5. Elise
— ? —
Elise
I don’t sleep much.
The guest room bed squeaks every time I shift and the ceiling has stains in shapes I’ve decided not to look at and down the hall Simon is snoring loudly enough to come through two doors. None of that is what’s keeping me up.
What’s keeping me up is that I can still feel it.
It doesn’t stop when the thing stops. I’ve been lying here for three hours with my body still running the same loop it’s been running since a parking lot outside Utica, and every time I get close to sleep it starts up again, and the worst of it is that I’m not even embarrassed.
I keep waiting to be. I keep going back to look for it.
Nothing. Just a low hot hum and the ceiling and a man asleep in the room across the hall.
At six I give up and go downstairs.
Rowan’s on the back porch with his forearms on the railing, watching the light come up through the trees. He doesn’t turn around when the boards creak, but his shoulders shift, so he knows it’s me.
I come and stand next to him. Not touching. Close enough that not touching is a decision.
“You didn’t sleep either,” I say.
“No.”
“Good.”
He laughs, low, one breath of it. “That’s cold.”
“I’d hate to be the only one.”
The mist is sitting in the low ground past the yard and the whole world smells like wet pine and cold stone.
He’s got a mug in one hand. He passes it over without being asked and I take a mouthful and hand it back, and there’s something about doing that, the ordinariness of it, that unsettles me more than anything that happened yesterday.
“He’s going to notice,” I say.
“Probably.”
“That’s it? Probably?”
“He noticed something yesterday and then talked himself out of it, because the alternative would require him to think about somebody other than himself for longer than four seconds.” He turns his head. “He’ll get there eventually. Just not today.”
“You sound very calm about it.”
“I’m not calm at all.” He says it easily, like a weather report. “I’ve just had a lot of practice looking like I am.”
Something goes through me at that, low and unhelpful.
I take the mug back so I have something to do with my hands.
Daylight does the cabin no favors.
We pulled half the sheets off yesterday and what’s under them is worse than the sheets suggested.
Sagging cushions, water rings on every surface, a couch that smells like it’s been composting quietly since the Clinton administration.
There are mouse droppings in the kitchen drawers.
There’s something under the sink that none of us has been brave enough to identify.
Somebody, at some point, stacked forty years of National Geographic in the hall closet and put a broken lamp on top of them.
“We’re not doing this in three days,” I say.
“We’re doing it in three days.” Simon is standing in the middle of the front room with his hands on his hips, which is what Simon does instead of working. “The realtor’s coming Monday.”
“Then the realtor’s going to see a cabin with mice in it.”
“Elise.”
“I’m being accurate, not difficult. Look at this room.”
We look at the room. Rowan pulls a sheet off what turns out to be an armchair with a spring coming through the seat, and the dust goes up like something detonating, and all three of us step back.
“Fine. We prioritize.” Simon rubs the back of his neck. “Front room, kitchen, the bedroom. Nobody’s going to look in the hall closet.”
“They will absolutely look in the hall closet.”
“Then you do the hall closet.”
He says it like a punchline and goes out to the truck for trash bags, and Rowan and I are alone in his grandmother’s front room for the first time since a rest stop parking lot.
Neither of us says anything.
He picks up a box. I go to the hall closet. That’s how we’ve decided to handle it, apparently, without discussing it once.
Wanting someone in a house with three other rooms and one other person in it turns out to work like this.
It’s not the moments alone. There are almost no moments alone. Simon drifts through every twenty minutes to point at something and call it junk, which is his version of helping, and the rest of the time he’s audible, banging around in the back bedroom or on the phone to someone about nothing.
It’s everything else. It’s Rowan reaching past me for a roll of trash bags and the six inches of air between his chest and my back.
It’s the two of us carrying a dresser down the hall and having to stop and adjust and his hand ending up on top of mine on the wood for a second longer than the adjustment needs.
It’s him crouched under the sink with his forearms wet to the elbow and me having to physically leave the room.
By eleven I’ve hauled nine bags of garbage to the truck and thought about yesterday roughly four hundred times.
By one I’ve caught him looking at me twice, and both times he didn’t look away when I caught him, which is somehow worse than if he had.
Simon has sorted one box.
He’s been carrying it around, mostly. Picking things out and holding them up and telling stories about them. This was Grandma’s. Do you remember this? Somebody should keep this. He’s been at it for three hours and the box is not measurably emptier.
“Simon.”
“What?”
“You’ve been holding that ashtray for four minutes.”
“It was my grandfather’s.”
“Then put it in the keep pile and pick up something else.”
He puts it in the keep pile with enormous care and picks up something else, and I go back to the closet and pull out another twenty pounds of magazines and think about how there’s a version of this weekend where I find that charming.
That’s the thing about the end. It isn’t that you stop loving them.
It’s that you start seeing the mechanism.
Once you can see the little levers a person pulls to be liked, the whole thing stops working, and you can’t unsee it, and then you’re just standing in a hallway watching a man perform sentiment about an ashtray.
***
There’s a knock on the front door around five.
The woman on the porch is past sixty, in gardening gloves and a canvas jacket, holding a foil-covered dish and looking past me into the front room with frank curiosity.
“Thought I heard cars,” she says. “You’re the Maine boys.”
“Two of them.” Simon appears behind me, charm switching on. “Mabel, right? You knew my grandmother.”
“I fed her cat for eleven years.” She hands me the dish without asking whether I want it. “Lasagna. You won’t have food in the house and the store’s twenty minutes each way.”
“That’s kind of you.”
“It’s leftovers.” She’s still taking inventory over my shoulder. “That place has been sitting since the funeral. You selling?”
“Listing it Monday,” Simon says.
“Mm.” She makes a sound do the work of a paragraph.
“Well. I’m the white house with blue shutters, quarter mile down.
If the water goes off you’ll want to know where the shutoff is, because it isn’t where you’d expect, and the people who rented it before your grandmother took it back flooded that kitchen twice. ”
“Noted.”
“And there’s weather coming Thursday.”
“There’s weather coming every Thursday,” Simon says, and she looks at him the way you’d look at a dog doing a trick you’ve seen before.
“There’s weather coming Thursday,” she repeats. “The creek jumps its banks when it’s heavy. Road out floods at the low point past my place. It’s happened four times since I’ve lived here and if it goes, you’re not getting a car through until it drops.”
Rowan comes out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a rag.
“How long does it usually take to drop?”
“Day. Sometimes three.” She takes him in with a glance that lasts fractionally longer than the one she gave Simon. “You’d want to fill something with water and have a plan about the generator.”
“Understood. Thank you.”
“Mm.” She steps off the porch. “Bring the dish back when it’s empty. Don’t wash it, I’ll do it.”
We watch her go down the path and Simon shuts the door and immediately says, “She’s been dying to get in here for ten years.”
“She brought us food.”
“She brought herself an excuse to look at the house.” He’s already walking away. “Everyone up here is like that. Bored out of their minds.”
I look at Rowan. Rowan looks at the door.
“We should fill the tub Wednesday night,” he says.
***
We eat the lasagna standing up in the kitchen at nine, because the table is still under a drop cloth and none of us has the energy to deal with it. It’s rich and cheesy and it’s the best thing I’ve eaten in weeks, which says less about the lasagna than about the last four months.
Simon takes his upstairs. He’s been drinking since seven, beer he brought in a cooler, and he’s at the stage where he’s decided to be reflective.
“We had good times here,” he says from the doorway. “You know that? Us. In this house.”
“We came here twice.”
“Three times.”
“Once was so your mother could count the silver, Simon.”
He looks at me with an expression I recognize and used to fall for, wounded and boyish, and then he goes upstairs, and four minutes later the bedroom door shuts.
The cabin goes very quiet.
Rowan is at the sink washing the dish Mabel specifically said not to wash. The window over the sink is black with the night behind it and I can see us both reflected in it, standing in a kitchen that isn’t ours in a house that’s about to belong to strangers.
“She said not to wash it.”
“I’m not sending a dish back dirty to a woman who’s going to be our only neighbor if that road floods.”
He sets it on the rack. Dries his hands. Turns around and leans back against the counter, and now there’s five feet between us and the entire day is sitting in it.
We haven’t been alone since six this morning. Fifteen hours of six inches and hands on wood and not looking away.
“Ask me,” he says.
“I’m not asking you anything.”
“Then stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Elise.” He doesn’t move off the counter. “You’ve been checking where he is all day. Every twenty minutes. You did it four times while we were eating.”
Heat goes up my neck. “That’s not what I was doing.”
“That’s exactly what you were doing. You want to know how I know?” His voice stays low and even. “Because I’ve been doing it too.”
The refrigerator clicks on behind me and the sound is enormous.
I could go upstairs. That’s the whole thing again, the same quarter-second I’ve had twice already since yesterday morning, and I already know what I do when it comes.
I cross the kitchen.
I get about three steps.
Then my foot catches the edge of a box we’ve been stepping around all day, one of the ones from the hall closet that I dragged out and never emptied, and it goes over and spills across the floor between us. Papers. A church bulletin. Somebody’s reading glasses.
And a small velvet jewelry pouch, worn soft at the corners, that slides out and stops against my shoe.
I know that pouch.
I bend down and pick it up because my hands do it before the rest of me catches up, and I already know what’s inside it, because I’m the one who bought it.