The Shuddering

by Ania Ahlborn

“Isn’t there a rule about mixing beer and wine?” she asked. “You do realize I bought a bottle of Bordeaux.”

  “One bottle for five people isn’t going to cut it, Janey,” Ryan told her. “Unless you’re feeding midgets.”

  “It goes with the meal.” Jane turned back toward the kitchen. Despite the cabin’s size, there wasn’t a proper space for the table, just a large nook jutting out of the kitchen’s north side. The table their mother had bought hardly fit within it—Mary Adler had assumed it would go in the dining room, but their dad had already ordered a pool table and refused to send it back.

  “Whatever. You want to drink beer with boeuf Bourguignon, suit yourself.” The Talking Heads drifted in melodic waves from the living room. She could hear the shuffling of cards, which meant a new game of poker was about to start. “Can you call everyone in?”

  “Only if I can sit at the head of the table.” Ryan pointed the beer bottle at his sister, waiting for her to answer in the affirmative.

  “What’re you going to do, give a speech?”

  Ryan raised an eyebrow as if considering it, but simply bobbed his head to the music, the bottle’s neck still pointing at her like a distant microphone, waiting for her reply.

  “Would you go get them already?”

  He took another swig and wandered away while Jane pulled out drawer after kitchen drawer, searching for a wine opener among a menagerie of kitchen utensils. She smiled as her friends started to filter into the kitchen. Sawyer touched her elbow as he followed April in, and Jane closed her eyes after they had passed.

  Opening her eyes, Jane shot Ryan a pleading look, but he was already on top of it, jiggling the bottle opener at her from across the room.

  Jane held up her wineglass with a smile. Ryan sat in his requested seat at the head of the table, his wineglass full of lager instead of Bordeaux.

  “To the next three days,” she said.

  “To the mountain,” Ryan interjected. “Good powder.”

  “To new friends,” Jane added, a faint smile directed at April. “And old.” Her gaze wavered, pausing on Sawyer a moment later.

  “And an incredible host,” Lauren said, nudging Jane in the ribs.

  “But most important, to my brother, who will be sending us obligatory boxes of Swiss chocolate from the foot of the Matterhorn for the next who knows how many years.” Jane’s smile wavered as she met Ryan’s gaze. “I miss you already,” she said softly, then lifted her glass higher to keep herself from tearing up.

  Dinner was relatively quiet save for the music that filtered in from the living room, a hush that Jane was satisfied with as she watched everyone eat. There was an occasional quip between the boys, a random joke and easy laughter to accompany the quiet jingle of forks against porcelain plates. Afterward, Lauren helped clear the table while Jane replaced the dinner plates with smaller ones, the three-layer chocolate cake making its appearance on a footed glass stand. Sawyer rubbed his hands together childishly when Jane placed the cake between both boys. She caught April rolling her eyes at her boyfriend’s antics, but only smiled when she caught April’s gaze.

  They drank coffee and stuffed themselves with sugar, talking about old times—about how the boys used to sled down the driveway when they were kids, nearly knocking their teeth out because the slope was too steep and Jane and Ryan’s dad would leave the Land Rover parked at the base of the hill.

  “I’m just glad the road was clear,” Sawyer mused, a bite of cake balanced on the tines of his fork. “Walking up that slope, especially when it’s covered in snow…”

  “It’s a killer,” Ryan agreed.

  “You should install a lift,” Lauren suggested. Ryan leaned back in his chair and raised his hands, his eyes on his sister.

  “Have I not been saying that for years?”

  “He has,” Jane confessed with a laugh. “But it’s too late now, I guess.”

  “Now you’ll be installing a lift in front of your Swiss chateau?” Lauren asked.

  “If there isn’t already one there.”

  “There won’t be one in Zurich,” Jane told him.

  “But there will be in Zermatt. Nothing but snow and cheese fondue.”

  “You’re going to gain a thousand pounds.”

  “I think he’ll be okay,” Sawyer cut in, lifting another bite of cake. “If he hasn’t gained a thousand pounds living with you for the past thirty years, a little cheese isn’t going to hurt.”

  “What’s it like?” Lauren asked, leaning in on her elbows. “Switzerland, I mean.”

  “You’ve seen The Sound of Music?” Ryan asked, and Lauren nodded. “It’s like that, but multiplied by ten.”

  “Raindrops on roses?” Sawyer asked.

  “And whiskers on kittens…” Jane jumped in.

  “Bright copper kettles?” Lauren singsonged.

  “And warm woolen mittens,” they all finished together, laughing as April watched in silence, a smile pulled tight across her mouth.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it,” Ryan said, his comment directed at the quiet one of the group. “‘Sixteen going on seventeen’?” he asked. “‘How do you solve a problem like Maria’?”

  “Who’s Maria?” April asked, countering Ryan’s faux shock with a confession. “I don’t like musicals. They give me the creeps.”

  “She won’t even watch Rocky Horror,” Sawyer told them.

  “You know, we used to call Sawyer Frank N. Furter back in high school,” Ryan told her. “He had a fishnet and lipstick phase.”

  Jane couldn’t help the laugh that burst from her throat, covering her mouth a second later. Sawyer slouched in his seat, looking a little embarrassed but far from annoyed.

  “You caught so much hell.” Ryan chuckled, shaking his head at his best friend. “You remember Coach Miller?”

  “Oh god,” Sawyer muttered. “I haven’t thought of that guy since we graduated.”

  “What was with Coach Miller?” April asked, finally deciding to join the conversation.

  “Coach Miller was our biology teacher, but he wasn’t qualified,” Jane explained. “They just stuck him there because there wasn’t anyone else to teach it.”

  “So Sawyer walks into bio one on the first day of freshman year,” Ryan began, “his face full of makeup, his hair pulled up into a six-inch Mohawk—”

  “That I had to iron to get to stand up straight, might I add—” Sawyer noted.

  “And Coach Miller looks up from his desk like he’s just seen a goddamn nightmare. He looks straight at Sawyer and he goes…” Ryan squared his shoulders and squinted his eyes, scrunching up his face in an attempt to look seriously perturbed. “‘Son, what in the Sam Hill is wrong with your face?’ And Sawyer says…”

  “‘I’m ugly, sir?’” Sawyer replied, a nostalgic grin pulled across his face.

  “And that is why you should watch Rocky Horror,” Ryan concluded. “Because Sawyer used to be a sweet transvestite.”

  April forced a smile, then covered her mouth, hiding a yawn. Jane looked down to her plate, a pang of irritation scratching at her heart. April wasn’t even trying. She wanted to ask her why she had even bothered to come at all. But she swallowed her annoyance and offered the table a conclusive nod.

  “That’s our cue,” she said. “We should get to bed if we’re getting up early tomorrow.”

  “Six o’clock sharp,” Ryan clarified, only to be met with a communal groan. “What?” he asked. “It takes an hour to get up there, not to mention packing up, eating breakfast…”

  “Chocolate cake,” Lauren mused, sliding her finger across the bottom of the cake plate to scoop up a bit of frosting. “The breakfast of champions.”

  Jane plucked the cake off the table, more than half of it still up for grabs, and Lauren picked up their dirty plates and icing-smeared forks, walking them over to the sink as the rest of the group stretched and rose from their seats.

  “I should take a shower,” Lauren said. “Or I’ll have to get up even earlie
r, and you know me and mornings.”

  Jane nodded. “Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll finish up here.”

  “Are you sure?” Lauren asked, making a face at the stack of dishes on the counter.

  “I’m just going to run the dishwasher. I’ll meet you up there.”

  Lauren was the first to disappear down the hall, followed a moment later by April and Sawyer. Jane watched them for a long while, her heart twisting around a seed of jealousy.

  “Hey,” Ryan said, snapping her out of her daze. “You okay?”

  She turned to the sink and nodded sternly. “Fine,” she said. “Just tired.”

  He leaned in, pressing a kiss to her temple. “Thanks for dinner,” he said. “You’re tops, Janey. Just swell!”

  Jane smirked and smacked him with a dish towel as he turned to join the others upstairs. “Idiot,” she murmured, turning on the tap.

  After running the dishes beneath a stream of hot water, Jane arranged them in the dishwasher, occasionally glancing up at her own reflection in the window above the sink. She wondered what Sawyer saw in that girl. Maybe Jane was just being harsh—maybe April was great; she was just uncomfortable around so many new people. But the way she had sat at the table while they all laughed, stone-faced, like she couldn’t have been bothered to even try to be part of their group…it made Jane angry. It was as though April had come up to the cabin with Sawyer only to ruin his good time—their last time at their childhood haunt, at a place they’d never see again.

  Jane squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the burn of tears at the backs of her eyes. Everything was different. Ryan was leaving. She and Sawyer felt like strangers. The house already felt like a memory. And then there was that girl, screwing it all up.

  With a dinner plate in hand, she paused at what sounded like thumping on the deck. She knitted her eyebrows together, listening for it again, and there it was—a muffled shuffling against the wooden planks, like Oona wandering around just beyond the kitchen door.

  “I swear to god,” she said beneath her breath, sliding the plate into the machine before snatching the dish towel off the counter and wiping her hands. She had warned Ryan over a dozen times that bringing Oona with them was more trouble than it was worth. Lots of guests meant lots of distractions, and this was the proof: Ryan had let her out, only to forget her again. Lucky for Oona that Jane was still downstairs, or that dog would have been frozen through come morning.

  Squinting against her own reflection, she tried to see through the glare of the window. Sidestepping the sink, she cupped her hands against the glass of the door and peered outside, looking for the husky. She flipped on the outdoor light, spotting a shadow just beyond the corner of the house. Unlocking the kitchen door, Jane stuck her head out into the cold.

  “Oona?”

  She puckered her lips to whistle, but all that came out was a squeaky breath of air. She couldn’t snap her fingers either. These were talents that hadn’t been bestowed upon her, no matter how hard Ryan had tried to teach her when they were kids, and up until now Jane couldn’t have cared less. Exhaling a sigh, she hissed the words into the cold.

  “Oona, come!”

  But she received no reply. The shadow loomed, seemingly alert but not responding. Shaking her head, she shut the door and went back to the sink. If Oona wanted to come back inside, she’d show her furry face before Jane was done with the dishes. If not, she’d have to tell Ryan to go outside in his pajamas and catch pneumonia, which she supposed served him right. She ran the water again, not wanting to do dishes at dawn. But as soon as she started clanging plates together the scuttling out on the deck returned.

  “Not this time,” she said to herself, choosing to ignore it, scraping a bit of leftover food off a plate before hitting a switch next to the sink. The garbage disposal roared to life, chewing up bits of meat and vegetables. She killed it and looked back up to the window, only to have her heart launch into her throat.

  Sawyer stood behind her, having sneaked up on her without knowing it.

  “Shit, sorry.” He winced at his own reflection in the glass.

  Jane closed her eyes, trying to regain her composure. The jolt of surprise sizzled in her blood before subsiding, immediately replaced with an unidentifiable warmth when Sawyer reached for a dirty plate, nudging her out of the way.

  She kept her hips flush with the counter, not daring to face him, her bottom lip between her teeth.

  “What’re you doing?” she finally asked, casting a sidelong glance at him.

  He glanced at her through a veil of wavy hair a few inches shy of his shoulders.

  “Dishes,” he told her, sticking a plate beneath the stream of the faucet.

  A flare of hope ignited deep within Jane’s chest. Was Sawyer choosing dishes over going to bed with the nymph upstairs?

  The water caught the plate’s beveled edge and sprayed sideways, soaking the hem of Sawyer’s Stabbing Westward T-shirt—washed-out black cotton immediately turning as dark as the sky beyond the window. He grumbled and slid the plate into the machine before pressing a dish towel to his shirt.

  Jane’s heart thumped in her ears. She stepped away from the sink and moved to the table, gathering up used napkins and place mats, desperate to keep her hands busy and her eyes averted. She didn’t want to be alone with him. It made her want to say things, to ask questions, to slide back into his arms and forget the last ten years.

  The hiss of the sink eventually gave way to the sound of the bottom rack sliding into place. The dishwasher door snapped closed and she cringed at the sudden silence, afraid to turn around. She stood at the head of the table, her eyes downcast, her fingers nervously folding napkins that needed washing.

  “I heard about what happened,” Sawyer said from the sink. “With you and Alex.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, forced a reply. “Yeah?”

  A moment of silence, then: “He’s an idiot.”

  She clenched her jaw, not sure what the hell he expected her to say.

  “Either way, I’m sorry. I was going to call, but, you know…”

  “Yeah,” she said, pulling at the edge of a napkin. “I know.”

  “At least it happened when it did, right?”

  Jane said nothing.

  “Shit, that came out wrong. I’m just saying that—”

  “Yeah,” Jane cut in. “I get it. No kids, no big deal.” She frowned at the edge in her voice. “Thanks, Tom,” she said, trying to soften her tone.

  She heard Sawyer pull in a breath behind her, imagined him standing there with the sink to his back, the heels of his hands resting against the edge of the counter, studying the tips of his combat boots. “Listen,” he said after a long pause. “I feel like an asshole. Losing touch…” He hesitated. “It’s my fault, I know that. I should have fixed it.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Come on, Janey.”

  She sighed, crumpling the napkin up in her hand, slowly turning so that she could see him. He stood just the way she had imagined, his head bowed, his legs crossed at the ankles.

  “I was out in Boston; you started teaching; then you got married.” He looked up at her. “Still are, right? What was I supposed to do?”

  She felt numb.

  “You could have at least come to the wedding,” she said softly.

  “So you could have had a severely uncomfortable guy sitting alone at a table during the reception?”

  He was right. Inviting Sawyer to the wedding had been a strange thing to do. She’d never admit that after dropping his invitation in the mail, she’d hoped he’d show up, if only to answer the pastor’s call: “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  “Well, you could have at least RSVP’d,” she whispered.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I kept wondering if you had just forgotten.”

  He held his silence.

  “I left a spare seat open at the head table.” It was a secret she had sworn she’d never confess. “I was worri
ed that you’d come and you wouldn’t have anywhere to sit.”

  “Jesus.” The word came out upon a breath. “Ryan didn’t tell me…”

  “I asked him not to.”

  “It was your day,” he said. “I didn’t want to screw things up.”

  She dared to look up at him then, chewing her bottom lip before diverting her eyes again. “Your hair’s gotten long,” she told him, her gaze focused on the floor. “It looks good; like a proper musician.”

  It was the reason he had left for Boston: to become a sound engineer, to rub elbows with his favorite artists and make them sound more amazing than they really did. She couldn’t imagine what was going through April’s mind, Sawyer’s closest friend looking like he’d stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog rather than a rock club. She wondered how weird it was for April to realize her edgy boyfriend hung out with a bunch of trendy yuppies who—

  Without warning, Sawyer pushed away from the counter and breached the distance between them. He reached out, took Jane’s head in his hands, his palms pressing against her cheeks. Her heart stopped as she felt his breath drift across the curve of her bottom lip. She let her eyes flutter shut, not wanting to see what was coming. When he pressed a kiss to the top of her head, a tiny voice inside her head cried out, screaming that he wasn’t fooling anyone, that they both knew what they wanted. Maybe if they just gave in…

  “Good night,” he whispered. He turned away from her and grabbed a can of Coke out of the fridge. She opened her mouth to speak as he lingered there, the cold refrigerator light casting a halo around his frame, but couldn’t find the words. He glanced back at her as if about to say something more, but he silently left the kitchen instead.

  The moment he was out of sight, Jane slid into Ryan’s chair, the drumming of her heart threatening to choke her. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe Sawyer didn’t want more. He had April, and April was beautiful. He had moved on, while she continued to cling to the past.

  “Shit,” she whispered, pressing her fingertips against her eyelids, fighting the sting of tears. She was pathetic. Weak. She had sworn up and down that she was ready for this, but she wasn’t. She had insisted that everything would be fine, but nothing was.