Sleep was the best amenity at the retreat. For the first time since college, Teagan slept eight hours a night. When he went to bed, his body ached from the effort of hauling sacks of pea gravel up the mountain, from cutting limbs, and from digging out roots, but the ache was pleasant. He was glad to fall asleep. He was glad to wake up the next day. He didn’t know whether it was the drugs, the labor, or the bolster of Darcy’s direct attention, but he felt better than he had in years.
Part of it was the sheer absence of the hours spent lying awake in bed, thinking about things he’d done wrong that day. He’d hated the empty, twitchy hours in the middle of the night, and now those hours were gone. He slept. This was real luxury: he went to sleep when he was tired, and when he woke up, there was daylight. Every day he reveled in the sybaritic pleasure of his cheek against the linen pillowcase and the contrast between the cool morning air and his warm blankets. It was so gentle an ascent into wakefulness that he couldn’t remember his dreams, which had previously been of the sort where he was accidentally naked in public or taking a test he had forgotten to study for.
But today he dreamed of falling. He was falling. He fell off the bed and landed on the synthetic sheepskin rug of his tent, as confused about where he was and what he was doing as in those banished bad dreams. It took several flailing, jumbled moments to realize that he’d fallen because Darcy had pulled the sheets off the bed with his body still tangled up in them.
She stood over him in the faint blue predawn light, looking at his unclothed form with frank appraisal and what he hoped was a small degree of approval.
“Not bad, Bear Bait,” she said, hands on her hips as she critically assessed the stomach that was still taut with panic at its abrupt descent. “Looking good, actually! We’ll have you back up to your fighting weight in no time.”
Teagan reflexively jerked the duvet off the bed and over his hips to cover himself, but his antidepressants had more or less eliminated the risk of untoward morning wood incidents. Nothing to see here. Please move along.
“Hi, Darcy,” he managed, choking back a sludge of embarrassment and surprise.
“Good morning,” she said with solid cheer. “You’re a heavy sleeper, huh?”
“Only recently.”
Darcy looked different today, and his rebooting brain slowly grasped for the details: her hair was down and blown straight so that it hung nearly all the way down her back. Instead of her customary T-shirt and cutoffs, she wore fitted jeans and a button-down black shirt. Carved silver hoop earrings dangled alongside the curve of her cheeks, the first jewelry he’d ever seen her wear. She’s so pretty, his barely conscious mind mumbled.
Darcy nodded in satisfaction. “That’s what honest work will do for you! Do you have any plans today?”
Darcy made his plans every day. Or rather, his plan every day was Hi, Darcy, and she told him what she wanted him to do. For two weeks, it had been a good program.
He wordlessly shook his head.
“Great. It’s my day off,” she said, face expectant.
“Oh,” he replied. “Did you . . . want to go do something?”
He barely dared to hope. It was not at all apparent to him that Darcy was organizing his days out of anything more than professional obligation or the usefulness of his manual labor. He didn’t mind. Use me, please.
“I do!” she said cheerfully. “Would you like to see a beaver?”
“Beaver?”
“Beaver,” she confirmed.
Teagan didn’t know what was going on half the time that he was here, and that proportion only increased when Darcy was speaking to him. Possibly Darcy was delivering the least charming proposition he’d ever received. More likely there was an actual giant rodent sighting in his immediate future.
“Sure,” he said from the floor. Either way, sure.
“Fantastic!” she said, although she didn’t seem to have doubted his answer. “Hurry up and get dressed—Yellowstone is a three-hour drive from here.”
Ah. The toothy kind of beavers it was, then.
Darcy pulled his folded clothes off the chair by the bed and tossed them over to him. She bounced on her heels while Teagan pulled on his pants, eyes fixed awkwardly on the ceiling as he did up the fly on his chinos. She did all but physically hustle him out into the bracing chill of the early morning.
“I got you breakfast already,” she said when he looked at the residence building. “You can drink it on the way. And we’ll get lunch in Mammoth Hot Springs.” She took his arm and began to drag him along with her to increase their pace.
“Wait, wait, I should ask Sloane if she wants to go,” he said, leaning back on his heels and looking at his sister’s tent. He wasn’t totally awake yet.
Darcy halted. Her face flashed with a few emotions, faster than he could follow: surprise, wariness, then a shade of judgment. “You want to bring your sister along?”
Teagan flushed as he realized that yes, objectively speaking, he was cockblocking himself. He nodded rather than backpedal.
“Okay, go on, then, be quick,” Darcy said. “There’s a line outside the tollbooth by nine.”
This was the little dance he and Darcy did: he acted like a teenage boy with his first crush, and she graciously pretended not to notice. He remained keenly aware that she had used most of her words ever uttered in his presence to convey that he was a disaster, and he was only deluding himself if he thought that uninterrupted time with Darcy would do anything to change her mind about him. Despite that conclusion, he still generated a small pearl of regret as he veered off the main path and over to his sister’s tent. A long ride alone with Darcy might have been nice.
“Sloane?” he warily called from the mosquito-netted entrance. He ducked inside. “Sloane, could you wake up for a second?” Sloane went off like a parcel bomb if disturbed in her sleep, and he carefully stayed out of striking range. She didn’t move from under her mound of fluffy pillows. “Sloane?”
“Mrf,” she finally grunted, tossing the uppermost pillow aside. “Are you dying again?”
“No,” he quickly reassured her. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Thenfugoff,” Sloane moaned, reaching for her pillow again.
“Sloane,” he insisted, grabbing the pillow away. “Hold on. I’m just checking if you want to go to Yellowstone today. On a hike. To see beavers.”
“No, I don’t want to get up and see beavers, have you met me?” she snapped, lunging for the pillow to wave it with menace in his general direction.
“I have, yes, but also, you dragged me out here. So I thought you might be interested in hiking now,” Teagan said, planting his feet.
“I’m not.”
“Okay,” Teagan said, a little relieved despite his best intentions.
“Wait,” Sloane called when he took a step back. “You’re going though? Is Darcy taking you?”
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, hoping he looked blasé about the topic. “You’re still welcome though.”
Sloane snorted her disagreement to that proposition. “You’re so dumb, Tiggie.”
He sighed. “So I’m often told. You’re sure you don’t want to come? Who knows when you’ll ever see Yellowstone if you don’t.”
“I can live with that,” she muttered sleepily. “But you and Darcy have a very nice time, okay?”
He wondered what he was missing that Sloane was engaging in subtext.
“It’s not like that. I’m like her . . . rescue pet. That she’s fostering. She doesn’t like me.”
“God, wish I could meet someone hot who dislikes me the same way she does you. You’ve been spending, like, every waking hour with her for the last two weeks—do you realize that?”
“I’m sorry,” Teagan immediately said. Had he been neglecting Sloane? That was the entire reason he was at this glorified summer camp. “I don’t have to go either. Do you want me to stay? We could do something together today.”
Sloane made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat. “No, I do not want you to stay. Go see beavers with the hot maintenance girl. Live a little. Jesus. Ask about her beaver.”
“Sloane!” he objected in horror. She might be twenty-two, but he preferred to maintain the illusion that his baby sister had never heard of sex.
“What? Good for you. You both should have some fun.”
Teagan hesitated. “Do you really think so?”
Sloane growled and hurled her pillow at him. “Get out of my fucking tent, Tiggie! I’m going back to sleep. You’re so dumb about this stuff.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, replacing her pillows on the bed and backing away from her. “See you tonight, I guess?”
He assumed he’d be back tonight. But he knew there were hotels in Yellowstone, and if it was three hours away and Darcy’s day off, maybe she’d want to stay there?
“Teagan?” Sloane called when he was almost out of the tent.
“Yeah?”
“I am happy you’re going. You look really happy.”
As Teagan walked through the wet grass to the rumbling pickup truck emblazoned with the wellness retreat’s logo, where Darcy waited with visible impatience, he was surprised to realize that was true. He probably should have gotten on antidepressants years ago. Or taken time off. He’d taken vacations since business school, of course, but most of them had revolved around other people’s weddings and bachelor parties and life milestones, and he hadn’t found them particularly relaxing.
This trip was relaxing, in a different way from running on a treadmill until endorphins made his brain stop screaming. He felt quiet and whole after a day spent clearing trail with Darcy. Maybe it was Darcy. Maybe he just needed to spend time with someone whose demands on him were tangibly achievable. And maybe she was coming around on him. Maybe he was just too out of practice to realize it.
It had been a couple of years since he’d been in a relationship. If anything, he’d seemed to get worse at dating as he got older, and conversations that had moved easily when he was in his twenties had grown superficial and stilted. Women still asked him out from time to time—he didn’t think he was such a catch, but he was aware that just being single, gainfully employed, and interested in women his own age guaranteed a baseline level of marketability in Manhattan—but nothing had gotten serious for a long time.
Not that this could either, since he’d be gone in a couple of weeks, but it felt important anyway.
Teagan was full of optimism when they departed the wellness retreat for the first time in his three-week stay. “Jack and the Giant Tree Stalk,” Darcy said as she thrust a thirty-two ounce smoothie at Teagan’s chest and jerked the truck into reverse. “Jackfruit, kale, and lots of coconut cream.”
She’d made him drink worse things, so Teagan obediently put the straw in his mouth and settled into the passenger seat, as pleased to go on a morning car ride as a hunting dog who saw the game bag in the truck bed.
Nature! Scenery! A beautiful woman in the driver’s seat! Somehow, he’d thought his adult life would look a lot more like this, back when he was a teenager.
Darcy plugged her phone into the center console and fumbled with it, eyes mostly on the narrow unpaved road back to the highway. The phone connected, and a tinny artificial voice slowly and phonetically recited that the sea otter was a keystone species in Pacific Northwest kelp forests because it regulated the sea urchin population.
“Shit,” Darcy said, fumbling again with her phone and propping it on the steering wheel.
Teagan covertly put one hand on the bottom of the wheel as Darcy thumbed through her phone screen at forty-five miles an hour around a switchback.
“Can I help?” Teagan asked, glad that he couldn’t really manage terror as an emotion through the SSRIs.
“Finish your smoothie. I had to wake Kristin up to make it,” she said. She found what she wanted on her podcasts app and plugged her phone back into the truck.
The podcast that began to play was professionally produced, with slick background music. Darcy turned up the volume and settled back in her seat as they hit I-90.
“The first step,” the mellow-voiced narrator recited through the truck’s stereo, quoting the Twelve Steps. “ ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.’ ”
Teagan looked over at Darcy. She kept her eyes on the road this time, but she smiled with closed lips.
“So what does that mean to us?” the narrator asked. “The first step looks different to everyone I’ve ever met, because alcoholism looks different on every person.”
“Darcy,” Teagan said, abruptly full of foreboding for the rest of the car ride.
Darcy didn’t look back at him.
“Bear Bait,” she replied.
“Can we listen to music instead?” Teagan asked.
“No,” said Darcy. “I always listen to podcasts on long drives. This is Sober Sam’s Sobriety Podcast. It’s very highly rated. Five stars.”
“Does it have to be this one?” he asked, polite yet firm. “We can listen to the otter talk.”
“No, that was for school. This one’s for you.”
“Darcy. I’m not an alcoholic,” Teagan insisted. “I barely drink. I’m not lying.”
“See, that’s why we’re listening to Step One,” she said with professional cheer. “You need to work on that one, obviously.”
“I would admit it if I was an alcoholic. My mother was an alcoholic. My sister abused pills. Everyone else out here has some kind of substance abuse problem, and they’re all nice people. But I don’t have a drinking problem.”
“Uh huh,” Darcy said, patently unconvinced. “You know, your sister told me you were hospitalized before she brought you out here.”
Teagan froze, the distant shame that had circled him from far out in space now visible in orbit for the first time in days. He looked at it in alarm, willing it to go back out where he didn’t have to think about it. The fluorescent lights of Gracie Square were so foreign to the experience of cutting back branches in the woods with Darcy that it sometimes seemed like he’d hallucinated the experience. “I was,” he warily admitted.
“Yeah, and you never mentioned the hospital to me. Or to anyone else, right? Nobody knows.”
Teagan exhaled. He didn’t want to think about it. It was a beautiful morning in Montana, and everything else was very far away. It was going to be a very nice drive.
“So?” he asked. So what else was he supposed to do? He’d done everything his doctor had told him to do. There weren’t twelve steps for having a panic disorder. There wasn’t some duty to announce it to everyone he knew. He took his medications every day. It was even possible he’d never have another panic attack, so that time he had a nervous breakdown did not need to be part of his biography.
“So, we’re listening to the podcast,” Darcy said. “Unless you want to talk about why you landed in the hospital? I get why you wouldn’t talk about it with Rachel or the doctor. They suck. But you’ve also had two weeks to talk about it with me, and you haven’t. Do you wanna?”
Her expression said that this was a challenge she was certain he would not meet. She was right. Besides, there was nothing really to talk about, nothing relevant to the woman, the car, the scenery. That was one bad week, one which would not recur.
Teagan shut his mouth and sat back for the long, winding road through the mountain valleys as Sober Sam encouraged them to take stock of everything drinking had cost them. Darcy turned up the volume even higher so that she could crack the windows and get a heady stream of cool air as they sped down the highway.
Teagan’s enthusiasm for the trip was only slightly diminished by the price of admission. The weather in the park couldn’t have been better, and Darcy was probably the best person in the world to visit it with. She’d worked here before, she’d mentioned that. She seemed to know more about it than most guidebooks.
And God, anywhere he looked, the view was amazing.
They passed sprawling mansions and log-cabin shacks, herds of cattle and new-construction horse ranches. The hills and raw rock cliff faces gleamed gold and silver in the morning light. Bits of wind from the cracked windows caught at Darcy’s loose hair and teased it around her face. Her fingers tapped on the steering wheel as they drove at exactly ten miles an hour over the posted speed limit.
As they turned off I-90, the podcast fell silent with the conclusion of Sober Sam’s thoughts on the first step. To cover the absence, Darcy began to sing an endless marching cadence:
I wanna be a forest ranger
Wild squirrels are my only danger
The sun was now coming right through the windshield and into their eyes. Darcy pulled an elastic from her wrist and tied back hair lit to the color of fresh embers by the angle of the light, then took a pair of knockoff Ray-Bans from the sun visor and tipped them over the arch of her nose. She was so beautiful his chest ached like he’d pulled a muscle there.
Darcy caught him looking at her and shoved his arm, laughing because she thought his expression was about her singing.
“Episode two,” she said, and turned on more Sober Sam.
Teagan would have preferred her singing, even though she couldn’t find half the notes she was looking for.
Darcy straightened up as they passed the tollbooth to Yellowstone and fiddled with her hair in the rearview mirror when they reached the first intersection.
“Which way to the beavers?” Teagan asked, scrutinizing the park map she’d shoved in his lap.
Darcy finally, blessedly, turned off the podcast and looked at him out of the corner of her eye as she took the turn toward Mammoth Hot Springs.
“Okay, so, full disclosure,” she said. “Beavers are actually crepuscular.”
“Crep—”
“Active at dawn and dusk. So. It’s almost eight thirty. The beavers are probably going to sleep right now.”
The road she chose was the one that led to the visitor center, not the turn toward the northern lake trails. Teagan began to feel confused again, not certain any longer why he’d been lured out of bed before dawn and promised beavers, only to be subjected to a podcast about alcoholism and interrogated about bad habits he didn’t actually have.
“Are we not actually going to see beavers?” he asked, looking down the busy road ahead of them, full of summer park tourists.
“I mean, I can never promise you’ll see any animals here. They’re wildlife. Wild. They have their own agendas. But, if you’re willing to wait while I run a couple of errands in Mammoth Hot Springs, I can ask the rangers what’s out today, then we can go see the bison, maybe some elk, whatever . . . and we’ll catch the beavers at dusk. Does that sound like a plan?”
Darcy said it all very quickly, as though she were hoping to gain his agreement without a great deal of thought on his part.
“What kind of errands?” he asked, not sure whether he was supposed to be suspicious.
“Some stuff for my job,” she said evasively.
“Doing what?”
“Does it matter?” she asked.
“Well, yeah, do you need any help? Anything I can do to get it done faster?”
“No,” she said firmly. “You’ve helped plenty. Just hang out, all right?”
“For how long?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe a couple of hours?” she said, tone tight.
Teagan stared at her.
Darcy’s jaw clenched as she kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead of her. “I’ll give you my phone. You can keep listening to the podcast while you wait.”
Oh, to hell with that.
“Did you seriously just bring me out here to make me listen to alcoholism podcasts?” Teagan demanded, annoyance beginning to rise after three hours of Steps One and Two.
Now who’s dumb, Sloane? She’d halfway convinced him this was going to be a date.
“No,” Darcy snapped, face shuttering. “I brought you out here because it’s my only day off for two weeks and I need to interview for winter park positions, but Rachel’s planning some appropriative sweat lodge bullshit today where you choke on steam and talk to your ancestors. She had me up and stacking firewood before dawn.”
At that explanation, Teagan sat back hard in his seat. Of course it was something like that. He should have known better.
She didn’t like him.
Stop showing your ass, Teagan.
“Seemed like talking to your ancestors in particular was the kind of thing that could set you back to day zero,” Darcy said, voice still defensive.
She didn’t like him. She didn’t like him for very good, understandable reasons. She thought it was her job to help him, and she was trying her best, but he needed to stop expecting anything more than that.
Beavers.
Darcy fidgeted again with her hair and the collar of her shirt, which had been ironed and starched within an inch of its life.
“I didn’t find out about the postings until last night or the sweat lodge stuff until this morning, so I didn’t have a chance to plan anything else for you.” Her tone was apologetic now.
“Sure,” Teagan said. “I get why you needed to be here.”
Why he was here was not apparent.
“I’ll try to be quick,” Darcy repeated. She now sounded openly guilty. “I really will take you on the wildlife tour after that.” She snuck a look over at him as she slicked on some cherry Chapstick, the closest thing to makeup he’d seen on her yet.
Teagan shook his head. She probably had things to do back at the camp. Things she wanted to do on her day off.
“You don’t have to babysit me,” he said. “You could have just warned me about the sweat lodge plans.”
They arrived in a cluster of old, federal-style buildings looming over a few gift shops and cafes.
Darcy’s lips pursed as she parked the car, hand tight and nervous on the gears.
“Well, I couldn’t leave you to your own devices all day if you didn’t want to come, could I?” she asked.
Teagan sighed and unclipped his seatbelt. She seemed to think he’d spent most of his previous three and a half decades passed out in a gutter somewhere.
“I would have been fine,” he said.
He mentally shook himself, afraid that he sounded like a brat. He gathered his composure, which he’d scattered all over a train platform several weeks ago and never quite recovered. He smoothed his face and gentled his posture.
“I’m sorry Rachel treats you the way she does,” he said, meeting her eyes. “But it’s actually not your job to take care of me.”
Darcy visibly flinched.
He didn’t want to be her job. He wanted—well, nothing he could picture actually happening, but he didn’t want her to look at him and see another giant mess she had to clean up.
Despite her frown, he got out of the truck. There was a restaurant on the other side of the parking lot. Maybe it had Wi-Fi. Or coffee. Or bacon.
“Look,” Darcy said, grabbing him by the elbow and drawing his attention to a trailer at the base of the hill. “I’ll be in there, okay? I don’t think the restaurant serves alcohol this early, but don’t order any. Don’t go near the elk. They bite.” She nodded at some large, somnolent creatures grazing on the nearby lawn to the delight of a crowd of tourists. “After I’m done, I promise we’ll go hiking, and I’ll find you a beaver if I have to swim into the goddamn pond myself. Okay? Sound good?” Teagan didn’t know why she was still asking. It’s not like he had a choice but to wait.
Teagan eased her hand off his arm and ignored her worried frown. “You don’t need to worry about me,” he said. “Thanks. Good luck with your interview.”