7. Nadia
seven
Nadia
The last field book goes into the case at eleven in the morning, and the certification page goes on top of it, and Creed's signature is on the certification page in fountain pen because of course it is.
He takes a long time over it. Reads the whole page first, which he does not need to do, having written it. Then he uncaps the pen, signs, puts the date under it, and turns the page around to face me with two fingers — the way you hand somebody a tool by the handle.
"There," he says. "Now go be right in front of a committee."
Eleven days ago that signature was the only thing in the province I wanted.
October twenty-sixth. Day twenty-one of twenty-one. There's snow on the northwest block, four inches of it since Friday, and we walked the last transect yesterday in it with the light going flat and blue and my model finally, finally closing.
The corridor is continuous. Narrow at the creek — sixty-two metres at the pinch, which is thin but it isn't broken — and continuous all the way to the provincial boundary.
Twelve days of ground truth says so, with a wet signature under it, and on Monday it goes to the regional office with my name on the report and his on the data.
Sixty-two. Two metres above the number that would have split one population into two. I ran the final surface at eleven o'clock last night on the cabin table with him asleep four feet away, and when it resolved I sat with my hand over my mouth in the dark like a lunatic.
"That's it," I say.
"That's it."
We pack the cabin out together. It takes two hours and it's oddly formal — the stove swept and the flue closed, the bunk stripped, the propane off, the shutters over the windows and screwed down, the folding table collapsed and hung on its nail.
He does it in an order he clearly does not deviate from.
I hand him things. He tells me where they go.
"Dry goods in the tin, not the cupboard. Mice."
"Mice."
"They've had twenty years to work out where the cupboard is." He wedges the tin under the bunk frame. "There's a fellow comes up in February to check the roof and I like him to find it the way I left it."
"You've never met him."
"I've met his handwriting."
That's the whole man in four words, and I have to go outside and pretend to be looking at the truck.
The map is the last thing. He rolls it and holds it out.
I put it in the truck so I don't have to have a face for a minute.
When I come back he's standing at the top of the steps looking at the clearing, which is what he does instead of a ceremony, and there's a thing coming and we both know it.
"Nadia."
"Yeah."
"I've been fine up here for twenty years." He says it flatly, the way he says all the things that have taken effort. "I want to be clear that that’s the truth. I liked it. I'd have kept liking it. I'm not going to stand here and tell you I've been suffering, because I haven't, and you'd know."
"I would know."
"But I don't want the handoff to be the end of this.
" He comes down one step. "You give the Ministry the data on Monday and your reason to be within four hundred kilometres of me is finished, and I've been carrying that around for three days like a stone in my boot.
So I'm saying it out loud instead. I'd like there to be a next thing. I'd like a lot of next things."
The wind comes across the clearing and moves the snow around on the steps.
"I've turned down two flight changes," I say.
He stops.
"WestJet has emailed me twice about a seat on the eighteenth and again on the twenty-fourth.
Ninety-four dollars, both times. I let them both expire.
" I put my hands in my pockets because otherwise they're going to do something undignified.
"I've had a bag in the back of that truck since the second week that I didn't need for a day trip.
I've been telling myself it was for weather. "
"It wasn't for weather."
"It was not for weather."
Creed comes down the last two steps and stands in front of me.
"I'm not asking you to move to a cabin," he says.
"I'd never ask that and you'd never do it and you'd be right not to.
But I've got a house in Kamloops that I use like a storage unit, and you've got a firm that lets you file from anywhere with a scanner, and the North Ridge decision is going to generate three years of monitoring work that somebody has to do the ground for. "
"Somebody."
"I'm available."
"Are you." I take a handful of his jacket. "What are your rates."
"Steep." He puts his hands on my waist. "I'll want it in writing."
"You'll want everything in writing, it's a pathology."
"It's a profession." His thumbs move once on either side of my spine.
"Nadia. I need to say the part underneath, because if I don't say it now I'll say it badly in November over a phone that keeps cutting out.
I'm not proposing a monitoring contract.
I'm using a monitoring contract as scaffolding, because I've been out of practice at this for so long that I need something to hold on to while I say it. "
"Say it, then."
"I want you where I am." He gets it out flat and level, the way he says the things that cost him.
"Not for the season. Not while the file's open.
I'm forty-one and I've been perfectly content and I'd have gone on being perfectly content for another twenty years, and then you came up that road, and now content is the worst word in the language. "
The wind takes the top off a drift by the steps and puts it in the air between us.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay."
"Yes. To all of it — the next thing and the things after.
" I get up on my toes and kiss him, and his hands come around my back and lift me clean off the snow, and I say the rest of it against his mouth because it's easier there.
"I'm not doing another five years of wondering.
I'd genuinely rather be hit by a truck."
"That's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."
"I'm a professional communicator."
He kisses me against the side of my own truck with the door still open and the cold coming down off the ridge, and it goes on long enough that my back ends up flat against the panel and his hand ends up inside my collar, and when he finally lifts his head we're both breathing like we've come up a grade.
He carries the last case down the steps and sets it in my back seat, and then opens my door for me, which he has never once done, and it undoes me more than the speech did.
We drive down the fire road in two trucks, mine first, his headlights in my mirror the whole fourteen kilometres. At the gate he gets out and swings it shut and locks it for the season, and the sound it makes is the season ending.
Then he gets back in and follows me into town.