Left of the front door is the kitchen. The counters are thick butcher block, with a deep porcelain farm sink. The cabinets under the sink are painted a bohemian array of bright colors, no two colors or shades repeated, and no two cabinet pulls are the same, some being cut crystals, others brass knobs and others ceramic butterflies and delicately wrought designs of filigreed metal or oiled bronze. The cabinets above are white, open face, floating. On the shelves are blue-and-white china dishes. The faucet is oiled bronze, a high elegant arch with antique knobs on either side of the base. The stove is also an antique piece, while the refrigerator is stainless steel, French-doors over the freezer drawer, ultramodern.
The rear wall features a single open doorway, with a sliding barn door stained a dark reddish brown. Beyond, the bedroom. A king-size bed, four-poster, handmade. A tall bureau on one wall, heavy and dark wood with thick bronze pulls; a small, delicate white vanity opposite the bed, lined with Edison bulbs. A bathroom, all white subway tile and industrial fixtures and exposed piping, and a deep hammered-copper soaking tub.
The real draw, though, is the loft. It’s over the back of the cabin, accessible by a ladder-like stair. The space is deep, taking up the entire rear half of the cabin’s footprint, it’s been turned into a library. Shelves line the walls, worked into every little nook and angle, and there’s a large skylight in the metal roof to let in daylight. Instead of a couch or recliner is the largest beanbag chair I’ve ever seen, so big I could curl up on it. There’s a wicker basket beside the beanbag, filled with fleece blankets. The bookshelves are lined with books of all variety, everything from sweet romance and women’s lit and thrillers and horror to biographies and classics and collections of essays. Another floor lamp stands beside the beanbag chair, this one steampunk clockwork.
Every inch of this cabin was designed for me. It’s everything I’ve dreamed of remodeling our home into one day. I’ve talked about it for years; from the moment we bought the house, I talked about knocking out all the interior walls and installing thick exposed beams and making it a boho, industrial-chic wonderland of coziness and color and warmth. I talked about it, but we never got around to it. There was always another book to write, another signing tour, another book-to-movie project for him to oversee, another week of double shifts at the hospital and then vacations to Italy or Spain or Iceland, where we’d spend a week playing tourist in exchange for twelve hours of him signing books and taking photographs.
It makes my eyes sting. Did he have this cabin remodeled into this, for me? Or did he find it like this and know it was meant for me, perfect for me?
My knees wobble as I explore.
The fridge is stocked—everything is straight from my personal grocery list. Everything he knew I would buy is here, from my favorite brand of ice cream to my favorite cans of flavored sparkling water, low-GI pasta, no sugar added condiments. Our own pantry, fridge, and freezer back home have been, in effect, lifted and transported here.
I browse the cabinets: Le Creuset pots and pans, cast iron skillets, deep pasta boiling pots, stoneware omelet pans. Even my preferred brand of kitchen utensils are here. A cabinet full of hand-thrown mugs which he knew I’d love. One cabinet near the fridge opens up to reveal a hidden wine rack—filled with my favorite brands of red wine.
Another cabinet reveals dozens of bars of my favorite chocolate, Stevia sweetened and ultra-dark, sea-salt almond.
Adrian, god.
He did this for me.
How? When?
I head into the bedroom. The comforter is the exact same as the one we have at home, one I had imported from France at great expense, a rare indulgence for me. Thick, heavy, but breathable, velvety soft on the underside and wild with colorful arabesques on top. I run my hand over the comforter, and feel a million joyful, happy memories of Adrian and myself under this comforter bubble up inside. Folded on the foot end of the bed is my favorite blanket, a thick, fleecy, stretchy, soft, warm thing that I was only ever able to find on an obscure Etsy site. He found a duplicate, somehow. He knew how much I loved to wrap up in it and read, or watch TV with him. It’s a comfort item, that blanket. And here it is.
My eyes sting.
But there’s more.
On the tall bureau is a handmade wooden tray, on which is a clutch of my favorite essential oils and a small diffuser. He made fun of me for my weird obsession with essential oils, but they just make things homey for me. Scent is a vital element of home, and I just love a diffuser gently bubbling with some thieves’ oil, or an orange peel cinnamon.
On the vanity, a Jonathan Adler candle, another of my favorites. In the drawers, my favorite brands of makeup. Eye shadows, foundations, lip gloss and lipstick and lip stain, lip pencils, eyes pencils, contouring sponges, everything you’d find in my makeup kit back home, is here.
In the bathroom, there is more of everything me. In the medicine cabinet is my favorite mouthwash, face wash, hand lotion, body butter, moisturizer, razor, shaving cream, everything. Even the damn towels folded on a floating shelf over the toilet are my favorite kind, the thick, soft, enormous bath sheets. My shampoos and conditioners and everything, it’s all here.
It hits me, there, in the bathroom.
Adrian just knew me.
I’ll never find that again. No one could ever know me the way he did. He knew every single thing there was to know about me, from my absurd but paralyzing fear of wasps to my deep, abiding, passionate love affair with mint chocolate chip ice cream. My most embarrassing moments, he knew—including that mortifying wardrobe malfunction in high school, every teenager’s worst nightmare come true, when my skirt literally fell off in the middle of an end-of-the-year speech in front of the entire school, leaving me in front of a microphone stand in my white granny panties, complete with visible maxi pad. Oh yeah. That bad. He knew about it. He knew my sexual peccadilloes, my hatred of lima beans, my obsession with New Kids on the Block, my “celebrity hall pass” list that consisted exclusively of Justin Timberlake and Hugh Jackman.
He knew it all.
He knew my makeup.
I fall to the floor in the bathroom, sobbing. I have a tube of lotion still clutched in one hand; the subway tile under me is cold and hard. I cry harder than I have since right after he died.
God, I miss you, Adrian.
I miss you so fucking bad.
This cabin is a love letter from Adrian. It said everything that language could not possibly begin to express. His intimate knowledge of everything I am as a person, as a woman. It’s him telling me, I know you, Nadia. I know you, and I love you. This is my gift to you.
I sob on the floor for a long, long time. Missing him. Hating him for leaving. Hating the world for taking him. Hating myself for needing him so badly I can’t figure out how to exist without him.
It’s there, lying with my cheek squashed against the icy tile floor, that I realize how angry I am. I hadn’t understood that until now. It’s a white-hot rage. At him. For leaving. He promised he wouldn’t leave me, and he fucking left me.
My intellect understands that he died, that he didn’t walk away from me. But my emotions know only one thing: he left.
God help me, I’m so angry. I’ve been avoiding and denying that anger for so long, now. The anger is there, simmering, boiling under the surface, and I’ve been ignoring it. It’s why I can’t sleep. Why I can’t eat—I have no appetite, and when I do eat, food is tasteless.
It’s not just sadness, not just missing him.
I’m so angry at him for dying that it’s been poisoning me.
This cabin is the antitoxin I need, apparently. How he knew, I’ll never know. But he did.
* * *
I eventually manage to scrape myself off the bathroom floor. When I do, I have an imprint of tiles on my reddened cheek. I go out and haul my bags inside and I unpack every damn thing Tess packed for me, which is just about my entire wardrobe. I put everything away; fill all the drawers with my clothes and the shallow but wide closet with my dr
esses and my shoes and my boots.
I make myself at home.
Because somehow, I realize I won’t be leaving here any time soon. I can’t leave here until I’m whole again, and that will take a long, long time.
When I’m unpacked and my suitcases are shoved under the bed and on the shelf in the closet, I go over to the wine rack in the kitchen. Withdraw a bottle of Josh, slowly uncork it. I haven’t had red wine since before Adrian died—it was our thing. He liked whiskey and I hate it; I like vodka and he hated it. The one thing we could agree on was red wine.
I pour a glass, swirl it, watching the ruby liquid smear down the glass in receding waveforms. Take a tentative sip.
I’m hit with a tidal wave of memories. Sitting on our couch, two bottles in, a giant bowl of popcorn on his lap, marathoning LOTR, which was a yearly thing for him. It bored me to tears, so he’d get me tipsy and then I’d fall asleep. Or, sitting in bed with the iPad and a bar of chocolate, him reading while I binged Vanderpump Rules. Italy, getting drunk on red wine in a street-side cafe in Florence, telling the server to choose the wine for us because who the hell knows anything about all those weird, obscure, Italian name wines anyway? It’s all good, especially once you’re four glasses in and the world is topsy-turvy and beautiful with that golden Italian sunshine.
All that, in one sip.
I take the bottle with me as I head outside to the little dock. It’s maybe twenty feet long, with four shoulder-high posts weathered gray and stained with bird poop. There’s an Adirondack chair and a small table, handmade by whoever built the cabin and a lot of the stuff in it. It’s deep, and comfortable.
The sunset is breathtaking.
I hurt, all over. Grief and anger are physical. I can taste them. Feel them in the tension in my shoulders. Relax? Ha. I have to think about breathing. Each breath, I have to tell myself to suck it in, and let it out. Take another breath. Keep breathing.
The wine rolls in my mouth, tumbles in my belly. I should have eaten first. But then, I haven’t been properly drunk since my bender after the funeral. I know I should go slow, take it easy. But…how?
I think the alcohol does something to the anger. Metabolizes it, somehow. Half a glass, and I’m feeling it. I’ve not been a teetotaler the past year, but I’ve not gotten drunk. I’d rather work. If I were to get drunk, I think I feared I’d end up feeling things I was trying to hide from.
Well? Here we go.
The bottle lightens, and so does the pressure in my skull.
I miss you, Adrian.
I hate you for leaving.
Come back, goddamn you.
Hold me.
I’ve cried myself out, I think. I don’t weep. I sit on the dock and slowly get drunk, watching the sun impale itself on the pines. A fish leaps, sending ripples skidding across the surface. I think about him. The good times, for now. I can’t go back to the horrors of his death, not yet. For now, I just have to let myself remember him.
Start there.
The sunset fades into a purple sky, and the air cools. My feet are bare, and my toes are cold.
The bottle is empty, and the stars are making their first appearance.
I think of our one and only attempt at camping.
We took a weekend trip…actually, probably not far from here. It was early in our marriage. He wasn’t a camper, and neither was I; he was more of a road trip person, and I was a homebody who rarely left my hometown. He went out and bought all the gear, the tent, the cooler, the lantern, the bug spray, the camp stove, all of it. He had enough gear for us to camp out for a month. It was a disaster. He pitched the tent in the most uneven, rocky area he could find. Mosquitoes ate us alive, rabid, bird-sized swarms of them. He couldn’t get the fire going, and by the time he did, it was nearly midnight and we were snapping at each other. He brought a bunch of canned beans and fruit, but no can opener. A camp stove, but no propane. One sleeping bag each, and it was the coldest weekend of the entire summer, and we froze all night.
The most magical part of it was the last night. We were cold, miserable, hungry, and ready to go home and live like civilized people. We couldn’t sleep. We were too frigid and miserable to even fuck, which says something. So, we abandoned the notion of sleeping and left the tent. Wandered down by the lake, where the moon was high and full and silver and bright, and we sat on a big boulder with our sleeping bags zipped together and wrapped around us both, huddling together, watching our breath huff out in a white fog, staring up at the sky full of stars.
We sat there all night long, just staring up. Holding each other. Not talking, just…being. Together under the stars.
I haven’t seen stars like that since.
Until now.
I lose my breath, staring up at them. My chest aches. I feel him in their twinkling countless millions, feel him watching over me from somewhere behind them.
I’m not okay.
But for the first time since he died, I feel like maybe, someday, I could be.
Coffee & Home Cooking
25:
Dawn—I’ve woken at 6 a.m. on the dot without an alarm since I was sixteen, and by now it’s an unbreakable habit. I’ve been letting—sometimes forcing—myself to lounge in bed for an hour, dozing off, thinking, just enjoying being warm and in bed. Finally, around seven, just after sunrise, I take my cup of coffee out onto the porch—it’s not quite truly cold outside, chilly enough to require a jacket, but it’s bracing. The mug is hot against my palms, steam rising from the black liquid.
I sit with the book. In it, the narrator has met the heroine—like him, she’s a widow who recently lost her husband. They’re both closed off and bitter and hesitant to let anyone in—sounds familiar.
The heroine in the story is tall and slender with jet-black hair and green eyes.
The hero is tall, strongly built, and a carpenter.
A little on the nose, buddy.
I read on:
…I couldn’t make coffee for shit. This is from the heroine’s POV. I worked early and stopped for coffee on the way, and so rarely make my own coffee. On the weekends, my husband used to make it for me, but now, it was just me. And I couldn’t and wouldn’t make it for myself. It’s not like making coffee was hard or complicated. It was the principle of the thing, really.
I think about my pour-over inside. I wonder if she’s had coffee, yet. If she’s awake. A cup of fresh coffee would be a nice way to introduce yourself as a neighbor.
I’m considering this when I hear her front door open. She’s wrapped in a blanket. Sits in the rocking chair, but with her knees under her. I’m standing up, at this point, thinking. I’ve got my mug in my hands, having just refilled it, so it’s steaming.
She glances this way—it’s far enough I can’t really make out her exact expression, but I can feel her longing for coffee from here.
I head back inside and make a fresh batch. I carry the pour-over in one hand and my mug in the other. Head over across the grass between the cabins. I can feel her tensing as I approach. I stop at the base of her steps.
“Uh, hi.” I clear my throat. “Wondered if you might like some coffee.”
Her eyes are green, a deep, dark shade of jade. They search me. “I…yeah, actually, that would be amazing.” She seems embarrassed. “I don’t…I have stuff to make coffee but I…every time I make coffee, it tastes like dirt.”
I lift the Chemex. “Well, grab yourself a mug.” I set a foot on the lower step. “Mind if I come up?”
She hesitated. “I…yeah, sure. Yes. Please. I’ll be right back.”
Rising, she floats inside with the blanket trailing behind her like a superhero cape. Returns momentarily with a big ceramic mug, intentionally lopsided to mold against the hands. She offers me the mug, giving me something that might be the wayward ghost of a smile—tiny, faint, hesitant.
I hold the reusable copper filter in place and fill her up. I then dig in the pocket of my flannel shirt for packets of stevia and a spoon; in the story, she fix
ed her coffee black, with a little natural sweetener.
She takes the packet and spoon with a quizzical grin. “Thanks?” A question, by the tone of her voice. As in, how do you know how I like my coffee?
I shrug. “I drink mine black,” I say. “I had sweetener but not milk or cream. So.”
It’s not like I could come out and tell her, you know how I know how you take your coffee? Your dead husband wrote a story that seems to be about you and me getting together.
And also, it’s true. I don’t have milk or cream at the cabin, just packets of stevia, mainly because I was thinking about trying to make a cake or something and couldn’t find bags of it at the local supermarket, only a small box of individual packets.
She pours stevia into her coffee, stirs, sips. Her eyes slide closed, and she groans. “Oh my god, so good. Thank you.” A single small hand slips out from under the blanket; the other clutches the coffee without letting go of the blanket, keeping it pinned under her chin. “Nadia.”
I take her hand. It’s tiny, warm, delicate. “Nathan.”
“Well, Nathan. Thank you for the coffee.” Her eyes go to the sun peeking up over the top of the trees. “It’s very beautiful here.”
I turn and lean my elbows on the top rail, mug clutched in both hands. “Sure is.” I inhale deeply. “Peaceful.”
“Have you been here long?”
I shrug. “Couple weeks.”
The Cabin Page 15