by Will Weaver
“So how are things at home?” Bill asks Sarah.
“Fine, thanks,” she says quickly. “We finally got our boat in. My parents are busy getting the place ready for winter, that sort of thing,” she says.
He narrows his eyes. “Ready for winter?”
“It needs … some winterizing. It’s actually our summer place—The Cottage, we call it.”
“I see,” Bill says as he passes the casserole dish to his wife.
“We must meet your parents, soon!” Mackenzie’s mom says, and touches Sarah’s arm.
“For sure,” Sarah says, matching her with cheeriness. “But they love being on the river so much that it’s hard to get them away from there. I mean, it’s so pretty where we live.”
Bill Phelps makes a throat noise, and the dinner continues with a focus on Mackenzie’s tennis career. Once or twice Sarah is certain that Mackenzie’s dad is staring at her.
After dinner, she and Mackenzie do the dishes while Jane takes Mitzy for a walk. Mr. Phelps watches television, though sometimes he watches Mackenzie and Sarah—Sarah can feel his gaze.
Suddenly Mackenzie’s cell phone plays. She opens it. “It’s Django!” she mouths to Sarah, and disappears up the stairs.
Then it’s just Sarah in the kitchen. She rattles the dishes loudly as she works.
Bill gets up and comes into the kitchen behind her.
“Hi,” Sarah says stupidly.
He glances around, then back to her. “I want you to know that I know.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know that you don’t have a home on the Mississippi River,” he adds, keeping his voice low. “I’ve checked at the courthouse and in the plat maps, and there’s no record of you.”
“It … we inherited the cottage from my grandmother,” Sarah says quickly. “It’s probably still in her name.”
“Don’t lie. You’re only getting yourself in deeper,” he says. “I’ve also made some calls to the Hubbard County courthouse. Nobody down there has ever heard of your family.”
Sarah swallows. She’s rinsing silverware and just happens to have a butter knife in her hand.
“Which means just one thing,” Bill continues, keeping his voice down. He glances around. “You and your family are Travelers.”
“What?!” Sarah exclaims. She manufactures a laugh, but it comes out fake and strangled.
“So let me give it to you straight,” Bill says, leaning closer. He has her cornered in the kitchen. She can smell his breath; it’s sour and grapy with wine. “I suggest that you just disappear. From this community. From this school. You have no future here. If you don’t, I’ll blow the whistle on you; and the sheriff will find you—wherever you and your family are squatting.”
A door bangs.
“Mitzy saw a squirrel!” Jane says from the hallway. “And she barked at it—as if she’s any danger to a squirrel!”
Bill Phelps pivots to pick up a dirty plate and pretends to be rinsing it.
“Hey, you two don’t have to do the dishes!” Jane says cheerfully as she comes into the kitchen.
“No problem,” Sarah says, slipping the knife into the dishwasher.
“Just trying to get to know Sarah a little better,” Bill says.
“That’s so sweet of you,” his wife says, and gives him a quick kiss. “Now, you go read your newspaper, and I’ll help Sarah finish up.”
Luckily, the dishes are nearly all put into the dishwasher. “I guess I’ll head up and see if Mackenzie’s off the phone,” Sarah says.
Once out of sight up the carpeted stairs, she pauses to grip the railing and get her breath. Her heart is slamming inside her chest like an insane clock. Mackenzie laughs once behind her bedroom wall. Sarah heads for the hall bathroom, where she locks the door. She sits down on the closed toilet seat and looks around: the shiny bathtub, the faucets, the gleaming chrome, the fluffy rugs on the tile floor, the lineup of shampoo and conditioners and colored body washes. The whole room tilts as if she might faint—but she keeps taking deep breaths until her heartbeat slows.
“Hey,” Mackenzie says when Sarah enters the room.
Sarah musters a smile.
Mackenzie cocks her head. “Are you all right? Your face is, like, white.”
“Sure,” Sarah says. “I think I ate too much. Or something.”
In the morning she wakes up exhausted. Mackenzie’s bedroom is too hot, the bed is too soft, and Mitzy kept nuzzling around all night on top of the covers.
“Shower?” Mackenzie mumbles.
“No rush. You go first,” Sarah says.
As water hisses behind the bathroom door, Sarah looks around the bedroom. It’s totally girly in whites and pinks, with wall posters of boy bands. It feels like a room from a movie set or a museum. A diorama dedicated to showing how teenage American girls once lived. She has a vision of shabby people from the future passing through this very bedroom on a guided tour; they murmur and point at things in disbelief. The marked path on the white carpet is worn down to its mesh by rough sandals and boots. Mackenzie’s big bed is roped off. The closet and the chest of drawers are open for ease of viewing. All the clothes. The endless pairs of shoes. The tour ends at the bright bathroom, with its soaps and bottles of shampoo and conditioner, its long, fluffy towels. In the line of gawkers are the little girls from the Travelers’ minivan. They are now teenagers but even prettier with their cornrow hair—and when the museum guide is not looking, they reach across to touch the soft, stuffed animals on the bed. Examine the tubes of lipstick and eyeliner in the bathroom. With a guilty look over their shoulders, they quickly replace things exactly as they were and shuffle forward. The line is moving again—it’s a busy day at the Museum of the American Teenage Girl.
After Mackenzie finishes her shower, the bathroom is humid, and Sarah locks the door and takes her turn. A long, slow shower with her eyes closed. Afterward, as she dries off, she looks about the bathroom. Its big mirrors. Its counters full of beauty products, perfumes, lotions. She rummages through a drawer of deodorants and soaps and nail polish. Takes—okay, steals—an unwrapped bar of lavender-scented soap. It’s not like she’s ever coming back to this house.
After her Thursday-night sleepover at Mackenzie’s house and a long day at school on Friday, Sarah (and her stolen bar of lavender soap) comes home on the orange bus. Miles is waiting just out of sight in the woods, as usual.
“Ready for a fun-filled weekend?” he calls to her.
She stands unmoving as the bus rumbles away.
“What?” he says. “It was a joke.”
She plods down the ditch, then past him.
“Bad day?” Miles asks.
“You don’t want to know,” she mumbles as they head down the forest path.
“That’s why I don’t go to regular school,” Miles says behind her.
They soon arrive on the ridge above the cabin. She pauses to look down at the scene: the shack, the little wooden-walled add-on room she has to share with stinky Miles. Toward the woods the narrow, square outdoor toilet with its cold seat, poopy-stinky smell, and cobwebs on the ceiling. The sawmill, the junk pile—the little corral where Emily hops up and down when she sees Sarah.
“So how was school?” her mother calls from across the yard. She’s reading manuscripts on the little front porch.
“It wasn’t—it isn’t,” Sarah says. She drops her backpack on the porch with a thud, slumps onto the front steps, and begins to sob.
“Artie!” her mother calls, and soon her parents are on either side of her.
“What happened?” her father asks.
In a blubbery rush of words she tells them everything.
“Whoa, what a creep!” Miles mutters.
“It’s tennis,” Nat says.
“Huh?” Sarah says, looking up.
“He didn’t want you to compete with Mackenzie,” Nat adds.
“Obviously,” Artie adds.
“We all agree,” Miles says.
“So?” Sar
ah says. “It doesn’t change anything; I can’t go back to school.” Her chest starts heaving again.
Miles and his parents look at one another.
“I’ll go crazy here!” Sarah says to them, jerking her head toward the cabin’s door.
“What’s wrong with here?” Miles asks.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MILES
THE NEXT WEEK AS HALLOWEEN approaches, the weather turns suddenly colder—more proof that both the news and the weather reports can’t be trusted. The motorbike ride to town is downright freezing, but Miles and his mom score a pumpkin. It’s no bigger than a grapefruit and more yellow than orange, plus it has a flat side. Back home inside the toasty-warm cabin, the whole family gathers around to stare at it. No one says anything. Finally Sarah breaks the silence. “That’s the world’s saddest-looking pumpkin.”
“Not a good year for pumpkins,” Miles adds, warming his hands by the woodstove. The temperature outside is thirty degrees, but it’s eighty in the cabin thanks to Art, who has become Mr. Firewood.
“And you don’t want to know what I paid for that thing!” Nat says.
“Why did you buy it, anyway?” Sarah asks. “It’s not like we’re going to get any trick-or-treaters out here.”
“We need to keep our family traditions—celebrate things. Otherwise, what do we have?” Art says.
They all look at one another. Art talking about family togetherness is more than a little strange, but he has been different—more with the program—ever since Sarah’s run-in with Mr. Phelps. It’s as if the incident was some weird kind of wake-up call to fatherhood.
“Okay, then—let’s carve our giant pumpkin!” Sarah says sarcastically.
“We should make a design first,” Art says.
“I agree,” Nat says.
Miles flashes on Birch Bay, when his grandparents were still alive and he was really small—when time was different, when a day was a week long.
“We each come up with a drawing,” Art says. “Then we have a vote—and the winner gets to carve the pumpkin.”
Miles and Sarah look at each other. Sarah rolls her eyes. “This is, like, fourth grade.”
“Fourth grade was fun with you two,” Art says.
“I’ve got paper and pencils,” Nat says.
“And no rush, everybody,” Miles says. “We have all night.”
“No kidding,” Sarah grumbles, but sets to work on her drawing; she’s careful not to let Miles see it. The whole family sits around the table, hunched over their drawings, shielding their design from one another with one hand and drawing with the other.
“No peeking!” Sarah says to Miles.
“I wasn’t!” he throws back.
Sarah has the winning design (they’ve all agreed not to vote for themselves). Using the flat side of the pumpkin as a forehead, she carefully carves out long ears and horizontal eyes to create a decent-looking goat face.
“Emily!” Miles says. “That’s pretty good.”
“Watch this,” Sarah says. When she lights a little candle inside, Emily’s bright, narrow eyes stare back.
Artie leans back. Looks around. “This must be what it was like,” he says.
“What what was like?” Sarah asks.
“Families. Way back in the day.”
No one says anything.
“I mean, before cell phones and internet and television and even telephones,” he continues.
“You mean before electricity,” Nat asks.
“Yeah,” Miles says. “Not only off the grid—no grid.”
“If you think about it,” Artie says, “what was there to do?”
“Nothing!” Sarah says. She tries to be sarcastic, but it doesn’t work.
“Exactly,” Miles says. “You had to make stuff up. Like we’re doing right now.”
She gives him a dark look—as if he’s a traitor for siding with a parent.
“Play games, sing songs,” Art continues.
“Forget it! I’m not singing,” Sarah says.
“Or do nothing at all,” Nat says, and leans against Art.
Sarah rolls her eyes. Wood crackles in the stove, and in the small, warm cabin they sit and watch the flicker of the fire in the tiny glass window of the stove’s door.
Much later that night Miles awakens. It’s deep dark. There’s a different scent—a thicker, cooler air. He listens: The woods outside the cabin are quieter than usual. No night sounds at all. No hooting owls, no night critters scampering across the roof. He steps quietly over Sarah and goes to the cabin door.
Snow! Giant, wet flakes falling like albino leaves. The ground is totally covered; the trees, too. Trick or treat from the weather gods. Back in the day, back in his old life as a kid, the first snow would have been a thrill. Now he is filled with dread. He breathes deeply, filling his lungs with the clean, wet air—several breaths of it—until he’s calmer.
“Winter’s coming,” his father says behind him.
Miles jumps. “You scared the bejesus out of me.”
“Sorry,” his father says as he continues to stare at the falling snow.
“I hope we can do this,” his father says.
“Do what?” Miles says, though he knows what his father means.
“Get through the winter. Go back home someday.”
“‘Back home’ might not be there,” Miles replies, turning sideways to his father.
His father looks straight at him.
They return their eyes to the window and are silent as they watch the falling snow.
At first light, Miles takes his gun and slips outside. In the new snow, dog prints circle the burner barrel (Sarah has been feeding him). New snow is an open book—if you know how to read it. He heads up the ridge above the cabin, but the snow is unmarked except for a line of heart-shaped deer hooves unwinding like a necklace across the throat of the woods.
Walking quietly on the soft snow, he eases through the oak trees. Heel to toe. Slowly. As soundlessly as he can. Ahead, a moving shadow—a patch of brown: a deer among the tree trunks! He lifts his gun; a fawn pauses to look around. It’s an easy shot, but he holds his fire: The weather is still not cold enough to keep the meat. The little deer bobs its head and flicks its stubby, brown-and-white tail—then picks up a scent (Miles) and bounds off. It’s a deer he would never have seen without the white backdrop of snow.
Down by the river there are mink tracks along the shore. Fox tracks, too. A fox leaves a single-file track: Its two rear paws step exactly where the front paws have landed. Less energy expended—especially in snow—and fewer tracks left behind. In nature, everything makes sense.
He is about to head back to the cabin when he sees the old dog. At first he thinks he’s dead—frozen in place—as he approaches him from behind, but his neck is erect. The old mutt with the tattered collar watches the cabin and yard. Miles steps on a branch, which cracks and flips forward. The motion, not the noise, startles the dog. He whirls toward Miles, and the hair on his back goes up like the dorsal fin on a shark. They have a long moment—two predators in full eye contact—then, scrambling, the dog runs, throwing snow from his claws. Despite his lame leg, he is incredibly fast. Once into the riverbank brush, he pauses to look back.
“Hey!” Miles says, and pitches a stick at him.
The dog does not flinch. He’s either stupid or afraid of nothing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SARAH
“WANT TO HELP ME WITH some firewood?” her father asks from the doorway to the bedroom.
Sarah shrugs. “I guess. It’s not like I’m doing much.” She puts down her vampire novel, which she has reread for the tenth time.
Outside, they haul and stack dead limbs that her father has cut and sawed by hand.
“Do you miss regular school?” her father asks.
She shrugs angrily.
“You probably met at least some nice kids there,” he says, taking one end of a heavy limb; together, they swing it onto the pile.
“
Sort of,” she mumbles.
“Any boys?” her father teases.
“The main reason I liked school was for the toilets and hot running water,” she says sharply.
Her father keeps working in silence.
“I mean,” Sarah continues, “how are we going to, like, bathe when it’s winter?”
“Bathe? I thought you’d never ask!” Miles says as he comes around the side of the sawmill. He’s totally sweaty but as happy as a clam.
“In the river, I suppose,” Sarah says. “Cut a hole in the ice. Jump in. Well, forget that.”
“No, no, no,” Miles says impatiently. He gestures to them, then calls for Nat. “I have a surprise for you!” he announces to his family.
Sarah brings up the rear as they follow him around the corner of the sawmill. Attached to one side of it is a lean-to eight feet square. Board walls. Wooden door. A small iron pipe poking through the roof.
“This thing you’ve been working on,” Nat says, “what is it?”
“Step inside and you’ll see,” Miles says. He couldn’t be more pleased. This whole environmental disaster has been just perfect for him, Sarah thinks.
Cautiously, Nat opens the door and goes in, followed by Artie and Sarah. There are four sturdy wooden benches, like bunk beds—one on each wall.
“I don’t get it,” Sarah asks. “We already made an extra bedroom.”
“It’s a sauna,” Artie says. He smiles widely.
Miles beams from the doorway. “Exactly! That’s how people bathed in the old days. Take a sauna, then take a roll in the snow.”
“A roll in the snow?!” Sarah says.
“It would certainly get you clean,” Nat says, looking directly at Miles.
Who of course misses her point.
“Do you guys like it?” he says enthusiastically.
“It’s great,” Artie says. “I thought you were building a storage shed or something.”
Miles is so pleased he actually giggles.