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The Almost Wife

Page 12

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz


  “You okay?” Nathan called.

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

  Lightning cracked above our heads, briefly illuminating the old barn ahead, and thunder boomed almost immediately. The storm was on top of us. We shouldn’t be out here, I thought. We shouldn’t be exposed like this.

  Nathan took my hand and tugged me forward. “We’ll do it together,” he said.

  But then I saw her. Past Nathan, on the hunt camp road, the hazy figure waited for me. “No,” I murmured, pulling back.

  “Kira,” he said firmly. “As you said, we need to find Olive before Madison does. Or we could lose her trail to this rain. Now let’s go.”

  “Okay,” I said, breathing deeply. Okay, I told myself. I can do this. I held Nathan’s hand tightly, like a frightened child, and, clutching my bag to my chest, stepped forward, walking the road I had driven with my father when we headed to the cabin on our last hunting trip, keeping my eyes on the figure ahead. She grew clearer and clearer as we came closer. Her hunter-orange cap and vest, the oversized camouflage jacket and pants, the rifle in her hand. When we reached the old barn, its gray boards crumbling at the base as its wood foundation rotted into the ground, the girl, the frightened twelve-year-old girl I had been, nodded once and came to walk beside me, a fetch matching my gait step for step.

  I would find Olive. I could stop Madison from taking her. I could do this.

  The long grass parted as we pushed through it, further soaking my yoga pants. My runners were soggy. Rain dribbled down my face and into my cleavage. The drops of water on the young trees reflected the light from our flashlights as we rounded the corner to my father’s hunt camp.

  The meadow around it was now overgrown with young sugar maple trees. The sauna was still standing. The outhouse was out of view behind the cabin. Beyond that, on the far side of the field, camouflaged and hidden by bush at the forest edge, I knew I’d find the tree stand my father had erected there. I used to love it as a child—I thought of it as my treehouse, not a platform for hunting. My father had rarely used it because the deer knew when it was hunting season and disappeared from the main tracks. We no longer saw them along the roads or in the fields. A hunter had to go deep into the forest, where the deer took sanctuary, coming out of hiding only to forage in the dark before the hunters were active at dawn, and again after sundown, when the hunt was over for the day. I marveled, as a child, at the intelligence of these animals, how they learned the rhythms of the hunt, when it began, when it ended. When hunting season was over, the deer returned to their usual foraging patterns, often grazing in farmers’ fields or crossing the road in the morning or evening with little fear.

  The cabin itself was small, built on a concrete slab that served as its floor. It had cedar siding, and rainwater cascaded from a metal roof that sheltered a small porch in front of the door. Even though it was solidly built, the forest had begun to reclaim it. Rot crept up the siding from the bottom, and a small tree had wedged its way through the floor of the deck on one side.

  My fetch looked back in my direction once before climbing the steps. Walking right through the door, she disappeared into the cabin.

  “I don’t think Buddy’s going to pick up Olive’s scent now, not in all this rain,” Nathan said. “It’s too heavy. Or he’s picking up too many scents.”

  Buddy zigzagged through the long grass and young trees around the cabin, excited by several trails, probably not just Olive’s, but Madison’s and Sarah’s as well. Or the many scent trails of the deer that lived in this forest. Oh, to be a dog. To take in the world through smell, to time travel through scent, breathing in events that had happened an hour, a day, a week before. The past lingered like ghosts all around Buddy. But then, this forest had its share of ghosts for me too.

  “I’ll check the cabin,” I said.

  “I’ll keep working Buddy out here.”

  I ran up the stairs to the deck and tried the door. It was locked, but the window on it was broken. Recently, by the look of it—either Olive or Madison breaking in. A rock would have done the trick. Rather than retrieve my set of keys from my bag, I reached in and turned the knob from the inside, careful not to cut myself, then took a deep breath and, for the first time since my father’s death, walked inside.

  21

  The cabin was dark, as the power had long ago been shut off, and smelled musty, of mold and mice. There was a layer of dust on the gun cabinet and the phone hanging on the wall, and mouse droppings littered the table. The corners of the ceiling were canopied with spiderwebs. But our mugs were still there on the floor where they had fallen, crusted with the dried remains of coffee. My father sucked his coffee through sugar cubes held between his teeth. I’d learned to do the same, and to drink it at all hours of the day, even in the evening with supper, so that at night I lay wide awake on my cot, vibrating under the influence of caffeine and fear. The bedding on the cots was worn floral sheets cast down from the summer house years before and covered in rough gray camp blankets. A Hudson Bay blanket lay over the back of a chair near the woodstove.

  One bed was made up neatly, but the other was rumpled. Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed. Olive, or Madison or Sarah, trying to warm up, perhaps after being soaked by the rain. I touched a dark spot on a blanket; it was wet. The blankets had been thrown back hurriedly, likely when Olive or one of the women heard us outside, and there were wet shoe prints in the dust leading to the back door. I shone the light on them for a closer look. Runners, I thought. Likely Olive, then, or maybe Sarah. Whoever it was, I must have just spooked her.

  “Olive?” I called, though I knew she must be hiding outside in the forest. There was no place to hide in here, and little in the way of furniture. Just the two single beds, a table, two chairs and the small potbellied woodstove that we had used to heat the place. The door on it stood ajar, and wood was arranged inside as if someone had been contemplating making a fire but hadn’t gotten around to it. Perhaps Olive hadn’t felt confident enough to do so. I doubt she’d ever lit a campfire, much less got a woodstove going.

  My father had kept kerosene lanterns on hand for power outages, and I shone the light on two of them on the shelf now, then searched the room with the flashlight until I found a box of Red Bird matches on the windowsill. I lit the lanterns, bringing the inside of the cabin to life—and all at once I was back there on my father’s final day.

  We had arrived at the camp before lunch, carrying our hunting gear and a bag of rice pies and jelly pigs. The lights were already on inside, and when I opened the cabin door, I found Teresa waiting for us at the small pine table. She’d made a fire and the cabin was warm, a relief from the November cold outside. But even so, Teresa wore a bright-blue puffer jacket.

  “What is she doing here?” I asked my father.

  “You and I have some things to talk about,” he said as he closed the door behind us. “I asked Teresa to help.”

  “Help? With what?”

  It was only much later that I realized Teresa was there as a sort of counselor. Before my parents’ separation, my father had had long conversations with Teresa in our summer house kitchen, conversations that came to an end when I entered the room, conversations I now understood were all about me. Teresa was a home care worker, not a social worker, not a counselor, though I thought she viewed herself as one. She was too quick to intervene, to give advice. Even now, I imagined her sitting at the kitchen table with her clients, offering them unaccredited counseling sessions along with a healthy serving of mashed potatoes, applesauce and cabbage rolls. I expect she felt she had missed her calling for lack of an education.

  Teresa stood up. “Actually, I asked your father if I could talk with you, with both of you. I’ve been worried about your dad. He’s been very sick for a long time—”

  “Sick?” I asked, my heart speeding up.

  “Depressed,” Teresa said. “Do you understand what that means?”

  I gave her the look. Of course I knew what
it meant. I wasn’t a baby. I glanced at my father then. The anguish in his face. I had spent the time since my parents’ divorce not really looking at him. He seemed so much older now, and drawn, like he had been sick for a long time. He looked smaller, somehow, unkept. Depressed, Teresa had said. That meant he was sad, really sad. Sick, but sick in the head.

  Teresa smoothed a strand of hair out of my face. “I’ve also been worried about you, about the things you say about your father, what you call him, things a child shouldn’t say or think about a parent. When your dad told me he was worried too, I suggested we all get together and chat about it.” She sat back down. “Come sit with me.”

  My father took a seat on the nearby cot, but I remained standing, wary now. “Look, I’m only here because the judge said I had to visit Dad. That doesn’t mean I have to talk to you.” I looked pointedly at my father. “Either of you.”

  My dad reached out to take my hand, but I shook him off. I thought, for a moment, that he might cry, that I might cry, so I turned away, to look out the window. The day was overcast. I could leave, walk back to the summer house, but it was a long walk, and snow had begun to fall. A crow on a nearby branch eyed me through the window, its head tilted. It seemed unnaturally, eerily large.

  “What you just said, the way you just acted . . .” My father paused. “That’s exactly the kind of thing we’d like to talk to you about. You told the social worker you were afraid of me. Kira, can you remember a time when I hurt you?”

  I snorted. “Plenty,” I said. It was a response I’d heard so often from my mother.

  “Name one.”

  Had my father ever hurt me? When I wound back through my fragmented childhood memories, nothing of substance surfaced. He got angry at me now and again, mostly over the messes I left on the table and in my room. When my mother yelled at him, he yelled back, and that had scared me. But I couldn’t remember a single incident where he had hurt me. I just felt an overwhelming sense of fear in his presence.

  “You scare me,” I said.

  “But why?”

  I didn’t answer. He leaned forward on the cot and put his head in both hands. We all listened to the crackle of the fire in the potbellied stove. The cabin smelled of woodsmoke, creosote.

  I finally sat on a chair.

  Teresa put a hand on the table between us. “I think your mother led you to believe you should be afraid of your father,” she said, “even though there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Why would she do that?” I said. “That’s dumb.”

  “Your mother is very angry at your father,” Teresa said.

  “Mom has every right to be,” I said. “He’s is a cheater, an alcoholic. He makes life miserable for her.” My mother’s words.

  “I’m not any of those things,” my father said quietly.

  I looked to either side of him, but not at his face. I had never seen my father spend time with other women during his marriage to my mother, and he wasn’t a heavy drinker, as my mother claimed. But she had never liked how he went off to have a beer with his hunting buddies from the island. They’d always fought about it afterward. So it must have been bad.

  “You forced me and Mom to live in poverty after the divorce,” I said. Something else my mother claimed.

  Dad breathed out heavily. “I pay child support, Kira. But your mother has made her own choices, sometimes foolish choices. She felt she deserved a better lifestyle than she could afford, and overspent. When she ran low, she came running to me. I gave her more money at first, but when it became a habit, I stopped. We are divorced, after all. She has to make her own way.”

  “You left us,” I said. “You don’t love us anymore.”

  “Oh, Kira, I may have stopped loving your mother, but I will never stop loving you. It’s just . . . your mother doesn’t always see things clearly.”

  My father glanced at Teresa, and she nodded sideways. Go on, tell her.

  “Your mother is a wounded woman, Kira,” he said. “Her father did hurt her.”

  I knew about her father. My mother had told me, too much. Things that made me want to cover my ears. But I listened because I knew Mom wanted me to listen; she needed me to listen.

  Teresa took my hand. “Your mother has accused your father of no end of horrible things, to keep you away from him, to keep you to herself. Maybe, in her way, she is trying to protect you, but there are no grounds for her accusations.”

  Dad looked up at me. “Kira, I just couldn’t handle the way your mother acted anymore. That’s why I left. But I should have taken you with me.”

  “Your mother has been lying to you,” Teresa said. “Your dad isn’t scary. And you shouldn’t treat him like you do, calling him names and swearing at him. Honey, your dad is afraid he’s losing you.”

  “I’m afraid I have lost you,” Dad said.

  “You have,” I said, pulling my hand away from Teresa’s. My mother would like that I’d said that. She would think it was funny. I knew even as I said it that I would offer the comment to her as I might a bouquet of wildflowers.

  “I don’t believe you,” Teresa said. “That’s your mother talking, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head as the urge to defend my mother welled up. It had been my job to defend her, against my father and sometimes others, like my teachers, like Teresa. “My mother doesn’t tell me what to say. I make up my own mind.”

  “I believe you still love your father,” Teresa said. “But you’ve pushed your feelings down deep inside, to please your mom.”

  In that instant, I felt, at first, terrified, because some part of me knew she was right. And then I felt enraged. I hated Teresa. This nosy, irritating woman who always spoke her mind and stuck her nose in other people’s business. I hated Teresa the way I hated my father. Blindly, for reasons I could never fully define.

  “No, I hate him. I hate him!” I shouted, then turned directly to my father. “I hate you! I absolutely fucking hate you!”

  Teresa, shocked, sucked in air. “Kira!” she said.

  I picked up the cast-iron kettle, a clunky black thing still hot from the stove, and wielded it by the handle as if to hit my father with it. But I hesitated and beat the table instead. I hit, hit, hit it, leaving crescent moon–shaped dents in the wood. Bang, bang, bang.

  Teresa took the kettle from me as if I were a toddler who had gotten hold of her daddy’s hammer.

  But the storm inside me only grew bigger. I pushed everything off the kitchen table, the mugs filled with coffee, the teaspoons and sugar bowl, the glass salt and pepper shakers. It all clattered to the floor. The shakers spun in the same direction, like ice-skaters.

  My father hugged me to stop me from doing any more damage to the cabin or myself, and I struggled in his arms.

  “Kira, that’s enough,” he said slowly, his words thick with fatigue.

  “I hate you!” I cried again. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” But I settled into my father’s embrace, my head against his shoulder, my arms wrapped around him with such need that I could have been saying I love you! My father ran a hand over my hair, shushing me, and kissed my head. The protective numbness inside me started to melt, and something else surfaced through the cracks. I began to shake, overwhelmed by repressed emotion that I fought to dampen. I couldn’t love him. I couldn’t love both him and my mother. To do so was a betrayal of my mother. And yet I knew I would feel split in two like this as long as my father was alive. In that moment, I wished he were dead.

  It was then, cheek pressed to my father’s chest, looking out the window at the crow looking back, that I realized what I must do, here at the hunt camp, before my father took me home. What I must do to prove myself to my mother and protect myself; what I must do to end this torment.

  I just wasn’t sure yet how I would get away with it.

  22

  I smoothed a hand over the crescent-shaped marks I’d left in the pine table fifteen years before. Then startled as Nathan appeared at the door.

&nb
sp; “Find anything?” he asked. “Was Olive here?”

  “I think so. Somebody sure as hell was.” I glanced around the room with him at the broken window, the shards of glass on the floorboards, the wet pillow, the opened stove door and the footprints through the dust on the floor. I was still shaking with rage, or grief, or adrenaline—I hardly knew which anymore.

  Seeing my face twisted with emotion, Nathan pulled me into a hug. “Hey, hey,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  But I didn’t explain. He already knew part of the story, and I had never found a way to tell him, or anyone, the rest.

  “My mother always hated this cabin,” I said instead, as I pulled away from him to wipe my face. “Even before she and my father were divorced.”

  “Well, she would, wouldn’t she?” he said, looking around. Water dripping from his rain jacket pooled at his feet.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “This was your dad’s getaway. He took you out here to train, or on his hunts, without her. Your mom was jealous of anything that didn’t include her, where she wasn’t the center of attention. Remember how she bullied her way into managing your training? That was always your dad’s thing. After your folks split, she just took right over.”

  “That’s not the way it was.” Not with the training, at least, I thought. But then here I was, still defending her. “I was living with Mom. It made sense that she would take me to events.”

  He sunk his hands into his jeans pockets. “And when she did, she pushed me out of the picture.”

  “You still competed,” I said. “We saw each other at races.”

  “Yeah, but your mom made it clear she didn’t want me around.”

  He’s a distraction, my mother had said of Nathan. You need to focus on your training, on the events. She said the same of any friend I made, but especially Nathan. She called his mom, Teresa, an interfering bitch, and her dislike of the woman extended to her son. When we stayed at the summer house, I had to sneak out to see Nathan, lie in order to meet up with him. It seemed that habit had extended into my adulthood.

 

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