The Cabin

by Wilder Jasinda

It’s hard to read Adrian’s story. I put it off, sometimes for days at a time.

  More from the heroine’s POV:

  Sometimes, I wish he would just…push a little. Nudge me out of my shell. Because as much as I like it in my shell, and as much as I’d get a little spiky and snotty if he DID nudge, part of me wants to be drawn out of myself. I think he’s afraid of hurting me. Of scaring me. Of getting too close too fast even for his own liking.

  Just a little, at first, I’d tell him, if he asked. A walk, maybe. Take me fishing, because while it’s boring as hell, it’s something different, something to do besides try and pretend I’m cool, I’m fine, this is fine. I dunno. I just know he’s there and I’m here, and we keep sort of slipping off of each other, not quite connecting, because my hurt is deep and my shell is thick, and so is his. I think we’re also like two soap bubbles floating through the air, bouncing off each other, connecting for a moment, separating.

  I read a bit more, another chapter, but I keep thinking about that part. Don’t push, just nudge a little.

  All right. Let’s give it a whirl. I’m bored and lonely again, and I’d like to talk to her.

  It’s early afternoon. She just quit painting and has packed up and gone inside. It’s a gorgeous day, one of those days that’s on the verge between late summer and not quite fall. Cool at night, but still warm during the day. I stuff a sweater in my backpack, a couple bottles of water, my hunting compass, and a package of jerky.

  Before I can reconsider, I head over and knock on her door.

  She opens the door enough to frame her body. “Hi. What’s up?”

  “I was thinking I’d go for a little hike in the woods. Nothing strenuous, just…walk around the lake a bit. And I thought maybe you’d like to come along.”

  I’m tempted to overexplain, to ramble, so I chew on the inside of my cheek to keep my mouth shut.

  She just stares at me, thinking. “I…”

  “If you don’t want to, I get it.”

  She huffs. “No, I…I do. Actually. I could use the exercise.” She’s wearing short cloth shorts with ragged, rolled-up hems and a baggy T-shirt—painting clothes. “Let me just put on some jeans.”

  I nod and turn away. She closes the door—a few minutes later she exits the cabin wearing faded blue jeans, a more form-fitting T-shirt, hiking boots, with a sweatshirt tied around her waist.

  I indicate the shoreline heading away from my cabin, to the right of hers. “Done some exploring around my cabin, but haven’t seen much on this side.”

  “I’ve barely left the cabin except for the dock and town a few times.”

  “I was the same way, first couple weeks up here. I still only venture out when I feel the need, and I don’t often feel the need.”

  We follow the shoreline, walking side by side, me nearer the water. Not too close. No risk of accidental hand touch. We walk in silence for quite a while, and then she finally glances at me.

  “So who’s gonna go first?” she asks, a wry grin on her face.

  I laugh. “I guess I will, since you came up with the icebreaker.”

  I lift a branch up and out of the way, and she ducks under it; here, the shoreline grazes the tree line, so the pine tree branches hang out over the water, forcing us further into the trees.

  “My wife died in a car accident three and a half years ago.” I rarely come right out and say it like that. “And it hurts as much now as it did a month afterward.” I pause. “But maybe that’s just because I never really dealt with it.”

  She trips on a root, and I catch her by the arm. “Thanks,” she says, recovering. “My husband died. A year ago on the day I arrived.” She pauses, crouches to run her finger in some deep tracks in the dirt. “Bear, I think.”

  I glance at it. “Yeah, I’d say so. Big one, too.”

  “For me, some days, it hurts more now than it did then,” she says, straightening and brushes her hands together. “As if it’s…fermented, somehow.”

  I nod. “I get that.”

  We’re on the far side of the lake, now, and we move through the trees to the water’s edge—we can see the cabins, windows gleaming in the late afternoon sun. The docks, dark fingers out into the water. Just the two of them, side-by-side, alone out there.

  Behind us, a hill rises, the crown obscured by trees.

  “Want to see what’s at the top?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Sure. Probably just more trees, though,” she says, laughing.

  “We can go back, if you’re bored, or tired.”

  She shakes her head. “Sometimes, boredom is good, and so is being tired. But anyway, I’m not bored. I’ve just never been an outdoorsy kind of girl. Much to my dad’s annoyance, since he was a fisherman and hunter and hiker and camper and all that. I just never liked it. Bugs, dirt, wild animals, weird noises, and did I mention bugs.” She pauses as we wind around a dense cluster of trees, the grade steep up here. “This is nice, though. I’m enjoying it.”

  “I grew up doing this.” I wave a hand at the woods. “My dad was in Vietnam, and came back having trouble being indoors. Mom left, and left me with him, and since he always wanted to be out in the woods, the woods is basically where I grew up. Once, when I was, oh, fourteen, fifteen, Dad packed us some big old bags and our rifles and told me to say goodbye to the house for a while. And he meant it. We drove up to Montana near the Yellowstone, out there where it’s real wild, and spent a good six months living like Jeremiah Johnson.” I laugh. “Minus the fights with natives, obviously.”

  She eyes me incredulously. “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. It was the only place he was at peace. And I didn’t have anywhere else to go and no one else to go to, so I went with him.” I sigh. “He taught me woodworking. If he wasn’t in the woods, he was in his shop out back, working the lathe and the saw. He made furniture. Tables, chairs, bookcases, bureaus. I could make a bookshelf before I could shave.”

  “Wow.” She gestures behind us, where the cabins would be. “So, that’s not really even roughing it for you.”

  I cackle. “I mean, those cabins are really well finished. So no. But in comparison to how I grew up? Sometimes, we wouldn’t even bring tents. We’d make shelter out of branches and moss and shit. Find a cave. Sleep in the hollow of a fallen tree.”

  “My husband and I went camping once, like with a tent. It was terrible and we hated it and we never did it again.”

  I hold another branch out of the way as we top the rise. “It’s not for everyone. But it can be fun. I don’t think I’d do any survivalist camping anymore, but being way, way out there, where there ain’t anybody for fuckin’ miles, and everything you need to survive is on your back? Makes you feel…confident, I guess. Comfortable in your skin, because you’re this little fragile ol’ thing in a great big world that’s been here before us and will be here after us, and suddenly your dumb little idiosyncrasies and the shit you’re self-conscious about…it all just doesn’t matter as much. Getting to the next campsite, making the next kill so you can eat, that’s all that matters.” I wave in the direction of the cabins. “And I guess living in the cabin is a version of that. Lessens the intensity of focus. Lets you sort of…just live with yourself, in a way you can’t in the city, doing the day-to-day grind. But maybe that’s just me. And I’m still figuring it out as I go along myself.”

  “No, I think you’re right.” She turns in place, taking in the vista; the crown of the hill is high enough and bare of trees enough to provide an amazing view of the lake. “I don’t think I ever realized how much stress I was under. Just in general. Add in the grief and trauma of losing Adrian…?” She trails off, shaking her head, as if the rest of the statement is self-evident. Which, to me, it is.

  “It’s a killing kind of stress,” I say. “Your body may not die right away, but your…your spirit does. Your soul. Your mind. Your heart. It all dies. And eventually, your body will give out too.”

  “What’s the answer, though?” She leans her shoulder against the
nearest tree, staring out at the lake and the now-distant cabins. “We’re lucky, Nathan. Not everyone who loses someone can just…up and move to a cabin on a lake in the middle of nowhere and not work.”

  “No shit. I didn’t even know I needed this.” I hesitate. “It kinda…fell into my lap.”

  “Same here.”

  We’re quiet awhile, just absorbing the vista.

  Eventually, she pushes off the tree. “Well. Onward around the lake?”

  “I’m ready.”

  Conversation loosens a bit, then, as we walk. Nothing in-depth or serious, just little stories from childhood. The few times her dad tried to get her to go hunting with him went comically wrong, and made for good stories. And I, of course, have a wealth of crazy but true stories from growing up with an antiestablishment survivalist father: bear hunts, being chased by wolves, making an igloo in a blizzard so we didn’t die of exposure.

  We both keep it light, innocent, nonpersonal.

  It is nearing sunset when we reach the cabins. I pause on the bottom step, glance at Nadia. “I put a roast in the crockpot this morning. Just about the only thing I get right every time.” I laugh self-consciously. “Care for some?”

  She’s hungry, but hesitant. “I, um.”

  “I can bring a table and another chair out onto the porch.”

  “Okay, then.” Her face illuminates with a grin. “I can provide the wine this time.”

  And so we find ourselves on my porch, sharing roast beef, red wine, and a loaf of bread she bought from the little bakery in town. We don’t talk much, which seems to be the usual. When we’re done eating, I move with my glass of wine to the railing, watching the last of the sunset mingle and fade into dull crimson-orange becoming umber and purple.

  “I enjoyed this,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  I shrug. “I dunno. Walking with me. Talking.”

  She’s in my rocking chair, feet curled under her, hands pulled into her sweatshirt sleeves so only her fingertips show, wrapped around her goblet. I can feel her chewing on how to say what she’s thinking. “I’m sorry if I’m…standoffish.”

  “Nah.” I sigh, with a little huffed chuckle lost in it somewhere. “I’ve been standoffish and prickly for years. I mean, I’ve never been a super sociable Chatty Cathy typa guy. Dad didn’t talk much, so I never got the habit. But then after Lisa died, I’d go days, weeks without saying much of anything but monosyllabic answers to direct questions, and sometimes not even that.”

  “If you grew up in the wilderness, how’d you go to school?”

  I snort. “Good question. Answer is, I didn’t. Dad was older, see. Right on the edge of draft age eligibility. He’d been an adjunct professor before he got drafted. So, he homeschooled me, but that’s a generous term for it. Taught me to read, write, do math. Enough that I wouldn’t come across as this illiterate, uneducated bumpkin, which I was. He had old copies of things like Herodotus and the Illiad and Mark Twain, and he’d carry them with him on our treks, and I learned to read on those. For those stretches of months we spent at home, he’d check out books from the library, books on science and history and biographies and stuff like that, and that’d be my education in that subject. Most of what he taught me was woodworking and woodcraft, and survivalism. Book learning was basically just to keep me from being a complete outcast when I left home. I was anyway. I left home at seventeen, apprenticed myself to a carpenter, and he set me on track into trade school, and I only got halfway through before a friend’s dad noticed the quality of my work and hired me on at his construction company, and things went from there.”

  “You had a really unusual upbringing.”

  “Yeah. I guess I did.”

  “Where’s your dad now? Passed on?”

  I shrug. “I dunno. After I left home, he vanished. Went off into the woods somewhere and never came back.”

  Silence.

  “I’ve talked and thought more about my childhood these last few weeks than I have in years,” she says.

  “Same.”

  “Why, do you think that is?”

  “Easier than the hard stuff?”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too.” She pauses with her goblet partway to her mouth, making her words echo. “The hard stuff is just so fucking…hard.”

  “Maybe the past is another way for us to keep trying to avoid the hard stuff, though.”

  “Yeah, I’m worried you’re right there, too.” She finishes her wine, stands up. “I’m going to go. I did really enjoy today, so thank you.”

  “See you ’round.”

  She pauses on the top step, next to me, gazing sideways at me. As if considering saying something. I meet her gaze, and wait. In this light, her eyes are more emerald than jade. She’s filling out, her cheekbones less sharp, the hollows in her cheek less pronounced. Her clothes don’t hang off her quite as noticeably.

  “Maybe…” she starts. Stops. Clears her throat. “Maybe knock on the door, tomorrow. With coffee.”

  I smile. “Will do.” I raise an eyebrow. “I’m an early bird, I gotta warn you. Probably be around six thirty.”

  “It’s okay.” A grin. “Maybe I’ll get up in time to make pancakes or something.”

  “I’d like that,” I say.

  My heart squeezes. Pancakes are my favorite thing in the world to eat. I don’t know how to say that, though. There’s just so much layered over the topic of something so simple as breakfast food.

  She seems to notice, or maybe I’m inventing that. She just nods. Heads down the steps, one last sidelong, hesitant, shy smile at me. “Good night.”

  “Night.”

  * * *

  I discovered, somewhat by accident, that she was crazy about mimosas. We’d gone ice-skating, and afterward stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall cafe. It was early, between breakfast and lunch, and the place wasn’t serving liquor yet. But they DID have mimosas, and when I suggested we get mimosas, god, the way her eyes lit up. She got wasted on mimosas, and I had to all but carry her home, and I think that’s when I really, truly fell in love with her. They made her goofy. Wine made her sleepy and serious. Whiskey made her cranky. Beer upset her stomach and she claimed it all tasted like ox piss. Why specifically ox piss, I could never get her to say. Tequila she flat out refused to drink, saying she’d learned her lesson the hard way, and wouldn’t elaborate. But mimosas? Silly, a little wild, and so funny.

  I shut the book, considering.

  It’s still fairly early, yet. Not even ten. I bet the supermarket is still open a bit longer, I could snag a bottle or two of champagne and some orange juice.

  I grab my wallet and keys and head out—I catch the supermarket five minutes before close, much to the annoyance of the sullen teenager behind the register. Two bottles of medium-expense champagne, two cartons of orange juice.

  Rash, probably, bringing mimosas to breakfast. Shit, she may not even wake up tomorrow. And if I bring mimosas and she DOES love them like Adrian’s book is hinting, what do I say? Another coincidence?

  She needs to cut loose, though. She’s wound up tighter than a spring coil.

  I want more time with her.

  I like talking to her.

  I like telling her things about me. I like knowing things about her.

  It may not mean anything. It may not become anything but friendship. I’m too scared of what that would look like, feel like. And I’m terrified of what that would be like with her specifically. I just…don’t know how to do that.

  But I can do this. One little thing at a time, and just take it as it comes.

  Lie Just A Little Longer

  I wake up at five forty-five, on my own, without an alarm.

  I have no idea what’s possessing me, but I go with it. Give in to impulse.

  Heading out to the kitchen, I rifle through the cabinets until I find the box of pancake mix. Preheat the cast iron griddle I find in another cabinet, mix the ingredients and whisk until it’s smooth. I hear his
door open as I’m ladling the first four palm-sized circles of batter onto the griddle, and the cabin is filled with the sizzling of the batter in the oil and the scent of pancakes. While they wait to be flipped, I open my door, right as he’s tromping up the steps; he has a brown paper bag under one arm and has his glass pour-over thing, full of coffee, in the other hand.

  His nose lifts, and he sniffs, and his face lights up. “Hell yeah. I love pancakes.”

  I grin. “Me too. I didn’t learn how to make them until college, though. My college roommate and still best friend, Tess, taught me. All throughout college, every Saturday, we’d wake up early and make a shitload of pancakes. Half the dorm showed up, usually.”

  He hesitates on the threshold, and for some reason, I don’t invite him in. “I, uh, figured I’d up the ante, a little, if you’re making pancakes.”

  He sets the pour-over on the stump-table by my rocking chair, and reaches into the paper bag, pulls out a bottle of champagne. My heart does a flip, and then hammers when he produces, next, a carton of orange juice.

  Mimosas.

  It feels too direct. Like he knows things about me he shouldn’t. I mean, it’s just mimosas. It’s a pretty common morning thing for a lot of people. He can’t know the joyful memories I have of mimosas.

  Paris, with Adrian, sleeping in late and waking up to sip mimosas on the balcony with the Eiffel in the distance.

  Weekend brunches in college with Adrian, Tess and Clint, Elmore and Tanya, and Kyle and Tanner, and we’d all crowd around a too-small table in our favorite brunch haunt and eat piles of fruit and pancakes and waffles and omelets from a chef station, and we’d get absolutely clobbered on mimosas and laugh ourselves stupid.

  That trip to Germany with Adrian when we were promoting Pocketful of Posies. The hotel’s room service had been middling at best, but their mimosas came in giant goblets with fresh-squeezed orange juice and were stupid cheap, and we’d spend half the morning still buzzed from mimosas with breakfast.

  “Uh. Pancakes need flipping,” Nathan says, shaking me from my reverie.