
Finally he says the magic words. The words that ran through her head whenever Ben picked a fight with her.
“What did I do wrong?” he says. “How can we go back to where we were?”
It takes Sarah’s breath away how easy it is to have power over someone. You already know who you are, Ben whispers again.
Sarah unlocks and opens the door. Caleb’s face slackens with relief. She’s careful to keep her expression neutral. She’s had a lot of practice.
“I don’t belong in Sweetside, and neither do you,” she says.
“You’re wrong about that. I do belong here.”
“You don’t. I wish you’d see that.”
He gently places his hands on her upper arms. “We can talk about it later. Don’t get me wrong, Sarah. It’s not that I don’t want to be with you. I like you a lot. I want you to be happy. You deserve to be happy.”
Like herself, he’s spent his life trying to please others. His father, his uncle, Elijah, even the townspeople who treat him like a pariah. But she can’t let him see she sympathizes, not when he’s eating out of her hand.
“For now, can you please come down for dinner?” he begs.
Sarah lowers her eyes, her jaw set. But she says, “Okay,” and he smiles as if he’s won a major victory when it’s really her who’s won.
Sarah follows him down the stairs and back to the kitchen, where she resumes setting the table. “I’ll get Elijah,” Caleb says, heading for the sunroom before she can tell him she saw Elijah outside.
The front door squeaks open, and she hears Elijah stomping the snow off his boots on the doormat. She goes to meet him. If she tells him she wants to leave, maybe he can convince Caleb it’s the right thing to do.
Elijah clutches a long, pale object. “I dug this up in the woods,” he says proudly.
“Elijah, no!” Caleb roars, storming down the hall.
Sarah startles, and Elijah freezes like a deer in headlights. “It’s just a branch,” he says in a small voice. He looks pathetic with his black eye and scarred lip. “All the bark got stripped off, so it looks like a bone. I thought it was cool. I wanted to show Sarah.”
Caleb sags against the staircase bannister, and the tension in Sarah’s body eases. He’s not turning into Jacob Vass. Yet. “Fuck. I’m sorry, Elijah. I didn’t mean to yell like that. I thought you were going to show her something gross. Go wash up for dinner.”
Elijah sets the branch on the side table and retreats into the downstairs bathroom to wash his hands.
Caleb gives a shaky laugh. “He’s always digging stuff up in the woods.
The last time I had a girl over for dinner, he dragged in a rotting squirrel head.
He was so proud of it, too. That didn’t help our reputation as the town weirdos.
” He pinches the spot between his eyes. “I hate it when I yell at Elijah. But sometimes it just comes out.”
He lifts his head to meet Sarah’s gaze. “Do you ever feel like you’re becoming someone you hate?”
It’s so easy to lie. Why didn’t she figure this out before? So easy to swear that up is down and black is white. She learned from the best, after all.
Sarah smiles. “No, never.”