17. Stella
STELLA
The plow driver knocks three times. Hard, efficient knocks that have no idea what they're interrupting.
I'm already sitting up, the quilt pooled around my waist, staring at the frost-hazed window where the dawn light has gone from gray to a sharp, blinding white that bounces off four feet of freshly packed snow.
The kind of light that belongs to a new day in a world that has been reset and doesn't care what the previous world looked like.
Kirk is already moving. He's up and dressed before the second knock lands, pulling a flannel over his thermal with the practiced efficiency of a man who has been answering emergencies at dawn for his entire adult life. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't look at me.
"Morning, Kirk." The plow driver's voice is weathered and cheerful, the voice of a man who has been up since four and considers this a perfectly reasonable situation.
"Hell of a storm. Got the main road cleared faster than expected and ran the rigs all night to punch through the ridge.
Cleared your drive best I could. She'll need some work before—" A pause. "You got company?"
A beat of silence.
"Guest," Kirk says.
A single word. Final as a door closing.
"Well." The driver sounds mildly delighted. "Town's open. Road's clear down to Harlow. It'll refreeze tonight so I'd say get down before noon if you need anything."
Another pause. Another silence that Kirk apparently considers a complete response.
"Right then," the driver says. "You take care now."
The door closes. The mechanical roar of the plow engine builds as it reverses and turns and grinds its way back down the mountain, taking its cheerful indifference with it.
I sit in the silence it leaves behind. Barnaby appears in the doorway of the bedroom, tail low, reading the room the way he always does. He looks at me and then at the empty main room and then back at me and his tail drops lower.
I get up.
My clothes are folded on the chair in the corner where Kirk placed them days ago.
My peacoat, still faintly damp in the lining.
My designer thermal leggings, stiff and wrong-feeling after days of wearing Kirk's thick wool socks and his oversized flannels.
My heeled leather booties, which look like a joke in this context, which have always looked like a joke in this context, sitting there at the base of the chair like evidence of a woman who had absolutely no idea what she was walking into when she left the city six days ago.
I pick up the leggings. The fabric is cold to the touch.
It takes longer than it should to get dressed.
My fingers aren't cooperating. I keep moving slowly, methodically, folding Kirk's flannel shirt with more care than is necessary and placing it at the foot of the bed where Barnaby watches me from the doorway with those brown eyes that have always seen too much.
I pull on my peacoat and the yellow wool feels alien against my skin. Too bright. Too thin. A costume.
I reach for my booties and sit on the bed and put them on one at a time, and the two-inch heel that felt perfectly reasonable in Chicago feels like a personal insult right now.
I look around the bedroom. The rough-hewn walls.
The quilts in their layers of brown and grey and deep red.
The kerosene lantern on the nightstand that we never fully turned off because the room felt better with a thread of warm light in it.
The indent in the pillow that is still shaped like Kirk's head, and the smaller indent beside it that is still shaped like mine, and the fact that those two indents are close enough that there is no daylight between them.
I breathe through my nose and I stand up and I walk out of the bedroom.
Kirk is at the kitchen counter. He has made coffee, two mugs, and one of them is sitting at my end of the small table.
He is standing with his back to me, both palms flat on the counter, looking out the window at the mountain and the brutal blue sky and the white world that has materialized overnight.
I sit down at my end of the table. I wrap both hands around the mug. The ceramic is hot and solid and I concentrate on that.
"Thank you," I say. "For the coffee."
He turns around and picks up his own mug and leans back against the counter.
He looks at me for a long time with those ice-blue eyes that I have learned this week are not cold at all, they are just careful.
He is doing what he always does, reading the situation with that silent, precise intelligence that he keeps entirely behind the wall of his face.
"Roads clear by noon," he says.
"I heard."
He nods once and drinks his coffee.
I drink mine. The woodstove is putting out a steady, orange heat and Barnaby has given up his position in the bedroom doorway and crossed to my chair and put his heavy head in my lap. I scratch behind his ear automatically.
"I'll need to call for a rental car," I say.
"Or a cab. Or whatever passes for a cab out here.
" My voice is too bright. I can hear the defensive optimism cranking up like a generator, filling the silence with noise because the noise is more manageable than what's underneath it.
"Does Harlow have a cab? It seems like the kind of town that has one cab and his name is something like Earl and he only runs Tuesday through Thursday. "
Kirk says nothing.
"His name is Earl, isn't it."
"Gary," Kirk says.
"Of course it's Gary." I look down at Barnaby's silky ears. "I'll call Gary."
Silence.
"I'll drive you," Kirk says.
I look up. His expression gives me nothing.
"You don't have to do that."
"Roads refreeze by tonight." He sets down his mug. "I'll drive you."
It is not a discussion. It is the same voice he uses to tell me the temperature or how many cords of wood are stacked against the back wall, the same flat declarative that is his version of care, and that is exactly the problem with it, that is exactly what is going to make the next two hours unbearable. I nod.
"Okay," I say. "Thank you."
He goes to get his keys.
The truck is a heavy-duty Ford that has lived its entire life on mountain roads and wears the proof of it in every dented panel and salt-eaten wheel arch.
Kirk starts the engine and it turns over immediately, that deep authoritative rumble that belongs entirely to him, and the heat kicks on within two minutes, which is better than my city apartment manages on most winter mornings.
I climb in and the seat is approximately a foot and a half off the ground, which means I am performing an undignified scramble in a peacoat and heeled booties and I am very aware that Kirk is watching this from the driver's side without commenting, which is somehow both considerate and excruciating.
I get in and shut the door. The cab smells like him, like cold pine and diesel and the same bar soap that I have been using all week and have now apparently permanently associated with safety.
Kirk reverses out of the drive.
The mountain road is narrow and walled on both sides by the high white banks the plow left behind, and Kirk navigates it without hesitation, both hands easy on the wheel, reading the surface of the road the way he reads everything.
The tires crunch over packed snow. The engine is a constant low growl.
Outside the window, the mountain is extraordinary and I hate it.
The snow is unbroken and blue-shadowed and the pine trees are loaded so heavily with white that their branches bend nearly to the ground, and the sky is the deep saturated blue that only exists at altitude in winter, and under any other circumstances I would have my phone out and be taking fifty photographs.
My phone is dead. My phone has been dead for five days.
I stare out the window and I don't take any photographs.
The silence in the cab is doing something to the inside of my chest.
I try twice to think of something to say that isn't what I actually want to say, which is turn the truck around, which is pull over, which is look at me and tell me what the last six days were to you because I need to hear it said out loud before this mountain road deposits me back into a world where it becomes something that happened once and slowly calcifies into a story I tell myself at two in the morning.
"The tree came down about twenty feet from the generator shed," I say. "You're going to need to clear that before?—"
"I know."
"Right." I look back out the window. "Of course you know."
Three miles of mountain road pass in silence.
The truck descends in long sweeping switchbacks and with every turn the altitude drops and the trees change and the town below becomes incrementally more visible, a cluster of rooftops and a church steeple and the grey ribbon of the main road cutting through the valley, the world that exists outside the ridge assembling itself piece by piece like an argument I've been avoiding.
"Stella." His voice is low. Just my name.
I turn from the window.
He is looking at the road. His hands are steady on the wheel. A muscle works in his jaw beneath the dark beard.
He doesn't say anything else. He says my name and then he runs out of whatever came after it, or decides against it, or buries it under the same six feet of packed silence he buries everything under, and the muscle in his jaw stops working and he just drives.
"It's fine," I say, and I hate myself a little for it, for how quickly I smooth the moment over, for the reflex of making it easy. "It's fine, Kirk."
He says nothing.
The road levels out as we hit the valley floor.
The town of Harlow materializes around us, modest and quiet in the aftermath of the storm, the main street plowed but not yet fully awake.
A hardware store. A diner with a handwritten sign in the fogged window.
A post office. A gas station where a man in an orange vest is salting the entrance with a coffee tucked under one arm.
The entire town fits inside four blocks and feels utterly, bafflingly ordinary after six days on a ridge where the only other living things were a massive man and his dog and the relentless weight of the weather.
The motel is on the far end of the main street.
It is called the Harlow Inn, which is generous.
It is a single-story row of eight rooms with a hand-painted sign and a parking lot that has been plowed into a single narrow lane.
It is perfectly adequate. It is completely without character.
There is a small office with a neon VACANCY sign glowing red, which seems like a foregone conclusion given that it is winter on a mountain in Montana and the storm just lifted six hours ago.
Kirk pulls into the lot and parks and cuts the engine.
The silence that follows is a different kind from the truck silence. This one has an edge to it. This one knows it's the last one.
I don't move immediately. I have my hand on the door handle and I am looking at the Harlow Inn and its eight identical doors and the absence of everything that the last six days contained, and I am working very hard on the optimism reflex because it is the only tool I have ever reliably been able to find in the dark.
"The rental company will send something from Billings," I say. "Probably tomorrow, depending on the roads. I'll be fine here for a night." I turn to look at him. "Thank you. For everything. Not just the ride, I mean for—" I stop. "You know what I mean."
Kirk's hands are on his thighs. He is looking straight ahead through the windscreen at the motel wall.
His profile is exactly what it has always been, carved and hard and everything complicated happening somewhere behind the surface of it where I have never quite had full access, where I have spent six days pressing my ear against the wall and catching fragments.
He turns his head and looks at me.
The full weight of those ice-blue eyes, the ones that have seen everything and catalogued everything and spent days watching me with an attention so precise it felt like being studied and sheltered at the same time.
"You'll be warm enough," he says. His voice is low and rough and he is not talking about the motel.
I nod. My throat is tight.
He reaches across the cab and takes my hand from where it rests on the seat between us.
He holds it for four seconds, his enormous rough hand wrapped entirely around mine.
He looks down at it and then he sets it back on the seat as carefully as he sets everything down that he doesn't know what to do with.
I get out of the truck.
The cold hits me immediately, thin and sharp and full of the aroma of the valley, pine and diesel and the distant wood smoke of other people's fires. My heels crunch on the salted pavement. The yellow peacoat is doing nothing.
He is already looking forward. Both hands back on the wheel where they belong, where they are useful, where they know what to do. His shoulders are square.
He doesn't look at me.
He lifts his chin once, that single gruff nod that is his entire vocabulary of tenderness when tenderness is too large to fit in words, and then the engine turns over and the truck backs out of the lot and pulls onto the main street and moves away from me with the slow unhurried certainty of something that has already made its decision.
I watch it go. I peer at the red taillights until the truck turns at the end of the main street and disappears behind the hardware store and is gone, and the street is quiet and flat and the cold settles down around me like the storm was never over at all.
I stand there for a moment longer than I should.
Then snatch my bag and I walk toward the motel office and the VACANCY sign casts a red glow across the salted pavement in the early morning light, and I push through the door into the odor of stale coffee and commercial carpet cleaner, and behind me on the main street of Harlow the world continues its ordinary, indifferent business as though nothing happened on that mountain.
As though I did not leave most of myself up there in the snow.