Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Wren
By the second day, I can put weight on the leg if I'm willing to lie about how much it hurts, which I am, because lying flat watching a man not look at me is its own kind of injury.
Forced togetherness, it turns out, is mostly chores.
Eli runs the cabin like a small, grim ship.
There's wood to bring in, ice to chip from the spring box, the dog to feed and let out into a yard she patrols like she's expecting an invasion.
Juniper, a gray shepherd-something with one ear that doesn't stand.
He does it all in a silence that started out like a wall and is starting, by hour thirty, to read like a language.
I'm learning him. The set of his shoulders at the window means he's listening to the mountain.
The way he checks the rifle's rounds before bed, every night, the same ritual, means he hasn't stopped doing the math.
The single beat he takes before he answers any question means he's deciding how much of himself it'll cost.
I decide to make it cost less.
"Let me do something," I say, the third time he passes me to haul wood. "I'm going insane. I can stack. I can sit on a stool and stack."
He looks at me like I've proposed surgery. "You've got cracked ribs."
"I've got bored ribs. Worse condition." I'm already swinging my legs off the bed.
He moves fast, for a big man, faster than I've seen him, and gets a hand under my elbow before I can put weight wrong on the ankle.
For a second we're close. His hand engulfs my arm.
The heat coming off him is a solid thing, and the silence changes temperature.
He lets go like I'm hot to the touch. Steps back. Resumes the line on the floor.
"Sit on the stool," he says. "I'll bring the wood to you."
So that's how it goes. I stack wood by the stove while he splits and hauls, and somewhere in the rhythm of it the wall comes down a brick at a time.
I ask him the names of the peaks I can see through the window and he gives them, the Sister, Dutchman, the Saddle, and then, unprompted, the names of the wildflowers that'll be there in July.
Columbine and paintbrush and a tiny alpine forget-me-not he says grows in cracks where nothing else will.
The way he says it tells me he's looked at it a long time, alone, and never had anyone to name it to.
"You like it up here," I say. "Not just tolerate. Like."
"It doesn't lie to you." He sets a split down. "A mountain'll kill you, but it tells you it's going to. People kill you smiling."
"That's the bleakest thing I've ever heard a man say while making me soup."
"It's good soup."
"It is annoyingly good soup." It is. He cooks the way he does everything, without waste, and the result is better than anything in my apartment, which contains a despair and several kinds of granola bar.
I tell him so, and he doesn't smile, but something at the corner of his mouth shifts, and I'm learning that for Eli that's the whole laugh, the rest of it happens somewhere I can't see.
"Okay. Your turn. Ask me something. You've been studying me like a rockface and you haven't asked me a single thing about myself. "
He's quiet, splitting another round, and I think he won't bite.
He bites slower than other people, that's all.
You have to wait out the silence and not fill it, which is hard for me, because I fill silences for a living, I fill them with measurements and certainties and the sound of my own competence.
With Eli I'm learning to sit in the quiet and let it hold us both, and it's strange how much that feels like the thing I came up these mountains for in the first place.
The deep-time quiet. The being-small-against-something-old quiet.
He is the first person who has ever felt to me the way the rocks do.
The beat. The cost-counting. Then: "Why geology."
It's not the question I expected, and that's why I answer it honestly.
"Because rocks don't leave." It's out before I've vetted it.
"My dad did. When I was eleven. And my mom decided that meant everything about me was temporary too, like I'd inherited the leaving.
And I found out you can hold a piece of stone that's a billion years old and it's just — there.
It was there before everyone who ever hurt you and it'll be there after.
There's a whole field, Eli, deep time, where human pain is a rounding error.
I needed that to be a real place I could go. So I went into the rocks."
He's gone very still. Not the listening-to-the-mountain still. A different one.
"That's not bleak," he says. "That's the least bleak thing anyone's said in this cabin in nine years."
"It's the same thing you said about the mountain not lying."
"Yeah." He looks at me then, full, no line on the floor for one whole second. "It is."
Something passes between us in that look that I don't have the field training to log.
It's not the wariness of the first night or the careful distance of the rules I know he's set without telling me.
It's recognition. Two people who decided, separately, years apart, that the cure for being left was to love the things that can't leave you.
And who are both, right now, in a one-room cabin, looking at the one thing in the room that can.
He breaks it first. Of course he does. Turns to the stove, busies his hands, rebuilds the line on the floor brick by brick.
But that night, when he checks the rifle's rounds and banks the fire and lies down on the hard floor by the door, the floor, the second night running, while I have his bed, I lie awake and watch the shape of him in the dark and understand two things with the clarity altitude gives you.
The first is that Eli Brandt would die before he'd let me be touched, and not just by the men below. By anything. By the cold, by the dark, by the world that taught us both that warmth is a trap.
The second is that I am twenty-four and I have spent my whole careful life loving things because they couldn't leave, and I am lying in a stranger's bed wanting, for the first time, to be brave enough to love a thing that could.
Outside, the wind drops. The mountain goes silent. And in that silence, far off, so faint I almost convince myself it's a tree cracking in the cold, I hear the high mechanical whine of an engine, somewhere down the long grade.
Eli's already sitting up.