18. Kirk
KIRK
Itake the long way back.
There is no reason to take the long way back.
The direct road up the mountain is clear now, the plow having scraped it down to bare gravel in a single wide pass, and there is nothing between me and the home that requires navigating around.
I take the long way because turning off the main street and heading back up means arriving, and arriving means walking through the door, and I am not ready for that yet in a way I cannot name and would not name even if I could.
Barnaby is in the truck bed, standing with his big grey head angled into the wind the way he always does, his coarse fur plastered back against his skull. I watch him in the rearview mirror. He has been standing that way since we left town. He keeps looking back toward the motel.
The road climbs. The trees close in on both sides, heavy with the snow the storm packed into their branches, the weight of it bending the younger pines into arcs.
The morning light comes through at a low angle and turns everything pale and blue and cold.
The plowed snow sits in high walls on either side of the gravel, grey-brown at the base where the blade scraped up the dirt, white and clean on top.
I park in front and cut the engine.
Barnaby jumps down before I open my door, lands in the snow with a heavy thud, and immediately trots to the front step. He sits there facing the door and his tail does not move. He looks at the door. He looks back at me. He looks at the door again.
I get out of the truck.
The cold is absolute up here, the kind that gets into the seams of everything, that finds the gap at your collar and the inch of wrist between glove and cuff and focuses all its attention there.
The storm has left the mountain rearranged.
A spruce at the side of the clearing has come down, its root ball wrenched up from the frozen ground and turned toward the sky, the roots trailing ice and clumped earth. It missed the wood pile by four feet.
I look at the cabin.
I have looked at it ten thousand times. I built most of it with my own hands or rebuilt what was already there, and I know every log in its walls, every shingle, every place where the chinking needs freshening in the spring. It is exactly what it has always been. Solid. Mine. Sufficient.
I go to the door and push it open.
The smell hits me before anything else. I cannot describe it with any precision, but it is there, some faint undercurrent beneath the wood smoke and the pine pitch and the kerosene that has been the smell of this place for years.
It is the ghost of shampoo, something fruity and warm, and underneath that the particular warmth of another person having moved through the air of a space and left a small piece of themselves behind in the molecules of it.
Barnaby pushes past me and goes straight to the rug in front of the cold stove, turns three times, and lies down. He puts his long grey nose on his paws and stares at the rug and does not thump his tail against the floor.
I close the door.
The silence lands on me like a physical weight, immediate and total.
Years up here and the silence has been the whole point of it, the thing I came for, the reason I chose a mountain with no neighbours and a road that disapproves of visitors.
The quiet was the architecture I built my days inside of and it was enough.
It is not enough now.
I can hear the specific absence of her. The way she would have been talking already, some running commentary on the spruce tree that fell, on the angle of the morning light, on whether Barnaby was being dramatic.
The cabin is twelve hundred square feet and it is somehow larger than it has ever been.
Every corner that held her for six days now holds only the geometry of the place she was standing.
I build the fire up. My hands know this, the kindling, the birch bark, the careful architecture of the first log before the fire is established enough to handle anything heavier.
I am crouched in front of the stove and I am doing all the correct motions and behind me the cabin breathes its cold, empty breath and Barnaby does not move.
When the fire catches I stand up and look at the kitchen.
Her mug sits forgotten. She left it, or put it there in that deliberate way she had of making herself useful even in the final minutes of being here.
It is the same mug she threw at my head on the second morning, the brown ceramic one with the chip in the handle.
I washed it last night and she must have used it this morning for the coffee I made before dawn and set it back down instead of in the cabinet where it lives.
I leave it there.
I go through the morning's necessities because the animals don't care about the state of a man's interior life.
The chickens need their water unfrozen and their feed box topped.
The generator needs its fluid checked after the sustained cold of the past week.
I split the wood that was waiting to be split before the storm, working through it in long steady sets until my shoulders burn and my breath comes hard and the stack beside the cabin is where it should be.
Hard work has always been reliable medication. It empties the mind down to its foundations and leaves only the physical, the heartbeat and the burning muscle and the requirement of the next swing. It has seen me through worse than this.
It doesn't work.
I swing and I am aware of the exact way she stood at that window watching me yesterday morning.
I felt her eyes from thirty feet away through the glass and through the snow in the air between us, felt them on my back and my arms and felt the heat of her attention as a physical thing against the cold.
I was showing off. I knew it and I kept swinging anyway, kept putting the full force of it into each strike and watching the rounds of wood split clean, because she was watching and I am apparently a man who will swing an axe harder because a woman is looking.
That is the level to which she reduced me and I found I could not resent it.
I stack the last of the wood and go back inside.
Barnaby has not moved. He is still on the rug, chin on his paws, staring at nothing. I put his food bowl down in front of him and he looks at it and looks away.
"Eat," I tell him.
He exhales through his nose, a long slow breath that somehow manages to contain an entire opinion. He does not eat.
I stand there looking at my dog, who spent six days glued to the side of a tiny auburn-haired woman who arrived with no practical survival skills and immediately became the most important person in this cabin, and I recognise the particular suffering he is engaged in because it is structurally identical to my own.
"She's gone," I tell him. The words come out flat and precise. Stating a fact that the cabin already knows.
Barnaby puts his nose back on his paws and closes his eyes.
I eat standing at the counter. Dried meat and crackers and water from the pitcher because I have no appetite for the effort of cooking and there is no one to cook for.
I eat the way I ate before she got here, mechanically and without interest, fueling the machine.
The fire spits in the stove. Outside the wind is coming back up, not the full fury of the storm but its aftershocks, gusting against the north wall and finding the small gaps in the chinking and coming through as thin cold whispers.
I sit in the armchair.
I have sat in this armchair every evening for years.
I have read in it, cleaned my rifle at the side table beside it, worked my way through the stack of books that arrives with my quarterly supply order.
It is the correct size for a man of my dimensions, which most furniture is not, and it is positioned correctly relative to the fire and the window, and it has always been where I end up when the work is done.
I sit in it for eleven minutes before I stand back up.
The cabin is wrong. I move through it trying to locate the specific nature of the wrongness the way you probe a sore tooth, methodically, checking each corner.
The kitchen. The small table where we ate, her knee against mine in the tight space and we don’t move away.
The rug in front of the fire where everything broke open and rebuilt itself in the span of a single night.
The window where she stood in my flannel drinking her coffee and watching the snow and the morning light caught in her hair and turned the auburn of it to something closer to fire.
I stop at the window and look out at the mountain.
The snow is blinding in the full morning light, the whole valley laid out below the ridge in unbroken white, and it is enormous and it is beautiful and it means nothing to me at this particular moment, which is information I sit with for a while.
For years, this view has been sufficient.
The mountain and the work and the quiet and the dog.
I chose this deliberately. I came here after everything that happened and I built the walls high enough and thick enough to keep the world at the correct distance and the system worked.
She broke the system in six days without trying.
Without even understanding what she was dismantling.
She just walked into it with her yellow coat and her relentless warmth and her way of filling a room with the particular frequency of herself, and the walls went down so quietly I didn't notice until she was already inside all of them.
The bedroom door opens and I see the bed is made. I stripped it and remade it this morning before we drove down, the quilts squared and smooth, because I am a man who makes his bed and the fact that I did not want to was not a sufficient reason not to. The pillows are stacked against the headboard.
I sit on the mattress.
The springs take my weight and the bed settles and the pillow on the right side shifts slightly and something slides out from beneath it onto the quilt. A small, folded piece of fabric. I reach for it without thinking.
Canary yellow.
I hold it in both hands. It is her scarf, the one from that yellow peacoat, the one she had wrapped twice around her neck when she arrived and then lost somewhere in the first day's confusion of warming up and drying out.
It must have ended up under the pillow. Small and light and entirely saturated with the scent of her, that warm fruity shampoo smell and underneath it something else, something that is just her, the particular biochemistry of the woman who slept in this bed and fit perfectly on me.
The cold feels like something survivable rather than just something to endure.
I sit there with it in my hands for a long time.
The fire pops in the other room. The wind pushes at the north wall.
Barnaby's nails click on the floorboards as he finally gets up and comes to the bedroom doorway and stands there looking at me with those deep sorrowful eyes that have always understood more about the situation than seems reasonable for an animal.
I look around the bedroom. The specific quality of the light in it. The way it smells. The dent in the second pillow that will fill back out by tomorrow and leave no evidence.
I think about her standing in the parking lot of the Harlow Inn in that useless yellow coat with her bag at her feet, watching the truck.
I did not look back. I kept my eyes forward and both hands on the wheel and I drove away because that was the correct thing to do and the correct thing has always been the same as the necessary thing in my experience.
Except that it wasn't. I understood that the moment I turned the corner and the motel disappeared from my peripheral vision and the road opened up ahead of me and there was nothing left to look forward to except the empty cabin waiting at the top of the mountain.
I look down at the scarf in my hands. Yellow. Ridiculous. Completely impractical for actual winter. Exactly like her in every detail.
I bring it close and I breathe in and I close my eyes.
Something shifts. Deep and tectonic, the way the ground moves in the spring when the frost breaks up beneath the surface and the earth begins the long work of becoming something different than it was.
I have been frozen for years. I came up here and I packed the cold around myself deliberately and I told myself it was protection and it was, it served its purpose, it kept the wreckage of everything that came before from doing any further damage.
But she was warm. She was the specific temperature of everything I stopped letting myself want, and she was in my bed and in my kitchen and in my arms in the dark and she smelled exactly like this, and I drove away from her and came back to this and I am sitting on a made bed holding a yellow scarf and my dog is watching me from the doorway with an expression that I do not appreciate but cannot argue with.
The rental company said tomorrow. She would be at the Harlow Inn until tomorrow at the earliest, maybe longer depending on what Billings had available.
She is in room six, because that was the one the man at the desk had the key for, and the Harlow Inn is twelve miles down the mountain road and my truck is in the driveway.
I stand up.
Barnaby's tail begins, slow at first, one heavy swing and then another, picking up speed as I fold the yellow scarf carefully and put it in the front pocket of my shirt.
He reads the shift in the room the way he reads everything, some antenna tuned to the frequency of my intentions, and he is already turning back toward the main room and the door, his nails loud on the floor.
I pull on my coat. I find my keys on the hook by the door. I look around the cabin once. The fire is banked correctly and will hold for hours, the chickens are fed, the wood is stacked and the generator is full and every necessary thing has been done.
I scratch Barnaby's head and he shoves his enormous skull up into my palm with a force that nearly staggers me.
"Stay," I tell him.
He sits. He is radiating approval.
I open the door onto the cold morning and I pull it shut behind me and I walk to the truck.