Stay (10 page)

We sat in the sun and sipped while the dew burned off and the fire snapped. She held her mug in her left hand and the right hung empty and relaxed from the wrist resting on her knee. It was the first time I had seen her neither tense nor posed.

“I’ve decided to take the trailer into town today and get the wastewater tanks drained and the freshwater filled. That way you’ll have showers and other indoor plumbing conveniences for the few days that you’re here.” And I wouldn’t have to live in a small space with the smell of an unwashed, unbrushed guest. I finished my coffee, which wasn’t bad. “I shouldn’t be longer than four or five hours. Don’t play with any of the edged tools while I’m gone.”

“You’re going to leave me here?” Both hands were now wrapped around her mug so tightly that her fingertips were white.

“I had planned on that, yes.”

“What will I do?”

“Whatever you want. Go for a walk. Take a nap.”

“Where?”

I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “Well, right here. The grass is comfortable, and it’ll be warm all day.”

“But—out in the open, all exposed?” She was genuinely frightened. I opened my mouth to tell her she could always lock herself in the hogpen if she was afraid of bears, but I doubted she had even considered that possibility. I shrugged. “Well, come with me if you’d rather, but don’t expect to be an idle passenger. There’ll be time for you to take a shower.”

I banked the fire and cut more firewood but was still done before Tammy emerged, hair wet, smelling clean and young.

“Come help me get the rig ready for traveling. I don’t want a single loose item by the time we leave. Start with your bed.”

It always took longer than I thought. Everything that was on an open shelf or countertop had to be stowed and secured, a rubber band snapped around the roll of toilet paper, the water heater turned off, food in the fridge and cupboards cushioned against breakage, rugs rolled and furniture moved to pull in the living area and wardrobe slide-outs, awning stowed, and all the carefully reconnected propane appliances disconnected again.

I used a hitch with an adjustable quick-slide base, so it didn’t take too long to hook up the truck, but then there was the rig’s tire pressure check, a last check to make sure all doors, interior and exterior, were dogged and/or locked, and, finally, unchocking the rig’s wheels. I threw the chocks onto the rear seat of the truck and Tammy got into the passenger seat. I looked around the clearing.

I had no memory of getting here, all those months ago, and it was a minor miracle I hadn’t ended up in the natural ditch that ran along the northern edge of the track. I’d have to fill that ditch sometime soon. Meanwhile, I wasn’t alone.

I leaned in to the open window. “How are you at guiding drivers?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

“I need the truck and trailer to be lined up dead straight before I hit the top of the track, otherwise the trailer wheels might cut across and end up in the ditch. And I’d rather not flatten the well pump while I’m backing and filling.”

She did an excellent job, and after ten minutes we were creeping down the mountain. I kept an eye on the dash readouts; engine compression holdback was excellent, even on the steeper grade halfway down, and I began to relax. It’s a forty-minute drive down Highway 25 to Naples. We kept our thoughts to ourselves.

The service station was empty except for two coverall-clad workers: a tall, soft-faced boy who could not have been more than eighteen, and a wizened, bowlegged man who came up to his shoulder and had probably been born before cars were invented.

I pulled in and leaned out of the window. “Hey there.” A nod and “Ma’am” from Bowlegs, just a blush and a bob of the head from the boy. In my peripheral vision Tammy began to rearrange herself subtly in her seat, sitting up straight, tilting her face so her dimples showed, pulling back her shoulders to push her breasts up tight against her shirt—and then her pupils irised down to points and her focus turned inward and something in her sagged. She slumped and pulled herself in and down.

“I need to empty her out, hose her down. If you’d point me in the right direction I’d be grateful.”

“Empty her out, is it?”
Eee-yut
. He cocked his head at the RV bay. “Just had everything topped up Thursday.”
Thur
-us-day. “Should suit. Need some help?”

Tammy slid a bit further down in her seat.

“Just about got it covered.”

“You sing out now if you change your mind.”

I parked, got out, and chocked the wheels, just in case. Then I showed Tammy how to hook the power cable up to the converter so the batteries could start charging. “There should be two pairs of rubber gloves in the undercarriage storage bay. Get them.”

We drained with the red hose and rinsed with the green, opened and closed, connected and disconnected for a while, then washed the whole place down—including the truck and trailer—before rinsing and filling the freshwater tanks a final time. It was tedious, messy, and foul-smelling, but once all the hoses were stowed and all the valves, cocks, and caps firmly closed, I felt the usual satisfaction of an unpleasant job well done. I told her to check the tires while I squeegeed the windows. She finished first. When I’d dried the windscreen wipers and snapped them back in place, I walked slowly past the glistening tires. They looked fine and fat and all the dust caps were in place.

“You’re dying to check, aren’t you?” Julia said, sitting cross-legged on the roof of the truck.

I was.

“Don’t do it.”

“Aud?”

I hadn’t heard Tammy approach.

“Aud?” A curious glance at the truck, then at me. “Are we done?”

“Yes. We’ll fill up on gas and pay on the way out.” I remembered her reaction to the men. “Or I can walk over and pay while you stay here.”

She steeled herself. “On the way out works.”

She sat stiff as a ramrod as I chatted to Bowlegs and he scratched his chin and wrote a few smudged figures on an invoice while his young assistant filled the gas tanks and money changed hands. She didn’t say anything as I pulled out, or as we drove back up Highway 25.

“New York,” I said, and her head made a slow, unwilling turn. “You don’t have to talk to me about it if you don’t want to, but if you do, I don’t have to tell Dornan.”

She said nothing for a while and I thought she was going to go back to that unnatural, unreachable place, but then she breathed in and out, fast, twice, the way you do before you dive through a doorway not knowing who or what is on the other side, and said, “It’s not a pretty story.”

“No.”

“I mean, it doesn’t make me look good.”

We didn’t say any more for five miles, but she began to fiddle with her window button, then her air vent, then the seam of her pants. She tucked her hair behind one ear, then the other, then pulled it forward again.

“I want to tell someone.”

“Yes.”

“It— I just can’t.”

“Okay.”

“Stop being so fucking agreeable!” Her face worked as she tried not to cry, paling at the creases like a stretched and twisted pencil eraser.

“Tissues in the glove box,” I said.

After she had finished, and had wiped her swollen face clean of mucus, she stared out of the window. “This is the road back to the cabin,” she said suddenly.

“Just about there,” I agreed.

“Maybe we should get everything set up and back in place, first.”

“If you like.”

We worked for two hours putting everything back together, and when that was done it was time for a late lunch. In the clearing, Tammy talked brightly of the food, of the road, of the rig, and her eyes shone like spinning coins. When she stopped talking, the clearing was silent but for the wind hissing in the treetops.

A blood red maple leaf spiraled down from a branch and landed tip first in the grass.

“Aud?”

“Mmm?”

“What was it like, being here on your own, with everything so quiet?”

“Peaceful.”

“You didn’t get… nervous?”

“No.”

“This morning, when I was making the fire, I felt jumpy, exposed.”

Exposed. Second time she’d used that word.

“But you don’t feel that way now.”

“No. Because you’re here. And there’s the trailer, somewhere I can go.”

I looked at the massive tulip tree, the trillium growing at its base, at the maple leaf. This made no sense whatsoever to me. “But it doesn’t worry you if I’m here?”

“No”

“If you were downtown on your own in”—I nearly said New York—“some big city, at this time in the afternoon, would that worry you”

“Jesus, look, I know cities I know how they work, what the rules are This outdoors stuff, it’s…It just doesn’t feel safe.”

Nothing was ever safe, not the way she meant it. But she had said
exposed
, and I knew that word. Exposed meant going back to live in Norway when you were ten years old, speaking English with more facility than Norwegian, and already being two inches taller than your classmates. Exposed meant conspicuous, different, not fitting in, not feeling at home, at least not until you learn that your self is your home and no one can take it away—until you fall in love and are led partway down a path that disappears as abruptly as your lover and leaves you stranded, lost in the mist.

Tammy’s eyes were bright again, and her mouth twisted at one corner. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Why don’t you tell me.”

After a pause she said, “I grew up in Connecticut.”

Either she’d get to the point or she wouldn’t.

“I grew up knowing the woods weren't a place I should go. No one ever said anything straight out, but the woods were where little girls got raped and trees got hacked down and Bambi got shot. You read about it in the papers.”

She shredded a blade of grass with great concentration. “It was like someone stuck big labels on everything: the woods, all the outdoors, was theirs, and if we went there, we’d end up like the deer or the trees. So, before, when you were still in bed and I was building the fire, it was like there were people in the woods watching, or animals, or whatever. They knew I was out here on my own. But it wasn’t so bad because I knew I could run into the trailer. And you being out here, now, makes it safe. Or something. And the trailer’s safe because I slept there.”

Forest can be dangerous if you don’t treat it with respect, but it’s just trees and birds and bears and beetles. I tried to think of a way to explain that. “A forest is just like a city. It can be dangerous, but if you learn what to expect and how to deal with it, you’re fine. Once you know how to read traffic signals and use a crosswalk, you’re pretty safe crossing a road. It’s the same with the woods.”

“Right.”

“You just have to get to know it, neighborhood by neighborhood, except you have streams instead of avenues. The places a stream runs through can feel like different worlds, the way, say, Park Avenue runs through both the Upper East Side and Harlem. I can show you one little neighborhood, if you like.”

A week ago, this part of the river, where trees on each side of the bank touch and merge overhead to form a living tunnel, had been a green-and-black oil painting of dark water and moss-backed boulders. Now it was as though some vandal had hurled cheap emulsion at the canvas: the arterial red leaves of a low-lying maple branch streaked violently from one bank to another, and on the far side, little poplar leaves the exact color of twenty-four carat gold lay strewn over the boulders like pirate treasure.

Autumn, like grief, changes everything.

The air smelled the same, though, rich and slow and secret.

“The best times of day to see wildlife are dusk and dawn.” The sun would go down in half an hour or so. “Sit quietly, and keep still. Even blinking can be enough to scare a bird off. Watch the falling leaves—they all fall at the same speed. When something moves at a different speed, you’ll notice. Use your peripheral vision.” It was like adjusting to the rhythms of an urban beat: learn the patterns, tune them out, and the unusual is instantly apparent.

We sat still and quiet, and gradually the ever-present rush of water faded into the background and I could hear Tammy’s breath. Ten yards south, a jumble of boulders and two fallen trees helped form a quiet backwater where the black, gleaming surface barely moved.

A bright
chur-wee
cut through the wood, and a little bird with powder blue wings flashed out then back into the trees. Tammy jumped.

“There’ll be more. Wait.”

Then it seemed the woods were full of bluebirds with their
chur-wee
and
tur-a-wee
and rusty-colored breasts. Two females flew at each other like kamikaze pilots playing chicken and Tammy smiled, but the battle was in earnest. Everywhere at this time of year, female bluebirds fought female, and males fought male, defending territory with the snuggest nesting hollows. When winter came, the winners would survive; the losers might not. The battle gradually retreated back into the trees and the calls faded.

Something plopped in the backwater. “Turtle,” I murmured, though I hadn’t seen it. Nothing else made quite the same sound, like a dinner plate falling flat into a full sink. The light began to change, thinning from rich afternoon mead to a more sophisticated predusk Chablis which slanted in through the trees and picked up the wings of insects dancing over the surface. Far fewer than there had been two weeks ago. Seasons are like economic change: cycles of plenty and dearth.

A flash of blue and white feathers and yellow feet caught my eye for a split second, then a kingfisher was rising up out of the water with a silvery fish in its beak. It alighted upstream on the blood red maple branch over the water and looked this way and that before maneuvering the fish so that it could swallow it headfirst. Then it was off again, sturdy body and mohawk haircut disappearing as it followed its river road to wherever.

We sat for a while, until the light began to drain away in earnest. “Time to go.” When you are visiting any strange place for the first time, short visits are best.

It was darker under the trees, and I walked behind Tammy so that she could see ahead instead of looking at my back, and so that she wouldn’t have to worry about an unnameable something creeping up behind her in the glimmering dusk.