Over the first weeks at the cabin, Jake created a structure for his days in the woods. He woke with first light and fed Sadie. Most mornings before breakfast, he chopped wood, if only to warm himself up. Then he made tea and breakfast. Most days, he would walk one of the trails. One led to an overlook that was high enough up that he could see the ocean. That became his favorite. Some days, though, it poured buckets of rain, storms blowing in off the coast. Those days he stayed in the cabin. He forced himself to sit and just be for long periods, doing nothing. After lunch, he let himself draw for a while or write in his sketch book. He drew only what he could see―the interior of the cabin, branches out the window, the porch rocker. Or he brought in bits of the woods and drew them: pine cones and fir boughs, stones and leaves. He kept track of his dreams, but nothing revealed itself. He found himself growing impatient for the kind of revelation Eleni had hinted at.
Every few days, he walked down to the truck, put in the distributor cap, and ran the motor for a while to keep the battery alive. At the beginning of the third week, he found a note. “Fresh supplies in the back. I’ll keep a tab running. If I don’t see you before the 22nd, I’ll bring more. Your friend, Don.”
Under the tarp on the pickup bed, he found two boxes of food. Apples, root vegetables, broccoli, and chard. More cans of chili and beans and tuna. Rice and more black tea. Two heavy loaves of wholegrain bread. A jar of honey and a jar of jam. Butter. Cat food. Tears came to his eyes, and he felt less alone.
Late in the afternoons, he would take himself up into the loft with one of the books from the wooden crate. He had left them alone at first, but as the weeks went on, he found that he needed someone else’s voice in his head some of the time. He quickly read through the two trashy novels. Then he began reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. He had read this book when he first moved to San Francisco. He had liked it then but had not remembered much. Now many of the sentences hit home. “…all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living…because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.”
He rolled over and stared out the skylight. He knew only too well that he was in the midst of a transition and he could not remain standing there. He thought about Marnie and his heart felt squeezed and anxious. She had belonged to Paul the whole time he had known her, and his love for her had never been free of guilt. When they had finally made love, there had been no joy in it, no comfort. He had known more comfort in a few weeks with Eleni than in all the years he had known Marnie. And he and Marnie had never talked about the deep things that really mattered, the yearnings of the soul that Rilke described in the letters. Instead, they had talked of the mundane―and they had talked of Paul. Paul had always been there between them.
Jake saw himself on Paul’s doorstep that last morning, Marnie opening the door, Paul beaming as he hugged his wife. His heart felt squeezed again. As he watched himself follow the happy couple into the kitchen, he saw himself for what he was. Not Marnie’s husband, not even her lover. Only a friend.
He felt sick suddenly, an anxious queasiness, and he went down the ladder and grabbed his jacket and went outside. A storm was brewing. The 3:00 light was yellowish and gray, and there was a restlessness in the top branches of the trees. Sadie had followed him out and she rubbed against his leg and moved back towards the house as if to say come along now. But he put her inside and struck out into the trees, taking the path to the creek. The rains had swollen it to twice the size since his arrival, and he could hear it singing halfway down the trail.
Once there, he knelt on the only dry stone left on the bank and plunged his hands into the water. The cold of it was a relief and he splashed some on his face and rubbed at the weeks of scraggly growth on his cheeks. He thought of Paul, who one winter had made a big deal of his full, thick beard and Jake’s inability to grow much more than a wispy goatee. Had it all just been a competition? Is that all men could do with each other? But surely he and Paul had really been good friends, had enjoyed each other’s company. Maybe it was the alcohol that had changed everything. All of it was just too much and his head began to ache.
He stood up from the creek and started back. The wind was picking up and the first big drops of rain were flattening the dirt in the clearing when he got to the cabin. The door had blown open, and he hurried inside. There were hot coals enough to revive the fire and he lay down on the couch with his jacket still on. Unhappiness lay on him like a cold blanket.
The day of the weaving came back to him. He had stood there for hours watching Paul perform for his students, watching Paul be at the center, like he was with Marnie. He saw with a sudden clarity that he had spent all these years on the edges. He was the friend, the sidekick. Not the main guy, not the artist. Even for the last few weeks, he had been living on the edges of Eleni’s life. He felt a huge wave of self-loathing, and with a groan, he rolled over and willed himself to sleep.
But the dreams were relentless. In one he was in bed with Marnie, then Eleni, then both women at once. There was nothing erotic about the dream. Both women were unhappy, and Jake felt a crushing weight of responsibility. He dreamed on. He and Paul were painting side by side in the clearing near the domino chimney. Paul was painting a landscape of the hillside but in the center of his canvas was a pale blue Corvette with a dark-haired woman in the driver’s seat. Jake wanted to ask Paul about the car but he found he couldn’t speak. So he turned back to his own painting. In it a woman with long gray hair stood with her back to him. In front of her on an old mattress was the body of his father. In the upper corner, cowering near a window, was a small boy. Jake reached out to touch his mother and make her turn and look at him but he put his hand through the canvas as easily as if it had been tissue paper. He willed himself to wake up.
It was dark, full dark. The trees were whipping and soughing in the wind, and rain pelted the tin roof and the windows. Sadie wasn’t on the couch with him, and he heard her meowing outside. When he opened the door, she raced in, her fur wet and matted. He apologized over and over, his voice low and soothing. He rubbed her dry, put fresh food in her bowl, and went to bed, Sadie coming up the ladder to join him. He was glad she never held a grudge.
The air was clear and clean the next morning, but Jake found himself too heavy with the dreams to hike. He built up the fire and sat on the sofa drinking tea, mulling over the images from sleep. Marnie and Eleni in bed with him, the responsibility that had weighed on him so. What did that mean? He wasn’t responsible for either of those women. Then he saw that he had wanted each of them to be responsible for him, to take care of him. Even in the dream with Paul, a woman was in the driver’s seat. Was it that simple? Was he still looking for his mother? He could see that something had to change in how he was with all of them but how?
And Paul and his dead father. That was so obvious. Why had he never seen it before? Paul and his drinking. His father and his drinking. With both men, the alcohol took them away from Jake. He felt on the edge of something but he didn’t know what it was. He waited but no more insights came. He decided to get moving.
He put on his coat and went out to the creek and filled jug after jug with water. He filled the two big pots and set them on the stove. When they boiled, he poured them into the metal tub from the back porch and set two more to boil. Eventually he had enough warm water to get into. The first weeks he’d sponged off or immersed himself in the cold creek, but it had grown too cold for bathing outdoors. Now the water all over his body, even if it was lukewarm, felt wonderful. He stayed in the tub until the water grew cold. As he toweled off and hurried into the last clean clothes in his duffel, he found the red pouch and the envelope from Eleni that he had left in the loft.
“Open them when you need them,” she had said. Maybe he needed them now. Inside the red pouch he found tiny things. A bag of black silk. A glass vial with a clear liquid and a cork stopper. A similar vial with dark sand. A charred bone, a small white feather, a baby pine cone. And a square of tin foil tightly folded. Inside were several slices of what looked like dried mushroom.
He sniffed the liquid in the vial, tasted a drop on his finger. Nothing, water perhaps. When he rubbed the little silk sack, the contents crackled faintly and gave off an herbal smell. He didn’t know the meaning of the natural objects either, if they were for creating some kind of spell. There was a book about Wicca in the apple crate. He could look later. He assumed the mushrooms were for some hallucinogenic trip. He’d never done drugs beyond a little marijuana and he didn’t know if he wanted his mind expanded. What if he went somewhere and couldn’t get back? Who would know? He felt a pang of fear.
The envelope was small and goldenrod yellow. Jake expected to see his name on the front but it was blank. It smelled ever so faintly of Eleni.
He didn’t open it. He felt the same sense of anticipation he had before opening Marnie’s letter, a letter that had cost him a lot. Was this a love letter from Eleni? Another set of false promises? That didn’t seem like her. She was always direct and clear. But he had believed that of Marnie too. Or was this a letter of dismissal, the whole quest she had sent him on only a way to get rid of him? These weren’t new thoughts. He’d been conscious of them all the time he’d been at the cabin. But now they seemed more urgent.
He fixed some chili and crackers and ate near the fire, still chilled from the bath. He brought his sketch pad over and created a still life of the bone, feather, pine cone, and tiny black sack. He added a couple of crackers to the arrangement. It just seemed the thing to do. He drew for an hour or so, losing himself in the shapes and ideas.
Then he got out the Wiccan book, but the symbols he found in the book were esoteric and specific―the Pentacle, the Horned God, Hecate’s Wheel. There was nothing about pine cones or feathers. He thought about them a while and realized the objects Eleni had sent were symbolic of the elements―earth, sky, water, fire. The elements he was living with each day now.
He rearranged the objects into a wheel and drew that. Something in him began to shift although he could not have said how. When the afternoon darkened, he went up to the loft and slept a while. He had no dreams.