The Remedy for Love: A Novel (13 page)

Twenty-Three

THE STOVE HAD
shifted but hadn’t parted with its chimney pipe, a good thing, plenty of disaster yet possible, plenty averted. The cold, however, had come inside. The fire had to be built back up, precious wood. Eric shoved the huge iron monstrosity back into place with his butt and the strength of his thighs. He remembered the spider pan in there with dinner only when he saw it, his creation blasted with ash and even coals but fragrant. He pulled it to cool on the butcher’s block, blew what he could of the ash away. Not that after all the excitement they’d be able to eat. He built up the fire.

Then there was work to do, work to stay alive, and together they did it, not so much as a glance at one another, damned souls riding down the long slope on the other side of fright. Danielle swept, thousands of pine and hemlock needles and fine snow and bits of bark and plain dirt. Eric labored to finish securing the breach in the wall, but there wasn’t much to work with, and in fact the blanket was holding reasonably well; already it had caught so much snow that the flapping in and flapping out had moderated to a heavy swinging—a relief—not so much like breathing as it had been, not so much the feeling of being inside one beast in mortal battle with another. He hoped the heat indoors would warm the blanket and melt the snow into it, moisture enough to build a gradual ice wall, real architectural strength. Meantime, he managed to pull two boards from the wreckage, used them to reinforce the weakened corner, nursing a rusty handful of assorted common nails, probably purchased down at Woodchurch Feed and Lumber in 1969 from Jack, free girlie calendar in the bag, Jack’s wife still alive, his kids still babies, his house still a showplace, his quirks not yet evolved into madness.

This wing of the storm was following the same pattern as the first, the snow texture lightening, the temperature plummeting, the cabin losing its heat. Snow filled in around the huge branches of the pine and soon the many air leaks and snow siphons would be sealed. Sudden irritation came over Eric like a wave, like the avalanche itself.

Pure focus, Danielle swept and tidied and brushed snow off of everything and brought an increasing mound toward the damage, favoring her ankle again, he noticed, then piteously limping, no complaint, like a broken wind-up toy. The front of the house groaned—those two colossal trees pressing upon it. The long extrusion of snow and debris that had been forced through the bashed door had hardened and become structural, like a cantilever beam (Eric hoped), maybe the only thing keeping them from catastrophe, and the girl swept.

“Just stop!” he roared.

Danielle looked at him briefly, barely, and continued.

Twenty-Four

HE USED A
spatula to carefully scrape off the ruined crust of his mac and cheese, added a little water, and put the dish back in the oven to crisp again. They had to eat, no matter what emergencies befell them. He’d kept the fire at the hottest temperature it could produce, so hot that the stovepipe glowed red. The food would be ready all but instantly. The kitchen area, at least, had warmed with the success of their labors, and Danielle had pulled off the huge cabin sweater once again, and then the top camisole (she wiped her brow with this), leaving only the pink camisole, a worn old thing. He could make out her steep nipples, briefest glimpse, then against his will looking again, against his will remembering the feel of her in the heat of the emergency, bony, protective. He’d feed her now all right. Alison was the big girl, lots of curves and cushions, lovely and feminine (if you didn’t get too close), never protective, insulated, insular. Danielle more the stick, someone you could imagine staying up nights writing angry poems, making phone calls at all hours, opening little packets of cocaine or meth, filling her nose (and reaching for your cock, hard squeeze), but also the one to wipe the snow and hemlock needles from your eyes, your very nostrils.

The foot of the avalanche still pushed against the face of the cabin, unimaginable weight. The shove had already moved the structure appreciably on its piers, Eric was certain, and there were still creakings and groanings beneath—how far could the cabin move before it fell? And if it fell, what would become of the stove, for example, the stovepipe, all the hot coals, the burning logs, the smoke? And what would become of Danielle and of him, no way out? The shed with its girlie calendar might remain; perhaps they could retreat there. Or maybe they could smash out the front window. He stepped over the two trunk-thick pine branches, put the hammer on the sill, just in case. It’d be a soft landing in all that snow. Unless the house moved so far they ended up in the river, not more than ten feet away and twelve or fifteen feet down. Unlikely, he decided: the beams might fall off the piers, but then the piers would poke up through the floor between joists, and that would keep the place from going very much further.

But who built a house with only one exit!

“Yo, food,” Danielle said.

“Okay, Miss Manners,” Eric said.

“I regret the loss of your nice bottle of wine, mister.”

“At least the wind’s all outside again.”

“Are we scared?”

“We’re cautious,” he said.

“I was like.”

“We’re going to have to find a way out, Danielle.”

“Like, shaking.”

He pulled his dish out of the oven.

She found her next box of wine.

The house seemed to be staying put. The groaning had definitely quit. Every flake of snow must have hurtled off the steep hillside, so no more slides. Unless a lot more snow came down, and in fact a lot more snow
was
coming down.

“We’re okay,” he said. He put a huge mound of mac and cheese on a plate for her, less for himself. Quickly, he scraped a carrot and cut it into sticks. Too much yellow and orange. He found the mango, peeled and pitted and cubed it (a little overly nicely, he thought, unaccountably worried about her reaction), still no green. They had nearly been crushed. He bent for pine needles, put a bundle of five on top of the pasta. This looked really nice. Talk about presentation telling a story! You had to take an interest in food if you were going to eat enough. The trees might have fallen more squarely on the house. Easily, that could have happened. And that would have meant death either directly or not. That’s how serious everything had gotten, mortally so. And yet they were going to eat, and yet he was worried about making it pretty.

He patted his pocket, but the phone compulsion was growing fainter: he knew the thing wasn’t there. He’d better write a note to Alison. A little note of farewell. Some kindly coroner’s assistant (that silent Bruce kid with the pimples and glasses) would find it in Eric’s pocket come spring, and finally Ally would know what had happened. Or was he just being dramatic? He knew what she would say. And she’d be right. If he seriously thought he were going to die he’d write a note to his parents as well, and in fact they had barely crossed his mind. His dad and mom, busy scientists still, poor correspondents, far off the grid as always, hard at work in the rain forest somewhere in Colombia now that the cartel was defunct, climate models, a lot of bad news, never great fans of Alison, not that they would admit it, Alison, who judged them flaky.

Very little wind was getting in anymore, amazing, all that snow out there, enough to plug a hole the size of a house, and their success in the face of disaster buoyed him, made him almost giddy. Unbidden, some sort of triumphal consonance, an image of Alison came to him, Alison crying at Portland Jetport, the two of them newly wed. He was headed for a Navy blue-ribbon environmental event, just a week’s excursion. But Alison had cried, so unlike her, cried inconsolably. “I’m going to miss you,” she’d said, over and over. They’d talked twice daily while he was away, and had phone sex, too. Hard to remember, hard to even believe. What words might she possibly have said? Perhaps it was he who’d done all the talking. But what it came down to was this: she loved him, she really loved him. And this: he’d needed that proof.

Danielle poured wine, sat in her seat, drank deeply. “Yo,” she said when he put her mounded dish on the arm of her chair. “You think that’s
enough
?”

“Probably not,” he said. “Big person like you.” He sat and began to eat. It was good beyond belief, smoky and like no mac and cheese he’d ever tasted, a dish of life.

She studied him, handing him a mug of wine.

He took it without a look, slugged at it, all appetite, blew out a breath, ate more.

“A pretty smooth operation,” she said. “You and me.”

“Please eat,” said Eric.

And she did, working her plate over methodically, all of the mac and cheese, then the carrot sticks, then the mango, which made her sigh. She even picked up the pine needles and sucked on them.

“There’s more,” Eric told her.

“A houseful,” she said.

Finally Eric let himself look at her. Tears ran down her cheeks. He was one of those who sneezed when others sneezed, and yawned when others yawned, and now tears came to his eyes, too, ran down his cheeks, tiny rivers of feeling.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he said.

“Do you really want sloppy seconds?”

He flinched.

“The bath,” she said, wiping at her eyes, pleased with herself.

He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and quickly. “So, you
were
paying attention.”

“Jim’s father put a camera in my bathroom but I found it.”

“Jim’s father belongs in jail.”

“Oh, old dudes like him can’t help it. Harmless.”

“I hate that expression. ‘Sloppy seconds.’ ”

“You are not big on expressions, mister.”

“And stuff like that isn’t ever harmless.”

The eye contact went on a little too long. Eric broke it. She was the kind who won a staring game. He sipped his wine.

She kept studying him.

He said, “I’m just not sure we can heat it warm enough. That’s a lot of cold water in there. We’d have to dip it out and boil it, keeping adding it back.”

Finally she looked away, drank her wine, refilled it, drank some more. She filled his glass, too, expertly manipulating the valve on the box, not a drop spilled. She mused: “How hot is a bath, anyhow?”

Something in the structure of the front of the house whimpered, but the jerking had stopped, the shifting. The food felt good in Eric’s belly. The wine was actually very good. He sipped a little more. They had almost died—this was coming home to him. They were not out of danger, either. This came home, too. Who knew how badly the structure had been compromised? But the silence was comforting, reassuring: they’d had a close call, that was all. They could breath now, they could live. He said, “Like, a hundred degrees? I think a very hot hot-tub is around a hundred five?” The fire was going low. The lamplight was nice, lambent and serene, while outside all was mayhem. The wine was perfect, really. Who knew what bouquet in boxes?

She said, “How much water do you think’s in the tub?”

“It’s stamped ‘thirty gallons.’ And it’s filled to maybe, well, about twenty-five.”

“And how warm is the water in there now? Cold, right?”

“Right. It’s cold. It’s on the floor. It’s maybe forty degrees. I mean, not much better than freezing. And that’s after I already poured hot water in.”

She sat up, smartest kid in class, no teacher’s pet: “Okay, mister, we’ve got the lobster kettle and a couple of little pots, like four gallons we could dip out and boil, right? So that gives us twenty-one gallons at forty degrees, and four gallons at two hundred twelve degrees. Multiply twenty-one gallons times forty degrees, and four gallons times two hundred twelve degrees, eight-forty plus eight forty-eight. That’s sixteen eighty-eight. Divide by twenty-five gallons, pretty easy, mm, mm, sixty-seven point five degrees. Do it again, four more gallons dipped out, same kind of same kind, and it’s, mm, mm, like, mm, ninety-point-six. One more time and we’re parboiled. Eric. So maybe just a couple of gallons to finish.”

The front of the house shifted with a thump, and something underneath gave a great groan. Eric made a show of ignoring the noise: “You did that in your head? Ten gallons boiling? That’s it?”

Rhetorically she said, “Okay. Truth. Is the house going to cave in?”

“It’s just settling, I think.”

“And yes, uh-huh, that’s it. Ten gallons. There will be some minimal heat interchange with the environment, and with our bodies. But we’ll have pots at the ready. Eric.”

“I like when you call me Eric.”

“Then I’ll stop.”

Twenty-Five

THE WOODCHURCH RIVER
flowed from a series of eleven ponds that were in turn filled by a hundred small brooks and streams draining the mountains that pushed up against French Canada, forming the border in those parts: granite peaks, rolling spruce-fir expanses, hardwood valleys, endless hiking, the working forest, the other Maine. Eric and Alison found every feature, followed every old path and logging road, examined every wall and ridgeline, named every stranded boulder (
glacial erratics
they were called, enormous rocks carried by ice from what was now northern Vermont during the last ice age, hundreds of miles). Together they learned the plants, learned the mushrooms, learned the topography, finding their way blind at times with a compass and map, or following waterways back down to the Woodchurch Ponds. These didn’t have individual names but numbers: Woodchurch Seven with the best fishing; Woodchurch Four with the best campsite; Woodchurch Eleven the most remote, water clear as the sky, trees leaning in at the banks, not a sign of humanity. Woodchurch One was biggest, hosted several camps. It fell over an ancient beaver dam improved in recent centuries by loggers with cement, and that was the head of the Woodchurch River—nothing much but growing quickly as more streams joined in. It passed village and woodlot, farm and graveyard, bickering and boiling. It underflowed bridges, splashed over bedrock, outlived all human plans. It flooded yards in spring and fall, froze hard in winter, pooled sweetly in summer, always falling toward the sea. Through the town of Woodchurch, flowing deeply, it was crossed by five spans, two of them defunct railroad bridges, two of them major roads, one a covered bridge, condemned. Beneath town it entered a gorge, and down there it roared for an inaccessible mile or two, opening gradually into the deep vale where Eric had found himself. Funny you could live somewhere for years and still find new places, secret corners, lost history.

Eric dumped the boiling lobster kettle into the tub, refilled it from the tub, and put it on the glowing stove at the point of highest heat. He dumped and filled the three smaller pots, and fit them around it. “Minimal heat interchange
.
” That’s what had made him say it:
I like when you call me Eric.

Danielle acted like someone who’d been handed all the power. She racketed around setting up her coffee system, two cups this time, one for her sidekick, her plucky trench-mate. She commandeered the littlest pot, poured boiling water over coffee she dumped in a filter freehand, a whiz at volume, too. There was still a wall of snow and hemlock pieces across the living room, a puddle growing, coolness emanating, the feel of a refrigerator door left open. She was married. She was married to Jim. Jim was a great guy. Jim was a hero. His face in that lost photo, warmth and depth. She handed Eric his cup of coffee. Wedding ring, engagement diamond, an antique pair, right there on the proper finger.

A medium pot was boiling. Eric dumped it in the tub, stirred it in, dipped out more, put it on the stovetop, added a log to the fire. It wasn’t like they had endless firewood. The firewood might not last the night.

“The best coffee was in Mexico,” Danielle said dreamily.

“Mexico,” Eric said, surprised to think she’d been there.

“It wasn’t that long ago. Jimmy and me on his brother’s Harley. Rock’s chopped Hog. Rock Knocker, they call him. He’s got tats. He’s got lots of tats. He’s all ink. He has a bird on his dick, Eric, like a toucan!”

“Who doesn’t, Danielle?”

She laughed, she actually laughed, something coarse about it, but pretty nevertheless: “You wish, mister. We were only in Mexico like a day, and stupid Jimmy got into a thing. This gnarly
hombre
looked at me wrong, and said some shit. But what José didn’t know is that Jimmy
sabe
street Spanish. And he
sabe
street fucking violence, professional style. He’s not supposed to use any of it outside the Rangers. Like ten guys in the end, trashing this
taverna.
He got his ear half bitten off and his nose busted. And he broke his own fucking wrist on someone’s neck—everyone thrown all over the bar like a bad movie, and we have to escape on Rock’s Hog across the desert in moonlight all the way back to Nogales, and Jimmy’s going through customs all bloody and beat to shit. But those border guys?” She started to grin, loved this stuff inordinately: “They’re all ex-military and they recognize a warrior and they love motorcycles and it’s just like alcohol wipes and a rinse in the back room, splint on the wrist, and then we’re free to ride all the way back to Tucson, no stopping, three in the morning.” She thought about that a moment, her face falling, everything about her caving in. At length, she said, “This is a tough man, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Probably Jimmy ravished you that night,” Eric said, one of those things you wish you could retract: Too true, for one thing. Vastly inappropriate, for another. So small, so pinched, so mean. And when, plainly, Danielle was about to cry.

“Dick,” she said. And then she did cry, pretending not to, even producing a fake sneeze to cover.

The coffee was very strong.

Danielle hadn’t touched hers. After a long time she sighed and said, “He deployed to Afghanistan with his cast still on.”

Eric couldn’t help the cross-examination, thoughts that circled the cavern of his mind like blood-sucking bats he couldn’t control, bad bats that flew from his mouth: “You left that out earlier. The cast.”

She glanced at him miserably, no fight left in her: “I left a lot of stuff out. Eric.” She gulped her coffee as if it were medicine, burped with no particular notice, seemed to think of something, hurried to the ladder without a word and climbed up to the loft, favoring the hurt ankle yet oddly athletic, a kind of physical confidence that no amount of hair chopping or self-starvation could hide.

Eric built up the fire, dropped one of the small pots boiling into the tub. The big pot was nearly ready, again, too. Danielle rummaged up there a long time, climbed back down with a stuffed FedEx mailer, sat with it in her seat, considered it. Eventually, she reached in, pulled out a precariously rubber-banded bundle of letters—very small paper and squares of cardboard—the backings for all the notepads Jim was apparently using. She neatened all the edges at length, checked them for order on her lap, found various mislaid pages, got it all organized, all the time in the world, a familiar undertaking, it looked like, a child sorting her penny collection.

Her neck was long, without tension. Her face had changed yet again. Eric wanted just a single smile back. She was someone different when she had a project. She touched her nose, that soft addition, squashed it absently, pressed it sideways, pursed her lips the other direction, not very elastic, like she’d break something if she kept it up. He thought of her kisses. They had not been chaste, only a little passive, not like the bites: she’d been waiting for him, and he had done the right thing, exactly the right thing, which was nothing, and he was a good person, also lucky: Danielle would be nothing but trouble, and trouble you didn’t fuck, because then you owned it.

“Here’s one of the first letters,” she said at last, having rejected the actual first and a couple more. She read with pride and ease and a little comedy and her mouth was free again: “ ‘Dear Ass Attack: This ain’t so bad as I said here. Errrr. In fact, it’s pretty okay shit. Still in base. A-plus. Good as you could hope. Wendy’s is here. Wendy’s, aight? It’s really like fucking home but zero foilage. I spent my whole pay stub on burgers. Beats a bag of nasty. Trojans in the PX for what? I thought it was Don’t Ask Don’t fucking Tell. Next what? Muslim Gerbils, right?’ ” She liked that joke, laughed with herself, but then dove noticeably inward, her mouth falling open. She read the rest of the letter to herself, her fingers tapping absently at those lips, which looked sore. And Eric had emphatically not kissed them, very good.

Several former clients came to mind unbidden: Pinky Daub, oh god, Pinky Daub, crazy as they come, but built like a muse, diaphanous dress to the courthouse and a reprimand from Judge Brackett: “This is a place of business,” he’d said.

“Your honor, I
mean
business,” she’d replied.

Another plea deal out the window.

No attraction.

He’d declined to represent Mary Alice Mayhew in her divorce because he’d dated her. She still claimed to respect him for that. He couldn’t think why they’d broken up (way before Alison). Not a lot of heat there, generally speaking. You’d have trouble telling their fights from their conversations, deeply boring. She’d married the head of financial aid at the college, whose first name was Stratham, then cut Stratham loose.

When Danielle was done with the long first letter, she stacked the tiny pages fastidiously, placed them under her leg. She pulled out the next, and after a quick review, again read aloud: “ ‘Dear Thing: Boredom galore. Bag of dicks. One-three-four mobilized and out yesterday . . .’ ” She held up the letter to show it had been scissors-redacted, continued cheerily: “ ‘So there go half the balls here. Kirkpatrick made two
LARGE
on poker last week, all these fobbits from Nebraskaway. If not for Monday Night Football (first thing Tuesday mornings!) I would go shitbasket. TV comes in perfect, better than home. And we had the cleaning crew in to watch. They totally get it. Last night balls to eight hundred I could not sleep. Making movies of ya, babe. I will write my wet name on you.’ ” She read the rest to herself, her throat pinkening with whatever he had to say, her cheeks flushing next, and more and more violently, not that Eric was watching.

She skipped the rest of that packet, opened the next, read lines randomly to herself, folded the letters quickly. Then she lingered, her voice different, channeling Jim: “ ‘Errrr. As warned, you will stop getting any letters. Dreaming of that big house we saw down by Proctor’s Store. Me pappy wrote and says it is still for sale. Me pappy says you are acting pretty dark shadows. What? You know you do not have to eat alone, baby. In that ass apartment. I got a whole pile of paper from you all at once, about sixteen letters from sixteen days running, nice. You don’t complain enough! Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Tell dat fuckbasket Mr. Clancy I will have a word wit him and his fucking brat. He is chickenshit, believe me. Show him this here. Your kisses I misses, like at the Kidd’s basement? Dat was some kiss. And about your little pants. Errrr.’ ” She read on silently, suddenly crushed the tiny letter into her lap.

Eric tried to imagine talking to Alison that way. Alison would mock him, at best.
Your little pants. Errrr.
He drafted his e-mails to her endlessly just to eke out steamy sentiments like “I miss you when I don’t hear from you for two weeks, but of course I understand.” Then he’d go yell at a client, some slip of a druggie girl caught passed out in a church basement with the alms box in her arms.

The fire was very high—their hot-water project in progress—and the outside was once again outside where it belonged, the wind howling wildly, their repair growing stronger by the minute, a wall of ice. Danielle read the next dozen letters to herself, put herself through a constricted but visible arc of emotion. Eric checked the water pots—two little ones boiling, so he dumped and refilled them in the increasingly warmer tub. He stayed at the stove, enjoying the heat, watched the three-gallon pot till it boiled, poured it into the tub, mixed the water, half of the big pot more. He built up the fire again, did some tidying in the kitchen, the buzz from the cheap wine moving into the headache range, fear returning: they were trapped, no egress, another night ahead, the hammer on the windowsill.

Danielle receded, flipping expertly through the thick packet of small pages, staring over them (here and there Jim had made a rough drawing), then carefully searching out the words she wanted, an album of greatest hits, inward smiles and small laughs, hard blushes, a lot more puffs of breath and sighs and a kind of private squirming. No matter what she said, she loved this guy, a love that Eric must help protect: Jimmy LaRoque was all she had.

With the fire so high and a cover it didn’t take long to boil three more gallons in the big pot, the littler pots all boiling twice in that time. He found himself enjoying the rhythm of the work, each pot on its own quickening schedule. The water in the slipper tub was plain hot: like compound interest, he thought, dipping out a little more.

“You about ready?” he said, unaccountable wave of anger.

Nothing from her, her brightened brown eyes skimming along whatever letter, from wherever, some bloody battle, more and more tender words no doubt as Jimmy marauded through the mountains of Pakistan, or wherever American military secrets had brought him.

He said it again, a little too sharply: “Hot bath.”

“Yes. Yes, thanks.” She read a little longer, then gathered her correspondence and climbed up to the loft where she rustled about the business of getting her clothes off, peed loudly into her pail. Eventually she descended in the big, filthy robe and equally filthy bare feet, difficult progress with that bruised ankle, stood by the tub. Eric poured new heat from one of the smaller pots, a couple of quarts hard boiling, stirred the tub, dipped the pot full again and back to the stove.

She touched the water, swished it around with her long hand, picking her feet off the cold floor alternately. “We got it, mister,” she said. “Maybe a little too.”

He could smell her, about half unpleasant. “You’re good to go,” he said. Really, he didn’t mean to be so curt. “Be careful. Your feet are cold—it’ll seem to burn.”

She said, “No it will actually, really burn. Eric. Could you go on up? I’m feeling shy?”

“Of course,” he said. “I mean, I was going.” He hadn’t heard her sound so modest, and it was appealing, chipped at his free-floating anger. He climbed the ladder and flopped on her bed and waited, privy to all the sounds of her getting into the tub: one foot at a time, a sloshing and sighing. He chanced a look and there she was with the robe pulled up around her slender thighs, warming her feet inch by inch, her legs very hairy, more like furred. He ducked back: of course he shouldn’t be looking and wouldn’t.