The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  “If it’s loaded, silly!” she explained, clapping him on both shoulders. “We can’t have a loaded gun just floating around the cabin while we’re here—especially once we get our drank on. I, for one, am yet unconvinced you’re not trying to make a skin suit out of us.”

  “Ha-ha-ha. Yeah, I’m not going anywhere near that,” Ben said. “I don’t know the first thing about guns. You check if you’re so damn antsy about it.”

  “Oh, don’t look at me,” Riley protested. “I’ll put a hole in the ceiling for sure.” She looked at Alice, but the redhead only threaded her fingers together and edged away.

  “Well, we should move it, at least,” Ben suggested. He took his glasses off and began to clean them. “Maybe put it outside…?”

  “There’s no way the thing’s loaded,” Alice repeated.

  “I’m so not touching it,” Riley added.

  Kait looked from face to face, her brow furrowed, toying with the idea—it had been a few years since she’d handled a gun, but her hands still remembered, could feel the quick movements of her wrists and fingers, feel the well-oiled wood and iron responding to her touch. But those hands did not feel like her hands now, nor were those memories her memories. What would it mean to call upon them now? Could she wield them like a tool—or would trespassing that life feel like just that, a trespass?

  Or like walking across a grave?

  “Have we got a towel we could wrap it up in?” Ben mused. “That way nobody’d have to touch it, and we could move it without—”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Kait said at last. And before she could talk herself out of it, she strode to the doorway, stood on tiptoe, and slung the big rifle down from the rack.

  A collective gasp of horror rose up, Ben in particular giving a very satisfying and unmanly yelp, but Kait ignored them. The gun was heavier and slipperier than she’d figured, and it nearly slid out of her hands as she juggled its weight, but once she got a handle on it she turned the weapon over in her hands, staring down the length of the barrel and inspecting it from all angles. “Winchester Model 94,” she murmured, the corners of her mouth twitching. “Lever action. And that’s eighteen ninety-four—they don’t manufacture these anymore.” She shouldered the gun and looked down the iron-sights, testing the balance of the weapon, keeping her trigger finger well above the guard.

  “Betcha it shoots, though.”

  “Maybe we should think about putting that back?” Ben began, but Kait swung around, careful to keep the barrel of the rifle pointed towards the floor. The other three in the room jumped back a step, Alice letting out a bleat. Kait’s heart was pounding, but something propelled her forward with irresistible strength, her hands moving quickly and surely across the gun’s oil-slick mechanisms.

  “You wanted to know if it was loaded, didn’t you?” Kait hooked two fingers through the lever and pulled; the ejection port slid open, and, sure enough, a fat gray bullet slid into view. I’ll make it about you. “Well, shit, look at that. It is.” I’ll turn it right around on you.

  She dumped the bullet and pulled the lever three more times. Chu-kunk, chu-kunk-chu-kunk. Three more bullets tumbled out, hitting the floor around her feet with sharp thuds against the rug. Tell me we’re not going to have any other problems, Kait.

  The fourth click came up empty, so Kait slammed the chamber closed with a satisfying chunk. “And now it’s not.” The bedroom’s all yours, my dude.

  “Kaity—”

  “And don’t we all feel so much safer?”

  Come on, Heart-Brecker—don’t be like that.

  She cradled the rifle and took three steps forwards towards Ben, kicking aside the little pile of bullets before thrusting the gun into his arms. Ben jumped and tried to push the weapon back, but Kait kept him and the gun at arms’ length, though it took all her strength to keep her arms locked. Ben stared. They all stared, but Ben stared hardest of all, and this time he did not look away.

  Tell me we’re going to have smooth sailing here on out.

  “Here’s your smooth sailing, Captain,” Kait said. Then she stooped down, snatched her pillow off the floor, and retreated to the darkness of her bedroom.

  Chapter 4

  Boyfriend

  “What did you say to her?”

  Steam rose in Ben’s face, fogging up the lenses of his glasses as he stirred the rotini pasta around in the boiling pot. Alice leaned against him heavily from behind, knotting her hands across his stomach and propping her chin on his shoulder affectionately. Her cloud of auburn hair tickled at his ears, making him flinch away at first, but he corrected himself and leaned into the hug, nuzzling at her with his cheek.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “When we were walking into the cabin,” came the soft reply. “I saw you two talking in the doorway there. What did you say to her?”

  “Oh, that.” Ben stopped stirring, then began again, counterclockwise. “It was nothing. It was quick, at any rate. Just, ah, exchanging gossip?”

  Alice broke the embrace, coming around to lean on the kitchenette counter next to him. The condensation on his glasses rendered her form totally inscrutable: a vague cloudlike shape reclining against the marble countertop beside him, but her red hair bobbed atop her head in a manner that struck Ben as disapproving. “Well, whatever you said’s got her cheesed off.”

  Ben sighed. “I’d rather not talk about it.” A pause—he glanced sidelong at the Alice-shape to his right. “She’s difficult to talk to,” he said at last.

  “She’s really not, I promise.”

  “Well, she’s difficult for me to talk to.”

  “Why, Ben?” A hand emerged from the blurry form, gently slid his glasses off his face one ear at a time; Alice scrubbed the fog off with her sleeve and returned them, equally gently, to their perch. “Look, she’s really nice—honestly. You just don’t know her like I do.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Ben replied. He could see her clearly now, but though her form was crisp the precise expression on her face still eluded him somehow. Her features were smoothed, but there was something in her eyes he couldn’t place. Sadness? Anger? Confusion? He wanted to reach for her hand, but instead he just stirred harder, sloshing the boiling water around in the pot. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t know her like you know her.”

  “So talk to her.”

  “I only know her like I know her.”

  “I mean it!”

  “Jesus, Alice…”

  “I want the two of you to be friends.”

  Boiling water splashed over the lip of the pot and sizzled on the red-hot burner. “Then what should we talk about?” Ben asked. “About Lutz? Probably not. Classic rock, then? Or, or slouching? What about being a total—”

  “Ben.” A warning. He ignored it.

  “She pisses me off so damn much, Alice. All she’s done is sulk and snipe at me from the back seat and bitch about my driving.”

  “She hasn’t—”

  “I know she was thinking it.” Another slosh of hot water, another vicious sizzle. “She hates me. When I backed off that curb a little funny in Mette? She smirked, Alice. I saw her in the rearview. I won’t be smirked at.”

  “She doesn’t hate you. She just—”

  “Just what?”

  He watched her consider the question, rolling words around in her head with her tongue in her cheek. “She just needs some time to get right again, is all,” she replied at last with a drop of her shoulders. “She’s had a bad couple of—well, you’ve heard the story. But she’ll get there, I know she will. I just want the old Kaity back.”

  “I know that,” Ben said. He loved Alice Gorchuck. He knew it was too soon to say that kind of thing aloud, but shit, there it was. He loved her, and the knowledge that he loved her stuck pins in him every once in a while, whenever he thought about her or when she looked at him in a certain way. That was the genius of love, wasn’t it? It hated to be ignored. It couldn’t stand silent acknowledgement—it demanded notic
e, like a cat pawing at your laptop keyboard or kicking breakable things off the desk or a high mantelpiece.

  And Ben had only ever been in love once before, a silly quick thing late in high school, when he was eighteen and she a little younger than that. They’d loved each other with that hot-burning, jealous kind of love you only know how to produce when you’re young and stupid, but eventually the affair broke apart under its own weight and she cut off all her hair and moved up to Massachusetts, and Ben never saw her again. He’d liked it, though, while it lasted—feeling silly like that. Like a hard pasta noodle sliding down into boiling water and softening up, expanding, curling cozily into the bottom of the pot. That’s how Alice made him feel—but damned if he could say it, especially in front of this Kait girl.

  Ben twisted the heat dial, bringing the pot down from a rolling boil. “But why has it got to be my time? Our time,” he corrected hastily. “Did I ever tell you about the time my father brought my mother to this cabin? This was way back, you know, before they—”

  “You told me that story,” Alice replied, grinning at him. “You—here, let me stir that a while. You know where the sauce is in the big cooler.” She took the spoon from his hand and nudged him out of the way of the stove with her hip. “Do you think we’ve got enough water in here? Look, the noodles are making an island.”

  “Well, it’s a good story,” Ben said.

  “I know.”

  “I like that story.”

  “I like it too!” Alice replied. “But we’re not your mother and father, are we?”

  Ben watched the pasta swirl. “You’re right.”

  Because my father would never have brought along Kait Brecker.

  With a low chuffing sound like a jungle cat, Kait stalked out of the bedroom and flopped backwards over the top of the couch, righting herself clumsily next to Riley, who slid over to give her room to sit. Alice watched her pass by, and Ben watched her watch. Color rose in her cheeks, which rankled—but why? He couldn’t get it straight in his head. Again he wanted to reach for Alice’s hand, to feel the cool assurance of her touch, to know that she was there and, by the simplest leap in logic, that he was there as well. He craved that anchor—but Alice was stirring the boiling pot with one hand and waving hot steam from her eyes with the other, so Ben looked out across the living room at the open doorway that led into Kait’s bedroom. He stared a moment, then two, blinking.

  “Alice?” he said at last.

  “Hrm?”

  “What happened to the hunting rifle?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked without looking up from the pot.

  “I mean,” Ben replied, grinding his teeth a little, “that stupid gun’s not on the rack anymore. Kait unloaded it, I put it back over the door—remember? But now it’s gone.”

  “Well, I didn’t do anything with it…” Alice frowned, then she turned the burner under the pasta down to low and stepped out into the living room, “Jeez, you’re right—hey, Kaity?”

  “I took care of it,” came the sullen reply from the couch.

  A muscle in Ben’s leg twitched. “Now, hold…” Alice caught his eye and held it. “What do you mean, you took care of it?” he began again, almost lilting.

  Kait’s face appeared over the couch-back. “I mean,” she replied, “I took care of it. Stowed it back in the bedroom so we wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. The bullets, too—they’re in a baggie in a dresser drawer. S’that okay?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine, I guess…” But Kait had already flopped down behind the couch and turned her music back up. Ben could hear tinny little guitars from across the room.

  “See, Kaity took care of it,” Alice said, trotting back to the kitchenette. She fished an oven mitt shaped like a beluga whale’s head from a low drawer and took the pasta pot off the stove, ferrying it gingerly over to the sink to drain.

  “That’s right,” Ben said through his teeth. “Kaity took care of it.”

  “Ben? The sauce?” Alice asked from the sink.

  “Soup’s on!” Riley sang out.

  Riley appeared at the threshold of the kitchenette with Kait close behind, and soon the space filled up with before-meal chatter. How many cups? Where are the clean plates? Not the breakable ones, the plastic’ll do fine… Then they were all around the little dining table just off the main living space of the cabin, tucking their knees and trying to avoid kicking each other in the shins. Ben ate ravenously. Driving always famished him—and though the tomato sauce was out of a jar and the Italian bread was all but stale, the meal was quite delicious, especially on such an empty stomach.

  But when his plate was clean, he realized the mistake he’d made. The others were eating instead of talking, leaving him little to do but stare across the table at Kait. Kait eating, chewing noisily, slurping Coke and occasionally peeking up at him through the curtain of her bangs. Her headphones were slung around her neck, and though the sound was turned down he could still hear what sounded like Danzig blasting from them. He pulled his gaze away and found a window to stare out, but only the dark wall of the night greeted his wandering eye, so reluctantly he returned his attention to the table.

  Riley, seated to his left, let out a rattling belch. “Whoof! Good eats, Benjamin,” she said, punching him playfully in the arm while the others applauded, even Kait. She shoveled in another bite of his pasta, laughing around the fork at a private joke.

  Ben sighed and stared into the leftover red sauce on his plate. Where had things gone wrong? He thought back to January, tried to picture the exact placement of the pieces on the board. There—the scene was coming together. He and Alice were sprawled out on the beat-to-shit hand-me-down sofa in her apartment, their limbs tangled together in comfortable knots. A pretty picture, the two of them, snuggled under a striped throw-blanket with the TV blazing—playing some old sitcom his parents used to love. Getting cozy and horny all at the same time, kissing and laughing, kissing and laughing again…and when a knock at the door startled them out of lip-lock, it was Alice who wanted to ignore it. It’s so late, it’s so cold, they’ll give up eventually, come back to me, Ben, keep me warm…

  But, no, Ben had shrugged off the blanket and tried to stand, prying loose from her protesting arms: we’d better see who it is, it could be important, plus they’re not going to quit knocking, listen to them go at it…! And so finally Alice had laughed and pulled him down to the couch, then rose herself and padded over to the door. A slow creak—the knocking stopped. The sound of muffled sobs cut through a gap in the laugh track. Ben half-rose, looking to the doorway. Then:

  “Kaity?”

  Ben had it figured down to the second: it had taken no more than twenty-seven seconds, not even a full minute, for the wheels to come off his precious little life. Alice reappeared at the entrance to the den, leading by the hand a trembling, red-eyed twig of a girl with brown hair and fat, poofy bangs and thick black eyeliner running in two parallel lines down her tear-streaked face. She didn’t look at him, only waved blindly in his general direction as Alice steered her into the room, but instantly the whole atmosphere seemed to change—like in the theater when the stage crew swaps out the yellow filters for blue and the orchestra switches to minor key.

  Ben shoved over on the couch, and the quivering girl circled around and plopped down heavily next to him, more heavily than her slender frame should have permitted. The sounds she was making were awful: the body-wracking sobs he’d heard from the hallway had bubbled away to little hacking baby-bird cries, and the lines of her makeup joined her eyes and the corners of her mouth like a kabuki mask. Pity stirred in his heart—and yet, he could not help imagining her face splitting open along those black lines, just unfurling like a big sad flower before wilting, drying up, crumbling away. The television flickered in the background, gone to commercial, now mercifully on Mute.

  Then Alice said something like, “Could you give us just a few minutes, Ben,” and he’d gotten up silently, numbly, barely thinking as he re-tucked his sh
irt and bobbed off to Alice’s bedroom. He could hear them talking down the hall—Alice’s voice soft and soothing, the new girl’s low and scraping and full of anguish—but it wasn’t until he closed the door and flopped down across Alice’s big double bed that the sobs started in again, louder than ever. And that’s when it occurred to him: his high school girlfriend had begun dating another girl a few days after she arrived in Massachusetts, a childhood friend who’d moved up there only two years before.

  This was how Ben Alden met Kait Brecker.

  He got the story out of Alice later, little by little, but the more she told him, the less sense the whole strange situation seemed to make in his mind. He’d seen Kait around campus a few times but didn’t know her by name until that night, but Lutz he knew—from an Honors course his freshman year and a couple of debate club meetings the year after that. And he’d liked Lutz, he remembered, even if they’d only ever spoken a scant handful of times. It wasn’t hard to read the guy: noisy, goofy, probably bullied a lot through junior high (for being called Lutz Visgara, of all the fool names), learned he was funny once he got to high school—voices, impressions, the whole class-clown spectrum. Loud and inappropriate at times, sure, but good-humored about it, even gracious when he wanted to be. He reminded Ben of a Looney Tunes character—an animated llama, perhaps, or a lop-eared lamb. Something gangly and wobbly and slender and wholly harmless.

  So to hear Kait’s story now, filtered through Alice’s own star-blind fury…well, it almost bordered on madness. He couldn’t dismiss the idea—and yet, he could not bring himself around to full-throated support either. He could no more believe Lutz capable of such behavior than he could accuse his own father or the family dog. And it was like his father had said: Benji-Boy, the truth is always floating out in the middle of things—which means that both sides are always lying, at least a little. That’s a lawyer’s whole job. To catch the other side in their lie and make them pay for it. And never stop making them pay.

  But here was a new scenario—one that Ben could not simply lay by and observe. There were new pieces moving on the board in patterns he couldn’t fathom. Ever since that cold January night, Ben could not remember a day when he hadn’t been put in a room with Kait Brecker somehow. She seemed to cling to the undersides of his days: there she would be, walking armand-arm with Alice to a class, or here, sliding in beside him and Alice for lunch at The Barn, or here again, sprawled out on the couch watching BBC documentaries when he came over to Alice’s apartment for a late dinner and a cuddle. Ben and Alice became Ben and Alice and Kait, and there seemed to be nothing Ben could do to shake her. So the cabin trip couldn’t come soon enough. They’d been planning it a month, and Ben clung to some fool hope that when he and Alice got back from Simmes Creek, Kait would have her shit sorted somehow, or at least she’d have found some other friendly harbor to dock her ship at—