OUTSIDE, SHE AND Aidan sat on the log that had been placed there, cut-side up to form a kind of bench overlooking the lake. Emily ate the pancake doused in jam, sweet with sugar, tart with berries, and she didn’t think about the taste at all, even though some dim part of her registered that it was good. Only about surviving. Only about fueling herself, to get Aidan to safety.
“You don’t need to be afraid of him,” said Aidan.
She turned to her little brother, surprised.
“I’ve touched him,” he said. “I’ve seen inside him.”
“Hmm,” she said. She was thinking of Brad. Of how he always had people laughing around him, of how he could be charming so much of the time. How violence could lurk inside someone.
Of course, Bob wasn’t Brad. For one thing, he wasn’t even charming on the outside. He was pretty much always grumpy—maybe this was just a kind of extreme extension of that? And Aidan…he wouldn’t be wrong, would he? He couldn’t be. People couldn’t hide their true selves from him. Their souls. If there was such a thing. Emily wasn’t as convinced on that score as her parents.
But good soul or not, Bob had been weird there.
Movement, fast and flickering, and she looked up, startled.
To her surprise, a camp robber bird fluttered down from the trees behind the cabin, stood on the fork she’d left on the plate, and started pecking at the pancake. It snagged a whole blueberry and carried it back to a branch. Chirruped.
Huh.
Someone had stayed here a lot, she realized. Someone who had eaten out here often—often enough for the camp robber to get used to people. She watched its little fast-twitching eyes, its compact body. Soon it flew down again and took a big piece of pancake. She thought it would probably eat from her hand, if she gave it the chance. She had a hunch it had been hand-fed before.
It was strange, but not in a bad way: the proximity, the tameness, of something wild and alive. Something alien.
She looked up at the sky. Clouds were gathering on the peaks, as if the mountains were breathing. The lake was as still as the surface of the moon.
A cough, from behind them. She turned, and Bob was leaning against the doorframe. He was trying to make it look casual, but she could tell he could hardly stand without support; it was in the set of his muscles. She knew about muscles: she had trained hers to do things they wouldn’t naturally do, to carry out poses and make movements that used hidden strength to convey softness, to convey grace.
“I said I have no kids,” said Bob, unprompted. “Well…I don’t have any. But I had one.”
She watched him; there were no words inside her, nothing she could say.
“We had one,” he went on, looking up at the sky. “A boy.”
Beside her, Aidan breathed out. He touched Emily’s hand.
Emily looked at him. Their eyes met. She knew that he had seen this already, that he knew it.
She turned back to Bob.
She watched his face. It didn’t show anything; didn’t reveal anything. It was like the middle of the lake: iced over. But his eyes: his eyes were like holes cut into the ice, in winter, to get water from deep below, and she was afraid of what might move down there.
She had to turn away, to look at the lake. At the edges it was all water, clear water, with fish in it no doubt. Was there a fishing line in the cabin? Lures? She bet there was. She could try to catch them a fish.
But she had to turn back, at some point. To look at Bob.
“You had?” she said eventually. She put a light stress on the word had.
“Yep,” said Bob.
“I’m so sorry,” said Emily. “I shouldn’t have…If I’d known, I would never—”
“No,” said Bob. “I’m the one who’s sorry. None of that is on you. I shouldn’t have snapped like that.”
She took a deep breath, smiled. “Forget about it,” she said. “It’s like it never happened.”
Bob looked into her eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. That’s the worst thing of all.”
He didn’t say anything else.
After a time, he went back into the cabin.