Chapter Four
I come up out of the dark to the smell of woodsmoke.
I’m in one of the leather chairs by the stove, on my side with my knees pulled up, wrapped in the gray wool throw that lives on the bench by the front door.
He’s tucked it around me. The stove’s not banked down for the night.
It’s burning, and the room’s warm and full of the soft no-color light that means I’ve slept clear through to late afternoon.
I don’t move yet. I lie there and take stock. My wrists ache where he held them. The insides of my thighs ache deeper, and there’s a hot, tender throb at the two places he fastened on, and a deep ache inside me that is oddly pleasant. My mouth’s dry, but I can still taste him.
I push the throw off and sit up. The room blurs for a moment and settles.
I’m in my underwear. He put it back on me.
He didn’t put the jeans or sweater back.
Those are folded on the floor at my feet, the sweater squared on top of the jeans, the socks in a neat little ball.
I look at the little stack of clothes for a long moment.
I get up with the throw around my shoulders, and go through the lodge in my bare feet, looking.
The kitchen is empty, the mug from yesterday washed and dried on the rack.
Back door bolted from the inside. I go to the front, and that’s bolted too.
I stand with my palm flat on the door and listen to my own house tick and settle in the quiet.
He’s not here.
I go up the stairs slowly, holding the rail. My room’s how I left it, blankets rumpled, pillow dented. I walk the rest of the second floor before coming back down and checking the great room again like he might’ve reappeared in it.
He’s gone.
I stand in the middle of the great room in my underwear and a blanket and let it sink in. I clean up and get redressed. Jeans, the sweater off the top of the stack, socks. I pull my hair back. Step into my boots by the door and grab the parka off the hook.
I go down to Cabin Two.
The rain has finally stopped. The cedars are still dripping, and the sky’s thinned out to a pale gray that means the system’s sliding off east, and the air’s gone clean and hard the way it does on the back side of a storm. I get to the cabin door and stop for a second, then go in.
Empty. The leather case gone off the desk.
The duffel gone from beside the bed. The flannel gone from the chair back, no coat on the hook.
The stove cold, the wood I laid still stacked, the kettle and the press untouched.
And the bed made. Made the way I made it Tuesday afternoon, quilt folded at the foot, pillows set with the corner tucked under, the cross-stitch throw pillow at its angle.
Like the three days never happened. Like I turned the cabin for a guest who never came.
There’s a square of paper folded on the quilt.
I cross the room and pick it up. It’s a sheet off the pad I keep on each cabin desk, my grandfather’s little cedar-tree stamp at the top. The handwriting is old-fashioned, tall and narrow, with the downstrokes long and the crossbars dead level. He used the pen out of the desk drawer.
Ashley,
I have not wanted to stay with anyone in a very long time. I want to stay with you. That is why I cannot.
I am sorry to leave like this. I would have said it out loud. I do not trust myself to.
Be well. Be careful.
A.
I read it twice, standing at the foot of the untouched bed.
My throat is tight, but my eyes are dry.
I read it a second time slower than the first, and then I fold it back along his own creases and tuck it into the inside pocket of my parka.
He took every other piece of himself out of this room. He left me that.
I shut the cabin door and walk back up to the lodge.
I pour a cup of coffee from the pot that’s been sitting on the warmer for hours.
I carry it to the corner of the kitchen table, sit, and wrap both hands around it.
The heat works into my palms. I sit and stare at the grain of the table, and I keep my mind carefully blank.
I have spent thirty-five years getting through hard things by putting my head down and doing the next task, and right now the next task is to sit here and hold something warm until I can stand up and run my lodge.
The mug cools. I hold it the whole time, until the cup’s the temperature of the room. Then I get up, pour it out, rinse the mug, and set it on the rack next to yesterday’s. And I get on with the evening, because that is the only thing I have ever known how to do.
The marks fade slowly over the coming days.
The thigh bruises go from black to green to a faint yellow ghost and then to nothing, and I find I’m sorry to see the last of them.
There are more guests to handle and wood to split and a roof that needs a season’s worth of work.
The days close over the top of him the way water closes over a dropped stone.
By spring, he’s gone soft in my memory. More like a thing I read once in one of my novels than a thing that happened to me.
The summer comes in loud and busy and leaves again.
And by the time a full year’s gone, I’ve started to lose the details, the exact wrong of his hands, the black of his eyes, the way the man came apart into something else over three days during a storm.
The note lies folded in the little lacquered box on my dresser. I don’t take it out. I don’t throw it away. I know it’s there, and now and again when I open the drawer below it for a sweater I pause, and something warm turns over in my chest. Then I shut the drawer and get on with my day.
It’s the first of November when the call comes.
I’m at the counter cutting onions for a stew, the lamps on against the early dark, the stove going for the season, the rain not here yet but coming.
Two days of weather radio promising the first real system of the off-season by morning and parked through the weekend.
The handset crackles on its shelf by the back door.
“Eagle’s Ridge, Eagle’s Ridge, this is Hawkins. Come back.”
I wipe my hands and cross the room to pick it up. “Eagle’s Ridge. Go ahead, Wyatt.”
“Hey, Ash. You hear about the weather?”
“I did.”
“The report hasn’t changed. Four days, maybe five. You set out there?”
“I’m set.”
“Good. Listen, got a booking for you. Last minute. Came in on the village line just now. Wants three nights, single, cash on arrival.”
I don’t move.
“When?”
“Tomorrow’s noon flight, if Jimmy can beat the system in. Fella’s already down in Petersburg.”
“What’s the name?”
“Vale. August Vale. Says he stayed with you a while back.”
Outside the window, the cedars have started to move, that first lean and sway they do when a system’s still over the horizon but already pushing its weather ahead of it.
“Ash? You there?”
“I’m here.”
“This Vale guy must have a thing for storms.”
I stand in my warm, bright kitchen with the cold coming up the channel toward me, and I think about a thumb dragged slowly across my knuckles. I think about teeth on my pulse. I think about a cold mouth and long fingers and a rumble I felt in my own body.
I want to stay with you. That is why I cannot.
A year of him being careful, somewhere, for me.
I key the handset.
“Tell Jimmy to bring him in.”
“Copy. I’ll let the village know. Want me out Wednesday like usual?”
“Not in bad weather, Wyatt.”
A pause. “You sure, Ash?”
“Positive. See you when the weather breaks.”
“Copy. Hawkins out.”
I set the handset back on its shelf and stand there a minute with my hand still on it.
The lamps are warm. The stove ticks. The onion waits on the board, half cut.
And out past the dark glass, the wind is coming up off the water the way it comes when something’s drawing in.
Tomorrow at noon, a plane is going to drop out of that gray sky and set down hard on my cove.
And a man six and a half feet tall in a good wool coat is going to step down onto the float and look at me like he’s been hungry the whole year.
I take my hand off the radio. I go back to the onion.
It takes me a long time to finish cutting it.
Thank you for reading!