“It doesn’t get muddy. Works as a doormat.”
“Ah.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“I didn’t look at the private papers. I didn’t need to.”
Now he looked at me. “You know where she is?”
“Yes.” Her, or someone pretending to be her. “I’ll be ready to leave tomorrow. It might take a few days.” He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. It shook slightly. “I haven’t shown you what I’m doing with the cabin. Bring your beer. Then we’ll cook that steak.”
His smile told me he knew I was doing it to help him, but he followed me to the cabin anyway.
“It faces south and west, and the long side measures thirty-six feet. The logs are oak, hand hewn. They’re a hundred years old and there’s no reason for them not to last another century.” I laid my palm against the solid wood. It was still warm from the sun. New York. “This is a craftsman cabin, built for my great-grandfather by masters, not one of the more usual settler’s shacks made from whatever came to hand and which have long since rotted away, and good riddance.”
His smile was real this time. “You always have been a snob, Torvingen.”
“I like well-made things.” I squatted and patted the corner of the building. Ten million people. “See how the sill and first end log are quarter-notched? If you could rip up the floor you’d see that the sleepers it rests on are all lap-jointed and middle-notched, and then pegged.”
He nodded seriously. He hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. It was suddenly necessary that he understand.
“Everything here was done by hand. You couldn’t just drive to Home Depot and load up your truck a hundred years ago. They had to cut the tree—and remember they didn’t have chain saws. Then they had to hew the logs: make the round sides flat. Even the chalk they used in their chalk boxes was made from local stuff, like pokeberry juice and lime.”
“What’s a chalk box?”
“What you use to snap out a line, so you know you’re cutting straight. You make the line, then score the log every two or three inches with a poleaxe. Then you use a broadaxe to slice off the chips.”
“Which you could probably use as kindling, to start a fire.”
“What?” My throat felt very tight.
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m doing my best. I only know two things about wood: it grows on trees and you can burn it, and I only learned the second thing two days ago. But go on, I’m listening.”
“This door—”
“There isn’t a door.”
“—doorframe. It’s pine that I split out myself, and it’s pegged with yellow locust.”
“Locust? Strange name for—”
I talked right over him. “Do you know how rare yellow locust is now? Do you know how long it takes to cut it, season it, then slice it into bars, then whittle it? Then you have to auger out the frame holes and get the wood braced properly against the logs. It’s hard to do that on your own, to get it vertical, to get a ninety-degree plane this way, too, and then to hold it there while you hammer in the pegs when you only have two hands and I don’t know how I’m going to hang the door itself, to make it all fit seamlessly so no one can tell I was—You have to never give up, never stop, because then you have to see—”
“Aud …”
“You have to see she’s not there, that there’s this great hole inside instead, nothing there—”
“Aud.”
My fists were balled and the veins on my wrists and the back of my hands thick blue worms.
“Aud!”
I panted. My face felt cold.
“I’ll help you hang the door.”
“The door?”
“I’ll help you hang it.” He put down his beer. “Right now. Where is it?”
“Inside.”
“Then let’s get it.”
My body belonged to someone else. I led him inside, over the wide, heart-of-pine floors that would be refinished once the door and windows were in, past the hearth I had already rebuilt, right through the wall that would be—between the studs I would cover with pine board one day soon—to the oak door. I had to put my own beer down before I could pick up the far end. He picked up the near. We walked it outside and leaned it on its end to the right of the doorway. He followed me to the hogpen, silently accepted hammer and nails and spirit level while I lifted down the massive wrought-iron hinge pieces and candy-cane-shaped drop pintles, then followed me back.
I watched myself lift half the hinge and put it against the logs at shoulder height and measure with the eyes, move it up slightly, hold it with the left hand, and with the right lay the spirit level along its top. Hinge a little low on the left. Move it slightly. Nod at Dornan, at the hammer in his hand, swap left hand for right and step to one side to watch while he puts in the big nail, don’t flinch even slightly as he swings, don’t move as what should be three swift blows for each of the three nails becomes a dozen swings, fourteen, then a pause, and on to the other hinge, at knee level this time. Bang bang bang, bang bang bang, bang bang bang. See Dornan’s pleasure: he can do this. Nod. Lift other hinge pieces, position, drop in steel spindle, move assembled hinge back and forth, remove. Measure door. Nail on upper hinge. Pause. Let Dornan nail on second. Pointing. Lifting the door. Holding, maneuvering, dropping in spindles. Done.
And with a snap I smell my own sweat, feel utterly weary, realize Dornan is watching me carefully.
“We hung a door,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, for the second time that day. He waited. “Going off like that. You must have—It’s …” I had never bled on someone before. I didn’t know how to apologize for it.
He didn’t seem to know what to say, either. He pushed the door gently, watched me and the door both as it swung smoothly backwards. “It works.”
“It’s not quite finished.” All I wanted to do was walk into the woods and stop thinking, but if I left the job half done it would drive me mad. “The top of the pintle needs securing, nailing down.”
He bent and picked up his beer, deliberately casual. “You’d have to show me how.”
“No.”
“Many hands make light work.”
“No.”
“Why not?” he asked softly.
I didn’t know.
“You’re helping me with Tammy. I’d like to help you.”
The sun shone warmly, the birds sang, and my cabin was more whole than it had been. I began to pant again, felt my heart accelerating, and this time it wasn’t a smooth machine, a turbine beginning to whine as it reached redline, it was a panicking, soft muscle. Accepting help would be like levering open my rib cage with a crowbar and giving him a knife.
Dornan’s face was tired, but the harsh lines bracketing his mouth had gentled. I don’t know what my face must have looked like, but he nodded as though I’d said something. “I’m your friend. I have been for a long time, even if sometimes I wonder if you know what that means.”
I was the one who helped, the competent one, armored and invulnerable. Aud rhymes with proud.
“You saved my life once, and I know you’ll find Tammy for me, but I know that none of that really means anything to you. You’re helping me the way you’d help a hurt dog. Which doesn’t exactly make me feel good. I’m a person, not a dog. But you don’t know that because you won’t let anyone in. I’ve been banging on that particular door for eight years. Mostly it’s been a waste of time. Even just six months ago, if I’d said all this you would have smiled and ignored me because you’d have had no idea what I meant.”
But now I knew, because Julia had turned me inside out like a sock, and there was no going back.
“So, will you show me? About the hinges?”
Children in the schoolyard ask, Will you be my friend? and they mean it, but this was the adult version, loaded with traps and consequences.
“And then you can show me the other stuff. The cabin. All the things you’ve done on the inside.”
“You’re not real
ly interested.”
“I admit I don’t know a piece of pine from a piña colada, but I want to hear all about what you’ve done with the place, because it was you who did it.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re friends. That’s how it works.”
That’s how it works. He seemed so sure.
So I showed him how to take a picture nail, hammer it part of the way into the doorframe just below the handle of the pintle’s candy cane, then use the hammer to tap it into a U-shape arching up over the pintle and back into the frame so the pintle couldn’t fall out. He did the second. Two small picture nails. Two friends. We stood and looked at our handiwork for a while.
“Now we can look inside, and you can tell me every single thing there is to know about how to make a log cabin from scratch.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. Though if there’s a lot to say—and I can’t imagine it being otherwise—then perhaps we should wait until we’ve eaten. There’s steak. What would you like with it?”
“You’re the cook. I’ll sit out here and think.” Not think. “About finding Tammy.” About being in the world.
“And you’ll be wanting another beer brought out to you, I suppose?”
“I’ll be down there.” I pointed to a boulder fifteen yards down the heath bald.
He headed back to the trailer and I walked sideways down the slope. From the boulder, blackberries, azalea, and rhododendron stretched all the way down to maple and cherry and other successional trees. Julia appeared about ten feet away, her back towards me. She said nothing for a moment, and when she turned round she was frowning. “You’re blaming me for this?”
“You made me make that promise.”
“You could have said no.”
“Not to you.”
She laughed then, that rich, fuming laugh, like Armagnac, and knelt next to me. “It was your choice, Aud. You were ready. I just came along at the right time.”
“Beer,” Dornan said from behind me, and handed me a frosted bottle. “Does that miniature stove work the same way as a real one?”
I turned back to look at Julia, but she was gone.
“Aud? The stove?”
“Yes. It takes a bit longer, that’s all.”
“Dinner in half an hour, then.” He turned to head back up the slope.
“Dornan?”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing.”
He shrugged and climbed back up, those long wiry muscles working under his jeans. He rarely wore anything but jeans, even though he made a lot of money from Borealis, his string of cafés. The closet in his midtown home was full of good clothes; he had shown me them years ago, complaining that his girlfriends always bought him suits, as if he couldn’t afford them for himself, if he’d wanted. I knew what clothes he had, what films he enjoyed, what books he read; his favorite color, his hopes and fears and dreams. I knew that his front tooth was blue not as the result of a barroom brawl, as he liked to pretend, but because he had hit the metal bar with his mouth when trying to beat the Trinity College, Dublin, pole vault record. I knew that his first wife had died of leukemia six months after they had both graduated, before he and I had met.
In the time I’d known him I had driven him home when he was drunk, held his head while he puked, put him to bed. I listened on the nights his pre-Tammy girlfriends had left him. He had been to my house once, the night he drove me home from Borealis, the day he thought I’d been in a car accident, the day Julia died. I had not even let him through the door. And now he was here, and I had let him help.
The steak smelled good, rich and red and strong. Muscle. Cooked muscle. I flexed my left hand, the one holding the beer, and watched the muscles in my forearm swell, then relax. What had Dornan’s muscle felt like when he swang that hammer? Everyone’s muscle attaches differently, to a bone that’s thicker or thinner, under skin that is sensitive or not.
Everyone is different, I thought. Everyone is different. I stood. “Dornan, I’m hungry.”
“Then get up here and eat. It’s more or less done.”
We ate outside. The steak was so big there was barely room on the plate for the red potatoes tossed in butter and marjoram. We had to eat the corn first. It was succulent and buttery and very hot. Dornan admired the wood-and-steel prongs jammed into each end of his corn.
“Halfway up a bloody mountain, half mad, no food, but you remembered to bring these—What are they called, anyway?”
“No idea.” The corn was the best thing I’d tasted in months.
“Come to think of it, there are a hundred things I don’t know the name of, usually fiddly little things. These, for one. And those things they use to nail cable and wire to the baseboard in your house—you know, those double-spiked U-shaped thumbtack things—for another. And where do they all come from, who thinks them up?”
“Um,” I said, around my corn.
“Rubber bands. Toothpaste caps.” He touched the ruby stud in his left ear. “Those little metal things that go on the back of earrings. I’ve had this since I was twenty, never lost the stone, but I’ve probably sent the sons and daughters of the devil who makes earring backs to college.”
That was something Julia might have said. I felt my mouth twist. Dornan tilted his head and waited.
“Julia …” I tried to swallow past a closed throat.
He understood. He went back to eating his corn. After a moment he said, “I liked what I saw of her, that once, in the café.”
I set my corn aside. “Tell me what she looked like to you.” I was hungry for another viewpoint, to see Julia again for the first time.
“Tall, taller than she really was, anyway, because of the way she held herself, like a ballet dancer. When I saw her come in that night with you, I said to myself, Now there’s a handful, because I thought she’d be snooty, you see. It was the way she carried her head. But she wasn’t.” He picked up his steak plate and knife and fork. “Until Tammy came in. Though I don’t blame her for it—I expect she took her cue from you.” He looked up. “Your face is a study.”
I just stared.
“You think Tammy’s body blinds me to her faults?” He shrugged comfortably, then started cutting his steak. “Bit more well done than I like. No, I think I see her very clearly. You, now, you were the one who was blinded. You couldn’t see her good points for her bad. Ah, now your face is closing up. I haven’t seen that face for a while. No doubt you’re thinking, He doesn’t know the half of it and I’m not going to ruin his image of his fiancée by telling him. Tell me, did she try to seduce you? Yes, I thought so. She tried it with all my other friends who didn’t like her.”
“I—”
“Oh, I know, you turned her down.” He speared a piece of steak, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “So, you turned her down, not your type, but the point is, Torvingen, the point is, she is my type. She might use sex like subway tokens but I trust her in my own way.” He forked up more steak. “Eat, eat, while it’s still hot.”
I did. My teeth sank into the juicy muscle. Everyone is different. “Different people want different things.”
“Yes. And Tammy was the one for me.”
“I’ll find her.”
“No doubt.” He looked at his steak sadly. I reached out and touched his arm.
“I’ll find her,” I said again. We ate for a while without saying anything. I drank my beer.
“She pretends she’s tough,” he said, “but she’s not. She’s smart, and pretty as a picture, and she knows her way around the world, but sometimes I’d look at her and just want to hold her, protect her from everything. She wouldn’t let me.”
“No,” I said. I hadn’t been able to protect Julia. I hadn’t been able to protect myself from her. Dornan got up, disappeared into the trailer, came back with a box of tissues.
“Every luxury,” he said with a crooked grin that showed the blue tooth. “Even halfway up a mountain.”
I wiped my face. The tears
kept welling, I kept wiping. “I can’t bear it.”
“You will, eventually.”
“Tell me about it, Dornan, about grief.”
“It never goes away. After a while, though, after a long, long while, life starts to sand it down and take the sharp edges off. Over the years it gets smaller, until you don’t notice it so much. Sometimes some jagged bit will catch you off guard, but that happens less and less.”
I thought of Julia weeping on the boat in Norway, so many years after her brother died. “I don’t think I can live for years feeling like this.”
“You don’t have much of a choice.”
“There are always choices.”
“Oh, you won’t kill yourself, you’re too self-centered, and you’re too stubborn to go mad. So that means you’ll have to cope.”
Cope. A small word for a terrible task.
“Building this house is one way of doing it, of course.” He put his plate down and twisted to look past me at the cabin. “It looks almost finished.”
“The outside, maybe. The inside needs a lot of work. That interior wall needs finishing, some of the floor pulling and relaying. The handrails up to the loft have to come out. I have some lovely walnut I want to put up there, really fine grain. I also want to turn the board gable into one of half logs, so it matches everything else.”
He stood, dusted off his jeans. “Show me.”
I did. I showed him each joint, discussed every decision on materials and design, and explained how I’d cut the walnut for the railings myself, from the sixty acres of mature black walnut plantation that was part of the reason my great-grandfather had bought this land in the first place. As the evening wound on, I took the flashlight down from the nail near the door and kept talking. He listened patiently for hours, as friends do.
Outside, it was almost dark.
“Espresso, I think,” Dornan said, and went into the trailer. I sat on the log, stoked the fire back to life.
He brought two cups and a carafe outside, sat next to me on the log, and poured for us both. We stared at the fire. Far away, wild turkeys gobbled.
“I’ve told you what happened my first night in this country,” I said.
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