by Mary McNear
“The dedication,” she corrected him, pulling her sweater a little closer around her. “It was hard. And strange. Apparently, Mr. Mulvaney made the high school junior class attend, so there were all these teenagers there. And Mrs. Fast said hi to me. You know, seventh-grade social studies? But I didn’t recognize her right away. It made me feel so old, not recognizing her. Though, I guess, twenty-eight isn’t exactly old, is it?” She looked at him when she said this, but he was watching her without any real expression on his face. “And Dominic’s dad spoke,” she continued. “Which was incredibly sad. And Tanner. Tanner Lightman was there. You know, Jake’s brother—”
“I know who he is,” Gabriel interrupted. And something in his tone made Quinn stop. It wasn’t quite impatience, but she got the distinct impression that he knew all this already. The sun must have come out from behind a cloud just then because the light in the room changed and a patch of it fell across Gabriel, lighting up his gray-blue eyes and the strands of blond in his hair. He leaned forward, closer to her, as though to get out of the sun.
“I didn’t think you’d come for it,” he said, running his hand along his chiseled jaw.
“Why not?” she asked.
He looked at her, speculatively. “I didn’t think you’d want to be reminded of the past.”
“Well, you’re right, in a way,” she said, folding her arms around herself. “I don’t want to be reminded of the accident. And I didn’t want to come back here either. But I made myself.”
“You made yourself? Against your own will?” he asked, with mild amusement.
“What I meant is that I thought I should come,” she said. What she didn’t say to Gabriel is what she’d told herself a couple of weeks ago: You can go back to Butternut and try to figure things out or you can wait for your life to fall apart again. “I thought it was time to come back here, even though I knew doing it would make me feel . . . sad.” And even saying that word, as inadequate as it was, made her feel the sadness encroaching. If she was expecting sympathy from Gabriel, though, she didn’t get any.
“Is that all you feel when you think about the accident?” he asked, a quizzical expression on his face. “Sad?”
“What do you mean?” she said. But even as she asked for clarification, she realized she was afraid of what he was going to say.
“I mean—just sad? Do you ever feel guilty? You know, about the night of the accident?”
“Do I feel guilty? Because of . . . what we did?” she asked him. He closed his eyes for a second and then looked away, but not before she saw another emotion flash across his face. Not joy this time, but pain. Seeing that, and knowing that remembering that night was painful for him, stirred something in her that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“Partly that, yes,” he said, finally. “What I mean, though, is do you ever feel responsible for what happened?” He looked directly at her now, and it felt like a challenge.
Quinn felt suddenly anxious. “No. Yes. I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t feel solely responsible. I mean, I feel horrible about the night of the accident. I wish I’d done things differently. I wish we’d done things differently, but . . .” For the first time since walking into this cabin, she felt a flicker of anger. She had tolerated his standoffishness and his incommunicativeness, but she wouldn’t tolerate this. She could hear her voice rising. “The main person, Gabriel, who was responsible for what happened that night was Jake. What he did . . . it was a mistake. It was tragic. But it was his decision to drive his pickup out onto the ice and take his two best friends with him. It was his decision to stop his truck in the middle of the lake. No one told him to do that. No one else is to blame.” She looked at Gabriel, but he shook his head, as though she was wrong.
“What? You think I’m to blame for it?” she asked. Did Gabriel know what she’d said to Jake that night at the bonfire? No, he couldn’t. She hadn’t told him. She hadn’t told anyone.
“I didn’t say that,” Gabriel said. “But you left the bonfire so suddenly that night. We never really talked about what happened there. I just wondered if you felt responsible.”
“Do you?” she asked him. For a second, he looked stricken at her question. She didn’t wait for an answer.
“Never mind,” she said, standing up. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” A tumult of feelings crowded in on her—anger, confusion, defensiveness, fear, and hurt—and, as she headed for the front door, she thought, This was a mistake. Coming here. I don’t want to stay for one second longer.
“Quinn. Stop, okay? Wait a second,” Gabriel said behind her, a gentler tone in his voice. She paused, her hand already on the doorknob. “Here, at least take this. You’ll freeze without it,” he said, coming up to her and holding out her coat. She’d forgotten all about it.
“Thank you,” she said, but as she pulled it on she refused to look at him.
“Quinn,” he said again, and the affection with which he said her name felt familiar to her. She looked at him. “You don’t look back, do you?” he said, with something close to admiration. “You keep moving. If something stands in your way, you go around it.”
“That’s . . . not true.” But even as she said this, she knew that it was partly true. Or, at least, had been true, years ago. She’d stopped looking back. She’d kept moving. But only because she’d believed that if she didn’t keep moving, she’d never move at all. “That’s not true anymore,” she amended.
“Well, I’ll take your word for it.”
“I should get going,” she said, feeling, for a moment, almost suffocated by the weight of everything—of the town, of the cabin, of him. She opened the front door, and Gabriel, to her surprise, followed her out. He must have been aware of how agitated she was, how upset, because he seemed determined to end her visit on a positive note.
“You look like you’re doing well, Quinn,” he said, as they walked over to her car. “I’m happy for you. I am.” He smiled. The first real smile she’d seen from him since she’d arrived at his cabin. And seeing his smile made her realize how much she’d missed it.
She felt a little better now, outside in the clean, cold air with the sun glinting hard off the little patches of snow in the driveway. She breathed deeply. Maybe she and Gabriel should have gone somewhere else, instead of staying here. Maybe it was the cabin, impersonal to the point of unsettling, that had hobbled them in their conversation. She wanted to try this again, somewhere else.
“Do you want to meet later?” she asked him. “Maybe get a burger at the Corner Bar?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. But the way he said it was matter-of-fact, not unkind.
“What about tomorrow?”
“I’ve got some work to do,” he said.
“What kind of work?” Quinn asked, realizing that the conversation hadn’t even gotten far enough for her to ask this question earlier.
“I’m a caretaker,” he said.
Gabriel, a caretaker? Her face must have fallen, a little, because he said, “There aren’t a lot of great year-round jobs up here, Quinn, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“No, I remember. Caretaking is a good job,” she said. And it was. She only felt sad because it was so far from the kind of work Gabriel had dreamed of doing.
“It’s, you know, checking up on cabins in the off-season,” he said. “Making sure the pipes haven’t burst, or raccoons haven’t built nests in the living room, or whatever.”
She tried to think of something positive to say. “It sounds—”
“It pays the bills,” he interrupted.
Then he said, “All right, well,” rubbing his hands together, since he was without a coat. “Good-bye, Quinn.” It was he who reached out to hug her this time. Quinn hugged him back. She wanted him to stay that way, with his arms around her, but he stepped back. Still, as he opened her car door for her, she felt a momentary panic. Things weren’t right between them, and there wasn’t time to fix it. She was getting into her car and Gabriel was
waiting, as if he’d been waiting this whole time, since she’d set foot on his doorstep, for her to leave. And then she was leaving, driving down the gravel drive, and being careful not to look in the rearview mirror, because she didn’t know what would make her feel worse: Gabriel standing there and watching her, or Gabriel going back inside the cabin.
As she turned onto the main road, she realized how unrealistic she’d been. Had she honestly thought that she could come waltzing back into his life, after a decade away, and the two of them would just pick up where they’d left off? As if that night of the accident had never happened, as if they were both back on the blue couch in the communications room at school whiling away the time before they could both leave for college? Yes, on some level, she had. And that was what made the disappointment so bitter.
Chapter 6
Quinn stood on frozen Shell Lake, the surface below her crisscrossed with sharp lines cut into the dusting of snow, like those left behind by an ice skater. It was night and the sky was a starless inky black. Quinn was holding a coffee mug that had a chip in the rim and was half filled with red wine. “Quinn!” she heard Jake yell. He was in his blue truck out on the middle of the lake. There was someone else in the truck with him, and although she couldn’t see the person, she knew somehow it was Gabriel. But why was he there too? They were far enough away that Jake’s voice sounded distant. “Quinn, help us,” he called again. “Quinn.” He sounded desperate this time. And then she heard it, the splintering crack. The ice beneath her shifted, and she turned and started running toward the shore, away from the truck. She had to get to land. “Quinn, don’t go,” Jake yelled. And just as the ice gave way, she fell onto the shore. The mug that had been in her hand was broken, a spill of red wine staining the snow. She looked back over her shoulder, toward the center of the lake, where Jake’s truck had been. But it was gone.
The persistent ringing of her cell phone woke her, scattering the dream. Still, Quinn sat up on the bed and looked around. Her eyes settled on the garish nature photography on the opposite wall. She blew out a breath. She was at the Butternut Motel. She reached for her handbag next to her on the bed and found her cell phone. It was Theo.
“Quinn?”
“Uh-huh?” she answered. She was groggy, but she tried to push the dream out of her head. She needed to stop napping; now the dreams were disturbing her nights and her days. And besides, napping always left her feeling irritable.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Why?” She stood up, put her cell phone on speakerphone, and set it down on the dresser.
“You sound a little strange,” Theo said.
“I fell asleep,” she said. After she’d gotten back to the motel from Gabriel’s cabin, her feelings of disappointment and hurt gave way to anger. Anger at herself, but also anger at Gabriel. Her visit with him had been so upsetting that she’d opened her suitcase and started packing. Then, overcome by weariness, she’d lain down on the bed and fallen asleep.
She walked over to the closet now and surveyed the clothes still hanging there. As usual, she’d overpacked; she’d brought enough clothes to last a week. “Aren’t journalists supposed to know how to pack light?” she asked Theo now.
“Um, well, I guess if you’re a war correspondent, that would be a useful skill,” he offered.
She tugged a blouse off a hanger, started to fold it, and then gave up and rolled it into a ball and tossed it into the open suitcase on the bed. She yanked a sweater off another hanger and threw it in after the blouse. Now that the grogginess had worn off, the anger she’d felt earlier returned. Ordinarily, Quinn wasn’t afraid of anger. Her own or anyone else’s. It could be a useful emotion, under the right circumstances. Clarifying. And energizing. But this wasn’t that kind of anger. This was as much defensiveness as anger. She replayed Gabriel’s accusations over in her mind. Because that’s what they were. Accusations. No matter how obliquely he’d made them. First, he’d said she’d been a bad friend. And although he admitted he was partly at fault for them falling out of touch, he’d still laid most of the blame at her feet. Then, he’d asked her if she felt guilty about the night of the accident. And, on top of that, he’d implied that she might have been responsible for it.
Guilt and responsibility. In Quinn’s mind, there was a difference between these two things. Guilt could be an interior feeling that didn’t correspond to a “crime.” Guilt, after all, was entirely proportional to your own moral compass. You could feel guilty about not having been there for someone, not having done something you thought you should have done. But feeling responsibility, for an accident, especially, meant you were partly to blame, meant that in some way you’d caused things to happen. It was true she’d felt both of these things, in varying degrees, over the years. But she’d long tried to push them away. Especially responsibility. After all, the possibility that what she’d done that night, what she’d said that night, caused the whole tragedy was too awful to contemplate. No, she wouldn’t think about that.
“Quinn, are you there? Do you want me to call back later?” Theo asked.
“No,” she said, startled out of her thinking. “I want to talk now.” She walked back over to the dresser, where she’d left her phone.
“How was the dedication?”
“It was difficult,” she said, her anger suddenly deflating. “And afterward, I went to see an old friend of mine, Gabriel. Remember? I told you about him,” she rushed on. “Theo, he’s so changed.” She took the remaining clothes out of the dresser and dumped them into the suitcase, then carried her cell phone into the bathroom and, placing it on the counter, started stuffing her toiletries into a cosmetic case.
“Changed how?”
“He’s a different person,” she said. “Something happened to him.” She paused to screw the lid on a tube of toothpaste. “In high school, he was so driven, and talented, and funny. He got a scholarship to RISD. But he never went. He stayed here and now he’s taking care of people’s cabins . . .” Her voice trailed off. But those weren’t the only changes. Gone, too, was his affection and warmth toward Quinn; that was painful as well.
“He lives alone,” she added, retrieving her shampoo and conditioner from the shower. “I’m pretty sure he’s depressed. The thing is, though, he blames me for our losing touch. And he . . . I don’t know, I think he implied that by leaving here, I somehow abandoned him. Which isn’t fair. I didn’t stop him from going to RISD. And if he wanted to hole up in some cabin here, indefinitely, I don’t see how that was my fault either.” She zipped her cosmetic bag closed and carried it and her phone out of the bathroom.
“I’m sorry, Quinn. That sounds hard. What are you going to do about him, though?” Theo asked from the bed, where she’d set the phone.
“About Gabriel? Nothing. There’s nothing I can do.”
“You’re not going to spend more time with him?” Theo asked.
“No. That’s just it. He doesn’t want me to. He practically chased me out of his cabin.” She leaned over to zip her suitcase, then changed her mind. “In fact,” she said, sitting back down on the bed, “I’m pretty sure he hates me.”
“I doubt that,” Theo said.
“No, it’s true. I don’t think I’ll see him again. I’m already packed, and I’m leaving,” she said. He was quiet for a moment. “Theo,” she asked, “are you still there?”
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m wondering . . . do you think you should try to stay longer, spend more time with your friend? You know, find out what’s going on with him? Before you left Evanston, you told me you were going to . . . I think you said you were going to face things head-on, figure things out, so you don’t have another . . .”
“Breakdown,” Quinn finished for him. She was a little uncomfortable that she’d told Theo about this episode from her past, a time in college when she’d fallen apart. She traced the bedspread pattern with her finger.
“I’m not sure that’s the word I would use,” he said.
“T
heo,” she said, sighing, “I really appreciate your concern, but you’re starting to sound more like a therapist than an editor.”
He laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry about that. Call me when you get back to Evanston, okay?”
“I will, Theo. And thanks,” she said, hanging up. He hadn’t mentioned again that she write about this experience, she realized. Probably because he didn’t want to get her even more agitated than she already was.
She hoped she hadn’t been snappish with him. She liked him. She liked him a lot. He was supportive and unflappable and smart. And she imagined him as she’d seen him last, in his favorite coffeehouse in Wicker Park, seated at a table in the corner and looking appealingly rumpled as he raked his fingers through curly brown hair, his brown eyes mellow in the soft lighting of that cluttered room. She had a feeling that Theo would be amenable to letting their professional relationship develop into something more. The thought had crossed her mind before too. She was interested in him, but something was holding her back. The truth was, for the last couple of years she hadn’t been involved with anyone. No one had really interested her, or interested her enough. She’d gone on a lot of dates, but she hadn’t settled into any relationships. Over the years she had gotten romantically involved with a couple of men, but never for more than a year. Her closest girlfriend, Katrina, referred to these relationships as Quinn’s “eleventh-month specials.” This wasn’t intentional on Quinn’s part. It wasn’t as if she kept an eye on the calendar as the anniversary of their first date approached. It was more like an inner mechanism of hers sensed a shifting of the light, a changing of the seasons. Either way, she was apt to end things before the earth had made a full rotation around the sun.
She looked at her suitcase now. First sign of trouble and you’re ready to take off? What happened to sticking it out, Quinn? You had a plan to stay here for as long as it takes to figure things out. But here you are already plotting your escape. She stood up and carried her suitcase over to the luggage rack.