CHAPTER 27 – NELLIE
In this moment, the camping chair felt like best thing Nellie owned, which was saying something, because the camping chair had been purchased from a thrift store in Bozeman for six dollars and had a small fraying strip along the left armrest where something had once, in a previous life, been stapled to it.
But it reclined at exactly the right angle, and it was positioned three feet from Dolores’s open side door, and the Douglas firs overhead were doing their late-afternoon light thing where the sun came through in shifting columns of gold and amber and turned the whole forest floor into something so beautiful it was almost rude.
So, Nellie had decided that the camping chair was a minor treasure and the thrift store in Bozeman deserved a very good Yelp review.
She had eaten a great breakfast, by which she meant toast and two hard-boiled eggs, and was considering this an exceptional nutritional achievement.
The forest smelled like pine and something faintly musty from the afternoon sun hitting the undergrowth, and Eleanor stood twenty feet to her left, enormous and magnificent, her ancient bark lit gold at the base where the light reached.
It was, Nellie thought, an extremely good situation to be in. After such relentless physical activity the night before, she was considering a mid-morning nap when she was suddenly jolted upright by her own ringtone.
“Hi—”
“Where are you?” Sawyer asked, with something dangerously close to a Nellie-esque whine.
“That’s a fascinating opener.” Nellie laughed. “Very Rebecca. Very ‘the new wife has disappeared from Manderley.’”
“Where are you?” Sawyer asked again. This time, there was definitely more than a hint of whine.
“I’m in the forest.”
“Are you being vague to torture me? Where in the forest? Back at the cottage?”
“No, I’m back with Eleanor.” Nellie was thoroughly enjoying this needy side of Sawyer. “I needed trees. After last night, I’m sure you understand.”
“I thought you’d be here when I got home.” Nellie could hear the pout in Sawyer’s confession.
“I’m sorry. I got bored,” Nellie said, which was not entirely true but was partially true in the way that all good half-truths were.
The full truth was that she’d woken up that morning in Sawyer’s bed and stared at the skyline through those floor-to-ceiling windows and felt her body quietly, involuntarily longing for the ground.
Not because she didn’t want to be there; she had wanted quite desperately to be there.
But she’d been surrounded by marble and glass and the alien, moneyed hush of a building that had been designed to make the outside world recede.
After a point, she’d needed to hear birds.
“There’s a full refrigerator,” Sawyer said, as if this were a compelling counter-argument.
“I know there’s a full refrigerator. It has six varieties of mineral water in it.”
“You don’t have a refrigerator in the forest.”
“I have a very small refrigerator.”
“You have a cooler.”
“A cooler is a refrigerator. Don’t be elitist about it.
” Nellie had propped her feet up on the cooler in question.
“The thing is—and I mean this gently, with a great deal of affection—your apartment is very beautiful, and I feel like I’m living inside a magazine while I’m in it.
A very expensive magazine that would never photograph me because my boots have mud on them.
” She tipped her head back against the chair.
“The marble, Sawyer. It’s a lot of marble. ”
“It’s a penthouse.”
“There are, I counted, four different kinds of marble. Four. In the bathroom alone!”
A small sound came down the line that was extremely close to a snort. “You counted the marble?”
“I had time. I was surrounded by it.” Nellie looked up at the canopy, at the flat green light filtering through the firs. “Also, the walk-in shower is enormous. Which is great if you enjoy standing in an enormous shower alone, but I found it slightly isolating.”
“The walk-in shower is good for some things,” Sawyer purred down the phone.
Nellie’s grip tightened slightly. “I’m— Yes, well. That’s a fair point. Abstractly, I accept that argument.” She cleared her throat. “But the point stands about the marble.”
“Where exactly is Dolores parked?”
“I told you, I’m with Eleanor. Don’t you remember where she is?”
“I know where Eleanor is, Nellie. That’s where we first met.”
“Then you know exactly where I am.” Nellie grinned up at the towering giant and fondly recalled the first time she’d laid eyes on Sawyer. “I’m parked right beside her. I wanted to celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?”
“Everything!” Nellie spread her free arm wide, taking in the clearing and the trees and the perfect rightness of being exactly where she was.
“Eleanor is protected, you’ve overhauled your entire company to save the planet, I assume you’ve somehow managed to keep your position as CEO, and I won.
I genuinely won, Sawyer, and I wanted to tell Eleanor. ” She bit her lip. “Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing at you.”
“You were about to.”
“I was—” Sawyer paused, and Nellie was certain she was holding back a laugh. “Stay where you are.”
The call cut off. Nellie smiled at her phone and went to put the kettle on.
The thing was, she hadn’t actually expected Sawyer to come.
That was the part she was later, privately, unwilling to admit.
She’d half-expected a follow-up text with a mild rebuke about leaving without a note or possibly a summary of the mineral water varieties she’d failed to appreciate because that was the register in which Sawyer operated when she wanted to be affectionate and needed it to look like something else.
What she had not expected, after approximately sixty minutes of sipping tea and watching the light move across the forest floor, was the quiet sound of car tires on the dirt track.
Nellie sat up straighter in the camping chair and squinted at the approach.
Sawyer climbed out of her car with a bag over her shoulder. Not a briefcase, not the slim leather portfolio she carried everywhere like an appendage. A soft bag, the kind you packed for a weekend.
“You came,” Nellie said, bewildered, because this was apparently the level of articulate she was operating at.
“Why else would I have asked where you were?” The affectionate smile on her face was a million miles from the icy scowl she had deployed the first time she had pulled up to this particular spot. “Also, you left my apartment without telling me.”
“I left a note!”
“You left a drawing of a bird.”
“That was a goodbye. It was an illustrated goodbye.” Nellie stood from the camping chair, because it felt strange to have this conversation with Sawyer standing over her, even if Sawyer was making a valiant effort to look like her presence in the forest carrying an overnight bag was an entirely routine situation. “What’s in that?”
Sawyer set the bag down beside the van. “Necessities.”
Nellie looked at it. At Sawyer. At the bag again. “Sawyer?”
“You said you’d parked Dolores out here. I wasn’t going to show up without—” She reached into the bag. Pulled out, first, a toothbrush still in its cardboard packaging. Then a folded stack of fabric in a dark green.
Nellie took the fabric and unfolded it.
It was fleece pajamas. A full set. With a small embroidered ‘S’ on the breast pocket.
“You packed fleece pajamas,” she said.
“I figured it gets cold here at night.” Sawyer was chewing on her cheek, as if she was uncomfortable with how sentimental this all looked.
“You packed your pajamas and drove into the forest to sleep in my van.”
“I packed necessities and came—” Sawyer stopped. The faintest line appeared between her brows. “Don’t make it a thing.”
“I’m not making it a thing.” Nellie was, absolutely, making it a thing. She pressed the folded pajamas against her chest. “You’re going to sleep in Dolores.”
“That appears to be the plan.”
“My bed is significantly narrower than your bed.”
“I assumed so.”
“And I only have a camp stove for cooking.”
“Mm.”
“I have six varieties of instant noodles.”
Sawyer turned her eyes to the heavens and sighed loudly. “I came prepared to rough it.”
“Come in, then,” Nellie chirped, clapping her hands together because there was no other possible response to a billionaire standing in a forest with emergency fleece. “I’ll give you the tour.”
The tour took approximately forty-five seconds.
“This is the kitchen,” Nellie said, indicating the camp stove, the overhead cabinet, and the small counter with its clip-on cutting board and the tin of cocoa powder and the mugs hanging from their little hooks.
“This is the bathroom,” she continued, pulling back the curtain on the compact wetroom that could, by a generous stretch of definition, be described as containing a shower.
Sawyer examined it and managed not to wrinkle her nose.
“And this,” Nellie said, pointing at the back of the van, “is the bedroom.”
The bed was very narrow. It had a good mattress, which Nellie had upgraded herself with a piece of memory foam she’d had cut to size and was deeply proud of.
It had a patchwork quilt that Paloma’s mother had made her three Christmases ago and which was, in Nellie’s considered opinion, the coziest object she possessed.
Sawyer looked at the bed. Then she looked at the ceiling, and she appeared to be conducting an interior audit of her own comfort requirements against the available data.
“How,” she said, choosing her words with great and visible precision, “do you live like this?”
“With tremendous joy,” Nellie informed her.
“The ceiling—”
“Is cozy.”
“Nellie, I’m five-foot-ten.”
“I have plenty of room.” Nellie patted the quilt. “It’s very comfortable. Paloma always sleeps brilliantly in there.”
“Where does Paloma usually sleep?”
“On the bed.”
“And you?”
“Also on the bed, but in a friendly, organized—” Nellie gestured at the mattress. “We’re both quite small.”