The Retreat

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  Dan pauses, resentful that his authority is being questioned. He rolls his shoulder back, making it clear he’s trying hard not to turn to Sadie and put her in her place.

  “You’re the one who wanted to stay here,” he says to Karo. He pulls out the surplus flares and bear spray and a single tarp and tosses them peevishly at Karo’s feet. But then he looks at Maeve and starts to laugh. “What, are you two planning to run away before I get back?”

  He tugs the waterproof flap back over the top of his bag, fastens it, slings the pack onto his back, and turns away. Justin and Sim are waiting by the door now too, Justin with his red scarf still jaunty around his neck but shifting his weight from foot to foot with a manic energy. Sadie, Maeve can’t help but notice, pulling up closer to Sim.

  Karo catches Maeve’s eye, tension lining her face.

  “Right, got it, stay inside,” Karo says now. “We’re on our honor.”

  She crouches jerkily to retrieve the unused equipment, bundling it together in the tarp as best she can. Maeve wonders that no one else has noticed this change in her. Hard to ignore. But the men are busy.

  From the doorway, Sim calls out: “Remember your pretty face, Maeve.” He brushes a gloved hand across his nose and cheeks. “Dan’s right—stay inside, out of the cold.”

  Maeve’s brow furrows. It’s a reminder of their last hike together—but what she remembers now is the way he argued with Anna. The two of them going at it: Anna facetious and almost silly, Sim unable to drop it, taking it all too seriously.

  “We’ll be back here tomorrow,” Dan says. “With the goddamn army if that’s what it takes.”

  Sim flinches at the word, and even Karo pauses down on her haunches before rising slowly back to her feet. But it’s Sadie she locks eyes on when she responds.

  “That’s what I’m hoping for. Good luck. All of you.”

  Sadie raises a hand in salute and then they’re gone, out the door and away. An immediate, vacant silence fills the room. When Karo walks to the window, her steps ring out, echoey. Maeve follows a moment later, then checks the door to make sure it’s secure. The damn door, she thinks.

  She turns back to the room, cavernous and noiseless aside from the crackle of the fire. Instead of feeling abandoned, she feels light, almost light-headed, as though there’s suddenly not enough oxygen. A slight tremor in her muscles, the feeling you get after a long, hard workout. She remembers now what Sim said to Anna out on the ice.

  We’ll just let the next person freeze.

  They pass the afternoon efficiently, each independent of the other, and without much discussion, as though there were no avalanche and no crisis, as though Anna were merely in another room, working away, and the others off on a day trip somewhere.

  Maeve is absently tidying when she finds the tote bag of minibar loot that Justin brought downstairs on the floor by the leg of an armchair. For the best, she thinks. It must have been too heavy or cumbersome to cram into his backpack for the hike downhill. She tucks the bag under the desk for safekeeping and turns to check on Karo, who is reviewing a gallery catalog by the fire, assiduously working to regain her usual confidence. When she looks up, it’s like a warning shot. She doesn’t want to talk about it.

  “About Dan,” Maeve says instead. “I didn’t realize he and Justin—that Justin had a thing for him. Or they have a thing? I couldn’t tell.”

  Karo’s face relaxes. “Oh, Dan has a thing with everyone. That’s just the way he is.”

  Maeve’s eyebrows lift. “Everyone?”

  “Well. Frequently, let’s say. I told you, people become teenagers.” She half turns back to the book of color plates in her lap as though she is trying to decide which is more important, the paintings or Maeve. “I think that’s why some men choose to work in places like this. Resorts or retreats. Everything is ephemeral, everything is possibility.”

  Maeve shakes her head and drops into a chair.

  “I met my husband at a residency. My ex-husband,” she corrects herself quickly. Why does she still do that? He’s gone, he’s gone. Ex, ex, ex. “My ex-husband, my ex.”

  “So you know. You know what these places are like.”

  “Anna was hoping she was special, I guess—”

  Karo sets the book aside with a quivering hand.

  “Anna was naive, then.”

  This comes out abruptly. Maeve wonders who she could be angry with—Anna? Dan? Herself for letting any of it happen?

  Maeve, for bringing it up.

  “I’m sorry,” Karo says. “It’s just—I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to her husband. Her mother.” She turns and leans into the arm of the couch. “This was her second time here—so I knew her a little bit. She was quite lovely. Energetic, as you know. Brazen.” She looks to Maeve. “I liked her very much.”

  “Me too,” Maeve says.

  It must be cold enough now upstairs that they didn’t need to hide her body away in the freezer, Maeve thinks. It was Justin who made such a fuss about it—and now Justin not even here. She doesn’t say any of this out loud, but she can feel it burning in her.

  “They fear death,” she says instead. “Men—”

  “Everybody fears death.”

  There’s a curtness, or impatience, to Karo’s manner that Maeve cannot seem to escape. She changes course.

  “He never came on to me. Dan, I mean. But I wondered about him a few times. I found him—intrusive.” It’s a polite way to say what she really means.

  Karo almost laughs.

  “I saw him trailing you around campus. Dan can be quite competitive. But at a certain point, I suspect he decided you were already taken.” “Gross,” Maeve says.

  “Gross—that is not at all what I wanted to hear.”

  “You asked. I’m sure it bruised his ego. He thinks of himself as some kind of alpine playboy.”

  Maeve closes her eyes and opens them again. Debating.

  “What about Sadie?”

  Karo thinks about that.

  “I think Sadie is rather too single-minded for him. Argumentative. That would be too much for Dan in a girl her age.”

  “No, I mean—you’re quite sure you can trust her?”

  “Sadie?”

  It’s the wrong question, or the wrong timing. Nevertheless.

  “Sadie’s a pleaser,” Karo says, casually flipping a page in her catalog. “An achiever. It’s what makes her an excellent assistant—she gets a real buzz from praise. I imagine it makes her an excellent doctoral candidate.”

  “This morning—” Maeve stops, then starts again. “The reason I asked—this morning, upstairs, I found her going through Anna’s things. She said she was looking for Justin’s camera. She’d been using it for something, some kind of secret. Something to do with Sim—”

  Being a pleaser, she thinks, also makes you easy to groom.

  But Karo just stares at her blankly and doesn’t offer anything in reply. Maeve stumbles on: “I thought it was strange,” she says. “I mean, for her to be there at all.”

  “We all have things we’d rather others didn’t see.”

  Maeve pulls up short. This isn’t the response she’s expecting.

  She stands and begins to brush off her jeans as though they’ve become ashy. Really, she just has an urge to wipe the slate, wipe herself clean. “For the record, my thing with Sim—it was meant to be easy and quick. A bit of fun. That’s all I wanted.”

  “Men never think we’re capable of that.” Karo gives a brisk nod and turns back to her catalog. “And, for the record, you’re right, of course: Sadie shouldn’t have been going through Anna’s things.” She looks up again. “I took the camera. I have it now. It was causing too much trouble, all that sniping, back and forth—and I have absolutely no interest in a disaster documentary for High Water. I thought it would be best to remove it from the mix.”

  Maeve stands there, a little stunned. Karo struggles to her feet. When she goes into her office and shuts the door, Maeve is relieved to be
alone.

  At first, she thinks of using the upstairs hallway as a practice space, somewhere she can refocus without a witness. Karo is unlikely to brave the stairs in her condition. Maeve hasn’t been able to shake off the desperate urge to hit things, to smash her knuckles into a wall. Using her body will feel good: the extra adrenaline still buzzes in her limbs.

  But anywhere outside the lobby is settled in its cold now. Upstairs, it feels not so much like the thermostat has been set too low but like the frigid interior of a log cabin shut up for the winter. She paces the hall a few times, trying to make it work, but eventually just takes the opportunity to move her things downstairs. Extra layers, all her dance gear, every sweater and pair of socks she brought along with her—she packs it all up. She slips into an old plaid button-up, for comfort, pulls on a pair of fleece-lined leggings, then her jeans. Last, she slings the duvet off her bed across her shoulders.

  They won’t be able to sleep upstairs, away from the fire. Not anymore.

  The photo-booth image of herself and the kids: this, she won’t cram into her suitcase or risk losing in among the gear in her dance bag. She pauses in the icy room, looking down at their faces, playing the smooth finish between her finger and her thumb. Anna’s bear claw with its razor edge still sits in its place, in the pocket at her hip. She slides the little photo strip into her breast pocket instead, to carry close to her skin.

  Turns her phone on: No service. Turns it off again.

  Before she leaves, she crosses back into Anna’s room and stands there. Whereas the rest of the building feels vast, so empty it echoes, in here, the walls feel too close. Maeve takes a deep breath and tries to push it all away—then sets about tidying the mess that Sadie left behind. The bag and its contents, the clothing, strewn over the floor.

  She makes up the bed last, a morning habit, the way she would for Talia or Rudy. This time the act of pulling the covers up over the mattress, smoothing them out, feels like ceremony.

  Back in the lobby, Maeve works up a sweat by the mezzanine stairs, focusing on whatever burns: a lot of planking, then barre work at the rail. Karo in her office, no audience watching from the fireside this time.

  With no witness but herself, she can concentrate on drills, hard athletic work, repetition. If performing is storytelling, then practice is meditation. She starts with her mind spinning out and her muscles stiff, but there’s a rug that keeps her hands off the cold ground and makes the floorwork easier, and her instinct is borne out. An hour, then two hours, and the adrenaline is finally gone, replaced by a radiant warmth in her working limbs. She can think again.

  It’s hard not to keep checking the window while she works, though. Maeve catches herself casting a regular, furtive glance to the white expanse of outdoors, snow and trees and more trees. When she’s done, she gives in and takes a long hard look out, both front and back. Realizing, now, that she’s been worried the others would give up and return. They haven’t.

  Outside, the light thins and fades. Karolina comes out of her office and Maeve stokes the fire, adding a few logs and hauling wood closer in from the pile near the back door.

  The sun goes down.

  “Do you know,” Karo says, lighting an oil lamp, “I’ve lived here for five years, in this place. But I’ve never been here alone.”

  She gives her wrist a painful snap, and the match snuffs out. The new flame flickers in its glass cage.

  “Just tell yourself it’s the last night of this,” Maeve says. “A matter of hours.”

  But Karo’s hand still hovers over the flame, the tremor in it unmistakable. The foil trays that Sim and Maeve retrieved in the morning are still stacked on the main desk and she unwraps a corner of each, one by one, to figure out what’s in there, but it all seems too fussy. In the end Maeve digs an unopened package of hot dogs out of the back of the refrigerator. The kitchen itself must be cold enough now to keep things fresh. She skewers a few hot dogs with the longer, unbroken sticks of kindling to hold over the fire.

  It’s quiet and almost cozy with just the two of them. They go to pull the couch up closer to the fire, but Karo falters and then backs away. Maeve waits for her to take up her side again, but when the other woman doesn’t—only standing there, gripping her hands together as if in prayer—she adjusts it herself. They curl up, each at one end, holding their hot dogs over the flames.

  For a long moment, neither of them says anything.

  The silence feels soft and heavy. There’s only the indiscriminate crackle of burning wood to break it up, here and there, in bursts. Maeve looks over and finds Karo focused on the front windows, staring out into the night. Neither wistful nor anxious, just a steady gaze. There’s nothing out there that Maeve can see: the dark also soft, also heavy.

  “I worried,” Maeve says. “I wondered if they’d turn around and come back again before nightfall. But I guess not.”

  A drop of moisture, fat or just liquid, comes off the end of her skewer and hits the flame with a sizzle. She lifts it away from the fire.

  “No, that wouldn’t carry. Not for Dan,” Karo says. She blinks, and the strain in her face is hard to ignore. “He’ll be in it now. Until this thing is finished.”

  Karo’s skewer flames up at one end and she gives it a shake, pulls it out to cool. But when she holds it up, the skewer keeps on shaking—the tremor, Maeve can see now, moving from Karo’s elbow to her fingertips. She leans closer in case the other woman needs help.

  “Are you all right?”

  When Karo answers, it’s matter-of-fact. All business.

  “I have a great deal of pain. My stomach—my stomach hurts. It makes it hard to eat. And my bones, deep inside somewhere. I mean, not really the bones themselves, it can’t be. It’s just the nerves around them. The whole system is misfiring. That’s all.”

  “You couldn’t have gone with him,” Maeve says. “You couldn’t have made the trip the way he wanted you to. Dan, I mean.”

  Karo looks at her, misgiving in her eyes.

  “On foot? No.”

  “Is it wise to live up here at all, then?”

  “It’s why I took the job.” She takes a last survey of her half-burned skewer and lays it down on the ashy hearth. “I was diagnosed at forty—that’s early onset, very strange. No one had thought to check for something like this, so I’d been through a terribly dark time. Unexplained pain will do that to you. You begin to look for a way out. But then I started seeing things, people, that weren’t there—that’s when I went back to the doctor. Because of the hallucinations. I thought I was going crazy.” Her features stiffen, and something in her eyes changes, as though she is in a different place, a darker place, just revisiting the memory. “I mean, in a way, that’s exactly it: I was.”

  She blinks slowly and takes a breath. “But on the upside, that early diagnosis—it means the drugs work very well. So a job like this, with reasonable hours, downtime, insurance that covers the medication—” She nods to herself, then to Maeve. “You can see that I couldn’t continue painting. Not in any real way, not as my life, my living.” She shifts, pulling up on the blanket, and the movement of her hips makes her wince. “I wish I could say I don’t remember who she was, that Karolina. But I do remember. I still feel her inside me. This was, at least, a way to stay connected to that world,” she says. “Making art is easier when you’re well.”

  “Or wealthy,” Maeve says. “Or you don’t have children. Children come with a cost.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  It occurs to Maeve that Karo must feel a certain amount of envy toward the constant parade of working artists who come through the center. More than envy—resentment.

  For a moment, she wonders if it could have been Karo who locked Anna out. Anna, famous in her circle, both experimental and political in her way. Almost as quickly, she pushes the idea from her mind: The woman is sick. She’s struggling to toast a hot dog, Maeve.

  It couldn’t have been her. In a way, what Karo has done here at the cente
r mirrors Maeve’s own plan. Trapped in a body she doesn’t recognize, she’s chosen to direct others instead.

  “How long have the drugs been gone?”

  “I took the last dose yesterday. I have a few sleeping pills left—” A sharp intake of breath as Karo reaches down to massage her foot, the arch curving painfully.

  “You’ll be glad of them, I expect.”

  There’s a brief but noticeable silence, Karo looking at her rather strangely. Then: “I got complacent. My own fault.” Her voice grows stronger, trying to resume her usual brisk pace. “But I’m sure they’ll get a crew up here by tomorrow.”

  The day seems to have stretched on forever. Maeve’s eyes are softly burning. She turns to lean on the arm of the couch so that she’s facing Karo rather than the fire.

  “You don’t think it’s dangerous, the four of them out there alone?”

  “Of course it’s dangerous. The conditions are dangerous. But it’s dangerous to wait too long as well.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  This time the silence is hard-edged. If Karo could easily get up and walk away, she would; Maeve can see it in her.

  “She wasn’t wearing shoes,” Maeve says finally. “Anna.”

  Karo’s face twitches.

  “How much do you know about hypothermia?” she asks. Impatient, but resigned now to the conversation. When Maeve says nothing, she keeps on. “She probably threw them off herself. At the very end, before death—your body tries this last, wild solution. Your capillaries open wide. Blood rushes to the surface, to your skin. Suddenly it feels like you’re burning up instead of freezing. You might strip off your clothes. Lots of people do,” she says. “Don’t think I haven’t considered all the possibilities.” She leans in sharply. “But I didn’t see what happened to Anna. And neither did you.”

  Maeve pulls back, chastened.

  “No,” she says. “No, of course not. It’s just—” She shakes her head, as though the action could dispel the tension in the room. It sometimes feels like the years she spent with Iain—and, later, hiding from him—have made her into a woman she doesn’t like: anxious. Frightened, even. “I guess I’m thinking about her, that’s all. She was so focused on those dreams, the bear dreams I had. Maybe they predicted something?” It’s a naive thing to say, both flimsy and somehow very true. “She thought of them as transformative. Or, I mean, that’s how she imagined them to be.”