Chapter 6
EVANGELINE
Iwake alone in her bed.
The light is further along than yesterday.
Past noon, maybe. Rain has stopped. The cabin is very quiet in the way a forest is quiet, which is a full quiet, not an empty one.
Birds. A branch scraping the eave over the bedroom window.
The woodstove is low but still going, which means Max came in at some point this morning and fed it before she left.
She did this without waking me. I think about her in the room, putting wood in a stove, and being that quiet about it.
I sit up.
My palm is stiff under the gauze but not worse. My throat is softer. My lungs when I take a long breath catch only once.
I put my feet on the floor.
The henley I slept in is hers, the gray one.
The sweats are hers. The flannel shirt is on the chair where I left it last night.
On the dresser in the white dish is the ring, and the light coming through the window catches it the same way it caught it yesterday, and the look of the ring in the dish is the look of a thing that has been put somewhere on purpose. I do not pick it up.
I go into the kitchen.
A mug is rinsed and set on the drainboard next to mine from yesterday. There is a note under the french press.
Stew in the fridge, heat it slow. Bread in the bread box. I'll be in by seven.
No signature.
The number of the station is on the fridge is written in the same flat hand on a piece of masking tape stuck to the metal.
I stand at the counter with my hand flat on the note.
I'll be in by seven. Not I'll be home. She chose the word. She is a woman who chooses words. I watched her do it yesterday at the kitchen table, setting all right down between us three times in a row to mean the same thing three slightly different ways.
I make coffee. I eat bread. I do not heat the stew. I wash my mug and the spoon and dry them on the towel at the rack. I stand at the kitchen window and I drink coffee and I look at the wet gravel drive out through the pines, and at the place where the drive bends and disappears, and I think.
I do not have a phone.
I had one. It was on the nightstand in my bedroom in the house.
I don't know if I threw it down when I went to the window.
I don't know if it was on the nightstand when the ceiling came in.
I know that wherever it was, it is nothing now.
Whatever was on it, whatever was backed up from it, is a thing somebody else has access to. Not me.
I do not have a phone and I do not have a way to get one.
I think about this with the mug in my hand. I think about it plainly. Yesterday I was too tired to think about it and Max's voice was very steady telling me I didn't have to decide anything today, and I slept. Today I am not too tired. Today I have slept.
I set the mug down. I walk to the front door.
The key is on the hook by the door. Brass, small, old.
I pick it up and hold it in my palm. I put it back on the hook.
I turn the knob. The knob turns. The door opens.
Rain smell, pine smell, wet gravel smell.
I stand in the doorway in bare feet and Max's sweats, and I look out at the drive, and I step one foot onto the porch.
The porch is cold under my bare foot. I take the foot back. I close the door.
Not locked.
I walk back into the kitchen and I open the drawer where Max told me the truck keys were. The spoons are in it. The chef's knife. A pair of scissors. A roll of twine. A small wrench.
The truck keys are not in it.
I open the drawer below it. Tea towels. The drawer below that. Place mats. The drawer to the left. Flatware. The drawer to the right. Paper. Batteries. A small notebook.
No truck keys anywhere in the kitchen.
I stand very still with my hands on the edge of the counter.
The story I am telling myself about this woman, which I built in nine hours yesterday off an oatmeal breakfast and a set of kind sentences, has a small hole in it now.
The hole is the size of a key ring. She told me yesterday there was a key to the door on a hook.
There is a key to the door on a hook. She told me yesterday the truck keys were in the drawer with the spoons.
They are not in the drawer with the spoons.
I can tell myself she took them with her, because it's her truck, and she has the one working set and she needed them to drive.
I can tell myself that. I can also tell myself that she told me yesterday, with her face, that the truck keys were in that drawer as an option for me, and that this morning on her way out she moved them. Both stories fit what I can see.
I pick one story and I put it to the side.
I go through the cabin.
Not the way a person searches. The way a person looks. I do not open a drawer I do not have a reason to open. I do not pull a door I do not have a reason to pull. That is my line. I will look at what is on display, and I will not search.
No truck keys anywhere in the cabin. Nowhere obvious.
I go back to the living room. I sit on the sofa.
I pick up the book on the arm. The River Runs Out.
I turn to the page she has folded. She has folded it halfway through.
I read one paragraph. It's a book about a woman who drives a hearse in a small town in Montana, which is not what I was expecting.
I put the book back, page folded, arm up, exactly as I found it.
I think about the landline.
I could call the number on the fridge and ask for Hale and she would come for me.
That is the system she set up. I could call London and tell my friend I'm alive and hear her voice for the first time in eleven months and scare her enough that she would fly here and I could tell her everything.
I could call the police. I could call my father.
I could call Daniel's attorney, whose name I have begun to remember this morning, somewhere under the coffee. I could call anybody.
Every one of those calls puts me on a record somewhere. And I realise I want to disappear. I thought I wanted to die, but maybe it isn’t that. Maybe I just want to disappear.
I have lived in a man's house for eleven years, and one of the things I have learned from living in a man's house is that calls you make from a landline in a cabin in the hills go through a switching station in a town whose name you don't know, and somebody, somewhere, is billed for them, and the bill has an address on it.
Max told me yesterday if somebody comes, it's wrong. She said it looking at me like I am at risk. I believe her. That fire was no accident. Someone came to kill Daniel and me. I survived, but I don’t want to be next.
If I call from this cabin today, I have told somebody where I am.
And if I call out of this cabin today, and I am right about Max, I have put her in a list I don't know the shape of.
I don't make the call.
I am a woman who has spent eleven years not making calls. I am good at not making calls.
---
The afternoon is long.
I bathe. I change the gauze on my palm using the small first aid kit on top of the bathroom cabinet, which I open only because she told me yesterday she cleaned my hand with what was in it.
I heat the stew slow on the stove the way her note told me to.
I eat at the kitchen table by myself with a view of the drive and the pines.
I read four chapters of the novel.
I fold the blanket on the sofa the way she folded it.
I put a piece of wood in the stove when the fire gets low.
I sit at the kitchen table in her flannel shirt with my hands around a mug and I think about how many afternoons Daniel and I sat in a house that had six other people paid to be in it, and in all those afternoons I was never alone.
Even in the rose garden, even in my own bedroom, there was a staff member somewhere in the wings, a radio on someone's hip, a footstep in the hall.
I have not been truly alone for eleven years.
I have not been truly alone in a house in my life.
I am alone in a house. Well, a cabin.
It is not what I thought it would be. I thought it would be bigger. I thought I would fill the rooms with something. I sit at the kitchen table in an oversized shirt and I find I take up a very small amount of space, and I do not have to apologize to the air for taking it.
The light goes long through the pines. The rain starts again, very light.
At six forty-five I hear the truck.
---
She comes up the porch hard.
It is the first thing I notice before I see her.
The step of her boots is not the step she had yesterday.
Yesterday she came up the porch quiet and even.
Tonight she comes up the porch the way a person comes up stairs when the stairs have done something wrong to her.
She is not running. She is walking. The walk is heavy.
The door opens.
She stands in the doorway for a beat and sees me at the kitchen table. Her shoulders change.
I watch her shoulders change.
They drop a quarter inch. The tension behind her collarbone moves. It is the smallest thing, and I do not know her face well enough to read her face yet, and I know her shoulders from one morning, and her shoulders drop. Seeing me drops them.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
"Sorry I'm late."
"You're not late."
"Yeah."
She closes the door. She hangs her jacket on the peg.
She takes off her boots at the mat and sets them heel to heel.
Her hair is wet along the line where it went under the collar of her jacket.
She is in a dark fleece over a dark henley, dark jeans, and she looks tall in the doorway of a kitchen she has presumably always looked tall in, and she is angry.
The anger is not at me. I know that at once. I don't know how I know. I know.
She is angry at something that happened before she walked through the door.