“It might not take very long.”
“I’ll walk with you.”
“You can barely walk at all.”
“Who can walk, over their head in snow?”
“So now you’re with me.”
“I was always with you. Eric.”
“You little fucking bitch.” Kidding.
She liked that, tit for tat, smiled inwardly.
And they stood twenty minutes side by side at the newly cleared window, Danielle’s hand sneaking into his back pocket, a companionable fist, nothing grabby. The view was a revelation—just snow as far as you could see, all the trees across the river bowed deeply under it, so many knocked all the way down that it didn’t even look like a forest anymore, more like a glade, all the underbrush buried, all the rocks, all the variegated terrain smoothed into a single, featureless plane, even the biggest trees adroop.
Thirty-Two
SHE MADE A breakfast of Pop-Tarts griddled on the stovetop as if they were pancakes, not terrible. And the oranges—she peeled three, broke them into sections, handed them to him singly, one for her, one for him, fair being fair: beautiful, juicy, sweet, cold, acid, perfect oranges. Implicit in each small grunt of pleasure was the thought that they needed to make their stock of food last longer than might really be possible. Implicit was the idea of leaving, too: the cabin was still making noises, shuddering on its piers, sudden small jerks that shook the furniture. Meanwhile, perfect gentleman, Eric climbed the ladder to the loft and retrieved their slops bucket—she’d made further use of it, a mess, so he threw her soiled old T-shirt over it, gingerly brought it down and then out through the hatch door he’d made in the shed and back to the lady’s room he’d made, where he dumped it and swirled snow in it, buried the contents pristine, not a word between them about it after.
Then what? They pulled their two chairs up to the big window and simply watched the scenery—snow blowing in vortices, the river surging past with its load of snow and broken branches and once (like a plot development in a sluggish drama) a piece of someone’s dock or maybe even part of a cabin, hard to tell, numerous boards and beams coming to a corner, anyway, the whole structure thumping along in the current. The thermometer in the shed said zero degrees, which if things stayed clear would mean a much colder night—twenty below, the weatherman had said, a dangerous aftermath to a dangerous storm, no doubt worse suffering than theirs at hand, and a fourth system on the way.
Eric felt already the sorrow he was bound to feel when this was all over in a day or two: Jim was coming back. No way around it. There weren’t going to be any dates, no romantic dinners, no hikes along the beach, no days-long lovemaking, not for Eric and Danielle, and not for Eric and Alison, either. He had a faint glimmer of excitement, the idea that he might find himself single, dating, meeting a woman as yet unknown. But that familiar feeling never lasted and didn’t last now, folded quickly back into sorrow. The river was thickening, snow blobs joining into one mass, probably backing up behind the Route 138 bridge a mile downstream. Soon, in a day or two, the whole conglomeration would freeze solid. One way or another, they had to get out. Danielle’s kisses were firmer and faster and hungrier than Alison’s, even just the small sample they’d allowed themselves serving as confirmation of something. Firmer and faster and more insecure: because who knew when you would get your next?
She kept looking at him, clearly expected a plan.
Eric said, “Thinking.”
She merely stared.
He said, “You think, too.”
“It hurts right now. Each thought, mister, it’s like a needle in the brain. Whatever ghosts have for brains.” She put a friendly hand on his neck, squeezed a little, kept squeezing.
At length he got his thoughts arranged, more like pitchforks than needles, cascades of hay, practical at least. He said, “We need to melt snow. Ten to one, snow to water. And work out some kind of canteen. Because if we walk out it’s going to take a long, long time.”
“How long is long?”
“All day, I think. All the available light. We’ll have to leave at dawn.”
“Oh, good.” Another night, she meant, another night was good, more time to get ready, no need to motivate immediately, safety in waiting. “Awesome.”
“Awesome,” he repeated.
They watched the river.
At length, Danielle drew her hand from his neck, gave his shoulder a squeeze, patted the arm of her chair.
“How old are you really?” he said.
“How old did I say?”
“You didn’t say.”
“Well, you start,” she said.
“I am thirty-four.”
“Okay. I taught up in Presque Isle seven years, not one. And I was married five years, not just since September. I don’t know why I changed it. I thought you’d think I was stupid. I’m twenty-nine in a few weeks. Which means I’m only twenty-eight, though, when you think about it.” She put her hand back on his neck, a different kind of squeeze: emphatic. The river chugged past, seemed slower, higher, thicker, whiter.
Eric said, “And your name is Inness O’Keefe.”
Danielle flushed to the roots of her hair, withdrew her hand once more, coughed, grinned defensively, then scowled, her face darkening, the fury visibly rising: “You were stalking.”
“It’s on your envelope,” he said.
“You were on recon,” she said. But she hated her own analogy, you could see that, anything military, hated it, and anything secret at all, and anybody’s secrets, including her own. “Piece of shit,” she said firmly. “I take it all back.”
“Take what back?”
“All of it. Everything. Eric. You are dirt, you are crumbs, you are ashes in the fucking stove, and piss and shit in the bucket, and broken houses, and snot, and germs, and tears.” And with that, she pushed back in her chair, hopped painfully to the ladder, climbed painfully to the loft.
He could hear her crying up there, then snoring.
Thirty-Three
AFTER A LUNCH of spaghetti with butter and small bits of vegetables and huge amounts of expensive raw-milk Parmesan (it was the fragrance of garlic cooking that had lured her down), all eaten silently, she apologized. “It’s not like it’s your fault,” she said. “I just didn’t want you to know my name.”
“I can still call you Danielle.”
“I don’t know where I came up with that.”
“But I like Inness, too. Inness O’Keefe. It’s more like you.”
“No, it’s not. That’s the thing. It’s not like me at all. Not anymore.”
“Okay,” Eric said.
Enough talk. If they were going to leave at dawn, they had to get to work. Danielle or Inness cut a half-raveled old cabin scarf in two, sat him down and wrapped his feet, pretty nice wool, itchy and warm, stuffed him like sausages into the rain boots and duct-taped everything together. “I’ve had a lot of practice at snow suits and rubber boots,” she said. “Duck tape, not so much.”
“Duct,” he said despite himself.
She didn’t care, didn’t even hear the distinction.
He ventured out in the noon sun for clean snow, back and forth to the door he’d made. Danielle met him there each trip and ferried snow to the tub, a nice wordless project together. She’d built the fire up and dragged the slipper tub to where it was all but touching the stove. They’d calculated that the snow would make water at the rate of less than one gallon an hour, easily speeded by packing pots with snow, too, and heating them on the stove, then pouring hot cups and pints of water back over the snow in the tub, a lot of work, which Danielle or Inness bent herself to. Eric outside, Inness in, they managed to melt maybe two gallons worth of the snow and heap the tub high with more, a precarious mound, maybe six more gallons of water to look forward to by evening—cooking, washing, drinking, a little extra in the event the stovepipe was compromised and they needed to put out the fire, plain prudence.
But imprudently they were using more firewood tha
n Eric had anticipated. He made his way on the awkward skis under the window, forged a path downstream a hundred feet to a coppiced silver maple with a couple of dead trunks, the only dry wood he could see, difficult progress, ten full minutes. He broke off the few dead branches he could reach, dragged them back to the opening in the shed, where Danielle took them in. Around front, he was able to crack off some dead branches that the uppermost pine had shed in its fall, plucked and scavenged a good pile of sticks and twigs, maybe a half hour’s worth in the stove.
A high bank of new clouds had begun to darken the sky. More snow wouldn’t help their case, though the overcast might moderate the temperature. Really, Eric thought, they needed to walk out immediately. He tried to think his way through the problem, but the same loop had been playing for hours and didn’t change, not a note: it wouldn’t be impossible, getting out, only deathly exhausting, and at twenty below, if night caught you soaked in sweat, plain deadly. They had lingered too long this morning, had slept too late, had got too comfortable. They’d have to start at first light as planned—the plan was correct—make a steady march. They’d be well prepared, they’d be well rested, all the things they would not have been this morning. The trip up the hill was about a half mile, very steep, progress at probably half the speed he’d made to the silver maples, even less with Inness limping along behind. So, maybe three hundred feet an hour? Or make it five hundred: five hours to the road. Which might or might not be plowed. Well, they could smash a window at the veterinarian’s if necessary: the old gal owed him. He rubbed his shoulder.
By way of a test he scooted as best he could on the ungainly skis around the front of the cabin, skirted the crests of the fallen trees (outhouse definitely crushed under there), battled up the slope blindly. Away from the river the drifts were so high he couldn’t see out of his track and uphill progress was excruciatingly difficult. Ten minutes and he’d traveled at best thirty feet, with no sense of where the path might be and great banks of trees down in front of him and no doubt further trees down ahead: impossible.
He backed out through the personal canyon he’d made, faster progress than he’d achieved going forward, reached the juncture of his path to the silver maples. There he could see out over the snow, at least, a view down the valley of the great Woodchurch River. What if you walked out along the river, made your way to the Route 138 bridge? That way would be all downhill, and all fairly clear, flood-swept for millennia, the underbrush and everything underfoot completely buried in snow. If you could manage six hundred feet an hour, just ten feet a minute, worst case, the trip would take about nine hours, every bit of January daylight, plus some. And that was if it were really only a mile, and if Danielle could keep up.
He tried to calculate the strength it would take to push through this snow for nine hours or anywhere close: no way. But he made fairly easy progress back down to the silver maples, what with the path tramped both ways. At the maples, he headed downhill, kept tramping, put in what he hoped was a full hour in the fading daylight, six hundred feet, he hoped, maybe more (he was getting better with the skis): a head start for the next morning. If there weren’t more snow.
He found himself full of the thought that he’d gone against his principles with Danielle or Inness and very much taken advantage of her distress, even just the kisses, the fist in his back pocket, the hand on his neck, and he hated himself. There’d be no more of that, said a stern voice in his mind, even while the picture of them in their endless blankets and quilts and comforters on an endless beach played again in his head. Puffing hard, suddenly starving (hadn’t they just eaten lunch?), he saw that up ahead was a long inside bend of the river, another maybe thousand feet of progress blown almost clean by the wind, the long sandbar exposed. That would be easy going, and you’d be almost a third of the way to the bridge.
Suddenly there was a commotion, a mass fluttering, a small flock of common redpolls passing before his eyes like life to a drowning man. They landed in the snow-thick branches all around him, lively communication among themselves, bright crimson spots on their heads, streaked breasts, bright eyes, happiness with wings. Eric laughed, couldn’t help it; and at the noise the tiny birds startled and leapt as one to the sky and flew in a kind of scattered precision down toward the bend, took up on the bare branches of a dead pine, lingered a moment, then, as though showing the way, leapt to the sky again, and onward!
Yes, he and Inness could do this. And if things got too terrible in the first stages, they could always turn back. He tramped a tight loop to turn himself around, rejoined his hard-won path, much easier to go where he’d been before. Almost cheerful, thick with hope, he made his way back to the cabin in his own tracks, picking up two dead tree branches along the way. And full of resolve: no inappropriate anything tonight, early to bed, out at first light, and everyone’s life could resume.
Thirty-Four
DANIELLE OR INNESS was at the cookstove stirring a pot of ramen noodles and eating taco chips—the place smelled shockingly of salt and low-end spices. There wasn’t a lot to add to improve the meal, just a few pieces of red pepper left on the drainboard, a little onion. Oh, but carrots. Silently in the face of her silence (moody again or just efficient?) he diced it all and simply tossed the mix in the pot with the noodles. He’d heated himself to a sweat—that would be dangerous if it happened on tomorrow’s trek. Once again the loop played in his head, the various accidents they might have, the disasters. He’d got himself un-taped and barefoot, found that his pants were frozen, just office chinos. He skipped to the stove, hung the chinos on the peg behind, found his boxers soaked, too. His legs were pink as scrapes. He pulled off his shirt. Their robe was filthy, but it was going to have to do, dry at least, and warm behind the stove where Danielle had hung it. He wrestled with it, pulled his undershirt over his head, found her glowering at him.
“Okay,” he said.
“Asshole,” she hissed.
“What now, Lady MacBeth?” He pulled the robe on—found it warm, tugged his freezing, dripping boxers down and off.
She said, “You go off for two hours out there? You don’t say a word to me? I thought you fucking left! I was sure you’d left!”
Single-minded Eric, the constant complaint of Alison’s: he’d forgotten to say what he was up to, how long it might take. “I’ll try to do better,” he said, just what he would have said to his wife, end of discussion.
But Danielle marched right up. He protected his face—she’d slapped him before—and so she kicked him smartly in the shin, those felt shoes. “You’ll try to do better?” she said. And then she kicked him again.
“Hey!”
And burst into tears. He tried to think what to say, anger giving way to remorse, but she gripped his shoulders, sent the robe askew, tugged him to her, crushed him to her tight, a desperate embrace. “You are fucking frozen,” she cried, and pulled him tighter yet.
He spoke emotionally into the scent of Breck: “I was working on a path out there. I was working to get us out. It was very difficult.”
“I can’t leave,” she said. “I can’t leave this place. It’s all decided. When I thought you had, like, left. That was a revelation. I can’t leave. I remain. Like, oh, he listened to everything I said and he left. I was glad. Eric. I was glad.”
“I’m here,” he said.
She was stronger than he would have thought, so skinny, held him tighter, pulled him in, the robe all but fully open. She said, “But you left.”
“Okay. Okay. Shh.” And now Eric was crying, too. “I gave us a head start. I guess I got scared and just wanted to give us a head start.”
She hugged him harder, like trying to climb inside him between his ribs. “You were scared.”
“Scared,” he said.
She talked into his bare blue chest, full passion: “Most people don’t say that, mister.”
“Scared,” he said again. “It’s not something you feel every day.” The cold had penetrated his feet. He shifted them. No socks to
put on. No proper shoes.
“You better get the blanket,” Inness said, releasing him abruptly and using a corner of the robe to wipe her eyes. As she stepped away, he realized his mistake: Inness was scared every day and had been scared every day long before any snowstorm.
Thirty-Five
WHILE SHE DRAINED her ramen, he opened a can of her Hannaford baked beans, dumped them in a pot, added a couple of chopped scallions, and after some brief but intense heating time and a hasty, hungry self-service, they ate with their chairs pulled up square against the stove.
“Ramen good,” he said.
“You’re learning, caveman,” she told him.
“Baked beans good.”
“We’re going to fart,” Inness said.
Eric smiled at that and at thinking of her as Inness and wrapped himself tighter in the smelly robe, his legs crossed under him, feet unwarmable. He’d have to saw up the branches he’d brought in through his hatch door, add the scant pieces to their wood supply. They’d be leaving a cold cabin in the morning, it looked like, the overcast having blown off, a clear, deep-freeze night coming fast, bright stars already visible out the window, thermometer in the shed reading ten below already, the temperature of the floor not far from that (anyway a pan of water he’d left there was frozen solid), a Côtes Du Rhône cork in the hole where he’d let the hose through. A dense island of snow still floated in the slipper tub, and seemed to be refreezing.
Danielle pushed the island with her hand, set it spinning.
“But seriously,” Eric said. He’d finished his share of the food fast. She was in her chair beside his, not too close, eating more slowly, enjoying each bite voluptuously. She wouldn’t be hard to fatten up; she was someone who liked to eat. She kept complimenting him like he was a chef for adding scallions to the baked beans, for pairing baked beans with ramen.
The Remedy for Love: A Novel Page 18
