The Tent: A Novella (3 page)

“Should we try to find a shelter, maybe under one of the bigger trees? Maybe light a fire or something? We’ll freeze out here.”

“We’re under the only kind of shelter this part of the woods offers and we’re still getting soaked. Best to just keep moving for now
, like you said. I’m sure we’ll come across a ranger station or something sooner or later.”

“A ranger station? We’re in
Hocking Hills, Mike, not Yellowstone. How much research did you do before you dragged us up here? You’re more likely to find a moonshine still here than a ranger station.”

“Hell, right now I’d settle for that.”
When she doesn’t return his smile, he continues, “But seriously, there are a few cabins around these woods. We saw one of them on the way up here, remember? We’re sure to come across one if we soldier on a bit further.”

“Cabins, sure,” she says, and gives a slight shake of her head, “Which begs the question why you didn’t just book one of
those
instead of insisting we rough it.”

And there it is.
This time there was no attempt to keep the resentment from her tone. Gone is the levity, the ceasefire, the pretense that anything is going to be all right. Juliet slamming the window shut on poor old Romeo. And now he knows they have to keep moving, have to find a way out of this damn weather and this predicament, because with every hour that passes in these godforsaken woods, they are getting more and more lost, the rift he had hoped to heal widening with every step they take in the wrong direction. The storm is softening the walls of his marital house, the rain implanting mold beneath the plaster, and soon it will weaken them, force them to crumble until the whole place comes crashing down.

“Sorry,” he mutters too low for her to hear over the wind
that makes the trees sound as if their branches are laden with snakes. He turns and manages half a step before Emma’s hand slams down on his shoulder, startling a cry from him, her nails digging into his flesh through the thin protection of his slicker. Hissing pain through his teeth, he turns and sees her face has turned white, whiter than before. She has become a ghost with coals for eyes, and fear colder than the wind, colder than the rain seizes him, just as it appears to have seized her.

“
Emma, what—?”

“
Cody
,” she all but screams at him, the rain streaming down her face making her look as if she’s melting before him.

H
is confusion evaporates as he looks over her shoulder.

The boy is gone.

“He can’t have gone far,” he tells her, struggling to keep the panic from his voice.

“Really?” She has fallen into step behind him, on
e hand clutched on his backpack to steady herself as she makes her treacherous way across the deadfall. It has the effect of adding her weight to his already cumbersome load. “So finally you’ve gotten a handle on direction, have you?”

“God damn it, leave me alone,” he mutters under his breath
, then curses when his foot comes down in on a patch of ground that’s not ground at all, but a water-filled hollow. Cold water seeps into his boot up to the laces. The burst blister on his heel catches fire.

Lightning flares, turning the tree trunks to stone and sending thick spears of shadow into the cobalt spaces between them, but they reveal nothing to Mike but more felled trees,
scrub, and waterlogged forest floor.

As they march back the way they came, pausing every few seconds in the lulls between flares of lightning to lance with their flashlight beams the boil of the steaming dark, Mike knows it’s time to give up, not on the boy,
no, never that, but himself. All that matters now is finding Cody and getting them all out of here. And once he does—what then? Divorce, probably. He’s tired, just as worn out as Emma, and just as sick of trying so hard for little reward. He may be naïve in certain ways, but he’s far from stupid. And a man would have to be some kind of dumb not to be able to read the signals his wife has been sending him for the past eight months. She’s done, and if he had any sense at all, he’d be done too. All this trying to make her change her mind about him, about
them
, has done nothing but make him appear sad and desperate, which he is, and it’s exhausting, and it makes him hate himself.

Sometimes, it even makes him angry, though he’s never quite sure
at whom that anger is directed.

Right now, she’s making it a little easier to
for him to focus that anger.

He stops to wait as she clamps her flashlight between her knees, raises her hands to cup her mouth, and cries out the boy’s name
. He has already told her Cody won’t hear her over the storm, but she’s a mother, and mothers don’t listen to anything but their own hearts when it comes to their children.

As he sweeps his light across the boles, fear twists his guts. They will find the boy—he knows this, has to believe they will—
but this interim, the waiting until they do, is terrifying. Their attention was only away from the boy for a few minutes, so he truly believed what he had told Emma: The boy could not have gone far. Probably just snuck behind a tree to take a whizz, in which case moving further away from where they’d been was probably an even worse idea.

“Emma,” he sa
ys, when she pauses to take a breath to power another cry for the boy.

She looks at him,
eyes dark with anger, electric with fear. “What?”

“We shouldn’t go any further.”

“We have to find him. We have to find where he is.”

“I know.” A wild gust of wind strong enough to make him stagger drowns out his words, and he waits for it to abate.
We’re doing everything wrong
. Pulling his hood tight against his face to protect himself from the needling of the icy rain, he tries again. “I know, but I figure he just went to find some privacy so he could take a leak, maybe.”
Please let that be it.

Hope reduces some of the darkness in her eyes as the idea takes hold. “So what do we do?”

“We go back to where we were and wait there. If he comes back and we’re not where he left us, we’ll lose him for sure.”

She nods. “Okay, but let’s hurry.”

He does, and together they retrace their steps for a second time. At least this time, they know where they’re going. Along the way, in a stroke of luck Mike is almost afraid to acknowledge lest it reverse itself out of spite, the rain begins to ease off, the wind to lessen to a bluster, like an belligerent drunk losing steam. And by the time they reach the spot where they last saw Cody, the area memorable only because of a half-buried sandstone boulder protruding from the mud and deadfall like the shoulder-bone of a felled giant, the rain stops completely. Mike yanks down his hood and takes a deep breath, as if they have spent the past few hours not in a storm, but underwater, and leans back against the boulder, grateful for the temporary reprieve from the backpack’s weight.

“So, where the hell is he?” Emma asks, and when he looks at her, he sees the anger has returned. He watches her pallor deepen as the storm clouds scatter, uncovering a three-quarter moon that somehow looks as stained and wretched as the boulder upon which he rests. Unzipping his windbreaker and shrugging off the pack, he raises a hand. “
Just a second.”

Her body thrums with impatience. “You’re just going to sit there?”

“My feet hurt. Trust me, he’ll be here. We just need to wait.”

She stares at him for a moment. It only takes another one for her to be in his face.

And at last, the dam breaks.

“Wait? Trus
t you? Neither of those suggestions sound reasonable to me, Mike. We’ve been waiting for hours for you to show some sign that you’re even slightly capable of getting us out of this mess, despite there being no evidence of you being able to do anything of the kind as long as we’ve known you.”

We
. Mike wonders if perhaps his earlier paranoia about what she might be saying to the boy was not so misguided, after all.

Her voice is very loud in the eerie stillness left in the wake of the storm.

“And: trust you? That’s all I’ve ever done, Mike, is trust you, and look where it’s gotten me. I gave up my job because you promised to take care of me, even though I loved being a teacher. You said ‘trust you’ then too. I look forward to the vacations you promise you’ll get us with your bonus every year but those vacations never happen because the fucking
bonuses
never happen. And I’m still waiting for you to take care of
me
. But instead what I get is you forever looking at me waiting for me to tell you everything’s all right, that I’m happy with you, that nothing’s your fault. All you want are reassurances that I still love you, that I’m happy with you, when you’ve never been able to provide good enough reasons for that to still be the case. You moon about looking as if you believe nobody
should
love you.  And maybe you’re right.”

The color has returned to her face, the fury warming her from the inside out. Her breath steams in her face as she rages; her eyes glitter like elliptical shards of volcanic rock. “
So here I am, a prisoner of my own cowardice, trapped in a marriage of habit, forty-seven years of age with my looks gone to shit, my weight all over the place, and I’m stuck in these goddamn woods with
you
. My son is missing, none of us even wanted to
be
here. I fucking
hate
the woods, Mike. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that, but because
you
like them, here we are, and now that it’s gone to shit like everything else you touch, you’ve been looking at me with your sad eyes for hours hoping I’ll take pity on you and as usual tell you it isn’t your fault. Well, you want to know something, Mike? It damn well
is
your fault.
Every
time you fuck up, it’s your fault, because you’re a gutless piece of shit who makes life miserable for everyone because that’s all you know how to do. You waste away at a job you despise, transferring calls to everyone else because—and I swear this should be your motto—“It’s Not Your Department”. And I hate it, Mike. I fucking
hate
the way you suck the life from me. I hate the way you mope around depending on me, and on Cody, to make you feel better about yourself, and to make for you your excuses for the way you are, and I hate…I…” Breathing hard, she shakes her head and brings her hands up to cover her face. Then she turns away from him, her body convulsing as she begins to sob.

Mike sits stunned, the wind knocked from his sails as he tries to digest what she has just said.
It is as if the storm passed because she inhaled it, only to vomit it forth again into his face. Never in all their years together has he seen her lose her temper like this, at least not with him. He has seen her frustrated, irritated, morose. He has never seen her become the storm, and it leaves him confused. He opens his mouth to apologize until he realizes that’s all he ever does. So instead he waits, takes a deep breath, and in time, allows some of the storm to infect him too, allows his own anger to leak into his throat, an emotion forced into being by the absolute absence of all others in the face of her attack.

“Finish what you were saying.”

Still with her back to him, she asks, “What?”

“You were listing the things you hate. There was something else on that list. What w
as it? Was it me? Were you going to say that you hate me?”

She steps closer to the rank of poplars and beech and calls out for their son
, her distress causing her voice to crack on the second syllable. Without the storm for competition, her voice carries far and clear, echoing through the trees long after she has fallen quiet. If Cody is anywhere close by at all, he will hear her.

“Were you going to say you hate me?” Mike
repeats, and pushes away from the boulder. The backpack slides off the rock and crumples to the soft earth. He leaves it there and takes a step closer to his wife. A timid voice inside him, the same one that has kept him quiet, kept him characterized as weak his whole life, advises he stay silent until the smoke has cleared from this particular blaze. But he doesn’t want to, not now, maybe not ever again. Incredibly, for a man unaccustomed to giving up on anyone but himself, he thinks he may have found the real reason for this seemingly ill-advised jaunt into the woods. He thinks he might have brought Emma here to find out, not if she still loves him or if there is anything left to save, but to find out if
he
still loves
her,
if he
wants
there to be something left to save. Because right at this moment, he is emboldened and reinvigorated to find that he might not, and that he might finally have the words to tell her as much.