Chapter Nine
I’ve never been a good sleeper, so it’s a surprise when I drift from soft blackness to the sun filtering through the bright-orange walls of my tent.
Correction: our tent.
My eyes fly open at the sharp realization of exactly whose pencil is scratching along industriously behind my back.
Last night’s confession rushes back at me, along with the world’s worst vulnerability hangover. I don’t know why I didn’t make up some bland fake story about a dating disaster. He’d never have known, and I would have stayed safe, a dragon atop my hoard of ugly truths.
I roll over, cracking one eye.
McHuge sits on one of the camp chairs, wearing nothing but a pair of olive-green shorts, those professorial square black glasses, and a headlamp trained on a hardcover journal with FIELD NOTES embossed in gold on the cover.
He doesn’t sit on so much as inhabit the chair, relaxing bonelessly into the canvas fabric.
His shorts are short , or maybe it’s that his legs are long, stretching out for ages.
The hair dusting his thighs is gold rather than ginger, his skin a light champagne color interrupted by a density of freckles above his knees.
His farmer-tanned torso gives the impression of useful power, and plenty of it; but his belly is soft, rounding a little over the waistband of his shorts.
If he were a truck, he’d be a vintage pickup, cherry red, with a bed made of wooden slats: somehow very cute with all those rounded planes, but underneath the hood he’s got twelve cylinders if you should need them.
I’m seized with the desire to press my face into his stomach, to feel the comfort of him against my cheek, to hold on tight until I feel better.
“Marcus Aurelius, huh,” I croak, because I absolutely cannot continue to lie here and drink him in.
He looks up, eyebrows cocked. “Good morning to you, too. And I like the classics,” he says, tapping the slim volume of Meditations underneath his field notes.
“Marcus Aurelius happens to be extremely relatable for someone who lived two millennia ago. Feeling connected to people across time makes me more empathetic toward all people, which makes me a better therapist. ‘Kindness is invincible… what can even the most malicious person do if you keep showing kindness?’” he quotes.
Trust McHuge to be a better person before breakfast than I am at any hour. Trust him to be relentlessly analog, writing on recycled trees instead of a device.
“Taking notes?”
“Nope. Making lesson plans. Remember the Class 1 rapid with friendly eddies a kilometer or so downstream? We can split the clients into two groups and still be close enough to help each other with rescues. In the debrief, we can talk about hopping from safe haven to more dangerous waters and back to the next safe haven in your marriage, the same way you hop from eddy to eddy in whitewater.”
“McHuge,” I say carefully. “You’re not making this up as we go along, are you?
Is that why there’s no printed curriculum?
” Last time I worked as a guide, our trips were planned down to the exact weight of the food.
I assumed the Love Boat didn’t give out reading material for the usual McHuge reasons, like expanding to fill the present moment , or paddling your own river .
But this sounds like not even he knows what we’re doing.
He squints up at the roof of the tent, then switches off his headlamp and reaches for his pack. I refuse to feel regret when his navel disappears under a well-worn Rolling Stones T-shirt.
“I once lived with someone who shopped for food every day, instead of once a week. Arie’s explanation was How do you know on Sunday what you want to eat on Thursday?
Likewise, I don’t know what our guests will need tomorrow until I see what they learn today.
I also need to accommodate my coworkers, the weather, the terrain. So I shop for lessons every day.”
“Arie was your girlfriend?” I have no reason to be sour about any of his partners, past or present. No standing to be jealous of a woman who picked him the freshest fish for that night’s dinner.
“Boyfriend.”
“Oh! I didn’t know you were…”
“Pan,” he supplies. “And poly. But I don’t know if I’ll look for a polycule again. You know, your identity evolves over time, and sometimes you can’t predict where it’s going until you get there.”
“Yeah, totally.” That would be the “free love” bit from Brent’s article, I guess. I did not have “discuss the many facets of queerness with a guy I thought was cishet” on my bingo card for today. It’s uncomfortable to discover my assumptions about him were wrong.
“I should put the hot water on.” I wriggle out of my sleeping bag, trying to act nonchalant. He didn’t care if I saw him in just shorts, feet bare. What do I care if he sees me in my Leia T-shirt? My boobs are small enough that a bra is optional, anyway.
“I’ll give you a hand,” he says, tossing the books onto his cot, then pushing himself out of the chair. He takes off his glasses and rummages around in his backpack for a good minute before coming up with the case.
“Shouldn’t you put your field notes somewhere safer? Maybe type them into your phone and back them up to the cloud once in a while?”
“I’m not good at typing,” he says, wiggling his thumbs. He doesn’t have to say they’re too big. I look away and try to breathe normally.
“Besides,” he continues, “what do I need to protect them from?”
“Your tendency to misplace things. Bears. People whose names start with B who’ve already tried to invade our privacy.”
He laughs. “No one wants my notes, Stellar.”
I shake my head. “You should take better care of your intellectual property, and not just because it’s my future intellectual property. You had a best-selling book last year. Your ideas are worth more than you think.”
“You can’t copyright an idea, only a method.
And my methods are only worth anything if I sell a book proposal or Renee decides to partner with us, in which case the lawyers take care of that.
Our guests are ordinary people. With the exception of Sloane and Dereck, who presumably have better things to do than sneak around. ”
The fact that McHuge thinks Sloane is automatically trustworthy pokes me in a spot that I would dearly like not to be sore.
Maybe that’s why I snap, “And the exception of Brent, who has tons of incentive to sneak around, collecting dirt for another clickbait article. You’ve seen how he treats Willow—what makes you think he’ll treat us any better? ”
“I wasn’t under the illusion that only unproblematic people would come on this course, Stellar. And you’re right, their dynamic is a yellow flag.”
“But,” I prompt, when he stops.
“ And ,” he replies, giving the word a little heat, like a pitcher warming up his arm, “it’s not yet a red flag.
Right? There are a lot of reasons someone might not be their best self on the first day.
They’re feeling vulnerable. They’re worried they’ll be the worst paddlers.
They can’t see each other’s faces in the canoe, so they lose that avenue of communication.
They’re afraid, so it comes out as safer emotions—anger or judgment.
We can’t know what’s inside other people’s marriages, Stellar.
We can’t know what’s inside their hearts. ”
I don’t know whether he purposely raises his crooked eyebrow, but that fractured arch, split on the day he decided to become the person he is, says As both of us should know better than any words.
“But what if what’s inside their marriages is bad?” What if what’s inside their hearts is bad , my brain howls.
We had this saying in the ER: For you, it’s a regular day, but for the patient, it’s the worst day of their life.
It’s supposed to help us not take bad behavior personally.
Toward the end, I questioned that wisdom.
What does it do to people to work in a place where the person who’s allowed to be having their worst day is never you?
What do you do when you’re supposed to reset the bad behavior column to zero every day, but for you, everything keeps adding up?
At some point, the balance tips, and I never again want to be surprised when that moment comes.
“Then we can help them,” McHuge replies. “ If we stay curious, not judgmental. I’m curious about you, actually. I’m thinking your reaction has more to do with Stellar than it does with Brent and Willow.”
“Always the psychologist, McHuge,” I say, yanking open my pack and pulling out fresh day clothes. “So I’ll be the ER doc: Sometimes danger signs don’t mean anything. But I take them seriously anyway. Check and double-check them, get ready to react in case they do mean something.”
“I’m allowed to play roles other than psychologist, Stellar.” He steps between our beds, looking the tiniest bit pissed. “I’m allowed to be your friend. I’m allowed to be worried about you as a person. I see how hard it is on you to be this angry, never trusting anyone or anything.”
I step over my cot to where he’s standing in the relatively high-ceilinged center of the tent.
“It’s easy for you to be perfect. I’m sure you’re never angry.
But when I’m angry, that tells me to pay attention.
It saves me. Sometimes you have to choose between being a nice person and protecting yourself.
” My mom was never angry—not when I got held back in second grade after changing schools too many times, not when my dad’s irate marks pounded on our door in the middle of the night demanding their money back, not when we got run out of town.
She never used the power of anger to protect herself. Or me.
McHuge reaches out, hesitates for a second, then cups my elbow. I don’t know how to describe the sensation except to say he’s gentling me, like I’m a skittish thoroughbred and he’s the horse whisperer, coaxing me close enough to smell the goodness of him: zinc and bergamot and mountain wind.