6. Kirk #2
I wash up at the basin afterward, pouring water I heated earlier, and she dries without being asked.
It's a small thing. It's a nothing thing.
She picks up each bowl as I finish it and runs the cloth around the inside, and we work in silence, and the silence has lost the jagged quality it had earlier.
It's just quiet. Just two people in a small kitchen doing a task.
I become aware of the temperature outside by degrees.
I've been tracking it all evening in the way you track it when you live on a mountain and your survival depends on accurate readings, through the deepening in the wind's pitch, the way the floor has gone from cold to actively hostile underfoot, the way the draught under the door has developed a new, cutting quality.
The woodstove is burning hard. I know exactly how much wood I put in and I know how long it should last. Something isn't adding up.
I hang the last pot and go to the temperature gauge mounted by the door. It's an old mercury dial, nothing electric. I bring the lantern close and read it.
Twenty-two below.
The gauge only goes to twenty-five. I've never seen it read lower than fifteen in several winters on this ridge.
I straighten up.
I can feel it now, the way I couldn't quite feel it before when the kitchen and the cooking and the proximity of another body were all throwing off extra heat.
The corners are not warming the way they should.
The floor near the far wall is cold enough that you'd feel it through heavy wool socks.
The woodstove is doing everything it can but it's one stove in a cabin that was built to hold heat at twenty below, not whatever tonight is becoming.
Stella is standing at the counter, folding the dish cloth. She turns and stops when she sees my face.
"What."
It's not a question, really. More of a recognition that something has shifted.
I look at the gauge and then at her.
"Temperature's dropped hard." I say it flat, without dressing it up. "Colder outside than the stove can fully compensate for in a cabin this size."
She waits. Her chin comes up slightly, which I've already learned is what she does when she's bracing.
"The heat loss is concentrated on that end ," I tell her, gesturing toward the far wall, which is where the bedroom is, as she well knows, because she's been sleeping in the only bed. "Small space, two bodies generate more than one."
The pause that follows has weight to it.
Her eyes move to the bedroom door and then back to me.
I watch her face work through the information. I don't help her along. It's a fact of cold weather and physics. It is what it is.
"One bed," she says.
"One bed."
"And you're saying we need to share it."
"I'm saying the temperature is at twenty-two below and dropping. The sleeping bag is rated to minus fifteen. Alone, either of us runs a real risk. Together, the thermal differential?—"
"I understand the physics, Kirk." Her voice is even. She's embarrassed and trying not to show it, two spots of colour high on her cheeks that I can see even in the lantern light. "I just wanted to make sure you were saying what I thought you were saying."
I hold her gaze.
"I'm saying exactly what you think I'm saying."
Barnaby walks between us and pushes his blunt head against my hand, then pushes it against hers, as if he's brokering something. She looks down at him and a breath comes out of her in a short, slightly unsteady exhale. Not quite a laugh. Something more honest than that.
"Okay," she says. She says it to Barnaby, and then she says it again to me, steadier the second time. "Okay."
I say nothing.
She brushes past me toward the bedroom, her shoulder barely clearing my arm, and I stay where I am for a moment with my hand on the dog's head and the cold pressing in from every wall and the temperature gauge reading twenty-two below and still falling, and I understand with absolute clarity that the night has just changed its nature entirely.
Survival doesn't ask for your preferences. It just asks whether you're going to do what needs doing.
I bank the stove. I close the kitchen damper. I check the door latch twice, because that's what I do, and I take the lantern into the bedroom.
She's already in the bed, on the far side, as far as the wall will allow, the quilt pulled up to her chin. Her auburn hair is spread across the pillow and she's staring up with the focused expression of someone doing significant internal processing.
I set the lantern on the low shelf and blow it out.
The room goes dark and very cold and very small.
I sit on the mattress. It dips under my weight in a way that's unavoidable, rolling her slightly toward me. She compensates, holding her position. I can feel the warmth she's already built up under the quilt from her side and I can feel the temperature of the room working against it.
I lie down. Pull the quilt up. Keep exactly as much distance between us as the bed allows, which is not much.
The wind slams into the north wall like something trying to get in. The timbers creak.
She is warm. Even six inches away she is warm, and she is very still, and I am aware of every millimetre of space between us with a precision that has nothing to do with survival calculations and everything to do with the fact that she is the most alive thing that has been in this cabin in years.
The cold does what cold does. It closes the distance.