by Claire Adams
She was right; it was nice.
"How was the ride up here?" I asked, handing her the mug of coffee. She thanked me and took a sip.
"Well, I made it," she said, shrugging. “It was a little bumpy."
"Bet you're mad Brett's making you do his dirty work."
She laughed a little. "Are we that obvious?"
"As much as I'd want to believe you just wanted to visit me to see how I was, I know that isn't the case."
"Wow," she murmured. "Shit, let me just leave then."
"You came all the way here, might as well finish your coffee." We stood looking out over the snowy back of the house in silence for a few seconds. It had come down last night, at least another couple inches.
"You're still in one piece, so Brett's going to be happy to hear that. You don't look frostbitten or starved."
"How's he doing?"
"I don't know," she said. "Drive back down to Salt Lake and find out." I looked at her. Both her hands were wrapped around her mug, and she leaned on the railing with her elbows. There was a slight breeze blowing through her hair.
"Okay," I said, "maybe I deserved that."
"Now that I'm out here, I can kind of see the appeal, but," she paused, turning so her back was against the railing, and she could face me easier, "you could have waited ‘til July." I laughed a little.
"No, seriously. How is everything back at work?"
"It's okay," she said lightly, looking into her coffee.
"Really?" I asked. She shrugged.
"You said it yourself, Brett knows what he's doing, and he's been getting along pretty well since you left." Huh, I thought. Seeing her, I had thought there had to have been an emergency or at least a problem. We had been talking a little while now, and she hadn't said anything about the company until I asked. In the past, talking to her, she'd never really had a problem getting her point across. I didn't know whether to take her word for it or not.
"Hm," I said. "I know I asked why Brett had sent you here to do his dirty work, but looks like I was wrong. You just missed me."
She scoffed, looking over at me. "Try again," she said. "Brett said he hasn't been able to get in touch with you at all."
"Yeah, well…" I trailed off.
"Do I have to tell the poor guy you've just been ignoring him?"
"I haven't been ignoring anybody," I said. "I left my phone in Salt Lake. Didn't need it anymore."
"So you haven't read the news at all, talked to anyone, gone online since you left?"
"Nope." And it had been great.
"Then you don't know that there's a snowstorm forecasted to come through here this weekend." A what? I frowned. She was right that I hadn't had any contact with anyone for several days. That had been the point of leaving the phone behind, but then actually talking to people wasn’t even the primary use of mobile phones anymore, was it? I hadn't looked at the weather forecast. There was a thermometer anchored to the wall in the house by the door that told me the temperature inside and outside; that was all I had by way of the weather forecast.
"Huh," I said, "well, now I do."
"More than two feet of snow is expected to come down Saturday." I had prepared as much as I had thought that I'd needed to before coming here, but again and again, something would happen to remind me I had not done enough. It was a learning curve, and I could accept that, but I had left my phone behind, confident that I wouldn't want to talk to anyone. I had books, but those didn't forecast the weather.
"That sounds...cold."
"Unless you have a snowmobile or ATV, the road back to town is going to be impossible to use for at least a few days." A snowmobile. That sounded handy. How did she know that though? How experienced was she with mountain trails anyway?
"So what are you saying?"
"If you plan on feeding yourself and not freezing to death, you need to get out to the nearest town now and stock up." Alright; the point, finally. The reason why Brett sent her up here. She was right, kind of. I hadn't known about the storm. I was glad she told me. I'd probably be chopping and moving wood for the rest of the day now.
"No. I think I have everything I need. I’ll probably be swinging that ax nonstop ‘til it rolls in but I think I have everything."
"You think? You won't be thinking very much when you're stuck out here with no way to contact anyone, and you're down to your last can of pork and beans." I laughed a little. I had about enough food to last a few days without heading to the town. Once I had enough wood, it didn't matter how long I'd have to stay put. I looked at her, noticing her cup was empty.
"Want to go back inside?" I offered.
"The weather at this elevation is tricky. Major snowfall can take days, even weeks to clear." I closed the door behind her. "If you don't have enough supplies and no way to contact anyone, you'll be stranded."
"Thanks for telling me."
"Cameron," she said. She was frowning like she had expected me to say I'd go find a hotel or something for the next few days instead of staying here.
"Natalie?"
"You're not listening to me."
"I am. Thank you for telling me about the storm, okay? But if you thought it was going to scare me back into the city, then you were wrong. I can take care of myself. If I had had any doubts, the last week out here alone has shown me that I can take a snowstorm. Alright? Don't worry about me." I took her mug and walked both of them to the sink.
"You're crazy," she said, crossing her arms. I laughed. That might have been the first totally unfiltered thing she had ever said to me.
"Anytime you feel like making the drive, you come up here, okay?"
"You're not heading out to town? If you want, I can take you right now," she offered.
"No, you go ahead. I know you didn't come up here to do any of that." I looked her up and down again. She was a beautiful girl. I still didn't know how tall she was since she was always in heels. About a head shorter than me maybe. Yeah, with her hair and makeup like that, roughing it in the mountains was likely the last thing she wanted to do. She sighed.
"You're really bent on this whole thing, huh?"
"Do you and Brett have a bet on when I finally give up?"
"It's just," she trailed off then looked around the cabin again. It was tidy. There wasn't much furniture, and the wood was in a neat pile near the fireplace. Was this it? She was stalling. I wanted her to spit it out. It wasn’t just the kindness of her heart that had brought her up here, and she had already told me about the snowstorm. Come on, spit it out, I thought. I need you to come back with me because things are bad at the company. You need to get behind that desk and do your job. That was what she had come up here to say to me. No, scratch that. That had been what she had been sent up here to say.
"Take care of yourself," she said, finally. I walked her back out to her car. I waited until she had backed out and disappeared onto the road before going back to finish what I had been doing before she had shown up.
A storm was coming, huh? I kept my woodpile on the porch where it didn't get covered with snow. If she was right, I'd need to have enough to keep me going at least a few days. I had a tarp to cover my car, so I wasn't worried about that. Food? If I skipped breakfast each day, I had enough for three, maybe four days. I had had suspicions seeing Natalie, but now that she was gone, I found myself thinking about whether she'd actually take me up on that offer to come back for another visit.
She wouldn't. I mean, the trip was bad enough, add the cold and the isolation, and I wasn't sure it was most people's idea of a good time. Too bad, I thought. It had been nice having her for the short time she'd stayed. She wasn't a bad person to talk to. Seemed smart and today actually had something useful to tell me. I looked up at the sky. It was overcast, but it didn't particularly look like there was a storm coming.
She had been easy to talk to, too, strangely. She hadn't been hard to talk to in the past, but here, like this, I had expected her to be uncomfortable, and I don't know, pushier, I guess. Sh
e had listened to me in the end instead of trying to change my mind, and she had even offered to drive me to the nearest town to stock up on stuff. I had a good feeling I'd be alright, but it had been good of her to offer. Shit, she had made the trip all the way out here just for me to not take her advice. She probably knew what she was talking about, but she didn't need to worry.
Too bad, I thought. If anyone of those awkward elevator rides had turned into conversations, maybe something could have happened. It wasn't going to happen now. You meet a beautiful, smart girl right when there's no chance of anything actually happening, I thought. Well done. Obviously, if anything had been supposed to happen already, it would have. There would always be more, right? Too bad. Too fucking bad. I picked up my ax and got back to work.
Chapter Fourteen
Natalie
"This color would look nice on you. What do you think of this?" Kasey asked me, holding out a lipstick.
"I think it's over thirty dollars. I'm not spending that on a single lipstick," I said, taking it from her and putting it back on the display. Kasey had had makeup returns to make, and we had gotten distracted wandering out of the store. Makeup was one of those things you didn't know you didn't need until you had too much of it. I had only started wearing the stuff after leaving for college, so I liked to think I was making up for lost time.
"You should splurge," she said. "What else are you spending the money on?"
"You want to get it for me, go right ahead," I said.
"What's the matter with you?" she asked, looking up at me from an eye-shadow display. "You've been grumpy all morning.”
"I'm not grumpy," I grumbled.
"What happened yesterday?" she asked. I shrugged as we wandered the store. We had met for breakfast earlier, and both had the rest of the morning before Kasey had to go into the salon for her first appointment. "You said you'd tell me how your little visit to your boyfriend's new house went."
"He isn't my boyfriend," I said, rolling my eyes.
"So, not good?" she asked.
"Stop," I said, picking up a mascara then putting it back down. I wasn’t here to get anything. Most mascara was a scam anyway. There was only one way to get longer lashes, and that was eyelash extensions. Mascara wasn’t the problem here. I was irritated. Had been since having to drive three hours back home from seeing Cameron the day before. "It was... He was fine. He was just there. The cabin's nice. It's beautiful up there. It was cold, but he seemed fine. He was alright."
"Why are you saying all this like it's a bad thing?"
"I don't know how to feel about any of it. He's doing okay, I guess, but he's never done any of that shit before. He's never lived that far away from emergency services and resources. I went up there to talk to him about what was happening at work, but I choked. I couldn't do it."
"So he doesn't know his company is crumbling?" she asked. Crumbling was a strong word, but it wasn't exactly thriving at the moment.
"Everything that happened at the last meeting with the stockholders, I just couldn't say it."
"Why?"
"Because he finally seemed peaceful, Kase. Something about him was different. He seemed happier. I feel like he needed this.”
“Whether he needed it or not, don’t you guys need him?”
“I know. I wish I wasn’t the one who had to break this to him. When I was there with him, I just couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to be another person in his life forcing him into something he doesn’t want to do.”
“Are you serious? You went all that way and then talked about what? The weather?” she asked. She was being sarcastic but had hit the nail right on the head.
“We just talked. I told him about the storm that’s supposed to blow in from the mountains. Offered to take him into town to stock up because the snow’s going to be at least a couple feet deep. He might be trying to prove something, but dying during a snowstorm isn’t how he’s going to do it.”
“Snowstorm? And he’s alone up there?” she asked.
“Alone and determined he can take it.”
“He might not want to come back to Salt Lake, but he’s gotta be a lot more useful to you alive than he could ever be dead.”
“Well, tell him that,” I said, looking listlessly at a makeup display. I had been thinking about him a lot since I had been to his cabin the day before. The storm was scheduled to blow through the mountains today. He didn’t have his phone with him, or any phone with him, so he was fucking unreachable unless I wanted to make that damn drive again.
"Nat," Kasey said, "could he die up there alone?"
"It wouldn’t be hard," I scoffed. “He has all the ingredients for disaster.” Isolation. Limited access to resources and emergency services, and foolhardy stubbornness. He was looking at at least severe bodily injury, if not death.
"And you're just going to leave him?"
"I don't know why you think I have control over what he does; I clearly don't," I said. But I have control over what I do, I realized. I couldn't make him listen to me. He didn't have to listen to me when I told him he had to prepare for a storm, but he couldn't stop me from going back up there. "Kase?" I asked her suddenly.
"What?" I had an idea, and it was her fault. I hoped she wasn't going to abandon me because I wouldn't be able to do it alone. I told her. Technically, I couldn't make Cameron take care of himself. If he had decided his week of wilderness living meant he knew his shit, then I'd just have to step in where his good sense had failed him.
My car wasn't that big, and the number of things I believed he'd need in general might have been too long to get up there on this one trip. We started with a few emergency items: candles, a lighter, matches and a flashlight with batteries in case of a power outage. His cabin seemed to have electricity, but I wasn't sure whether his lights were solar powered, gas, or whether he was attached to the grid. We had lived pretty remotely on the ranch growing up, but we had always had electricity. We hadn't been total savages.
Unless a week had been long enough for him to have learned to hunt, he needed food. I got a mix of fresh and non-perishable food to be safe. If he didn't like canned corned beef, he was about to start. He had a fireplace, and the cabin had been pretty toasty when we had gone inside, but I remembered winters back home when we'd do everything short of setting the house on fire to heat it up. I took a chance and got an electric heater, hoping I was right that he'd be able to use it.
I picked up some kitchen and general items like paper towels and aluminum foil, even some extra blankets. Kasey helped but hadn't had that many ideas on what he'd need. The closest she had gotten to wilderness living in the past was dating a guy who liked to hike. Finally satisfied with the haul and running out of time before Kasey had to be at her salon, I dropped her off before I started for the mountains.
"Are you heading out there now? What time is the storm coming through?" she asked, talking to me through the open window of my car where we were in front of her salon.
"Afternoon, hopefully later than earlier," I said.
"Are you going to be able to make it back?"
"Maybe," I said. I hadn’t really thought about how I would be getting back. I had mostly been thinking about getting there first.
"Natalie, this is serious. You won't be able to drive through that."
"If worst comes to worst, I'll get a hotel or something," I said distractedly. "I just need to get up there."
"Just be careful," she said. I nodded. I had my phone and had splurged on a satellite phone too, just in case of any emergencies. It was the most expensive purchase of the haul, and I cursed Cameron silently for not bothering to get one himself. I left, and taking my own hasty advice, stopped at a store and got a stock of clothes and toiletries in case I really did end up having to stop at a hotel.
I drove as fast as I dared because the snow was already falling by the time I turned off the paved road to the all-weather mountain trail. The sky was obscured by clouds. It was windy, just how windy I didn't wa
nt to check. Kasey had been right. If the snow only got heavier, I wouldn't be making it back down. I concentrated on just making it up. You know what you should have gotten? I thought darkly. A snowmobile. No, what was I thinking? He should have gotten one. He should have done some fucking research and chosen a better time of year to abandon the comforts he had never had to live without. What kind of fool...
I stopped because it was no use. Concentrating on staying on the road, I finally got to his cabin. The trip that had taken me under three hours the first time had taken over four. The property was already covered in snow. The tarp over his car was completely carpeted. The wind whistled violently when I opened my door. I had dressed for winter that morning, but not winter in the mountains. My open coat whipped around me as I went over to the trunk and opened it to get the things out.
I grabbed a bag full of food and hurried to the porch, rushing up and sitting it on the highest step so it didn't get covered in snow before going back for another one. My second trip, I heard the door unlock as I came up the steps. Cameron came out looking confused. See, now, nobody would come out of their cabin emptyhanded like that if they heard a commotion outside. Maybe it was just your coworker, but maybe it was a bear. He was so green. It had only been a week that he had been out here, but it showed. How had he not broken his leg trying to get across a snowbank yet?
"Natalie?" he said, coming up to me.
"There's more in the car," I said shortly, walking back for more. He followed me.
"What is all this stuff?"
"It's for you," I said, hauling another bag out of the car. He helped me, grabbing the last bag and the heater and taking them up. I locked my car and hurried up to the porch.
"Did Brett ask you to do this?" he asked when we were both up on the porch. I was panting. My breath formed clouds in front of my face. I jammed my hands in my pockets.
"No. I just had a feeling you weren't going to listen to me, so I had to do something about it." He looked at the stuff on the ground.
"So, all this..."
"You should have gotten yesterday when I told you to get it," I said. I reached down for one of the bags, picking it up.