Chapter 4 #2
"Did you eat already?” I say.
"Earlier."
"Before it was light?”
"I don't sleep much."
"Because of your job?”
"Because of my job."
I eat. The oatmeal is very good. I cannot tell you the last time a bowl of food moved me and it moves me.
I have to put the spoon down after four bites and sit with both hands around the mug because my chest has gone tight and I don't want her to see.
She doesn't look at me while it passes. She looks out the window at the pines.
"The weather?” I say, when I can speak.
"Storm off the coast," she says. "We'll get rain by tonight. Not snow yet."
"I don't know where we are."
"Redwater County. Northwest side. Closest town is Millard."
"I've never been to Millard."
"Most people haven't."
I pick up the spoon again. I eat slowly. My lungs still hurt. Every fourth or fifth breath brings up a small cough.
"I don't have anywhere to go," I say.
I say it flat, not asking. Just the fact.
"No," she says. "I know."
"Everything was in that house."
"Yes."
"I don't have my wallet. My car keys. My passport. My medication."
"I know."
"I don't have anyone to call."
I am not sure this is true in the strictest sense.
I have a father on Long Island. I have a friend in London.
I have an attorney in Redwater City whose name I could probably remember if I sat with it for ten minutes.
What I don't have is anyone I could call at seven in the morning the day after my house burned down and expect to be met with anything resembling love.
And what I realize, saying the sentence to a woman I met two hours ago, is that this is the most honest sentence I have spoken to another human being in years.
She watches me.
"You don't have to decide anything right now," she says.
"You're safe here. I don't need the bed back.
I don't need the chair. I'll be at the station most of the day.
You can sleep. You can eat. The fridge is yours.
There's a woodstove, there's hot water, there's a bath.
If you need a doctor, I'll drive you into Millard.
If you want me to drive you into the city when you're ready, I'll do that too. You don't owe me anything."
Her face doesn't change while she says this.
She says it the way you would read out a list of items on a checklist, one after the other, and at the end of it I understand that she is not performing kindness.
She is giving me options. She is a woman who has spent a career giving people with no options some options, and she is giving me mine now, and it is the first time in a long time that somebody has set a thing in front of me that was not already shaped by what they wanted me to do.
"I think," I say, "I would like to stay a day or two. If that's all right?”
"That's all right."
"Until I can think."
"Until you can think."
"I don't have clothes."
"I said. Top drawer."
"I meant, real clothes."
"I know what you meant." A small beat. She doesn't quite smile. Something at the corner of her mouth moves a quarter inch and settles. "Once you're ready, I can drive to Millard and pick something up. Jeans. Sweater. Underthings. Tell me sizes."
"Later," I say.
"Later."
---
By afternoon I am in her kitchen in a pair of her sweats rolled at the ankle and a flannel shirt two sizes too big, and I am washing the oatmeal bowl at the sink because she told me I didn't have to and I wanted to anyway.
The shirt smells like cedar and like the soap I don't recognize, and the sleeves come down past my knuckles, and I have rolled them up the way a girl rolls the sleeves of a brother's shirt.
I have never had a brother. I have never worn any man's shirt but Daniel's, and Daniel's shirts always came back from the cleaner's with a crease at the cuff I was not allowed to wrinkle.
I wrinkle this one. I dry my hands on it.
Out the kitchen window the light has turned gray between the pines.
The rain Max promised is starting, soft at first, dotting the needles.
The woodstove is going. The cabin smells of woodsmoke and of the stew Max has started in a cast-iron pot for later, beef and onions and something bay-leafed.
No staff has cooked this. No staff has laid out this table.
There is no table setting. There is a kitchen towel, and there is a spoon in a pot, and there is a woman who saved me from a fire sitting on the step of the porch outside, boots off, lacing a spare pair.
I watch her through the window.
She is not looking at me. She is tying her boots with the single-minded attention of somebody who does not waste motion.
She has a jacket on now, dark canvas, the collar up.
Her short dark hair is dark with drizzle.
Her hands are broad and scarred and quick.
I watch her tie the laces and I notice that I am watching.
I file this quietly, the way you file a receipt you will want later but not yet.
A small curiosity about a woman, noted and put in a drawer.
She comes in and brings the smell of rain and pine with her. She takes her jacket off at the door and hangs it on a peg. She looks at the bowl drying on the rack and at the spoon I laid on the towel next to it, and she nods once.
"I have to go in at four," she says.
"Work?"
"A drill. I'll be back after ten."
"All right."
"There's a key on the hook by the door. If something happens and you need to leave, leave. Take my truck if you have to. Keys are in the same drawer as the spoons."
I don't know what to say to that. I say, "Thank you."
"Don't answer the door," she says. "There's nobody coming. If somebody does come, it's wrong. Go out the back. The forest runs down to a fire road. The road runs out to the county road in about three miles."
"All right."
"The landline works. The number for the station is on the fridge. You call that number, you ask for Hale. They'll come get me.”
"All right."
"Evangeline."
It is the first time she has said my name.
She says it the way you would say the name of a person who is in a room with you.
Not like a sentence with my name in it. Just the name, held up, set down.
I have been called Mrs. Clark for so long that my first name in another woman's mouth hits a place I wasn't bracing.
"Yes," I say.
"I'm going to keep you safe."
"I believe you."
I do. I don't know why. I don't know this woman.
I have known her for nine hours and she has fed me and bandaged my hand and handed me a set of sweats and left me her truck and told me not to answer the door.
I have been in rooms my whole life with people who told me they wanted what was best for me and I have never once believed any of them the way I believe this stranger in a wet henley in a kitchen I didn't know existed this morning.
She goes.
I stand at the window and I watch her truck move down the drive between the pines until the rain and the distance close over it.
I sit at the kitchen table in her flannel shirt.
I look at my left hand, at the pale band on my ring finger where the ring used to be, and I listen to the rain on the roof, and I understand that there is a shape forming under all of this that I cannot see yet.
I am a woman whose house burned down. I am a woman whose husband just died.
I am a woman in a stranger's kitchen in a forest I have never been in, drinking coffee out of a mug that says Station 9 in faded white letters, and I am not afraid.
I should be afraid.
I am not.
That is not the right feeling for this morning.
I know it is not the right feeling. Daniel is dead and my house is a hole in the ground and I have no passport and no money and I do not know if anyone is looking for me yet.
I should be afraid. I should be in a hospital.
I should be on a phone with my attorney.
I am in a flannel shirt that smells like cedar and I am not afraid.
I sit with that, the way I sat with the not-grief this morning, and I do not try to correct it. I let it stand. I have let other women's feelings stand in my own chest my whole life. The least I can do on my first morning as a widow is let my own feeling stand without arguing it down.
Somebody has done this. The fire was not an accident.
The phones, the cell booster, the window keys, the man at the treeline, the very specific fact that Daniel was sleeping in the east wing alone and the very specific fact that I was not supposed to be there.
I know that someone has done this. What I have not let myself do until now is put the two shapes in the same room: the man at the treeline who chose to leave me, and the woman who pulled me out of the fire and fed me oatmeal this morning.
They could be the same chain. They could be opposite ends of it. I do not have to choose today.
Today I have a kitchen and a flannel shirt and a pot of stew on a woodstove.
I look at the ring in the white dish on the dresser, down the short hallway, through the open bedroom door. It catches the gray light and throws it back weakly. The band I wore into the fire. The band I did not die wearing.
I say, out loud, to the empty cabin, "I am not going back."
The rain comes down harder on the roof. Somewhere far off a crow calls twice and stops. The stove ticks. The radio on the shelf is still on the weather band, a different voice now, a woman, reading a storm warning for a county I still have not heard of.
I pull the sleeves of Max's flannel shirt down over my hands and I tuck my knees up under me on the chair, and I wait for the woman who saved me to come home.