When Their Husbands Failed Them

Chapter 1

Piper missed the exit at Government Camp.

She saw the sign. She read all of it, the white letters and the arrow and the number, and she watched it slide past her window and understood about a half mile later what it had been.

She pulled onto the shoulder. The truck ticked. Below her the trees went down and down into a gray that had been blue that morning, and she sat with her hands on the wheel and waited to feel like a person who had missed an exit.

It took a while. That was the new part. Two months ago she would have sworn at herself, turned around, been annoyed for a mile and then forgotten it.

Now there was a gap between the thing happening and her arriving at it, and she spent the gap in a kind of soft nowhere, like a room with the lights off.

She turned around.

It cost her twenty minutes. That was fine. Nobody was waiting.

* * *

The truck was loaded with what a lodge needs after a year shut: bleach, mousetraps, a box of new candles, four cords of dry wood she’d bought off a man outside Sandy and a case of the pinot Grant liked.

She had loaded it herself that morning and it had taken two hours. It should have taken forty minutes.

She’d sat down on the tailgate halfway through. Just for a second, she’d told herself, and then she had woken up with her chin on her chest and the sun moved and a gray cat watching her from the neighbor’s fence.

That was Tuesday. This was Thursday. She was mostly sure of that.

Grant had booked the week in August, which was the kind of thing he did well.

He was good at the gesture. Seven days, no phones, nothing but us — he’d said it with his hand flat on the kitchen island like he was laying down a card, and she’d felt the old thing move in her chest, the one that had been there at twenty-seven when he was just a big loud man who wanted her attention.

I’ll come up Friday, he’d said. You go ahead and open it. You’re the only one who knows how.

That was true. Cold Hollow had been in his family for four generations and not one of them had ever learned to bleed a line.

* * *

She stopped again at the ranger station, which was closed, and sat in the lot for a length of time she didn’t measure.

She wasn’t tired. That was the confusing part.

She’d slept nine hours the night before and she wasn’t tired, she was far away, and there was no word for it that didn’t make her sound crazy when she tried it out loud.

She’d tried it out loud twice. Once to Shannon, who had gone very still and then very angry in a way that hadn’t helped.

Once to Vanessa, who had written something down and said that’s the anxiety, Piper, that’s exactly the anxiety, in her warm voice, and put a hand on Piper’s arm.

It helped, being told. It always helped for about four days.

She got out of the truck. The air up here was already cold enough to feel like a hand on her face and she stood in it and breathed until the nowhere backed off a little, and then she got in and drove the last hour.

* * *

The forest road turned to gravel and then to the two ruts that ran down to the lodge, and Cold Hollow came up out of the dark the way it always did — all at once, low and long, the big shake roof gone green with moss on the north side.

It was the first building she had ever been in love with.

She’d seen it eleven years ago, nine weeks into knowing Grant, and she had walked the whole main room with her head back looking at the frame while he talked about his grandfather.

Douglas fir. Eighteen-by-eighteens through the middle, hand-hewn, and the joinery at the collar ties done by somebody who knew exactly what he was doing and had done it in about 1911.

She had put her hand flat on a post and felt the adze marks and gone quiet, and Grant had stopped talking and looked at her.

You like it, he’d said, sounding surprised.

It’s better than you, she’d said.

That was the first time she made him laugh.

* * *

The key was under the same rock. She got the door open, got a flashlight out of the truck, and stood in the main room in the beam of it with the cold coming up out of the floor.

Then she went to work, and that was when she understood how bad it had gotten.

The power came on. The water didn’t. The pump needed priming, which meant the crawlspace, which meant lying on her stomach on packed dirt with a wrench, and she had done that particular job maybe thirty times in her life and it took her an hour and ten minutes.

Her hands wouldn’t hold. She would get the wrench on the fitting and her fingers would open, not because she decided to open them but because they were done, and the wrench would come off and she would lie there in the dark under her own house and wait for her hands to come back.

She got it. The water ran brown and then clear.

She came out filthy and shaking and sat on the step in the cold with her arms around her knees, and she thought, with a terrible, drifting calm: I’m sick. I am actually sick. There’s something wrong with me and nobody has found it.

And under that, further down, quieter:

They keep finding it. They keep finding it and it keeps being nothing.

Seven weeks. The last week of July she had started sleeping badly, which was the first thing, and Grant had been the one to say she should see somebody about it, and Vanessa had written her something for the sleep.

Then the sleep got easier and the days got strange, and Vanessa had written her something for that, and then something for what the second one did.

Three steps. Seven weeks. Every one of them a kindness, done in a warm room by a woman who touched her arm.

She stopped being able to work at height in the second week of September. She had told the Crockett job she was taking two weeks and then she had told them she was sorry, and they had been decent about it, and then a man she had known for nine years stopped returning her calls.

Two clients gone. Her name was small. It didn’t take much.

* * *

Her phone had one bar on the step and none inside, which was how it had always been here. That was the whole point of the place, according to Grant, who said it at every dinner party like he’d thought of it.

It buzzed at eight forty.

Storm coming in over the pass, they’re saying. I’ll come up in the morning. Get some sleep. You need it more than I do — V says the first few nights are the hardest part.

She read it twice, which took a while.

V says.

Grant said that about six times a day now and had for a couple of months, and it had stopped being a thing Piper noticed, the way a clock stops being a thing you hear.

V says we should give it another four weeks.

V says not to push you. V says the anxiety is the whole engine of it, Pipes, and once we get on top of that the rest follows.

She typed ok and then sat looking at it. She deleted it and typed the water’s on and sent that instead, and it failed, and she didn’t have it in her to walk down the drive to where the bar came back.

She took the pills at nine, sitting on the edge of the bed in a cold room, because she had taken them at nine every night for seven weeks.

That was the only night in the whole seven weeks she took them alone.

At home Grant set them out on the nightstand.

Two out of the amber one, one out of the white, and the glass of water, and he brought it in before he brushed his teeth, every night, so it would be there when she came up. He had never once forgotten.

She remembered thinking, that first week, that a decade in he had found a new way to be kind to her.

* * *

Friday he didn’t come.

The storm sat down over the pass and stayed, and Grant’s text arrived at ten in the morning when she walked to the top of the drive: Road’s closed at the summit. I’ll try tomorrow. Don’t do anything stupid up there. And then, four minutes later: Miss you.

She stood in the wet with her boots going dark and she believed him and it still landed wrong, somewhere below where she could reach.

The road at the summit had not been closed when she drove up it. She knew that. She had driven up it.

But she had also missed an exit she was looking at, and lost an afternoon on a tailgate, and this was the trouble with the last seven weeks: she could no longer be a witness to her own life.

Any argument she made against anyone had one answer, and the answer was you’re not well right now, honey, and the worst part was that it was true.

So she went back down the drive and made coffee and did not think about it.

* * *

She worked Saturday. Not much. She wanted to clean the flue and get a fire in, because the place smelled like a closed cupboard and because the first thing Grant would say when he walked in was God, it’s freezing.

She got the ladder up to the porch roof, put one boot on the second rung, and stopped.

Then she took the boot off the rung and put the ladder down flat and lay down on the porch boards next to it, because her heart was going like she’d run somewhere and she couldn’t remember standing up.

She lay there for a while. Rain on the roof. Douglas fir going up into the dark of the porch ceiling. She knew that timber. She could have told anybody the age of it.

I cannot climb a ladder, she thought. I have climbed a ladder every working day since I was nineteen and I cannot climb a ladder.

She started crying and stopped almost at once, because it was too much work.

* * *

Sunday afternoon she went down.

She was crossing the main room with an armload of kindling. She got about four steps past the hearth.

There was no warning that she could find afterward. No gray edges, no ringing. There was the room, and then there was a sound she thought at first was outside the building — a low flat crack, wood on wood — and then there was nothing at all.

* * *

She came up out of it in the dark.