DECEMBER 14, 1986
Stephen sits in the dark on the hill above his parents’ farmhouse in the clearing he and Deb have made together, a quart of Jim Beam between his knees. It’s December and the air is cold, five degrees—colder? Dropping. The ground is covered in a couple inches of snow, a few stubborn leaves cling to the oaks and beech, the smell of woodsmoke drifts uphill from the cabin where Deb and Danny sit near the fire. Deb will be drinking wine now, and Danny—ten years old—will no doubt be bent over a Tintin, lost on some desert island. They fought, Stephen and Deb. “Goddamn you,” Deb yelled. “Why don’t you talk to me?”
The words caught in his chest, unformable. His silence ice castles in the air. And so he left, with his coat and this bottle. The woods his solace, always.
When Stephen built this place he had wanted it to be different: higher ground, above the valley where clouds hung half the day in summer and the sun didn’t settle for more than an hour in winter. A place apart from the unfit world. A place apart from war. But Reagan is back in office and British scientists have discovered an enormous hole in the earth’s ozone layer above Antarctica. Is this place he built on the hill—adze, log, nail, timber—immune from it all? He doesn’t think so anymore.
Where had they gone wrong? He thinks of that night, ten years ago, when she told him she was pregnant—barefoot on fresh pine, dancing around the kitchen table. Her warm laugh. The way his heart had stopped just then, stepped backward into the woods—hard maples, twisted beech, soft pine.
Stephen walks uphill, leaves and ice crackling under his feet. The snow coming down harder now. He thinks of his son, Danny, and what he has, and has not, been able to give him. He thinks of Bonnie, living in town now with her baby, Vale. Of the part-time, low-paying jobs she works. He brings her money occasionally. Groceries. Venison stew. Still—a mother, alone? It’s the exhaustion in her eyes he cannot quell.
Deb’s unhappiness, either. At what point does a cabin—its aging pine and dim lights, its mineral-rich outhouse and trickling off-colored spring water—no longer suffice? “I’m sick of this hole we’re in, Stephen,” she said to him earlier. “It’s dark, we’re poor, we’re miles from anyone other than your mother; our cars don’t fucking run when we need them to. It’s a hole, Stephen. A hole! And you?” She’d put her hand on his chest, full of the tenderness he’d long denied, and said, eyes brimming, “You’re an asshole.”
He had remained quiet, watching the shapes rage made out of her face. Watching her tears. Standing and putting on his coat and boots. Before stepping out the door he had turned to her. “I didn’t ask you to come,” he said, finally. Its cruelty bitter on his tongue. Its truth bitter, too.
A few snowflakes fall, heavy and large, on Stephen’s face. The first snowstorm of the year: it always feels like a blessing. A way to start over. Stephen puts the bottle in his pocket and hikes farther up the hill. He always heads for the higher ridge, the spot where Lena’s cabin sits. The place they have let rot, corrode, fall back into the earth since Lena lived there. Porcupine-eaten holes in the floors, broken windows, a door that won’t close, the rusted potbellied wood stove. Stephen goes there sometimes. Some of Lena’s things remain—some pictures tacked to the wall, feathers, bones. A coffeepot on the old two-burner stove. He likes to feel Lena’s presence there. The woman who married an owl. Every bird is an omen, she used to say. Every one.
The hike up the hill doesn’t take long, but the night is cold. He should have brought paper, matches, kindling. Stephen takes a long sip from the bottle, stops at the door of the cabin and looks out at the dark hillsides around him. From this height he can see the edges of the barn below lit in moonlight. It looks alive like the coals of a fire or Christmas tree lights or the neon flickering of a TV. He watches the lights go out in his own cabin below. He can imagine Danny asleep in his loft, Deb climbing the ladder, undressing, slipping into the cotton nightgown full of holes she sleeps in. He wants to go to her, lift that nightgown, put his face against the warm, soft skin of her stomach, the skin still softened from when Danny was inside her, put his lips against her ear and say, sorry. She’s still beautiful. The most beautiful woman he may have ever seen, her face now shadowed by sun lines, smile lines, worry lines, like a well-loved world. Everything looks better to Stephen when it’s older—barn siding, floorboards, leather—and Deb is no exception. But he can’t bring himself to go back down there. Can’t bring himself to say those two syllables: sor-ry. He’ll wait until he’s sure she’s sleeping. Until he can climb into bed unnoticed, lie there unseen, studying the contours of her face in moonlight. For now he’ll stay here at this wind-loved cabin at the top of the hill, Lena’s haunt, watching it snow. Snow: such permission for silence! A world where he doesn’t have to speak, where he never had to speak: the strange groaning of the oak and the sweet-wintry scent of the pines and the air so brisk it stings his skin, turns his breath to icicles on his beard.
He goes inside, sits on the floor with his back against the wall, takes a long swig. His grandfather built this as a hunting shack. A place to go and drink, be alone. A place that stank of animal blood and whiskey. And then Lena made it into something other—light-flecked, feathered, warm. Stephen takes another sip from his bottle, then another, and feels the noise of his thoughts recede, feels his limbs strengthen, feels himself brave and deep and wise, feels himself capable of love and fatherhood and the tenderness required of a husband. The woman who married an owl. The man who married an owl. Is Deb one? He takes another sip. Lies down on the hard floor. He should get up and make a fire, but is there paper? Kindling? Wood?
Lena. He used to visit her when he was a kid. Loved her laughter, her touch of wild. “Here,” he’d say, handing her some treasure he’d found, and she would get down on her knees and look closely. Put it to her nose and breathe in—that fox skull, that hawk feather, that quartz stone. Rub it in her fingers. Ask him where he’d found it. Imagine the life it had before it found them.
“Because things find us, not the other way around,” she’d said, touching her forehead to his forehead. “Like you to me, and me to you—we needed each other, and so we both went looking.”
They found each other, Stephen thinks, his body slipping into sleep. He shouldn’t sleep here, he knows it, but the whiskey has warmed him, the bottle now empty. He just needs a short doze. A quick one. And so we both went looking.