Anna pushes two chairs together and stretches out, singing to herself anxiously, near where Maeve sprawls on the floor. Justin paces, turning his phone on, then off again, then on. The light comes and goes on his screen.
“Anything?” Maeve says. She’s done the same thing herself a dozen times in the past twenty minutes. She’s itching to do it now, her phone held loosely in her hand.
“Works great.” He drops to a crouch next to her, angling the phone and ducking his lips, then snaps a photo of them both. “I mean, there’s no signal, obviously. Why, was there a reason you wanted to call someone?” Maeve rolls her eyes. She hopes he can keep this up, his good humor—hers is already mostly gone.
Dan walks into the room. He’s been securing all the exterior doors and windows—Why? Maeve wonders. Against what?—and checking one more time for damage to the building’s structure, but now he slides in beside Karo to look over Sadie’s shoulder at the radio.
“Protocol,” he says—to the group, ostensibly, but pointedly to Maeve—“emergency protocol at High Water Center for the Arts states clearly that in the case of natural disaster, center residents are to stay indoors in a common space so that everyone is accounted for—”
He’s interrupted by a sharp banging and Karo glances up.
“Someone go in there and tell him to stop that,” she says, and for the second time, Maeve registers that Sim is not in the room. No one has mentioned him. Anna gestures to the ballroom next door, the gallery.
Of course. Why stop working just because you don’t have power tools?
Out loud, Maeve says, “So why is he allowed to keep working and I’m not?”
Dance—movement, repetition, exertion—is the only way she knows to stay grounded. It was hard enough to keep calm in the studio. How will she possibly cope if she has to spend a whole day just sitting by the fire?
Sadie jumps up and heads for the gallery door, but Dan is already there, rapping sharply on the wall. She hardens, glaring at him.
The banging stops.
“Because,” Dan says, turning back to Maeve, “he doesn’t have to go outside.”
“Well, what about me? Is there someplace I can work, then? What about tomorrow?”
But the question is met with silence; Dan actually turns his back. Finally, Karo looks up.
“This problem will be solved by tomorrow,” she says.
She grabs the radio—almost roughly—from where Sadie has left it unattended and begins to crank it herself; the girl stalks out to the chairs and sits down. Maeve watches her. In another world, she might have asked Sadie to help. She’s a former dancer, after all—she could have found Maeve some private place on-site, some unused meeting space or boardroom. Maybe if they hadn’t gotten off to such a bad start? Maeve frowns. No. Since the episode in the spa, she’s reluctant to approach Sadie at all. Karo’s and Dan’s controlling demeanor makes sense—they are responsible for the residents. She can find reasons for Dan to be letting himself into each cabin in turn. What was the word Karo used? Liability. Liable: that’s what they are.
But Sadie just seems abrasive. Mercenary. Maybe even sly.
Dan gets up and pounds on the wall a second time even though Sim’s work noise has ceased. It’s like the pounding is an outlet for him. The emergency has triggered something, put him on some kind of razor’s edge.
A moment later the door opens, and Sim walks out. There’s dust in a streak across his face where he’s wiped his eyes with a hand. He doesn’t say a word but his mood is low, glowering. He locks the big oak doors and pockets the key, then crosses over to the fire, dips a mug into the pot on the hearth, and drinks out of it. Maeve had thought there was some kind of food in there maybe, but of course it’s melting snow. No power means no filtration system. Even if the pipes don’t freeze, Dan won’t allow them to drink what’s coming out of the taps.
Sim doesn’t sit; he wanders back around the chairs and Maeve understands he’s come to stand behind where she is on the floor. She moves so that her back is against the warm stone of the hearth and she can see everyone at once.
Dan lets himself fall into an armchair next to Anna, almost brushing her hand. Maeve notices again the pointed effort he makes to keep space between them. It doesn’t feel like discretion. It feels like negging.
She’s irritated on Anna’s behalf, even if Anna herself doesn’t seem to care.
“I have to be honest,” he says, oddly pensive. “I thought we’d have power by now.”
Maeve plays with her phone, turning it in her hand.
“I’m quite worried,” she says suddenly. “I’m worried about my kids at home. How much longer till we get back online?”
Dan shifts in his seat, openly surprised.
“Oh, I don’t mean for you to worry,” he says. With no task at hand, all he can manage is performative calm. He looks stiff: like a Wikipedia image for normal, unafraid man. “The generator—I mean, that’s fucking irritating. But I’ve been up here in storms before. It’s not uncommon to lose power for a day or two. And we’ll be just fine without it.”
Anna just laughs, rather meanly. Her own pointed effort. Dan’s face darkens.
“Not something you put in the brochure,” Anna says.
“Sure it is.” This is Justin, already half in the bag, his voice growing louder as the evening wears on. “‘Research and develop new work in the quiet seclusion of the High Water Center for the Arts.’ I mean, Quiet Seclusion Is Us, am I right?” He takes a drink.
Maeve draws her knees in and gives herself a hug.
“I don’t mean to complain. I just—” She pauses. “It’s hard not to panic.”
I Survived the High Water Center for the Arts. She wants it on a T-shirt.
Sim drops down to sit on the edge of the stone hearth. He is not quite touching Maeve, but she can see his arm and hand, still dusty, out of the corner of her eye. He leans toward her.
“Jokes aside,” he says, “this is an artist’s dream. Avalanche isolation. No possible contact from the dirty world. Now, that’s for the brochure. Karo, do we have to pay extra?”
Karo stops pumping the radio and shakes out her hand, middle finger lightly extended. Justin reaches under his chair, but whatever he’s hoping to find isn’t there: he gropes around, then drops to his knees for a better look.
“Where’s my camera?” He straightens, scanning the room.
“Where’d you leave it?” Sadie says. She gets down on the floor, imitating him, her voice rising high in feigned horror. “Where’s the case?”
He doesn’t answer but his brow furrows. Maeve was right—he is drunk. But Sadie’s way of mocking him is too catty, childish.
“Maybe Dan took it. Dan hates that camera—” Sadie keeps on, up on her knees now. “Isn’t that right? You had, like, a bad interrogation experience or something?”
“Leave it, Sadie—” Dan says, starting to ramp up again. But Justin jumps in, his voice louder still.
“This avalanche is the craziest thing that’s happened here in years—it’s a real opportunity. Not just, you know, to make some ad for Karo—” He glances over to her as he says it. “But really. Actually.”
“You know if you weren’t always dragging it around like a toy—” Anna says. She turns her back to him, and focuses on Maeve. “Listen, there’s no reason to panic,” she says. “I’m from New Orleans, right? You know where I was in Katrina? Not in a tastefully decorated mountain lodge, I’ll tell you that.”
Sim looks at her, interested.
“Where were you in Katrina?”
For once, his tone irritates Anna, and her voice sharpens.
“Evacuated out to Jackson. My whole family.” She looks back at Maeve in an effort to ignore him. “But there was no electric in Jackson for five days either, and we didn’t know if our house was standing or fallen down or what. You’d just sit and watch the news and see all that water, and the people on the I-10. And bodies. It was the end of the world,” she says. Then she leans in
, reaching for Maeve’s hand. “We’re going to be okay here. It’s just a matter of time. Time and patience.”
“Okay,” Maeve says. She stretches her legs out long and folds her body over them, feeling the tug along the back of her hurt thigh and into her hip. Glancing at Dan, she gauges his mood now versus out in the snow. “I think there was a bear,” she says—not to him, but to the group. “Outside my studio. I told Dan already. But I thought I should say it again, out loud. In case anyone’s walking around.”
Karo’s head snaps up.
Dan looks annoyed. “I already told you not to worry about that.”
But he hadn’t. He’d dismissed her or assumed she was making excuses, trying to get out of an awkward situation.
Sim seizes on it.
“What did you see?”
“I didn’t actually see it. But—”
Dan’s jaw clenches: “I didn’t see anything, and it’s literally my job.” At this, Karo gives him a sharp look.
She’s embarrassed him, Maeve realizes suddenly. He feels like she’s called him out. He rises to his feet.
“That’s why I came to get you,” he says. “Figured you’d be scared out there. And you were. Not safe for a woman all alone.”
Maeve blinks.
“The woods are only scary when someone’s following you. If you’re alone, it’s fine.”
Dan stops and cocks his head, looking at her. He wasn’t expecting an answer, and Maeve’s tone was sharper than she’d meant it to be. There’s a taut silence before Justin cuts in—he’s still on his knees on the floor.
“Folks, I’m serious. Who took my camera?” He waggles a finger at Maeve. “This is an amazing fight and I’m missing out on recording it for posterity.”
Dan goes to leave, then turns back.
“And no one is going to be out just walking around,” he says, talking to Maeve. “We already covered that.”
Maeve is about to argue when a noise distracts her. The banging has resumed, a little more subtly this time. She looks behind her.
Sim is gone. The long argument gave him what he wanted: the opportunity to slip back into the gallery and keep working. No one else seems to have noticed. Across the room, Dan is still staring her down, waiting for a response.
She reaches forward into her fold again.
“Okay,” she says.
When it’s night, Karo sends Dan out to set off a few flares. The rest of the group gathers around the window like they’re watching fireworks, but it’s not like that at all. He fires them off from a flare gun, high into the night sky, the wind ripping at his jacket, and each bright spark just climbs and falls and that’s it.
When he pauses to reload the gun, Sim swings the door open and Dan spins to meet him.
“Get back inside.”
“Shh—”
“I need everyone to stay indoors while I’m operating the flare gun.” Dan cocks his wrist as if he’s holding a pistol, not an emergency beacon. “I said get back inside.”
“Just give me a second—” Sim raises a hand, then puts a finger to his lips. He’s braced himself in the doorway. Maeve can feel the cold of outside whipping into the room and she moves closer to Anna, the two women huddling together against the chill.
There’s a moment of silence before Dan moves toward Sim.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Dan says.
“Listening.” Sim takes a step, and the door closes a little. He’s still got his back against it, and he raises his hand again as though he could stop Dan talking with it. He looks up to the sky. “There’s no one up there—we’d be able to hear them. Search-and-Rescue use choppers and the wind’s been too high for them to take off today. The weather’s too bad right now for them to save anyone from the weather. Know what I mean?” He nods at Dan. “You’ve already fired three of those things. Better save some for tomorrow.”
He steps back inside and the door closes behind him. Dan stares at him a moment longer, then turns and fires off two more flares into the dark.
By now, it’s long past the dinner hour. They heat leftover lasagna in foil packets over the fire and eat it with bread from the freezer. The deep freeze is a walk-in and will stay well below zero, even without power; there’s no risk of food spoilage for days, Karo says. Maeve is privately distraught every time someone uses that word, days. She wants to pour another shot of whiskey into her mug but doesn’t.
She pushes the pasta around in its foil bowl in an effort to interest herself in eating.
“Dancers,” Karo says. “Were you always so tiny?”
“Tiny and strong like bull,” Maeve says.
She takes a performative bite and chews, but the joke is lost on Karo.
“You’ll find it’s remarkable how life can change you,” she murmurs, and Maeve frowns; a flicker of something, sadness or regret, showing in Karo’s eyes. Then she’s already turned away, toward the windows and the dark. Listening the way Sim was at the door, the same intent look on her face. But there’s no new sound, no light of a vehicle on land or in the sky.
Anna says she’s tempted to sleep by the fire in her two chairs pushed together.
“It’ll be cold upstairs,” she says to Maeve. “Don’t you think?”
“How cold? Will the pipes freeze?”
Dan says no, the building should retain enough heat to keep things manageable—
“I know,” Maeve says, cutting him off. “For a few days.”
She hadn’t even realized he was listening to them.
Consensus is that the power will be back on in the morning. But Karo can’t find a channel on the radio, and there’s a decision that if for some reason the power is not back the next day (although this is unlikely, Dan says yet again), they’ll hike out to the eastern rim to see the road conditions.
“We can try the radio from there—out in the open,” Karo says.
Maeve nods, but she’s uneasy: is everything going to be okay in the morning or not? She gives Anna a last smile, picks up her discarded jeans, and heads to bed on her own, looking for a little quiet. Her phone flashlight illuminates the back stairwell as she goes.
She’s halfway to her floor when she hears the creak and thud of the steel door below. Another light blinks on. And then footsteps following her up.
At first, she assumes it must be Anna. The sound stops on the landing below. Maeve turns to look down.
“Hey—”
But it’s not Anna who’s following her up. It’s Sim.
Maeve hesitates, startled. It’s not that she’s unhappy to see him. Not exactly.
“I thought about taking the other set of stairs,” he says. “Double time, to surprise you at the top.”
“Ah.” Maeve leans on the rail. “To scare me?”
“Not to scare you,” he says.
For a moment, neither of them moves. Then she steps back on her heel, and he takes it as an invitation and climbs the remaining stairs between them.
Maeve turns to keep going, thinking they can walk up together. But instead, he reaches out to hold her there. His hand on her wrist, pulling her in closer. His other hand at her waist, on her back.
She twists away and moves up to the next step. Then one higher, putting space between them again. It’s not that she wouldn’t be interested. It’s just—timing, maybe?
“Where do you think you’re going,” he says mildly. As though this is a game and they are both playing.
Maeve shines her light up to the next landing, to the door that leads out to her level. Then down beyond him, the stairs winding back toward the main floor. Anna, she remembers, is curled up by the fire next to Sadie. Justin and Dan and Karolina still trading gibes, well used to one another’s company. No one else is coming.
She stops, firm. Two steps below her, he looks up, his mouth curving as though he’s trying not to laugh. Like he’s allowing her to be taller, and it’s funny to see her there, above him.
“Look,” she says. “I’m going to bed. Alone.”
Maeve backs up toward the landing.
“I’m not pretending nothing happened. It’s just, I mean—” How to say this? Maeve feels like wringing her hands. The day has been so long and so strange, and she just wants it to be over. “Nothing really happened? Right? It was super-fun, okay, it was a fun night. But I’m here, I’m trying to work, there’s a goddamn avalanche, I’m worried about my kids. Cut me some slack, man.”
Something in what she’s said—she can’t tell what—stops him. The smirk disappears. He nods. “I keep forgetting you have kids.”
Maeve leans toward him, relieved that he’s finally listening. “I have kids. Two of them, little kids.”
He takes that in. She glances up to the door again and then back to where he’s standing.
“You must be really worried.”
“I am,” she says, opting for the full earnest. It feels a little like cracking her heart open: it hurts. “It’s really hard for me to think about anything else.”
“That makes sense, then.”
Maeve is not quite sure what to do with this. She wasn’t trying to make excuses or help him understand. She was trying to say No, thanks.
From down the stairs, there’s a long creak of the lobby door opening and then a new set of footsteps. Maeve looks down between the rails. It really is Anna this time.
“Hello?” Anna stops at the first landing, shining her own phone up at them.
Maeve raises a hand, a kind of wave. Anna climbs another step or two, trying to see. When she lands the thin beam on Sim, it’s obvious—she leans back and out again, catches Maeve’s eye.
“What’s going on up there?”
Maeve looks from Anna back to Sim. There’s a beat, his eyes on hers.
“Nothing,” Maeve says. “Just having a chat.”
But Anna doesn’t move. She holds up a pack of cigarettes.
“Think you can give me a hand?” she says. “I was going out for a smoke. Dan’s got all the doors locked tight, and I don’t feel like arguing. He’s a little wired tonight. I thought I could prop this one open for a minute before he notices.”
The Retreat Page 10