The Cabin

by Wilder Jasinda

  Adrian used to find it hysterical that I was so bad at making coffee. I’ve never understood it myself, but I’ve long since accepted it as a fact and learned to live with it. Mainly because I always had Adrian to make it for me, or coffee shops.

  Now, out here, I just have to learn, I guess. Finally.

  I attempt it—remembering Adrian’s formula. Two scoops of grinds per ounce of water. Not too coarse, not too fine. Add water. Turn it on.

  Simple.

  Only, I must have over-ground it or miscounted, because when it finishes brewing, twenty minutes later, it’s so thick you could cut it with a knife, so black and so strong you could strip paint with it.

  Dammit.

  Exasperated, I go out onto the porch, half wondering if I could somehow persuade Nathan to make me some without having to come right out and ask.

  I find, sitting on the porch in front of my door, a large green thermos, like my dad used to take hunting on the weekends. There’s no note, but it’s full of Nathan’s amazing coffee.

  Anyone can make coffee, but there is, as he said, an art to making good coffee. And this? It’s the best coffee I’ve ever had. I’ve had Italian espresso pulled by master baristas in world-famous coffeehouses, and this is just…magnificent. Bold, but not overpowering. I add a little sweetener, stir it up, sit on the porch and sip.

  His truck is gone.

  I refuse to let myself wonder where he is—it’s no business of mine.

  I leave my coffee to cool—it always drove Adrian nuts that I like to let my coffee cool off of scalding. I head up to the loft and peruse the books; I choose a Lee Child thriller. Something different—I usually read romances or something similar, easy beach sort of reads. My job is stressful enough that I don’t want to be stressed by my pleasure reading.

  But now, everything is different. So maybe it’s time to change things up a bit.

  I sit on the front porch and dive into the world of Jack Reacher, and find myself enjoying it way more than I thought I would. And just like that, hours have passed, and my stomach is rumbling.

  I’m feeling too lazy to prepare anything involved, so I make a smorgasbord of snacks, and keep reading.

  The sun shifts, and now it’s beating directly onto the porch, and I get hot. Sweaty. The inside of the cabin would be cooler, but I’ve spent nearly every minute of the past year inside, and I just…I want to be outside.

  The water looks cool, inviting. Why not?

  I change into a bathing suit, a plain one-piece that I tend to wear for real swimming rather just lounging on the beach. I don’t think any of my bikinis would fit at the moment anyway—the one-piece is all but hanging off me as it is. My ass is flat as a post, and my tits, never large on my best day, have shrunk to mosquito bites. But, I’m not here to impress anyone.

  I’m thankful there’s no full-length mirror here. I don’t think I’d be very pleased with my reflection. I need to eat, get back to a healthy weight.

  I bring a towel and head to the dock. The water ripples, reflects the sunlight like a million diamonds in the sun. When was the last time I went swimming? A hotel pool with Adrian, in NYC for a signing, a year before I found out about his diagnosis.

  I push that thought away.

  I dive in—don’t give myself time to think about it, to anticipate the cool of the water. Which turns out to be cold. I surface, shrieking and spluttering, pushing my hair back. Refreshing, though, once I have a moment to acclimate. I stroke across the water away from shore, and then turn on my back and float. The sounds of the world are muffled, and the sun is hot on my face and the parts of me that aren’t covered in water. I splash in circles, open my eyes to reorient myself, make sure I’ve not floated too far away from shore. I know I’m still pretty weak, and if I were to accidentally float toward the middle of the lake, I could be in trouble.

  Eventually, I start to feel a little cold, so I roll back to my belly and breaststroke back to shore. When I get there, I see Nathan’s truck, but not him, not at first. It’s not until I climb onto the deck and wrap up in my towel that I see him. The tree line of the forest starts a good twenty yards behind the cabins, and he’s off just inside the trees, skinning a deer. He pauses, glances my way, sees me and waves. I wave back, but head inside.

  Adrian tried hunting once, when we were first dating. A friend from college invited him, so he went. He hated it. Said it was cold and early and boring, and when he did finally manage to get a shot off at a deer, he both missed and felt horrible for shooting at it. Said he’d have felt even worse actually killing the thing, and when his friend made his shot and brought down a buck, he felt nauseated. Which was only worsened when his friend cleaned the carcass right there.

  He never went hunting again.

  My dad used to hunt a lot, when I was little, so the sight is fairly familiar to me. I’d wake up late on a Saturday morning and I’d see Dad out under the big old oak tree behind the house, a deer hanging by its hooves. We’d have venison steaks that night, Dad’s specialty. He’d freeze most of the rest of the meat, and then in the winter, when things were tight and lean, he’d break out back straps and steaks and ground venison and whatever else.

  Then he passed away when I was a teenager, and I’d wake up on Saturday mornings for weeks and months afterward expecting to see him out there with a deer, and I’d remember all over again with crushing sorrow that I’d never see it again.

  All this flits through me in an instant, from seeing Nathan out under the tall pines in the cool shadows, his hands pinked with blood as he expertly skins and cleans.

  I hurry inside, feeling nauseous. Not from the sight of the blood—I’m an ICU nurse. From an inundation of sorrow.

  Missing Dad took years to get past. You stop thinking about him, forget his face, the sound of his voice. The feel of his stubble on my cheek as he gave me a peck. You feel guilty for forgetting, but the forgetting is often easier than the missing, and then you feel guilty for sort of wanting to forget.

  So, I know how grief works. But this, with Adrian, it’s different.

  I didn’t have him long enough.

  We were just getting started.

  I didn’t have long enough to accept that he was dying.

  I find myself on the floor of the bathroom, in my wet bathing suit, my towel rucked under me, not crying just…drowning.

  I can’t wallow in it anymore.

  So, I force myself to take a long, hot shower. To actually style my hair. Put on a little makeup, just a touch, to conceal the hollows in my cheeks and the bags under my eyes. Get dressed in jeans and a sweater. I’m not sure where I’m going, but I get in my car and go anyway.

  I end up exploring the little town, perusing touristy gift shops and the library, the general store. I walk around and smile at the locals who smile back and say hello and ask me how I am and even manage to sound like they actually care about the answer. They know I’m new, and they’re all curious, but no one asks me anything.

  There’s a little cafe, a place that serves breakfast all day and specializes in chicken-fried steak with this incredible—and incredibly unhealthy, I’m sure—gravy that’s so thick you can stand a spoon up in it, and flaky, buttery biscuits. My nutrition has been whole foods, organic, artificial sweetener-free, all that stuff for years. I got into it while I was studying for my RN, having gained way more than the freshman fifteen and having not ever lost any of it. And then it became a way of life, and Adrian converted to it when we got married because it was just easier than trying to keep two separate kinds of food. But now? I just can’t bring myself to care. Maybe at some point I will, but right now, I just want to eat food that I didn’t make, and enjoy it. And hell, I need the calories anyway. I haven’t—and don’t dare—stepped on a scale, but I know I have to weigh less now than I did in junior high.

  There’s a lot of staring by locals, a lot of open curiosity, but everyone is polite enough to keep it at merely open curiosity.

  I look like hell, I know I do. />
  I probably have a look that just screams “shattered widow.” Something tragic in my countenance, probably. No matter. It’s why I’m here, right? To get rid of it. And I’m going to do it with chicken-fried steak and gravy and biscuits and red wine, and when I get home, a whole bar of chocolate as I lie out on the dock watching the stars.

  * * *

  He’s on his porch when I get home from dinner in town. I wave, he waves, and that’s it.

  Part of me wants to go over there and talk to him, just to hear my own voice. But I don’t.

  I stay inside reading—I finish the Lee Child thriller and start a biography of Einstein, more reading that’s out of the ordinary for me. Horizons? Expanding. The biography isn’t as enrapturing as the novel, but I plug away at it gamely until I look up and realize it’s dark and I’m more into it than I thought I would be.

  I take my bar of chocolate out to the dock, along with a blanket. Spread the blanket out on the dock and lie down, stare up at the stars. I don’t recognize pretty much any of the constellations but the Big Dipper. I make up my own, trying to trace lines from star to star in patterns.

  I hear the other dock creak under Nathan’s tread. I stay where I am. But I do wonder what he’s doing out here, at whatever time of night it is.

  I hear the feet of a chair thunk onto the boards. A moment of silence. A few hesitant strums of an acoustic guitar. A chord, tried a few times, the strings buzzing inexpertly. A muttered curse, a sigh. He tries the chord again, and this time gets it. Tries a change to a different chord, fumbles it, tries again, gets it. He plays like someone who used to play a lot, but fell out of practice. I slip a sliver of chocolate into my mouth and let it melt as I listen. He’s warmed up, refamiliarized himself with the instrument, and it sounds like old skills are returning. He now seems to be working on remembering a particular song, a handful of chords tried a few different ways, a low rough hum from his voice.

  I recognize it, when he remembers how to play it all the way through. “59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy)” by Simon and Garfunkel. Not what I’d have expected him to play. I would have assumed Johnny Cash, or maybe some early Metallica, or Journey. Instead, he plays Simon and Garfunkel. I hear him murmuring the words, playing and singing for himself. I don’t think he even realizes I’m here—I’d be a dark lump on the dock, even from up close, and he’s a ways away.

  It doesn’t feel so lonely out here, now. It was solitude at first, and I’m not really even sure when it became loneliness. When he came out, maybe. But now that he’s over there, and I can hear his voice and his guitar, I’m not as lonely.

  He moves without pause into “The Boxer” and I hum along under my breath.

  Dad used to love this song. He’d sit on the screened-in back porch on summer evenings, with the cicadas singing and the heat oppressive and he’d be shirtless, hairy and a little overweight, and he’d have his old Yamaha on his belly and his feet would be propped up on a battered blue milk crate, and he’d play every song he knew, with a beer sweating on the floor beside him.

  God, why is everything reminding me of my father, all of a sudden?

  I swear to God, if Nathan plays—

  Yeah, there it is. “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin.

  It’s like they have the same damn playlist, him and Dad.

  Then, Nathan surprises me even more. Freestyle. He just strums, picks, and hums, nothing I recognize. It’s a slow, sad melody, and it seems half remembered and half improvised.

  There’s a long silence, then, the last notes quavering across the lake.

  “What was that last one you played?” I ask, just loud enough to be sure he hears me.

  “Didn’t know you were there,” he says.

  “Just stargazing. And eating chocolate.”

  “It’s, uh…a little thing I used to play. For…well, uh. For someone who’s now gone.”

  I recognize that hesitation. Where you don’t want to even mention it, because it brings on the “I’m sorry for your loss” and the pitying eyes and the questions they don’t know how to ask.

  “It’s a beautiful piece of music,” I say. A pause. “I wasn’t intending to eavesdrop, Nathan.”

  “I know. I just haven’t played in, oh god, years. Lost the habit. Life gets busy, and somehow it’s the things you really love doing that get left on the wayside, you know?”

  “Like me and watercolors.”

  “That’s right—you said you painted.”

  “I mean, sort of. It was just for me. I started doing it in high school as a way to cope with…loss, and stress, and things like that. Then, like you said, life happened.” I sigh, something not quite a laugh. “I wasn’t very good.”

  “Neither am I. I started playing for similar reasons. My dad…those were all his favorite songs. I learned them as a way to…connect with him, I guess.”

  “You are good, though.”

  “I was once told I sound like a chainsaw at the bottom of a well when I sing.”

  I snicker at that. “That’s not nice. And untrue.”

  I mean, his voice isn’t good. It’s rough, deep, and dark. Smoky. He can carry a tune well enough. But there’s something raw and real in the way he sang, how he sounded.

  “I wouldn’t mind if you played another one,” I say. “My dad…he used to play most of the same songs when I was a kid.”

  “Thus the watercolors,” he says.

  “Thus the watercolors,” I agree, but I don’t know if it was loud enough for him to hear.

  “Uh, how about…” A few idle strums. “Ah. Betcha you know this one.”

  Three chords in, and I know it.

  “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” John Denver.

  God, this one. Dad would hum this one while he puttered in the garage or flipped the venison steaks, and it was always the last one he played before he put the guitar away. It was his anthem, I think.

  I laugh out loud. “Good god, did we have the same father, or what?”

  He pauses. “Well, I grew up in the backwoods of Louisiana. You?”

  “Atlanta girl, born and raised.” I laugh again, and it feels good to laugh. “When I say Atlanta, though, I’m being generous. Backwoods would be a polite term for where I grew up.”

  He picks up the melody again, and when he starts singing, I can’t help but sing with him. If you’d asked me ten seconds ago if I knew the lyrics to this song, I’d have laughed in your face—I haven’t heard it since Dad died. But yet, with the melody on that guitar, his rough-hewn voice singing the words, damn if I don’t sing every one.

  Is it weird that it feels better to miss Daddy than Adrian? The old hurt is more palatable. It’s a nice break from the raging, gaping wound of missing my husband.

  The music fades, and I sigh. Eventually, I stand up; wrap my blanket around my shoulders. “I’m heading in,” I say. “Good night, Nathan.”

  “‘Night.”

  * * *

  When I wake up the next morning, he’s put the thermos on my porch again—I’d returned it yesterday. This time, there’s a brown paper bag with it—a blank sketchbook with thick paper suitable for watercolors, a couple different palates of watercolors, as if he had no idea what’s good or not, so he just got the most expensive they had and the cheapest, and a clutch of different sizes and kinds of brushes. Because it wouldn’t fit in the bag, he’d set the easel on the deck beside the bag.

  The easel smells…fresh, like newly sawn wood. It almost looks like he made it. Being a carpenter, it shouldn’t surprise me that he’d make one instead of buying it, but the gesture touches me.

  I immediately take the easel, sketchbook, a mug of water, and the paints out to the dock and set up. I’m frustrated at first because I’ve lost the knack of it, but after a few false starts, I start to feel it coming back…like Nathan and the guitar.

  Before I know it, I’ve been painting for several hours. The completed painting is…not my best, but it’s recognizably the lake from my dock. I�
�m proud of it, maybe inordinately so. Winslow Homer, I’m not, but I feel good for having done it.

  The expulsion of creativity is as much an antitoxin to the poison of misery and despair and sorrow as the peace of the lake has been, as sleeping in has been, as eating well has been. As much as that dinner on my porch with Nathan.

  I gingerly tear the page from the book; Nathan is out on the lake, fishing. I heard him motor out early this morning, and he’s been on the far side of the lake ever since. I wedge the painting in his door, between door and doorpost.

  I wouldn’t say I’m alive, yet. But…maybe, just maybe, I’m feeling the first glimmers of renewal. Like a seed germinating deep in the thick black wet soil.

  I’m not okay. I’m very, very far from anything like okay. I think about Adrian just about once every other breath. I still wake up in the middle of the night and reach for him and tear up and clutch my pillow and scream into it when he’s not there.

  But…I laughed, last night. I painted, today.

  It’s improvement, if infinitesimal. But still, better is better.

  One Little Thing At A Time

  I haven’t seen Nadia for days. I wake up early, and she sleeps in. But we have a system—I make her coffee and put it in my old hunting thermos and leave it on her porch. She returns it sometime later in the morning. I made her an easel and got her some watercolor stuff, and now she’s out there most of the day, painting. On the dock, in the yard, under the trees, facing the cabins. She left me one, the first one she did, as a kind of thank-you. It’s good. Like me and guitar, I’d say don’t quit your day job, but it’s damn good.