The Retreat

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  Maeve can see that Sim is less comfortable with this new dynamic. This interruption. There’s a moment of silence, and then he calls down to Anna himself:

  “I can help you with the door.”

  “Great,” Anna says. “There’s a free smoke in it for you.”

  Sim just nods and reaches up to touch Maeve’s arm. He doesn’t try to move in any closer, but he gives her a little bow.

  “Get some sleep, Queen Bee,” he says.

  He has a way of talking to her that’s disarming. His eyes never break contact.

  “Yeah,” Maeve says. “Yes. You too.” She leaves him there, and he watches her go, with Anna waiting below them, down on the landing. Maeve pulls the door to her own hallway open.

  He’s still there on the stairs—she turns to look—as the steel door swings closed behind her.

  Day 5

  THIS TIME, IN the dream, Talia and Rudy are with her. They are walking together, hand in hand, through the wooded trail to the studio. There is no snow on the ground. Perhaps it is spring. The spruce and pine seem to grow into the path overhead, branches meshing; the ground at their feet sprayed with forget-me-nots and feathery green yarrow. Talia is talking and Maeve looks down at her, but the words seem far away. She can hear Talia’s voice but can’t make out what she is saying. Rudy pulls at Maeve’s hand, urging her on, faster and faster.

  As they near the studio, Maeve stops and presses a finger to her lips. She turns slowly, a full circle, squeezing the children’s hands tighter in hers.

  The scent of the bear is all around them. She thinks she can hear its rough breath back in the trees, but Talia will not stop talking: the sounds muddle. At the studio door, the wood frame has been clawed—long striations mark the entry, shavings in curls rest at her feet.

  That’s when she notices her hand. Her index finger has been replaced by a long claw, the same claw she found in her luggage. Maeve pats her pocket and finds it empty. The transformation of her hand is ugly but she can’t stop admiring it.

  She reaches for the children, but they are no longer there.

  There is a breeze and it is warm and pleasant. It must be spring. The door is unlocked and bumps gently against its frame. She reaches for the doorknob, although she knows she should not. She knows it’s in there.

  Light streams out through the crack in the doorway. The light beaming off the mirrors inside is so bright. It’s blinding.

  The door opens and Maeve goes in.

  In the morning, she wakes with a start. The dream is so close. Sunlight—actual sun!—filters through the window and Maeve rolls over and grabs her phone.

  Still nothing.

  Her battery is at 21 percent. All the on-and-off, on-and-off wearing it down. She holds it a moment longer. The time is 8:06. She turns it off.

  She rolls out of bed and twists and flexes her body. Her feet and ankles crackle to life. When she bends over to touch the floor, she feels her spine straighten, a subtle click into place. A series of clicks: snap, crackle, pop. From neck to toes, Maeve doesn’t have a joint that won’t click or crunch after too much stillness. She stays like that, folded over, her arms crossed at the elbows, a little extra weight to help gravity pull her into alignment.

  The chiropractor took a thermal image of her spine when she was twenty-six, told her the effect of dance—even then—was damage. That her upper vertebrae would likely fuse together before her sixtieth birthday. A kind of spinal arthritis. Overuse. She thinks about that diagnosis and the picture of her spine in reds and purples and blues every time she hears a pop or crack from her shoulders and neck. Folded over like this, she can see her feet, ropy with abuse; how they’ve widened, too, at the arch with age and pregnancy. She pulls up again and stands tall. The good news—at least at her core, the most damaged part of her, the muscles feel sore but strong.

  Five minutes, maybe ten, she warms up by herself in her room, getting her mind in shape before she has to deal with anyone else. There is still no power, so nothing has changed: another day as the new kid in school, trying to navigate a tight mesh of strangers. Karo, growing increasingly tense; Justin, vaguely hysterical; and Sadie—

  Maeve breaks out of her backbend and looks herself in the mirror, hard. At some point today, she must pull Anna aside and talk to her about Sadie. If nothing else, Anna deserves to know that she’s been watched.

  She throws on a pair of loose jeans over her tights, wool socks, and the bulkiest sweater she owns, an Aran fisherman’s knit in pure cream. The bear claw is sitting on her bedside table: she glimpses it there as she’s dressing and looks instinctively to her hand, the dream flooding back in a rush.

  She hesitates, then slides the claw into her pocket again, safe against her hip.

  Downstairs, a plan is going into action. Karo has made coffee using the fireplace kettle. Anna hovers near the window, where Dan is already lacing up his boots. Justin slumps, half asleep in a chair, red-eyed from the night before—but Sadie is watching keenly as Maeve crosses the lobby toward them.

  She just wants a coffee. What now?

  “There you are,” Karo says. She looks at Maeve a moment. “We were beginning to wonder.”

  Ah—she’s late, somehow. She is about to apologize when Sadie jumps in.

  “Where’s Sim?”

  But Maeve doesn’t register this as a question for her and pours some hot coffee into her mug. As she takes a sip, she realizes they are all looking at her.

  “Sim?” Maeve says. “How should I know?”

  Justin and Sadie exchange a glance. Karo brightens a little.

  “We just assumed,” she says. “Silly of us.”

  As though on cue, the back door off the lobby swings open and Sim walks in, stamping the snow off his boots. He’s carrying wood from the big pile outside the door.

  “You were outside?” Dan is unhappy. This is not emergency protocol.

  “I was up early. Walking,” Sim says. He sets the firewood down in a snowy heap. “Solvitur ambulando. What’s wrong?”

  “For one thing, I said I want everyone to stay together. And it’s foolish. You could have been locked out.” Dan goes over to the door. “You should have been locked out, in fact—these doors are all set to lock on contact. For security.”

  Sim cracks the door open a few inches.

  “Yeah, I rigged this one a little. Anna wanted a smoke last night; I thought it would be handy. See?” He fiddles with the latch for Dan’s benefit. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Maeve watches him demonstrate and slides a hand against her hip pocket. The bear claw is still there.

  “Look,” Dan says, glancing at Anna in an irritated way before turning back to Sim. “As long as we have no power, I’m responsible here. Do me a favor, don’t fuck with the doors.”

  Sim lets the door fall closed, hands raised.

  “I was awake, what else is there to do?” He goes to the fire, and grabs a mug where they sit warming on the hearth. “Temperature’s dropping out there,” he says. “This thing is going to get worse before it gets better.”

  Karolina and Dan look at each other.

  “Right,” Dan says. “I feel like we’ll be back in business by the end of the day.”

  “Do we get to take a vote?” Sadie says. She hasn’t moved from her chair, one leg crossed primly over the other. “Because I know who I’m inclined to believe.”

  Dan glares at her, his mouth set, but Karo catches his eye and he turns abruptly away.

  “Keep her away from me,” he says as though only Karo can hear.

  He’s proposed a group hike out to the eastern edge of the property, sort of a long way around to where the grounds meet a secondary road to town. The main gates are buried under snow, but farther out, they may find a whole different situation.

  Maeve feels a wave of relief wash over her. If she can’t distract herself in the studio, at least she won’t have to sit still all day trying to avoid Dan’s changing mood and her own constant worry. Getting outside wil
l feel good: moving always makes her feel better, and she can see firsthand just what they’re up against.

  Sadie gets up and drifts toward the desk. At first Maeve assumes she’s going to gather her things, but no, she just rifles through a file drawer as though she’s looking for something, then leans there, listening.

  “It’s possible the access road’s been plowed out,” Dan says. “And if not, it’s a clear day.” He gestures brusquely to Sadie at the desk. “Bring that radio along, we should get a channel no problem.”

  “What if a crew shows up and we’re all out on the ridge?” Justin says hazily.

  He’s gunning to stay behind himself, but it’s of course Sadie who gets assigned the task. Keep the fire going, stay near the phone, listen for the beep-beep of an emergency road crew. It’s the second time she’s been left behind in two days. If the unsexiness of the job makes her sour, she hides it well, performing her efficiency with a brisk smile. She sets herself up at the desk as though she could just fire up her laptop and get some work done.

  But her nails tap against the desktop as the rest of them bundle up for the outdoors. Dan hauls a load of snowshoes up from the basement storage room and shovels out a space at the back exit, enough room for six bodies, bent at the waist, to buckle them on.

  Outside, the sun is high and bright, but Sim’s words ring true: there’s a new cold, sharp and biting. From the back door, Maeve can’t see how bad the road looks where the western avalanche has made it impassable. Now she wonders if she really wants to know. The snowshoes are new and streamlined, and, looking around, Maeve realizes she’s been given a child’s pair—Dan guessing at her size. She works to lift her knees so the back edges won’t catch and trip her up, falling into a strange kind of walking rhythm.

  “I mean,” she says, as much to herself as to Anna as they tromp through the snow, “it’s only really been a day. Since the power went out. Like, a day and a half, but basically a day. It’s easy to feel trapped up here, but in the scheme of things, it’s not that serious.”

  Anna gives Maeve’s shoulder a squeeze, but the gesture knocks them both off balance, and Maeve recovers by grabbing Anna’s arm so she won’t fall. They’re laughing, and Maeve is grateful for the moment. The temperature has taken a serious dip. Anna flops along in her giant snowshoes, a scarf wound around her face so that just her eyes are showing. Her explanation, that she grew up in the South and never saw a snowflake until she was twenty-five, is a reasonable one. How can anyone be expected to grow used to this kind of cold?

  There’s a moment of quiet between them, both women relaxing into it. An unstated, easy closeness. Maeve glances up, gauging their privacy. Looking to see if the others are far enough ahead for the two of them to really talk. With Sadie left behind, it feels like the right time to tell Anna about her, how Sadie might get her kicks from spying on others or might have it in for Dan in some crazy way. She’d hate for Anna to get caught in the crossfire.

  But it seems a shame to break the moment with something so ugly. She doesn’t want to push Anna away.

  “Look—” she begins, but Anna cuts her off.

  “Hey, I didn’t fuck things up for you last night, did I?”

  Maeve tries to recalibrate.

  “With Nielssen,” Anna says. “I wondered if I was, you know. Interrupting. A cockblock. But for girls.”

  “Oh,” Maeve says. “I believe the expression you want is beaver dam.”

  “Yes. Did I dam your beaver?”

  “You did not.” Maeve looks ahead to where the others are, checking the distance between them again. She pulls her thin hood a little closer over her ears and gives a comical shrug. “I . . . just kinda wanted to go to bed. Is that bad?”

  “He finds himself irresistible, so why wouldn’t you?” Anna waits, but when Maeve doesn’t respond right away, she puts on her best high-society accent: “Ohhhh—he thinks it’s an affair.”

  “I don’t know what he thinks,” Maeve says. “Maybe I’m just thrown off by”—she gestures around them—“the unexpected winter wonderland. I thought it was a one-nighter! With a goddamn sculptor! Aren’t artists supposed to be promiscuous loners?” She’s laughing now. “I mean, Gawd.”

  “Well, we weren’t expecting to be up here playing Swiss Family Robinson in the snow,” Anna says. “Maybe he’s just bored.”

  Maeve nods and watches Sim walking up ahead.

  Iain, in the first days she’d known him, seemed almost not to notice she was there. It was only later she learned he’d been watching her, taking her in, making decisions. On the fourth day, rehearsal was almost constantly interrupted—a dozen deliveries from a dozen different florists, the bouquets arriving every twenty minutes until she was apologizing to the rest of the dancers, the choreographer, the pianist, everyone. The little cards all blank. Who could have done this? It was over the top, embarrassing, but ultimately flattering. The flowers filled a whole corner of the room.

  He was waiting in her dressing room at the end of day, leaning against the vanity when she opened the door. Almost shy. A last bouquet held out to her. Roses.

  You’re the prima here—I wanted to make sure everyone knew it.

  She doesn’t see any of that in Sim Nielssen. He was open and interested from the first moment. Honestly so.

  She wonders now what might have happened if she’d told Iain no that first day. Or even after the first week. If she’d told him the flowers had actually made things difficult, had hardened the other dancers against her. By the time she tried to set a boundary, everything was going too fast; he’d convinced her to move cities, jump companies. He was her director and her lover, governing every minute of her every day.

  Although last night, it seemed to be the no that was difficult for Sim.

  Not that that makes him so different from any number of men she’s known, of course. The years she spent with Iain swallowed her up, she sometimes thinks. She is always fighting her way out of them.

  She turns back to Anna. “Look,” she says again. “About you and Dan—”

  But Anna’s eyes flash a warning; Maeve, her head still turned, almost crashes into Karo from behind. Where the trail—if you could see the trail—splits off along the ridge, the others have stopped for a breath. Dan comes to stand between them, his attention flickering between the trail map and the hikers, setting the course for the next leg.

  Too late now to mention Sadie. Again.

  She snowshoes awkwardly aside, hoping to give herself some space. Near the ledge, she holds on to a branch for balance and peers down to the river below as she did that first day. The landscape has changed. The elk are no longer down there, the frozen river now buried deep in snow. She can see the cable of the SkyLift—they’re so much closer now. She follows it with her eyes, back to where it begins, a wide platform set high up the ridge where the forest beds into rock. Like a ski lift, or one of those rides that carry you to the other side of the amusement park.

  The snow slides slightly at her feet and she pulls herself back—remembering, suddenly, the woman who fell.

  Someone calls to her and she turns. Karo is carrying the radio and a few Toblerone in a backpack, and she hands around the chocolate now. They can’t stop for long; the cold is sharp and surprising. It hurts to breathe.

  Maeve tries holding a hand over her face to warm the air before it enters her lungs. When the sugar is gone, they start walking again. The wind whips at them. There are no trees here, just open sky and rock—somewhere under all the snow.

  They’re only five minutes farther along when Dan stops cold.

  There is no path anymore—they are making the path. But here, there’s a wider swath that intersects it and cuts off northward. Another trail, left by a larger animal, and a depression in the snow where the thing paused. You could almost imagine that it was an elk—two or three elk together, maybe—except for what it’s left behind.

  The scat is large and fresh enough and would be sitting in the center of the path if the path
still existed.

  “Fur,” Dan murmurs to himself, crouching to get a better look.

  Maeve leans in to see for herself. Not just fur but bits of bone: it must have gotten a deer, or even an elk, somehow fallen away from the herd.

  She feels winded, like she’s been hit from behind. It’s hard to speak.

  “It’s a good size.” Dan rises to standing, still staring down at the thing.

  “What does that mean,” Anna says. Her voice comes up, agitated. “A good size? The bear or the poop?”

  “It’s hard to predict the size of the bear exactly.” His tone is purposely casual, but he’s surveying the woods to the north of them with a sharp eye. “It’s a good size. I wouldn’t normally say this is a black bear. But I lead a tracking expedition every year: we don’t get grizzlies usually, not so close in.”

  Anna backs up to where Maeve is standing.

  “At home, we don’t even go for a picnic without a shotgun in the trunk of the car,” she says. “Just in case an alligator shows up.”

  Maeve keeps her eye on Dan, thinking of the claw in her hip pocket. He’s used to tracking bears in these mountains? That’s something she didn’t know.

  “I thought there was a bear near my studio.” Her shoulder brushes Anna’s now, but she’s speaking loud enough for everyone to hear. “Yesterday. Remember? I told you.”

  Dan looks put out.

  “I told you,” she says again, this time under her breath.

  It takes all of Maeve’s will to leave it there. Her stomach hurts. The day before, the bear was inside the tree line, close to human activity. What’s strange here is how open the landscape is. There’s no easy cover where they are, no place for an animal to shelter, nowhere to get out of the snow.

  “Still nothing to worry about?” Anna says. “They’re more afraid of us than we are of them?”