by Zoje Stage
“What movie do you guys want to watch tonight?” Orla asked, hoping to break the weird tension.
“I’m probably going to skip the movie.” All eyes turned at Shaw’s uncharacteristic announcement. He must have seen the question on their faces. “I’ve got work to—”
“You love movies.”
Orla wanted to kiss her daughter for sounding so accusatory; those were exactly the words and tone Orla might have used, especially if she’d wanted to pick a fight.
“Yes, my little Bean, it’s undeniable. But I have an idea brewing, and it’s time for me to start sketching.”
“Did the trees tell you something?” Eleanor Queen asked, a hint of haunted awe in her voice.
Orla gave Shaw a withering glare. He knew better than to make light of it this time.
“No—nothing I could understand, anyway. I had to think up some stuff all on my own.”
“Oh.” She returned to piercing her noodles, disappointment evident in her heavily drooped head.
“Okay.” Orla stood, quickly gathered up plates. “This weirdness has to end. You”—to Shaw—“get to your studio and do your thing. We”—to the kids—“are going to pick out the best movie ever.”
Tycho skipped out of the room. Shaw and Orla exchanged glowers but waited until Eleanor Queen slipped away before speaking again.
“You are not helping,” Orla whispered as they rinsed off the plates.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Act like you care that this isn’t easy for the rest of us.”
“You mean for you.”
“Does Eleanor Queen seem especially happy?” she spat at him as softly as she could.
“It’s our first full day, it takes time—”
“And you didn’t have the best day either, hate to bring it up. So running off to your room to hide—”
“To hide? I came here to work!”
“What about the rest of us?”
He sidled up so close to her his spittle stung like venom against her cheek. “Don’t think I haven’t always known that you wanted me to do something, succeed at something. Well, I’m getting on track, my work is better than ever. I never got in your way—I supported your decisions, even when you changed your mind.”
She knew he was referring to her abrupt change of plans after Tycho was born. Shaw thought she’d given the ECCB her notice, but she hadn’t yet, in case…she still felt strong then; she wasn’t ready. They’d been arguing about it for days—Shaw insistent for the first time that it was his turn—when Orla had blurted out the unforgivable.
“Are you going to bring in a regular paycheck? While you pursue your dreams? Because that’s what I do—make a salary we can count on. It seems to me you have it easier if I keep working, because then we don’t need to rely on you for most of our money.”
She might as well have stabbed him in the gut with his abandoned knitting needles. She’d apologized immediately. But it didn’t matter how many times she said she didn’t mean it, because the truth of it, the tools of his “trade,” lay scattered around the perimeter of their apartment. Orla had insisted that she believed in his talent, though he hadn’t, at that time, found his calling. But Shaw came back with the most self-damning rebuke of all.
“I’d never have been able to stay in New York without you. And your co-op.”
It was a pitiful admission and she’d struggled to decide if it was brave of him to confess it or a sign of something more pathetic that might unravel their future. Things had been tense during the final few weeks of her maternity leave. But once she was out of the house again, back to the routine they’d made work for many years, everything settled down. They hadn’t had another serious argument since then. But neither had they ever experienced a scenario where they would both be home together indefinitely.
Their first full day in their new home had not gone well. And if this was how he was going to behave in the North Country, the move was going to be a mistake beyond what she’d imagined. They—she—had anticipated needing an adjustment period; they were well aware that everything about their lives in upstate New York would be different than it had been downstate. But what if they’d failed to factor in an inability to constantly be in each other’s company? And what if Shaw’s grumpiness—or even the fear he’d experienced on his misadventure—was a sign that he was having second thoughts? He wasn’t allowed to have second thoughts. Especially after one day. They had all uprooted their lives for him in support of a landscape he desired to put on canvas, in support of his one hundred and thirty square feet of personal space.
Orla considered blaming the house. Its previous owner had lived here for decades, and died here—perhaps in Shaw’s studio. They’d found an enameled chamber pot in the room’s closet when they cleaned it out; maybe in his final years, the old man had been too rickety to climb the stairs to the only bathroom. Was there a filament of him still here, slithering between them, making silent, grouchy demands?
More likely, it was the many rooms, the many doors. Were they growing apart already? Or did they need more rooms, more doors, to maintain the boundaries of their own identities? As much as she wanted to blame something, Orla recognized it was the people within the rooms that mattered, and how they handled their emotions.
As the movie faded to black, Eleanor Queen clapped at the triumphant conclusion and Tycho jumped up and down. Shaw popped his head out of his studio and asked if Orla needed help getting the kids ready for bed. She said no but went upstairs feeling buoyed by his offer. He had sounded more like himself; hopefully their day of minor struggles wouldn’t wreck their equilibrium for long. When she came back downstairs, Shaw was waiting at the bottom holding two glasses of American Honey. For the first time all evening she grinned, and accepted the whiskey.
“I’m sorry—” they both blurted.
She followed him to the couch and scrunched into her preferred corner. Shaw set the whiskey bottle on the floor between them and curled in beside her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t plan on the day being so stressful, and I’m not handling it well.”
“I’m sorry too.”
They clinked their glasses together, optimistic winners of a consolation prize.
“To trailblazers,” he said.
“I don’t know if I’m exactly blazing a trail; maybe singeing it a bit.”
He snorted. “Well, tomorrow’s another day. And I won’t be so…I’ll stick around, I promise.”
They sipped in silence for a moment, gathering their thoughts. It felt good to be beside him, just the two of them, no one else around; it had been a while.
“You found a good idea?” she asked. It was important to her that he knew of—that he felt—her faith in him. “I guess I shouldn’t have reacted that way—it’s been weeks since you could work.”
A dreamy look came to his face. “I can’t really explain it. The imagery I see…the certainty I feel. It’s even stronger now. Like the muse is saying, ‘This! Look at this!’” He shook his head in wonder. “I printed up a few of my photos just for shape, depth. And started sketching, painted the first background layer.”
“I’m glad, Shaw. I really am.” Their fingers met, entwined. “Can we talk now? About today? The kids were so scared.”
“I don’t really understand—what happened?”
“I don’t know. They were playing. I came in to do some work in the living room. Next thing I know, they’re screaming. There was a total whiteout—”
“Oh my God.”
“I couldn’t see a thing. I found them and started helping them inside and then…back to clear, sunny skies. Like nothing ever happened.”
“That’s really odd.” His face spoke more than his words, and she wondered if he was thinking of his own frightening experience.
“Tycho was more or less unfazed afterward. But Bean…I just…I so hoped this would be something she’s not afraid of, and I don’t want her to be afraid. Especially on the first d
ay.”
Frustrated, Shaw shook his head, reminding Orla of the rocking of an Etch A Sketch, erasing an image. “I know. I’m sorry. I should’ve stayed—I know…I kept thinking, when I was out there and couldn’t get back, that it was my punishment. I was thinking the whole time that I shouldn’t have left, you’re all new to this place, and it was my…I convinced myself—I was sure the forest was punishing me. For bad decisions.”
Orla didn’t like how he was anthropomorphizing the wilderness again. She didn’t think Mother Nature interacted with individuals any more than she believed Jesus did. And it reminded her too much of Eleanor Queen’s unsettling description—like a bad dream come to life, of something wanting to eat her.
She inched closer to him and squeezed his hand. “I still don’t understand why you couldn’t get back?”
Shaw downed the rest of his drink—fortifying himself?—before he continued. “I had the map. I had the compass. I know how dense the trees can be around here. Growing up, several times a year, we’d hear stories of tourists who wandered off the trails and the search and rescue teams were mobilized. It should have been easy, so easy, to see where I’d been—leaving tracks all over the place in the snow.
“I hadn’t even gone that far…fifty, sixty yards out to the big pine—we’ll have to take the kids to check that out, must be five feet across its base. I didn’t think eastern whites could even get that big. So, anyway, then I went just beyond it up to the northern edge of the property, and I hung a right, following the boundary markings on the map. It was beautiful, the trees powdered with snow, the blue of the sky. Everything pristine. Quiet, muffled, the way snow does.”
His head made a metronome of nos as he tried to puzzle it out. “I got the camera. Started taking pictures. Then I caught this…wood smell. Something burning. And I knew there shouldn’t be any homes out that way, but I started following this smoky smell. And I came to, like, this ruin. A chimney. An old stone—”
“Was there something burning there? When we first got here—”
“No, not at all. It was probably just carried in from another direction. So I took a few more pictures and then wanted to continue on, follow the perimeter of the property, come back home. But…I couldn’t see my footprints. They should have been everywhere, I was just traipsing around. I thought…maybe there was some wind, and it covered the tracks. But…I would have felt that much wind. It would have taken time to bury all those…”
An electrified needle pricked Orla’s scalp, raising the hairs across her skull. It sizzled down her arms and she hunched her shoulders up, her body contracting, reacting to the presence of wrongness.
“Something’s wrong out there.” She blurted the words out before she could even think. Instinct.
He shrugged. “I’m just…maybe I’m more out of practice than I thought.”
Orla suspected Shaw wanted to reassure her—that’s what one did in response to someone’s crazy supposition, especially since she sounded like a tepid, poorly written character in a horror movie. Perhaps she was overreacting to everything, out of her element and spooked by her own imagination.
“And it was so weird because I should have been able to use the big pine as a marker, the way you used to be able to use the Twin Towers to get oriented, north and south. But…I couldn’t see it…so I checked my compass, but it was frozen.”
“Was it working before you left?” An alcohol-inspired paranoia was setting in, or something even more ridiculous. Maybe there was a spaceship buried on the land, or some old meteor that messed with magnetics and weather, and…all she knew about surviving in the wilderness came from movies she’d seen with Shaw. And if those had been rather horrifying movies—or cheesy black-and-white science fiction flicks—that was Shaw’s fault for having such twisted cinematic tastes. And he wasn’t helping. Maybe he was embarrassed, afraid they were in over their heads. He’d never been the leader before, and now he couldn’t even navigate around his own yard.
“I didn’t check it before I left, I just assumed…”
“You have to be more careful.” She took a gulp of the sweet whiskey, hoping to swallow down the lumpy pill of her anger.
“I know, I’m just…it’s been a while.”
So maybe the compass had never worked. And maybe the wind really had covered Shaw’s footprints. And maybe they were both feeling the pressure because they didn’t have the internet, and everything familiar was far away, and everyone trusted that they knew what they were doing, and no one had said, Are you really sure about this? To the contrary, all their friends—even Orla’s parents—thought the move was enviable, an accomplishment. Slowing down. Simplifying. Everyone talked of how great it would be to see natural wonders right outside their window. Because Shaw was from there. He knew what he was doing.
“I panicked, I guess. Walking in circles like a stupid…maybe I was just afraid of myself, of what I’d done to our family. And what if the kids don’t like it, and what if you don’t like it. And there I was, like an asshole, walking in circles—”
“Stop, babe. Please don’t talk about yourself that way. You were scared, and just like I said to Eleanor Queen, you’re allowed to feel scared. It can’t be like when you were a kid—you’re not a kid, and we have responsibilities, but they’re our responsibilities. You’re not—”
She froze when Shaw lurched off the sofa. At first she thought he was upset about something or trying to avoid their conversation. But then it registered: the look on his face. Alert. Afraid. Searching. Had one of the children cried out in their sleep? But she didn’t hear anything—from upstairs, or anywhere else. Her arms goose-pimpled again. “What is it?”
By his posture, his focus, the cock of his head—just like Eleanor Queen—he was searching for a sound. A sound she still couldn’t hear.
“Shaw?”
He stepped toward the front door, then abruptly turned and strode a few paces toward the kitchen. Just as suddenly as it came on, his intense look dissipated and his shoulders relaxed. Rattled, he finger-combed his hair and dropped back onto the sofa.
“What was it?” Something crawled inside her skin.
“I don’t know. I thought I heard…I heard something. Never mind.” He sat forward, plucking up the American Honey bottle.
Orla thrust her glass next to his and he splashed the golden alcohol into both. Her heart drummed a warning as she gulped it down. But Shaw settled back in, ready to pick up where they’d left off. The lines around his eyes appeared more pronounced than they’d been only moments before. He needed a good night’s sleep.
“Why don’t we—” She wanted to lead him to bed, but he thrummed with an energy that defied how exhausted he looked. Fingers tap-tapping a message against his glass, reminding her of Morse code.
“I want you to know,” he said, “I did more in-depth research about this area, since we hadn’t been seriously thinking of this as our destination when we first visited St. Armand and North Elba and Harrietstown. And it’s not just for the tourists—there are lots of creative folks in the village year-round, and there’s at least one place, a community arts center, where I might be able to do some teaching. I e-mailed them a while back, just to know our options. I could teach drawing or painting or digital photography—or guitar. I’m not gonna let us run out of money.”
“I appreciate that, but that’s not what I want for you. I’ve seen the progress you’re making—in the past year, and even more in the past few months. I want you to have this time—this is your time. We have resources to live on—”
“But just in case. And our savings won’t last forever. So that’s a possibility. You might even be able to teach ballet there.”
Orla sat up a little straighter, as if the very thought of doing something dance-related required better posture. Her body felt lighter than it had in weeks. “I’d like that. That would be an awesome part-time gig.” She hadn’t considered teaching ballet a viable possibility, not in the wilderness. When she’d done her own sup
plemental research, she hadn’t been able to get past the emptiness, the limitations. Everything was farther away than she was used to, but that didn’t mean civilization didn’t exist—people, and the various gathering places that drew them. The future suddenly seemed less foreign, less abstract. Promising, even.
“If we can fortify what we have with part-time stuff, it’s still creative—”
“I want you to be able to do your own work,” she said. But it was reassuring.
“I will—I am. This new one…” He nearly vibrated with excitement. “I swear, I wasn’t trying to freak out the kids, but this place…between my dreams and what’s really here, what I see…come look!” He abruptly snatched her glass, put it with his on the floor, and grabbed her hand.
At last she could giggle as he led her into his studio. How many times had he asked her to listen to his new poem or song or look at the new thing he’d made? This was familiar. This was a piece of home that would never change.
He’d taped the photographs, printed on cheap copy paper, on the wall beside his easel. The canvas depicted a rough sketch of trees with broad strokes of sky peeking through.
“So I know you can’t really tell a lot yet, but the limbs—they’re going to be fused together, from one tree to another, like it’s one organism. And there are going to be these details in the bark, almost like human anatomy, giving a sense of a nervous system, musculature—but subtle, so you have to look close. And then belowground…this part is all my imagination, because obviously I can’t see it, but the roots are going to look like…I haven’t completely decided. Maybe human arms and hands—”
“Oh God, that’s creepy.”
“No no, I don’t mean for it to be creepy. I want to convey how there’s this…intelligence belowground. A community. Among the roots. And how other things interact with it. So I thought if I depicted the roots with human hands…you know, there might be a rabbits’ nest, and one of the rabbits is sleeping in the palm of a hand. Like that.”
