“I don’t know, Nadia. I don’t fucking know. I wanted to tell you. I didn’t know how, or when. When was it right? When was it going to…god, I don’t know. When was it going to go any different than this?” He turns in a circle, wipes his wet face with a palm, and then returns to towering over me, turmoil written in the lines on his face. “I didn’t ask for this, Nadia. I was doing just fine on my own.”
“Oh really? Were you? I read the letter he wrote you, and he makes it sound like you weren’t.”
It’s raining harder, now. “Maybe not. I was exactly where you are, or were when you first got here. I’d quit sleeping except for a few hours. I was drinking all the time and barely eating. I’d take job after job, anything to keep working, to keep myself out of the house. I dropped to nearly one-sixty, and I’m sitting at two-thirty right now. Maybe less since I’m eating more healthily than I was before I came here.”
He stares at me, his eyes hooded, his emotions so mixed up it’s hard to read them all. “I got past that to a degree, on my own, but…I was no more over her or past my grief or okay than you. And she died almost four years ago. My point is, I had no idea he was going to do this. No clue. I had no idea how anything was going to work. What he wanted. Why do this? What did he expect? I was just fumbling my way through, Nadia. Everything I’ve said is the real, raw, God’s honest truth. Everything was legit, and heartfelt.”
I shake my head. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I choke on my own rush of words. “That book…why didn’t he write it for me? Why did you get his last book? Why couldn’t he send me out here to heal, but alone? Why did he think he had to set me up? Feeding a perfect stranger intimate details about who I am? What the fuck am I supposed to do with this, Nathan?”
“Knowing things on paper doesn’t make the discovery of them through experience any less real.” He reaches for me, but I dance out of reach. “I’m not okay with this either. It’s scary and hard. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m feeling things I don’t understand, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“You’re feeling things, are you?” I sound as bitter as I feel.
He flinches. “Hey, that’s not fair.” He thumps his chest. “Look me in the eyes and tell me you think I’ve faked anything.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Then how did you mean it? You think, what? That I’m only in this to…get something out of you? Get in your pants? You can’t honestly tell me you think that either.”
I can’t, not on either score.
I close my eyes. Just breathe. But it doesn’t help. It’s all wrong. I was falling for him—exactly as Adrian planned.
I feel so betrayed—but more by Adrian than by Nathan. And that sucks, because I can’t yell at Adrian, I can’t storm out on him.
I push past Nathan, inside my cabin. Grab my purse and head for my car.
“Where are you going?” Nathan asks, following me.
I get behind the wheel. Close the door, nearly catching his fingers in the process. He stands beside the car, and now it’s pouring. He’s soaked. His hair is pasted to his head. He seems heedless of it.
“I can’t let you go, Nadia.”
I put my finger on the start button. But I can’t push it.
My hand shakes; I want to drive away. I want to forget him. Forget these weeks at the cabin. How long have I been here? Two months? I’ve lost track, if I was ever keeping track. But I can’t. I can’t start the car. I can’t drive away.
“Don’t go, Nadia.” His big hand on the window, fingers splayed. “It was all real. All me.”
“I know.” I choke out the words. “It feels like a betrayal, though.”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you, I just…I didn’t know how.”
I look up and out the window at him. The wind is blowing the rain in sideways sheets, and he stands with feet braced wide against it, oblivious. Shirtless and enormous, all craggy rough features and deep dark eyes. His hand drops from the window, and now he sways, like a punch-drunk fighter.
“Don’t go,” he says again.
My finger curls into my palm, away from the start button. My hand rests on my knee. I can’t.
I keep seeing him—us—at the restaurant, on the bench. His bulk beside me was a bulwark against the world, against my own grief. I was just sitting there, with him. Close. His arm around me, almost intimate, almost holding me. And for a moment, I’d felt…okay.
With him.
And that was what made me panic. That feeling of being okay. It felt like I was betraying Adrian by not clutching my grief to my chest and hoarding it and stockpiling it and counting it like Scrooge McDuck with his vault of gold coins. I was swimming in my grief, like a shark through waters. Gathering it and pouring it over myself. Pain, pain, pain, hard and jagged—armfuls of shale, clattering as I gathered and flung the pieces over my head like mourning ashes.
I pull the lever and push at the door. He tugs it open and reaches in, takes my hand. Folds my hand into his—my hand is a fragile dove held in the cage of his fingers. Pulls me to my feet. Holds my hand in his against his chest. Rain is cold, driving in sharp splinters on my scalp. The wind is aggressive and hungry, a bully, shoving at me. He turns us, and now the wind is at his back and I’m sheltered in the lee of his body.
“I didn’t fall for the Nadia version of you in the book.” His forefinger touches my cheekbone, ginger, tentative; he traces across my temple, tucking a wet tendril of hair behind my ear. “I fell for you. For the you I’ve gotten to know over coffee in the morning. Over sunsets on the lake. That day we drank champagne and beer and talked all day and you fell asleep beside me.”
I swallow hard. Cold raindrops mingle on my cheek with hot tears. “You don’t know me. You know the me he told you about in the book.”
“You like your bacon crispy, almost burnt. That’s not in there. You always thought you liked your coffee black and sweet, but you’re starting to prefer it just plain black. You like reading biographies. You miss your father and you’re angry at him for abandoning you when you needed him most, and you feel guilty for feeling that way because he didn’t really abandon you. And Adrian dying only reinforces that. You’re angry at the world for taking the men you love away from you. You feel safe with me, and that’s a big deal because you weren’t sure you’d survive after he died, or if you even wanted to. You’ve never said it in so many words, but I think you were suicidal, at some point. I know I was. There was no one around to care if I lived or died, and it felt like it’d be easier and simpler to just…die. But something always stopped me. I don’t know what. And I think you know exactly how that feels. And none of that is in the book.”
It’s all tears, now, and we’re both so wet we might as well have just jumped in the lake.
“My mom gave up,” I whisper. I don’t know if he can even hear me over the wind and rain. “After Dad’s heart attack. She tried. But…she just kind of wasted away. It felt like losing her too, only slower.”
“Is she still alive?”
“Sort of.” I close my eyes. “She had a stroke several years ago. She’s paralyzed on one side, lost a lot of cognitive function. She doesn’t know me, can’t talk, just sits staring out the window, missing Dad.” I ache. “I visit her, and she just sits there, doesn’t even seem like she sees me. I feel like a shitty person and a terrible daughter, but I don’t visit her very often. It hurts, and she’s…”
“You’re alone.”
That breaks me. I sob, shake, and the only thing I can do is nod and let my forehead fall against his chest. Despite the ragged sheets of wind and sharp little pellets of rain, he’s warm, billowing heat, as if he has a furnace inside.
“I’m so lonely,” I whisper. His chest hair is tickly and soft against my cheek. His hand settles hesitantly on my back where my shoulder blades meet. “I have Tess, my best friend. I’m grateful for her. So grateful. She’s done everything for me. I’d be dead, literally, if not for her. But…”
“It’s not the same.”
“He wasn’t just my husband, he was my best friend and…he…he knew me inside out. He knew everything. He saw me, all of me, all there is. And now he’s gone and everyone is gone and I’m so fucking lonely.”
My other hand lifts, curls to nestle against his hot hard chest, and then claws in desperately, the vicious abandon of sorrow and grief and confusion and hurt and betrayal and need and desire and relief and…love, all coiling and braiding, boiling and twining, exploding and bursting and raging.
Nathan bends and scoops me up, cradles me against him with his arm under my knees and the other around my shoulders, and he carries me to his cabin and kicks closed the door—open all this time. He settles on the floor with his back to the easy chair, close to the fire. Reaches out with one long arm and snags a blanket off the couch, wraps it around his shoulders clutching the edges like a cape or cloak and closes his arms around me and now the fire beats in hot waves and his body heat and the blanket all conspire to warm me, and it’s not until I feel warmth that I realize how cold I was, how chilled to the bone.
My hair is wet, in draggled limp chunks and curls. Steam rises off me, off of his jeans. I’m curled on his lap, resting against his chest.
“It’s not fair that I don’t have a book on you,” I murmur.
“The book on me is…me. Ask me anything.”
I shake my head. I can’t think of anything to ask. And then something occurs to me. “Why do you even like me? I must be miserable company.”
A gentle laugh, a shake and a huff. “Because I’m just as miserable company. We get each other. We don’t have to pretend.”
I tilt my head to look up at him. “Why did he pick you?”
He exhales slowly, through his teeth. “I can only guess.”
“Try to guess, then.”
“Why don’t you try to guess why me? You know him better than I do.”
“You said it, I think—because you know what it’s like to be where I am. You’re the only person who could understand well enough to be around me in a way that would ease me out of my shell.” I feel the rightness of it as I say it; I rest my head against his chest again, close my eyes and let my thoughts flow. “And…I think in some ways, because you’re nothing like him.”
He nods. “Yeah, I can see that.”
“I mean, in a lot of ways, you’re total opposites. It makes it easier to…I don’t know—to be around you, because nothing about you reminds me of him or makes me think of him. You’re totally you.”
“I didn’t like feeling like I was lying to you, Nadia. So many times I’d sit there, those silences we have sometimes, and I’d be trying to figure out how to tell you, and it always just sounded…I don’t know, crazy. Like, unless I showed you everything, would you even have believed me? And…he told me not to tell you. Or, not to show you the book because he felt like you weren’t ready yet, but…I guess that seems like the same thing. Amounts to it, in my mind.”
“I’m angry at him,” I say. “For so much.”
“Tell me.”
“For leaving me. He promised me he would never leave. Before I knew he was sick, I knew something was wrong, and he promised me he wouldn’t leave. And he left. He left me. He left me. And now this. Setting me up with you, giving you the book, when I would have killed for another word from him, for anything from him. I’m mad at him for trying to force me to move on. He sent me here, let me wallow in my grief for a whole year and then sent me here. And I thought it was a coincidence you were here, but it was him all along. He schemed this whole thing. To make me move on.”
“And you don’t want to move on.”
I shake my head. “No, I don’t.” I feel my wet dress sticking to my chest and thighs. “Moving on feels like betraying him. And I guess part of me now is thinking, like, he did this on purpose, because he knew me so fucking well that he’d have known I would be angry at his meddling in my life even after he’s dead, and he’d know that that might push me away from him. From the not wanting to move on.” I laugh bitterly. “It’s so complicated.”
“But it’s not all that complicated, if you boil it all down.” He shrugs.
“Boil it down for me, then.”
He touches my chin, and I look up at him. “You’re left with a few simple things. One, you’ll never forget him. You can’t and won’t ever replace him, who he is to you, what he meant to you, what you had together. Two, he’s gone. The brutal truth is, he’s dead and you’re alive. The memory of him isn’t him, and I know you know that on a brain level, but on a more visceral level, you’re not there yet. You still think you can hold on to him by refusing to let go. Three, you’re young still, and you have a long life ahead of you to fill however you want. He wanted you to fill your life with happiness. I’m guessing he wrote you a letter too. No, I don’t want to read it—it’s yours. But I can guess that he said something along those lines. Because he did know you, and he knew you’d resist.”
“That feels like more than three things.”
“More simply put, then: you’ll never totally forget him or replace him, you can’t and won’t and shouldn’t. He’s dead, and nothing is going to change that. You have a life to live, and only you can choose what to do with it.”
“Easy, right?” Sarcasm drips from the two little words.
“No.” No elaboration, just the answer, because we both get it.
Silence. I look up at him, and his eyes drill into me. Search me. He’s unrushed. Patient. Still and gentle and strong.
“What do you want?” I whisper it to him. “With me, I mean.”
“More.” Soft, and his usually rough voice is almost smooth, but that’s just because he’s nearly whispering. He’s admitting something at great cost: risk, vulnerability. I could and might reject him—again.
The fire crackles, the only sound. Except my hammering heart.
His hand cradles my face, his palm like sandpaper and leather. He’s waiting. For me to get up, to tell him again that I can’t, that I don’t know, but I do know and something inside me, a tender just-germinated seed of something tiny knows that I can. And that I want to.
I’m warm, wrapped in the blanket and in his arms.
I shift to sit more upright, so my face is closer to his. Look at him, and tell him yes with my eyes even though my voice is caught in the hammering trap of my throat. My hands rest on his chest.
He angles his head to one side. Closes in. “I’m gonna kiss you, Nadia.”
And then he does.
It’s soft and slow. The beard is unfamiliar and ticklish, brushing rough against my upper lip and somehow soft at the same time, and his lips are warm and dry, and they feel cracked against mine and taste of rainwater. It is an unhurried first kiss. Gentle and questing at first, waiting for the pull-away. But it doesn’t come because I don’t want to pull away. I’m okay, here, in his arms, in the shelter of the blanket and his body and the cabin and the forest and the weeks and months of time to ache and hurt and question and rage.
It’s all right to kiss Nathan.
I’m giving myself permission.
He pulls away, first. Only a little. Enough for his lips to move, a barely vocalized question, his eyes too close to mine so they seem more like one cyclopean eye. “Okay?”
I nod. My fingers trail up from his chest to his shoulder, feeling the thick hard layer of muscle over dense bone, and then further up the side of his neck, and I momentarily feel his pulse drumming fast under my fingertips—he’s nervous too—and then I tangle my fingers in his beard.
“Kiss me again,” I whisper.
He shakes his head. Brushes at my damp hair. “Nope.”
I frown, pull away further. “No?”
A smirk, small and sly. “You kiss me.”
I weave my fingers into his beard; pull him back to my lips. “Fine.”
And now I kiss him, I lift up and I curl my other hand around the back of his head in the soft feathery damp weight of his
hair and I let feelings for him well up inside me. Let them rise. Let them exist. They’ve been buried inside, deep down, locked in a cupboard. Growing, until the hinges were creaking and fit to burst.
He’s good.
He’s kind.
He’s patient.
He understands my bad days, my ugly moods, my morose silences, my simmering anger. He doesn’t judge me for them or let them hurt him because they’re not about him.
He’s handsome.
He has gentle, creative hands that can tease artful life out of dead wood.
I kiss him, slowly, and let the things I feel escape, all of their complicated whirring wings like a twisting murmuration of starlings whispering and fluttering out of their too-small cupboard and let them escape and let their song begin to rise.
And I think of the title of Adrian’s last book, the one he didn’t give to me: Redemption’s Song.
I get it, Adrian. I hear your song.
I’ll always love Adrian. I won’t forget him. I’ll always have days where I miss him. I’ll hear a song and think of him. I’ll pass by a restaurant downtown where we had dinner after a movie, and I’ll see his ghost and mine walking hand in hand in the sweltering Atlanta evening and for moment I know I’ll almost hear his voice telling me how he’d rewrite the movie, which is why he usually only read nonfiction in his spare time.
But those moments will pass.
He’ll still be gone, and I’ll still be here, alive, on earth, with a future I still have to fill with memories, with life. I can’t live in the past: he’s not there any more than he’s here. I’ll have the memories, the time with him. His love.
He’s loving me from beyond the grave.
He was telling me how much he loved me—he has been, through this whole thing. The cabin is his love letter to me. Each item was his voice and his hands, caressing me. Reminding me that he loved me that I was his and he was mine and he knows me. But the cabin was also him telling me that I still have to remember to live.
The Cabin Page 24