46 #2
The bearded man keeps his hand on the steering wheel throughout the whole thing, but his eyes seem elsewhere. His fingers clench once before he finally looks away and starts the engine.
Just as he backs out of the driveway, a strange emotion jolts me in place, and I nearly run out and wave him down to stop.
But what do I say? What questions do I ask?
Nobody knows the ordeal Elias and I have survived. Nobody knows the truth. Hell, for all I know my nerves are feeding my brain all the wrong signals.
The leash is gone. I’m less certain about what it left behind, though. Because, if I strip it down to basics, I’ve been a captive woman living under a certain set of conditions for several months.
And while I contemplate just how far into crazy I’ve wandered, the red truck backs out and disappears into the night.
When I’m back at the cabin, the dogs have emptied their snacks and spilt their water all over the floor.
Grudgingly, I tidy up and tuck them away, then try to keep busy with the dishes, the chickens and the shower, but the emptiness gives me too much room to think.
As the night takes over, the dogs begin to fumble at the base of the couch, hunting for that perfect spot Elias never lets them have.
While they move around, I rub my fingers as if the motion might produce a coherent thought I can cling to.
I could take the truck. Keep going until the cabin, the lake and everything else disappears behind me.
My eyes find the keys hanging on a hook by the door. I pull the throw over my feet instead.
The doubt creeps in quietly and cruelly: what if what we have is real only because he taught my fear to answer his voice?
What if I have simply been conditioned to be a good girl to him?
I look at the naked ring finger, then the range where he’d thrown the dark band of my history. I think back on all the times I looked at his face and saw the truth.
‘Maybe I’m just full of shit,’ I rumble to myself.
Brute launches himself to my left and Menace takes it as his cue to conquer the right side of the couch where all the cushions live. I don’t shoo them off. I’ve already spread the throw in sacrifice to the dog hair. And somehow, having them close makes me feel safer.
I glance at their closed eyes. Listen to their exhales as they settle into the softness. I try to borrow some of that calm.
Doesn’t work, of course. Sleep is out of the question, and my thoughts only grow louder the longer I sit there.
I reach behind me towards the smaller bookcase Elias built to separate the kitchen from the sitting area. My fingers are already seeking the familiar spine of my friend Mary and her monster—
But they catch only air, one of my nails grazing the back of the bookshelf.
I stab the empty space with my gaze, stilling entirely as I try to make out what I’m seeing.
My hand remains suspended, and despite myself, my mouth curves.
Elias had taken Frankenstein. Our Mary. Our monster. The first bridge I ever crossed to him. That he’d taken it feels – briefly – like he wanted to keep me close.
Then the absence becomes too stark to ignore and starts grating.
Forcing my mind away from it, my gaze moves to the ouline of the red book where the dungeon and haystacks wait in lurid promise. It’s the one he used to drag me closer, page by filthy page, until curiosity and study melded into heat, and that heat became part of our orbit.
I reach for it slowly, already hating the little tremor in my fingers as if holding a trap long since sprung but still capable of biting.
And I start reading it from the beginning.
Morning comes grey, warm and humming with insects, and I begin with everything that is not fishing.
I feed the hens, change their water, collect ten eggs and clean up, then check the shed latch, the dogs’ bowls, the dry wood stack and the traps closest to the house.
Every small chore becomes a perfectly reasonable excuse not to touch the fishing rod now hanging against the tool shed door.
By noon I have swept a clean floor twice, rearranged kindling and begun negotiating with myself over whether starvation – while observing the thaw of reindeer meat – is truly worse than gutting something with eyes and scales.
That is when the grind of tyres on the track breaches the windows.
My heart leaps so violently I nearly fall over Menace.
Because the pistol isn’t at my waist.
Scurrying head-first into the bedroom, I snatch the weighted holster from the desk just as my head snaps up and my gaze darts out the window.
Anders’ truck emerges from the trees. There’s no mistaking its roar.
In that bright, stupid moment I am so anxious to see the blue eyes again that I abandon the gun and the meat on the counter, and bolt outside as though loosed from a crossbow.
The vehicle approaches and as it rolls closer, the windscreen catches the light, but shows only one outline of a person behind the wheel.
No passenger.
No dark curls.
When the truck turns into the yard, I realise it is Inga driving.
Everything inside me wilts.
The machine stops slightly crooked, which feels appropriately Inga Nielsen.
‘Hei hei!’ she chirps as she struggles to shove the door open with visible resentment.
‘Hei,’ I call back, plastering on a smile I don’t feel.
‘I thought I’d rescue you from the fishing gear,’ she says with a chuckle, climbing out of the truck with a basket hooked over one arm. ‘And from your own head. Jakob said both are dangerous when left unsupervised.’
I manage a weak laugh at that, but it doesn’t sit well that Elias had spoken to her about me being left unsupervised. And that basket she is carrying seems too full for an impulsive visit.
‘Elias has a way with words, doesn’t he?’ I say, then soften because the name they know him by still belongs to only them in a way I don’t fully understand. ‘I mean… Jakob.’
Inga smiles as she approaches. ‘Lunch first. Coffee after. Existential crisis later.’
Which is how I end up storing the meat for tomorrow, then strolling back outside beneath the thin shade by the cabin with bread, smoked fish and lingonberry jam. The coffee I’d brought is strong enough to scare off anything with an inhuman sense of smell.
Brute sits near Inga’s knee with the solemn devotion of a traitor, his ears turning with every sound coming from the treeline, while his brother runs another tireless perimeter check.
For a while, Inga talks about Sunna’s blanket. About which cousin has ruined her panel twice and insists on calling it artistic tension. Then about Mee’s mother threatening to redo half of it in secret because, naturally, seventy years of life entitles a woman to properly aligned stitches.
I laugh despite the hole in my middle.
The quiet stretches. My thumb rubs the pale strip around my ring finger before I realise Inga is watching.
‘Was he very upset when you lost it?’ she asks.
My fingers still. ‘Elias? I mean… Jakob?’
She squints against the afternoon sun and straightens the crease in the blanket where she lies on her side. ‘Yes.’
‘Not really. Why bring it up?’ I pick up the mug, the handle pressing hard into my palm. My voice catches, betraying everything my face does not.
She sighs. ‘The whole Hunt-slash-wedding gone bananas.’
Wedding. I remind myself to tread carefully so I don’t insult the traditions but also don’t give away enough for her to jump to conclusions. Or worse – make the right ones.
‘No, it wasn’t. Things have been developing in a way we… didn’t expect,’ I murmur.
She studies me until I have to draw my knees closer in an attempt to shield myself from her gaze. Menace appears in my line of sight, strutting merrily towards us. It pulls away from the topic for a beat.
But there’s no avoiding it.
‘At the risk of you hating me…’ I exhale. ‘The engagement was…’ I weigh whether to admit it aloud or not. I need to get it off my chest because I can’t keep looking at these people and smile lies into their faces. ‘Fraudulent.’
My body locks up. Excuses already line up to absolve us of everything. But in the silence, I realise nothing comes out of her.
I glance her way. A knowing half-smile is already waiting. ‘Figured something was going on, but I wasn’t sure. Nothing about Jakob is simple.’
She pushes herself up to sit with her legs crossed and throws another leftover piece of bread into her mouth. I wonder whether she’s laying the casualness on thick to keep herself from going nuclear on me.
Giving the bite a chew or two as her eyes meet Menace, who collapses at her feet, she then produces an empty plastic bowl and pours some ice water for both dogs.
All the while, I’m struggling to summarise the last few months into something that doesn’t resemble a horror story.
‘You don’t have to tell me the details,’ suddenly she says, ‘but I don’t think it was fraudulent.’
With my breath splitting my lungs, I let her finish pouring.
‘Even if it started off as fraudulent, it does not mean everything after it was too.’
She offers Menace one scratch behind the ear as he dips his nose into the bowl.
‘Jakob used to leave a room before anyone had a chance to ask him to stay. Now he sits through dinner because you are still at the table. He sleeps. He laughs when he forgets himself. And when the noise in his head grows too loud, he looks for you.’
Her fingers close around the empty bowl and she pours more water. ‘Whatever happened between you, those things are not pretend.’
The water bottle turns once in her hand. Then again. She picks at the edge of the label before speaking. ‘We all tried, you know. To find ways to make life here easier for him. Hoping it might make him come home for good.’
A shared silence passes between us. I know the full story of his childhood now, and though it fills in the blanks, it still doesn’t make it any easier to understand him.
‘I always wondered…’ she starts, shaking her head, ‘just because there were always small things that kept surfacing…’
When she doesn’t finish, I prompt, ‘What?’