Chapter 4
four
Everett
I smell the storm coming.
The bees tell me first when they start moving differently, tighter circuits, heading back to the hives.
Then the barometric shift, that particular weight in the air you learn to read after enough seasons.
By two o'clock the sky to the west is the colour of an angry bruise and the light has gone flat and strange.
Sloane is in the bean rows. She doesn't notice.
"Storm's coming," I call out.
She straightens up and looks at the sky like she's only now remembering there is one. "Oh." A pause. "Big?"
"Big enough."
She looks at the mountains. The leading edge is moving in fast, dark and banked, the kind of system that means business. "I should go before it…?"
Thunder. Not distant. The kind that comes from directly overhead, low and physical, you feel it in the chest.
She looks at me.
"You're staying," I say. It's not a question; it's the only sensible reading of the situation — gravel road, two-lane highway, visibility about to go to nothing. She knows it too.
"Okay," she says.
Just like that.
We get the hens in. She holds the gate, I move them, Gerald makes her displeasure known through the fence.
The hens are sorted in ten minutes. I check the hive covers, weigh them down, and by the time I come back to the porch the first rain has started: fat, slow drops on the dry wood, the smell coming up immediately.
She's standing at the porch rail watching it start.
"This is incredible," she says.
"You've seen rain before."
"Not like this." She's not being dramatic.
The light is doing something specific at the edge of the storm, that narrow band of gold that exists for about four minutes before a system rolls in, and the mountains are lit up strange and the valley is going dark below them and she's watching it with the whole of herself the way she watches everything.
"In the city, rain is just wet. Here it's like an event. "
"Give it five minutes," I say. "It'll be more of an event."
She laughs. The rain picks up. We step back under the roof overhang.
Burl, has not moved from his blanket.
As the storm builds and the rain gets harder.
The power goes out at. I light the kitchen lamp and find two more candles from the shelf and set them on the table, and Sloane is leaning in the kitchen doorway watching me like I'm doing something interesting when it's just candles.
I've lived without power for whole weeks.
"Do you want tea?" I ask.
“Yes, please.”
She sits at the kitchen table and Fig, who has manifested from wherever she goes during storms jumps up beside her and sits with her back to the room. Sloane strokes her once, two fingers along the spine, not making a fuss about it. Fig allows it.
I make tea on the gas stove.
The rain is loud on the roof, and the thunder comes in waves, and the candle on the table throws everything amber. Sloane has her hands wrapped around the mug before I've finished pouring and she's looking at the flame without thinking about it, and in this light she is nothing short of perfect.
I put the kettle down.
I can’t help but look at her and think of how adorable her quirks are, like the fact that she talks to the animals and doesn't care if I overhear. I've been careful about looking at her in any other way. But God, she’s beautiful. No matter how careful I am, I can’t deny it.
In candlelight, being careful gets harder.
"So tell me how a city boy becomes a homesteader," she says.
I sit down across from her. "What do you want to know?"
"Why you left." She glances up. "You don't have to."
"I know." I pause. "I was good at it," I say.
"The job. Fund management. I understood how the systems worked and I was useful in them and for a long time that felt like enough.
" I watch the candle. "Then it stopped feeling like enough and I didn't know what to do about that, so I kept going.
For about three years past when I should have stopped. "
"What made you stop?"
"My father died."
She's quiet. Doesn't say I'm sorry straight away, which I appreciate. She nods.
"He had this piece of land. He wasn't a farmer.
He just liked having land, kept a garden, some fruit trees.
I went up after the funeral to sort things out and I stayed two weeks.
" I turn the mug. "I slept eight hours every night.
I didn't check my phone. I ate what was in the garden.
And at the end of the two weeks I went back to Vancouver and sat in my office on the thirty-second floor and I thought: I can't do this anymore. "
"So you didn't."
"So I didn't." I look at her. "Took over the property. It was a long process and took about four months to wind everything down. People thought I was having a breakdown."
"Were you?"
"Opposite." I consider it. "I think I was coming out of one."
She nods slowly. "That's what it feels like," she says. "What's been happening to me, I mean. Like I've been operating on the wrong settings for so long I forgot there were other ones."
"You're young to figure that out."
She makes a face. "I feel about ninety."
"Then you look good for your age." I joke before I can stop myself.
That lands differently than I meant it to and she goes very still for just a second, and then she looks at her tea, blushing. I look at the rain and Fig stands up, turns around three times, and settles against Sloane's hip.
Shit, if that was my chance to flirt I think I blew it.
The storm peaks around five. Lightning over the valley, blue-white, illuminating everything for a second at a time. The thunder is immediate, no gap, right overhead. Sloane has migrated to the porch — she wanted to watch it, which I understood.
I bring Burl out. He goes on my lap, which is where he'll want to be, and Fig follows Sloane and sits on the rail and they're all out here together in the dry strip under the overhang while the rain comes down in sheets off the roof edge.
She's leaning on the rail. The storm is taking all the colour out of the world and replacing it with a specific silver-grey, and the smell is rain and ozone and wet pine, and she's watching the lightning come down over the eastern ridge with her arms on the rail and her face open.
It's the most still I've ever seen her.
Burl sighs on my lap.
Lightning again. She flinches slightly at the thunder and then laughs at herself.
"Okay," she says. "That one was close."
"Half mile."
"You can tell?"
"Count between flash and sound. The speed of sound is roughly a mile every five seconds."
Slowly, the rain starts to ease. Still heavy but the leading edge of the storm has moved on, the lightning tracking east now. The remaining rain is steady, drumming on the roof, running in a curtain off the overhang.
She's still looking at me. She hasn't looked away.
I put Burl down carefully, he settles on the blanket without complaint, and I stand up, and I close the distance between us, and I know I'm doing it before I decide to, the same way I offered her the farm two weeks ago without thinking it through.
She doesn't move back. She tilts her chin up slightly, and in the rain-light her eyes are very steady.
I put my hand against her jaw. My thumb at her cheekbone. She's warm and the rain has misted her hair and she looks like something that grew here on its own and I have no right to, but I do it anyway — I kiss her.
She makes a small sound and kisses me back, her hand coming up to my wrist, not pulling me away, just holding on. The rain comes down. She tastes like tea and storm air.
When I pull back she's still holding my wrist.