With

by Donald Harington

  A long silence will seize the room after that, as if there is nothing more to be said, and in a sense there will not be. Or it will all be denouement. It will soon be time to leave.

  “Let me show you the house,” Karen will offer her daughter, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, and the two women will leave the room.

  Hal and I will step out onto the porch to light our cigarettes. Robin will have nearly broken me of the nicotine habit, but it will be an addiction, after all, and I will need some time. I will need some time.

  “You will need some time,” Hal will say, surprising me, as if he will have been reading my mind. But he will not be referring to the breaking of my nicotine habit. “She’s young enough to be your daughter, and she’s probably just very grateful to you for coming along when you did, but now that you’ve helped her to find the rest of the world again, she might grow tired of you or she might discover someone else, you know?”

  “I’ve considered that possibility,” I will grant. “I’ll take my chances.”

  “But thank you very much for returning her to us,” he will say.

  “It’s just a temporary loan,” I’ll point out.

  “You won’t mind if I run a check on you?” he will ask. “Just routine. Just to see if you have any priors, or anything questionable in your past.”

  “My whole past was questionable, but you’re welcome to check it all out.”

  “The name of the company you worked for?”

  “Madewell Cooperage, Inc., St. Helena, California.”

  “Oh. You own it?”

  “I did. I sold it.”

  He will notice my SUV parked at the curb. “Nice wheels,” he’ll say. “You going to be able to take good care of our Robin?”

  “The best,” I’ll say.

  And there will really not be much more to be said. All the knots will be free, straight, clear. We will live happily ever after forevermore. I will take the very best care of Robin. And she of me. We will want for nothing. The homestead on Madewell Mountain will have all the comforts and amenities that we will desire or will discover through our subscription to Architectural Record. I’ll be an old man, and Robin in her elegant forties, before she will finally succeed in spending the last of the money from Sog’s heritage. We will have taken trips to England, France, Germany and Italy, with pleasurable layovers in our favorite city, New York. But our happiest memories will be of the thousands of days and nights on Madewell Mountain, in the fragrance of oakwood, the sound of the nightingales, the taste of wild strawberries, and the sight of lightning bugs. With all of our pets, including those that Hreapha will surprise Robin with on her subsequent birthdays.

  In time, the marvelous menagerie of Madewell Mountain will have two human additions, children born to us. Robin will name the first, Deborah, after the prophetess and singer of the Book of Judges, and I will name the second, Braxton, after my grandfather who built our homestead.

  Each year on my birthday I will receive from California a carton of twelve bottles of the very finest private-stock Pinot Noir, with a card inscribed “Many happy returns, André,” and each year for his birthday I will send to him the monetary equivalent in the form of a single barrel made from Madewell Mountain oak by the loving hands of Robin and the strong hands of myself. Our only hobby, hers and mine, will be the making of barrels—burgundy and bourbon barrels, as well as churns and piggins and firkins. And whenever we finish one of the latter, she’ll say, “Did you say ‘fuckin,’ Adam?” and we will of course have to do that.

  It will be so easy for us to live in the past, and to remember, to speak of, to reenact the scenes of our puberty together. Believing sincerely in in-habits, we will discover that Robin will have an inhabit of her own, who will be able to become any of the ages she has been, and to consort with my in-habit happily ever after. Our in-habits will cohabit.

  There will remain only one chapter in this story, and Robin’s in-habit will have it. There will remain only one more wonder in this wondrous journey: the moment when your in-habit, dear creative reader, will come into existence and will take possession of these pages.

  Chapter fifty

  Her mother will have said to her, when alone, “It just kills me that you grew up missing out on so many things. Don’t you ever think about all the things you missed?” And although she will have nodded in acknowledgment that she will indeed have, her mother will have begun enumerating all the things she will have missed: education, friendships, fun, and knowledge of current events, of the world, of things like etiquette. “Every mother wants to teach her daughter some manners,” she will have said. “But I was deprived of that chance. I was deprived of the chance also to help you with your social life, with boys, with going out on dates. My God, you never had a date! With nice boys your own age. And here you’ve taken up with that man and have nobody to compare him with! He’s handsome and well-spoken and courteous, but he’s the only guy you’ve ever known, except for that bastard who stole you away from me. It just kills me that you’re planning to marry him and will have to live the rest of your life without knowing if there might be a far more desirable man.”

  “I’m not planning to marry him, Mother,” she will have said. “He has been married before, and doesn’t think much of the institution.”

  “Really? So you’re just planning to go on living in sin together up there in your hideaway?”

  “Mother, I’ve read the Bible several times, cover to back. It was practically the only book I had to read. I have a pretty good idea of what sin is. Adam and I are without sin.”

  “Do you mean he’s impotent too?”

  Robin will have laughed. “Far from it.”

  “I guess the point I’m trying to make is that you have nobody to compare him with. How do you know if another man might not be…better in bed?”

  “If any man were better in bed than Adam, he would be too much for me.”

  “Oh, let’s not get to talking about such things, but I just want you to know how much I missed you, and how much I cried for you, and how much I will always regret all those lost years of your life.”

  “You never forgot me, did you?”

  “Of course not! And your stepfather and I never stopped looking for you. Your Grandpa Spurlock is still looking for you, so you’d better let him know that you’ve been found.”

  Robin will be keeping lists of things to do, and she will add to that list a visit to Pindall to see her grandparents. She will not have mentioned to her mother the fact that Adam once met Grandpa Spurlock on the trail leading up to her Madewell Mountain aerie, and that if on that occasion either Grandpa or Adam had found her, she would have been deprived of some of the most wonderful adventures of her entire experience. But the Fate-thing will always have a way to prevent such happenstances.

  Her mother will have told her about an organization called The Robin Kerr League, a nationwide group of the parents of hundreds, even thousands of abducted children. Her mother will have begged her to go on television or make a videotape to address the members of the League and tell them to have hope because she herself never gave up hope, etc., but Robin will have had to remind her mother that there will not be any publicity whatsoever about her existence.

  It will have been a condition of their meeting and their resumption of their relationship as mother and daughter that there will not be the slightest public mention of the story.

  Occasionally Robin will perforce give some further thought to some of the questions her mother will have raised, particularly one that will have already engaged her: despite her deep love for Adam, will she not be haunted by never having had a date to compare him with? Will she be completely happy with a man twenty-eight years her senior? Is it possible to fall in love only once and never again? To have that first love last forever?

  Although she and Adam will watch innumerable movies because they both will love and crave that form of entertainment, their principal diversion will remain an overpowering thirst for reading
, and they will consume enormous quantities of novels, the reading of which will provide Robin with a vast knowledge of human relationships that life will not have given her. Those many novels will also confirm her in her belief that her story will be unique, as well as settle whatever lingering doubts she might have about being madly in love with a man so much older. Eventually Robin will be strongly tempted to write a novel herself, but this future tense that Hreapha will have bestowed upon her will not extend that far into the future. And although she will come to understand the meaning of such novelistic concepts as self-referentiality, or self-reflective postmodernist fiction, she will have some difficulty accepting the idea of a novel wherein the main pursuit of the hero and heroine, apart from sex, is the reading of novels. Even if the setting for their reading, in that comfortably refurbished living room (the davenport alone will remain), with a nice fire going in their Vermont Castings woodstove, with glasses of Pinot Noir at hand or better yet the Sauvignon Blanc that Adam will make from his own grapes, will be sufficiently novelistic unto itself. Yes, she will allow, it might just be possible to write a novel about the reading of novels.

  But she will have so many other things to do. The hobby of cooperage will keep both of them busy. And her garden: she will continue growing all their vegetables and flowers. Although she will have been slow and reluctant to accept all the advantages and material comforts that their unlimited financial resources can provide (she will never become materialistic, let alone acquisitive), and will have learned to lament PROG RESS, as it will have been spoken and lamented by earlier generations of Stay Morons, one benefit of PROG RESS which she will welcome heartily will be her Troy-Bilt® Rototiller, with which she will be able to make short work of churning the soil of her garden.

  Of course she will be bothered by the noise that her Troy-Bilt® makes. And so will her pets, especially Hreapha, who will always escape deep into the woods whenever Robin starts up the tiller. Robin’s readjustment to civilization will encounter several irritations, principally the sounds of civilization: the roaring of the tiller, the ringing of the telephone, the whirring of the fax machine, the screeching of the printer, the beeping of the microwave, even the midnight moans of the refrigerator. But somehow these noises will give her an appreciation of what she took for granted all those years of her growing up: the sheer loveliness of silence, when not even the wind is stirring the evening air. The soothing comfort and solitude of quiet. Likewise the distress of brightly lit rooms will give her a new appreciation of the darkness that was her element for so many years and will remain her favorite condition. And likewise the obtrusion of smells, of chemicals—cleaning products, repellents, her beauty products even—will make her love all the more the smell of dirt and the smell of green. She will learn to adore green as if she had never noticed it before.

  Many of her garments will be green, a color that will go very nicely with her golden hair. She will frequently examine herself in the mirror, not with any trace of vanity nor self-criticism, but simply out of curiosity about her appearance as a modern woman, and her identity. Will she have remained and retained herself as she truly is despite fitting into society after a long absence? Will she really fit? What will show? Will anyone ever be able to tell just by looking at her that she will have been lost for all those years? Adam will continue to describe her to herself, each day without fail, in different words every time but with the same message convincingly reiterated: that she is a goddess incarnate, beauty personified, a living dream, a feast for the eyes. He will have said it so many times in so many different ways that she will almost begin to believe it, but there will always be the lingering doubt in her mind that any female who will have been subjected to such isolation and struggle, who will have been deprived of hygiene and balanced meals, let alone any knowledge of etiquette, algebra, civics and world history, who will never have had a chance to go out on a date, who will not have had a best girlfriend, who will have lived by choice in nakedness and wildness, who will without ever having learned the ugly term masturbation have practiced it so much throughout her later childhood and adolescence, whose only sexual experience apart from that will have been an eventual passionate affair with an invisible in-habit, could not possibly have expected to appear real, let alone normal, whatever that might mean.

  “Adam, sweet honey,” she will ask him one night during one of those postcoital moments of—what was the term he used? detumescent denouement—“do you think we ought to give up birth control?”

  His silence will remind her of the way the in-habit Adam often would not answer her questions. Moments will drift by. She will hear him, in the dark, in the bed, quietly chuckling. Then he will say, “I reckon there’s sure room for another of us.”

  There will be room for not just one but two of them, and the noise they make crying for her will be the one most tolerable noise in her life.

  “This future tense is nice,” she will sometimes comment to him. “Everything about you is nice. What’s nicest about you is that you know me so well and yet you love me so much.”

  “Do you want to know when I first fell in love? Not the first time I watched ye reaching by yourself. That was pure frustrated craving, not love. The first time I knew I loved ye was when you weren’t but ten or eleven and you told me that my initials which I burned into the first churn I made, ‘AM,’ could be taken to mean that I am, that I exist, that I have an identity. No one else could have given me that. You created me, Robin.”

  “I didn’t create you. For the longest time I thought I might have just dreamed you up, and even when you appeared in the flesh I continued to wonder if you were just a reverie, if maraichinage is just a mirage, but then you made me believe that I am too, that I am not merely some storyteller’s wildest fancy, and that Madewell Mountain with all its inhabitants is really my domain, and, believing that I am, I know that you are.”

  “Future tense, remember? Always ‘will be.’”

  “Always will be with,” she will say, leaving the sentence, like the future tense itself, unfinished, indeterminate, open to infinite possibility.

  With a determination never to finish, they will go on expanding their haunt, to the world, but first to the world around them, until they will know every rock and flower of Madewell Mountain, and then beyond it to Ledbetter Mountain and all of Stay More. Robin will never feel truly sociable, and she will hate crowds to the point of being almost agoraphobic, but she will learn to feel comfortable with her neighbors. She will visit often with Latha. Adam will visit often with George Dinsmore. They will occasionally have Latha and George to dinner. In time Latha will introduce them to her grandson Vernon Ingledew and his lovely companion Jelena. Latha will introduce them also to her granddaughter Sharon and the man Larry she is living with in the old Stay More post office/store/house that had once been Latha’s home. They will also meet another couple who will be living in the house that had been built by Daniel Lyam Montross, who was the grandfather or father of the woman Diana Stoving who will now be living in the house with her companion Day Whittacker. Montross had been the hermit who had kidnapped Diana as a child and been killed by Sugrue Alan. Robin and Adam will learn the stories of all these people, stories that Robin had already foretold to herself when she had created Stay More out of paper.

  Denouements, Adam will have warned her, should not contain surprises, but there will be one little astonishment in the confession by Day Whittacker, a professional forester, that on one of his regular reconnoiterings of the timberlands of Stay More, a number of years before, he had stumbled upon the Madewell Mountain homestead, had taken a good look at a naked girl playing with a fawn in the yard, and had decided not to intrude upon her privacy.

  Day’s audience will have been curious: did he not wonder if she lived there alone? Was he not tempted to speak to her and find out? Had he ever wondered if she might be in need of rescue? “Something,” Day will have said, “simply told me that she wasn’t in need of me.”

  They will be i
n need of him now, will be in need of all of them, as friends. Eventually Vernon Ingledew, a very intelligent and wise person, will decide to run for governor of the state of Arkansas, and Adam and Robin will contribute gladly and generously to his campaign. Stay More will temporarily be invaded by others during the campaign, and there will be a few additional people that Robin and Adam will want to know. The old Stay More hotel, which had been the home of Vernon’s ancestor, Jacob Ingledew, who had been governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction, and which Larry had temporarily inhabited when it was overrun with cockroaches, will become the home of a strange woman named Ekaterina, not from Russia itself but near enough to it to have piqued Adam’s interest, since he will never forget André Tchelistcheff, who will continue until his death at ninety-three to keep in touch with Adam and send him a case of wine on his birthday. Two additional new residents who Robin and Adam will enjoy meeting will be an Oklahoma oil heiress, an Indian woman, and her manservant, also Indian. All of these people will also have their own stories, not ones that Robin will have foretold in her paper Stay More, but ones she will enjoy hearing and reading about.

  Although there will come an occasion in the distant future when articles will be written about the coincidence, or design, that the impoverished backwater ghost town (one of which will propose a neologism, “in-habit town”) of Stay More will have happened to have contained half a dozen millionaires, including Adam and Robin, no one, according to their proscription, will ever write about Adam and Robin, who will be allowed to enjoy their seclusion and privacy for as long as they will wish.

  They will rarely leave except, before settling down to have and to raise Deborah and Braxton, their daughter and son, they will go to Europe. After her very first trip to England, which she will enormously enjoy, Robin will return home and will be surprised to discover that Hreapha and the other animals have not missed her. She will be almost hurt, and will say accusingly to Hreapha, “You haven’t seen me for several weeks, and you’re acting as if I didn’t even leave.”