DECEMBER 15, 1986
Deb can’t sleep. She lies in bed with the lights off waiting to hear the click of the door latch, the creak of Stephen’s boots across the kitchen floor, the sound of their bedroom door opening. At four she drifts off, but when she wakes an hour later he still isn’t there. At six, just when it’s starting to get light, she wakes Danny and tells him they are going for a hike. A hike! She adds that touch of false enthusiasm to her voice. The cabin is cold, a mess, last night’s dinner dishes piled up in the sink. Danny’s Tintins and Legos scattered across the floor.
It reminds her of the commune on winter mornings—that frozen water in Bird’s attic room, the frozen pipes in the kitchen, the sea of dirty dishes that arose around them.
They set out following Stephen’s footsteps through the snow—barely visible shadows.
“Look, your dad’s footprints!” she says, her body nauseous, her arms and legs shaking. She wants to smell woodsmoke from that shack at the top of the hill, wants to believe that he has made himself a winter camp up in the woods, in the trees, where he is always happiest.
“What is it you do up there?” she had asked him just last week.
He had shrugged.
“Don’t you miss us?”
“Of course,” he had muttered, but it wasn’t the tone she needed to hear. She wanted him to reach toward her, put his arms around her, cup his palm against the small of her back and hold her.
Hold me, she says more often than she wants to. Sometimes he does, a loose-limbed, nervous hold, and sometimes he turns away from her and does not.
Why doesn’t she leave? Deb thinks, pausing to wait for Danny. The snow is deep. Surprisingly so. It’s what her mother has asked her for years. I have no idea why you’re raising that boy in such squalor.
Squalor. Is that what this is? Is that what her grandmother’s village in Russia was? Outhouse, wood stove, dark pine whose corners never get entirely clean. They have water from a spring but no plumbing—the gray water still collects into a bucket in the sink, which she empties two times a day. Her twenty-year-old Datsun will only turn on when the radio’s playing—will only turn off when she clicks the radio back off. “What the fuck is that about?” she said to Stephen, who grinned, shrugged, walked away.
“Where are we going?” Danny says, pausing in the snow behind her. “I’m cold.”
“I know, hon,” Deb says. Hiding the terror in her voice. “It’s an adventure!”
What she has no way of describing to her mother are all the other gifts of this life she has chosen. The way it feels to wake in the dark, climb down the ladder stairs, and light a fire in the wood stove. The way it feels to make a pot of coffee and sit in the dim light with it cupped between her hands, a thick blanket wrapped around her neck and shoulders, and watch the day come. The way she has come to know the hillside with its cellar holes and springs and creek and wildflowers so that it feels like an extension of her own living body. The way the seasons create a rhythm to her days, and her years. The sensation of having made a world for yourself with your own hands. Of belonging somewhere. Yes, she is frustrated, and sometimes lonely, and poor. But still.
Where is he? The boot tracks faintly rising. Deb scans the treetops for woodsmoke, hoping, but sees none. “Shit,” she mutters under her breath. “C’mon, Danny. Hurry.”
And Stephen: How can she describe to her mother her reasons for staying with him? The mornings when he used to go downstairs before her and bring her coffee in bed, brush the hair back from her face and wake her. The way he looked at her then—surprised, each time. The way he smells—of wood and earthy sweat and salt. The way, when they have sex—less and less often these days—he cries out at the last minute, a ripple of pain and joy and love into the dark loft of the cabin. How afterward he burrows his face into the folds of her body, strokes her bare skin, and whispers thank you. How can she tell her mother these things? How the hazy blue sorrow in his eyes is not something she feels like escaping but something that draws her closer. How when Danny was a baby Stephen would go to him in the night and pick him up, and rock and soothe him, so that Deb could keep sleeping. The way he has given her this world—this cabin, this hillside, this child, this chance at something other.
They’re closer now. Neither of them speaks. Deb reaches out and takes Danny’s ten-year-old hand in hers, and he accepts it, and they continue up the hill that way, side by side, mittened hand inside mittened hand. Sunlight glistens on the crackling snow. The air is clear, cold, dry. They reach, at last, the small hunting cabin at the top of the ridge. No woodsmoke. No goddamn woodsmoke. The door is closed. Deb pauses and feels her bowels swirl. The taste of nails floods her mouth. A blue jay screeches from the trees above them, and its cry riddles through her limbs until it stings the bottoms of her feet. She turns to Danny and takes his other hand in hers. “You stay here, okay, love?”
He doesn’t blink, just looks into her eyes and nods.
She goes to the door of the cabin and opens it. The room is dark; her eyes haven’t adjusted. But she can make out a shadow. A body across the floor. He lies on his side, an empty quart bottle beside him, piss soaking the pine beneath him. His eyes are closed and her first thought is how peaceful they look. How peaceful he looks. Those cheeks those arms those shoulders. Stephen. She steps into the cabin and picks up his heavy arm, his leaden hand, peels back his sweater, and feels his wrist, as cold as snow, no pulse beating, and then she opens her mouth and a sound comes out, a deep and anguished howl. And then she stands, and leaves the cabin, and starts down the path to where Danny waits, shaking in the deep snow. She kneels down in the snow before him and puts her arms around him, buries her face into his neck, says, “Come, Danny. Let’s go home. We’re going to build a fire.”