9. Piper
PIPER
The cabin went the way most things in my life go lately, all at once and on a day it was raining.
I'd been renting a one-room cabin at the bottom of the grade since I got here, a damp little box with a hot plate and a shower that ran rust for the first minute.
I'd been sleeping in it less and less, because the house was where the work was, and the dog was, and the man who pretended he wasn't glad to see me was.
The cabin was where I kept the fiction. The fiction that I had a mailing address and a separate life and somewhere to go at the end of the day that wasn't a construction site.
I told Margo it was charming. I told the landlord it was perfect.
I told myself it was temporary, which was the only true one.
Then the landlord called to say his daughter and her kids were moving back from Denver and he needed the place by the weekend, terribly sorry, he'd mail the deposit, which is landlord for you will never see that money again.
I drove down to pack and found half my boxes already out on the porch in the rain, which is also landlord for I have stopped being sorry.
So that was that. I had a half-finished Victorian nobody could evict me from on account of I owned it, a bank balance doing a convincing impression of a flatline, and exactly one room on this mountain that was sealed, wired, and warm.
Marcus had finished it the week before, the little east room off the kitchen, drywall up, a window that actually shut, a baseboard heater that worked.
He'd built it to be the first thing the camera could show as done.
He had not built it to be my bedroom. Life, as ever, had other plans and a sense of humor about them.
I loaded the truck in the rain because the weather wasn't going to ask my schedule.
I was wrestling the last of the boxes up the porch, soaked through and narrating nothing for once, when Marcus's truck came grinding up the grade through the downpour.
He didn't ask what was happening. He took one look at the boxes and the rain and my face, set his coffee on the rail, and started carrying.
We moved a whole life from the truck to the dry in twenty minutes, and he said exactly four words the entire time, which were "Lift with your legs," and somehow that was the gentlest anyone had been to me in a long time.
I moved what was left of me into the east room that night.
A camp mattress I'd been pretending was a sometimes thing.
A lamp. My boxes of FRAGILE optimism, which had now physically trailed me from one bad decision to the next.
Beyond the door, tarps breathed in the dark of the unfinished rooms, the whole house creaking around the one lit square like an old animal shifting in its sleep.
I lay there that first official night and waited to feel trapped, the way I always feel trapped right before I leave a place.
The feeling never came, and that was the part that scared me.
For two years, every room I'd slept in had a door in my head marked exit, a version of the story where I packed up clean and vanished and let the internet decide what it meant.
This room didn't have that door. I owned the walls.
There was nowhere left to run that wasn't also the thing I was running toward.
I should have hated it. I slept like the dead.
The room had no plumbing, which meant my mornings now ran on a kettle, a washcloth, and the brand of optimism that had gotten me into all of this in the first place.
Hazel said there was a shower in the back of the diner I was welcome to, which is the kind of thing that happens to you in a town that has decided you belong to it.
I was going to be very clean and very humble for the foreseeable.
Then I made a video, because of course I made a video.
"Day one of living inside my own restoration," I told the lens, panning the tarps and the sawhorses and the extension cord taped down the hall like a vein.
"Some people would call this unlivable. Those people have never met a woman with absolutely nowhere else to be.
" It was, and I'm not too proud to admit it, the most charming thing I'd ever filmed, because for once I wasn't selling a fantasy.
I was just laughing at the truth before it could laugh at me.
Margo video-called inside the hour. She watches my uploads the way a hawk watches something small make a run for it.
"Tell me you did not just announce to the entire internet that you're living alone in a construction site in the woods with the man you can't stop filming."
"I'm not living with him. He goes home at night. To his own house. Which I have never seen. Where he presumably broods at a more comfortable scale."
"Pip."
"It's practical, Margo. The cabin's gone, this room is warm, and my commute is now zero feet. From a pure logistics standpoint it is the smartest thing I've done since I got here."
"Logistics." Margo can repeat a word back at you until it files for divorce from its own meaning. "Describe him to me."
"Who?"
"The logistics."
"He's a carpenter," I said, with enormous dignity.
"He has carpenter qualities. He's tall. He's quiet.
He rolls his sleeves up when he's concentrating, all the way up, past the elbow, and there are forearms involved that are frankly unprofessional, and he goes completely still right before he solves something, and his hands, Margo.
He holds a hundred-year-old board like it's a sleeping baby he doesn't want to wake, and then he says four words and they're the only four that needed saying, and I hate it.
I hate every part of it. It's extremely distracting. "
Margo was quiet a second, which is rare and never a good sign.
"Oh, honey." She said it the way Hazel says it, the way everybody up here says it, like they can all see the thing coming that I keep stepping in front of. "You are so far gone."
"I'm not gone. I'm housed. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
I hung up on her, which is the nearest I come to admitting she's right.
What Margo was really saying, under all the teasing, was the thing she's too kind to say straight out.
The last time I let a man and my whole life share one building, I didn't notice the exits getting bricked up until I was standing in the rubble.
She wasn't wrong to worry. She just didn't know I'd already done the arithmetic, awake in a room I owned, and decided some things are worth the risk of the rubble.
I didn't tell her that. Some decisions you keep to yourself until they've set too hard to pour back out.
After that there was no more pretending either of us kept office hours.
Before, he could leave and I could drop the performance, and we could each have our own separate dark to be people in.
Now he came at first light and I was already awake, or worse, only just asleep, in his flannel, because somewhere in the last weeks one of his shirts had migrated to my pile and I had declined to give it back and he had declined to ask for it.
He'd find me on the camp bed with the dog, who had taken to sleeping against my spine like a furnace with opinions, and he'd stop in the door a beat too long, and then he'd say "Coffee's on" or "Cold front coming" or nothing at all, and the day would already be moving, like a sentence neither of us remembered starting.
I moved into a house with no walls to speak of and one very large man who used even fewer words. Reader, I have made better decisions, but not many happier ones.
He never said a thing about me living there.
Not one word. He just showed up the next morning with a second baseboard heater in the truck bed, the good kind, and put it in my room without being asked, and when I started to thank him he was already halfway to the parlor.
Over the sound of a man not wanting to be thanked, he said, "Old wiring.
Don't run both at once or you'll trip the whole house.
" Which was the second time he had told me which thing wouldn't burn the house down with me inside it, and I was beginning to understand that this was how the man said the things he couldn't say.
"You know," I said, while he pretended my moving in was a structural development and not a personal one, "most contractors don't come with a live-in client."
"Most clients don't come with a live-in dog and a ring light." He didn't look up from the sill he was scribing. "Call it even."
"That dog is yours."
"He filed for a transfer." He fit the board, checked it, set it. "I didn't fight it. He's got better instincts than I do."
We learned each other the way you learn a house, by living in it and barking your shins on the parts that don't move.
He took his coffee scalding and silent. I took mine narrated.
He liked the radio off. I liked it on, so he would turn it off and I would turn it on and neither of us ever once acknowledged the war, which the radio mostly lost. Some days he left a sandwich on the windowsill, wordless, and pretended he'd made too much.
Some nights I left the porch light burning for a truck already gone, and pretended I'd forgotten it.
The evenings were the hardest, the seam of the day where he used to leave and now sometimes didn't, not right away.
He'd find one more thing that wanted doing in the failing light, and I'd find one more thing to narrate to nobody, and we'd work the same room in silence, the good kind, the kind I'd never once managed with a person, only with the camera.
The dog snored between us like a referee who'd given up on the match.
And every so often I'd catch him already looking, and he'd go back to his board so fast you'd think it had spoken, and I'd go back to mine, and the room would hum with everything two careful people were too smart to say.
A house with no interior doors teaches you a private kind of manners.
He took to whistling on his way up the porch, badly, so I'd know he was coming before he came.
I learned to announce I was decent before he had to wonder.
We built a whole etiquette out of not-looking, the careful chivalry of two people acting like the other one wasn't standing six feet off in a building with half its walls down.
It would have been easier if either of us had been the kind to just say a thing out loud.
We were, the both of us, exactly the wrong kind.
So we whistled and we announced and we orbited, and the wanting quietly filled in all the room the walls used to take up.
Then came the morning I want to keep.
I surfaced out of sleep the slow way, warm for once, the dog a dead weight at my back and the flannel pulled up under my chin, and I knew before I opened my eyes that he was there. The room takes on a held quality when Marcus is in it, the air arranged around a man trying not to take up space.
I opened my eyes to a slit. He stood in the doorway. He had two coffees.
Two. Both from Hazel's, in the paper cups she only hands out down the hill, which meant he'd stopped at the diner on his way up, in the dark, and stood at her counter, and said out loud to another living person, two.
One for him. One for the woman asleep in his dead mentor's house, in his stolen flannel, under his traitor dog.
He hadn't done it because I asked. I have never once asked.
He'd done it without thinking, which is the only way Marcus Webb does the things he actually means.
And he was just standing there holding them, looking at me sleeping like I was a problem he didn't own the right tool for.
So I did the kindest thing I know how to do, which is also the most cowardly.
I shut my eyes and kept them shut and breathed slow and let him believe I was still asleep, because if I woke up he would have to explain the second coffee, and we were both a long way from ready for that conversation.
I lay there in the warm with my eyes closed and listened to a quiet man set a cup down where I'd find it without having to be handed anything, and then walk off to start the day's work alone so that I could keep sleeping.
And I thought, clear as a struck nail, that this was the worst idea I had ever had, and that I had never in my life wanted less to wake up.