Chapter 3
three
Rafe
The gate is a steel pipe welded to a post. Chain, padlock, a sign that says PRIVATE KEEP OUT in weathered red. I unlock it. Drive through. Lock it behind us.
She watches from the passenger seat and says nothing.
The Subaru is behind us, backed into an abandoned cut-block two ridges east. I pulled it off the gravel, drove it in through the alders, walked back out the way I came.
If somebody pulls satellite on her plate, they'll see a vehicle heading northeast. Wrong direction. Bought me time.
The spur road climbs fifteen hundred feet in just under four kilometers.
My cabin is at the top. Not a nice cabin.
My father and I built the shell when I was seventeen.
I finished it alone after he died. Woodstove, propane range, cold running water off a gravity tank I fill from a spring.
A generator in the shed for the nights I want to charge a laptop.
Two rooms, a porch on the south side, a woodshed against the north wall.
I pull up beside the porch. Kill the engine. The silence up here makes your ears feel like something's missing.
She gets out. She has a canvas duffel, the laptop in the cooler bag.
"This is it?"
"This is it."
"It's..." She looks at the porch, the shed, the tree line. "Okay."
"I'm giving you the bedroom. I'll take the couch."
"You don't have to."
"I do."
"Rafe."
"I do."
I take the duffel from her because she's still weak and I'm not. Start the fire. Walk the perimeter, a slow loop, eyes up, because that is who I am.
When I come back she is standing in the main room with her arms crossed, not going anywhere.
I take her phone and kill it on the porch step with a framing hammer. Pull the SIM. Assemble the burner, put in the battery, make the call to Beauchamp. Sergeant, RCMP Major Crimes, Prince George. I served with him a lifetime ago. He picks up on the second ring.
"Dannick."
"Michel. Need forty-eight hours."
I give it to him straight. The contract. The paper. Voclain Holdings. The subject and the laptop at a private location. Coordinates by text. Saturday noon, he comes up if I don't call.
"Stay dark," he says, and hangs up.
I take the battery out. I put it on the porch rail. I turn around. She is standing in the doorway of the cabin. She is bleeding.
"When did you do that?"
She looks down at her hand. The left one. A cut across the pad of her thumb deep enough to have been bleeding through her sleeve for a while. "The woodpile. Your woodpile. I wanted to help. There was a nail."
"You didn't say anything."
"I wasn't sure if I was allowed to."
"Hazel."
"I'm sorry."
"Sit down."
I take her elbow and sit her at the table. I wash my hands at the sink. Hot water off the stove kettle, soap. I get the kit out of the cupboard above the woodstove. I keep a good one up here. I have sewn myself up twice. I know what I am doing.
I sit on the stool across from her and take her hand.
Her fingers are cold. I wrap my other hand around her wrist to still it. I look at the cut. Clean edges. Deep. It wants two stitches. Maybe three. "I have to flush this. It'll sting."
"Okay."
I run saline through it over a bowl. She sucks air in through her teeth. She doesn't pull away. Her hand rests in mine like she's decided to leave it there.
I lay out the butterfly banadages. I dry the skin.
I work slowly, because I am not in a hurry, because my hands are large, because her hand in mine is the size of a thing I could break.
I am aware of that in a way that has nothing to do with the cut.
Her knuckles are reddened from the cold.
There is a freckle on the inside of her wrist I hadn't noticed.
I close her thumb carefully. Four butterflies. I wrap it in gauze. I tape the gauze.
I do not let go of her hand when I'm done.
She does not pull it away. She is holding her own breath. I am aware of that too.
I am holding her small cold hand in my two big rough ones at a kitchen table in a cabin no one else has ever been inside of. My heart is doing something it has not done in a long time. I am not sure what to call it. I know I am not going to be the one to call it first.
"Rafe."
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
I nod. I let go.
Evening comes early at altitude. I make dinner. Eggs, toast, a can of beans I drain and season. She eats. I eat. We don't talk much.
After, she sits on the floor in front of the woodstove. She is wearing my flannel. The flannel is too big. The sleeves are folded twice.
I sit on the other side of the room. I keep the rifle leaning against the doorframe. Not because I think I'll need it in the next hour. Because that is how I sit.
She says, after twenty minutes, "Why are you doing this?"
"Because he lied to me."
"That's..."
"And because you asked me not to kill you."
She looks into the stove. The fire moves on her face. Then she cries the kind of tears that happens when a body finally stops running. Her shoulders go. Her breath catches. Tears on her cheeks. She does not wipe them.
This time I move.
I don't think about it. I cross the room. I crouch in front of her, slow, hands visible, because this morning I grabbed her from behind on a path and I am not going to forget that. She looks at me.
I sit down beside her on the floor. My back against the couch. My shoulder against hers. I don't put my arm around her. I just let her lean if she wants. She leans.
Her head comes to rest against my upper arm.
I can smell her hair. Some gas station shampoo, sweat, the specific dust of two weeks on the road.
Her bandaged hand rests on her thigh. Her other hand, after a minute, curls around the cuff of my sleeve.
Her knuckles against my forearm. Her breath evening out against my bicep.
We sit like that for a long time. The fire pops. The wind pushes at the window. I do not move because she is leaning on me. I would sit here until the stove went cold before I would move her.
"I haven't touched anyone in two weeks," she says eventually. Small. "I didn't know I missed it until just now. Is this okay."
"Yeah."
"Rafe."
"Don't worry about it. Just sit."
She sits. After a while her breath evens out further. I think she might be asleep against my shoulder. I don't move. When she straightens up, her eyes are dry.
"I should sleep."
"Yeah."
She stands. She looks down at me. Her hand, not the bandaged one, the other, comes up. Her fingers brush the side of my face above the beard. Light. A thumb at my cheekbone. The touch of a woman finding out what she is allowed.
I let her. She takes her hand back.
"Goodnight, Rafe."
"Goodnight."
She goes into the bedroom. The door doesn't close all the way. I hear her get under the blankets.
I sit on the porch in the cold with the rifle across my lap.
I think about the shape of her thumb against my cheekbone for a longer time than I should.
It has been eleven years since I noticed the weight of a woman's breath against my arm.
Eleven years since I noticed where someone's knuckles rested when they leaned on me.
The fact that I am noticing now, tonight, about a woman I caught on a path at dawn this morning, is a thing I would normally consider a problem.
It’s not.