Cabin Fever (15 page)

It was pointless. It was as clear to her as the face that looked back out of the mirror. She was living in a fragile bubble of a fantasy, and the slightest disturbance would be enough to pop it and send her crashing back to reality. If she were smart she’d end it now – not that there was much to end. She’d call Brad and thank him for coming over for dinner, then tell him that she thought she had enough for the story she was writing. She should send a clear signal that she was closing the book, and make sure that this wouldn’t go so far that she’d be disappointed when it ended.

The thing was, though, that she already felt disappointed. Simply contemplating the time when Brad would no longer be waiting outside her door was enough to make disappointment collect like a puddle in her heart. Sarah closed her eyes in dismay. She was doing it. She was actually starting to fall for the football player.

18

Winnie was not a weak woman, nor was she the sort to dwell on problems that could not be fixed. The house was too big now – its empty rooms echoed with memories that were now as much a source of hurt as comfort – and she owned far more furniture than she needed in this stage of her life. While another woman might have sat in one of those empty rooms and wept at what she had lost, Winnie preferred to make things better, not worse.
 

So it was that she began each day with a ritual. She started with a breakfast of stark simplicity – toast and coffee, plus a glass of water to wash down the vitamin supplements that her doctor wanted her to take – and then it was time to clean. It was a daily marvel to Winnie how quickly the dust accumulated, on every surface in every room. She moved through the house with a feather duster, filling the air with tiny points of light that, in the still interior air, would settle on the floor where she could finally capture it with a vacuum cleaner. That plus the tidying plus the laundry took up most of the morning, which brought her to lunchtime and the contemplation, over a cheese sandwich, of what she might do with the rest of the day.

This was always the hardest part for Winnie. In the morning she was busy, and in the evenings she allowed herself to zone out in front of the television before bedtime, but lunchtime was the worst because it always posed a question that she could not answer. The truth was, she had nothing to do with her spare time. Frank was gone, and the dogs were gone now, too. Those of her friends that were still alive had mostly moved away to live closer to children and grandchildren, of which Winnie had neither. She knew that she should volunteer at a charity or take up gardening – something, anything to keep her busy, but she didn’t have the energy. She could keep the house in good repair, but she couldn’t fix her life.

“Oh, Frank,” she said to the empty spaces in the room. “Look at the mess you left behind.”

She had loved her husband desperately, and he had loved her. They had been lovers and best friends for most of their lives, their existences so deeply intertwined that Winnie had no idea how much she needed Frank until he wasn’t there anymore. He had taken care of her, of course – he had been a good provider and fixed things around the house whenever they needed fixing – but far more than that, he had always been there to pick her up when she fell. He was the optimistic one. He was the one who could examine an obstacle and figure out the way past it. She had come to rely on those things, and in the process her own abilities had grown weak and shriveled. Winnie didn’t like needing anyone, because she knew what happened to need when its source of satisfaction vanished. She had learned, since Frank’s death, to understand weakness from the inside.
 

Winnie looked around the room. She knew that something had to change, otherwise she’d die here, and soon. She felt like it was almost time to make that change, but not quite yet. Maybe tomorrow.

She heard a familiar whine outside the front door, and her heart gave a leap. Rising from her chair at the kitchen table she hurried through the living room to the front door.
 

Pulling it aside, she found what she was hoping to see, and something more. Pollux leaped and hopped, eager to lick her face in hello. Winnie dropped to her knees and took the ecstatic dog into a hug, not caring that he jostled and stepped on her as he danced in her embrace. She looked up to the man who held the leash that was still fastened to Pollux’s collar. “You found him!” she exulted.

The man smiled. Winnie recognized him from the grocery store. She might once have known his name, but that was long forgotten. “I was reading the story in the paper, and it made me think of something – I’d seen a dog that looked a lot like yours sleeping under my neighbor’s porch a few days ago. I didn’t have to look too hard. This is one friendly dog you’ve got here.”

Winnie almost had Pollux’s enthusiasm under control, and was busily scratching his favorite itchy spot just above his tail. “He loves people.”

“He does, and he was pretty hungry, too, so it was an easy matter convincing him to come back home with me. I wasn’t completely sure that he was yours until I saw the way you two said hello. Now I’m sure.”

Winnie stood and held out her hand. “I owe you my thanks, and a reward, too. What do you think about $50?”

The man shook his head. “I think you should keep the reward. Spend it on dog treats, if you want, and tell the dog that they’re a gift from me.”

“I might just do that,” Winnie smiled.

The man seemed reluctant to leave. “You’ll be OK, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t mean to pry, but the article in the paper made you sound pretty alone. I know how that can be. My wife passed a few years back, and the kids live on the other side of the country. It can be hard sometimes. So I guess what I’m saying is, I’m glad you got your dog back, but how are you doing otherwise? Are you eating OK?”

Almost Winnie offered a prideful answer that would have put this presumptuous man in his place and silenced his questioning, but then she caught sight of the kindness in his eyes and the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes that spoke to a long lifetime of smiling and laughter. Behind her, past the door, lay an empty house full of shadows and dust. In front of her stood someone quite different. Different was good.

“I was just sitting down to lunch, actually. Would you like to join me?” she asked, feeling a little shy.

The man broke into the warm smile that had left all those wrinkles. “Daniel. My name is Daniel. And I would love to have lunch with you.”

Winnie smiled and reached out to take his arm and guide him inside.

19

The morning sun was entirely too bright and the birds were singing far too loudly for Sarah to contemplate the problem of Brad. Part of her wanted to throw her stuff into the back of her car and squeal off down the highway that led back to San Francisco, but she was able to suppress that cowardly impulse without too much effort.
 

The more enduring problem was she knew what she should be doing with the day, and it didn’t make her happy. The profile of Brad for the newspaper was lagging – she had barely started writing it – and she really needed to knuckle down and force her way through it. The problem was, doing that meant spending most of the day thinking about a man that Sarah did not feel ready to think about.
 

Well, if she was going to be thinking about Brad, at least she could do her best to make sure that she didn’t run into him as well. She jumped into jeans and a light top, gulped down a cup of home made coffee, and jumped into her car with the laptop in the passenger seat beside her. Some time in the country, out amid the quiet of the forest, seemed like just the thing to calm her mind and soothe nerves that were beginning to feel a little frayed.

Driving on these country roads was still a little disorienting. Sarah was used to driving being an experience of struggle and resistance against the other drivers – taxi cabs, delivery vans, city buses, even the other motorists – but out here there were few cars on the road (most of which were trucks), and a number of the drivers she saw had a disconcerting habit of waving happily at her as they drove past. Some honked their horns, which gave Sarah a comforting feeling of familiarity, but even that she knew was make-believe because they honked not in anger but in sociability. She found it all very strange – not bad, exactly, just a little odd, like a bear walking on its hind legs or a Chihuahua speaking English with a Mexican accent.

As she drove out of town, the trees alongside the road grew thicker and the hot air that blasted through her window grew heavier with a thick scent of pine and dust. Sarah didn’t have a specific destination in mind. She was looking for quiet this time, rather than a view, so when she saw a sign pointing to a nearby nature walk, she took the right turn and headed up the narrow, unpaved road. There was a time not too far distant when she would have worried about driving on a gravel road, thinking about the nicks and scratches that would certainly be left in her beloved car’s paint job, but today it seemed like nothing she should think about. Driving through the trees was too intoxicating; it was too heady a mix of the primitive feeling of being out alone in the woods and the modern experience of feeling a powerful automobile beneath her. Sarah lost herself in the experience and drove deeper into the wild.

Eventually she came to a parking lot that was, if you were being strictly honest about it, little more than a slightly wider portion of the road that someone had lined with felled trees. Sarah pulled her car off to the side, turned off the engine, and sat for a moment in the quiet. It was one of the fullest quiets she had ever experienced – the stillness had a way of seeping in through your ears and eyes until it felt like her head was filled to overflowing with it. But gradually, as her city ears adjusted to the surroundings, she began to admit a range of small sounds – the buzzing of insects, the call of birds, the faint hush of wind seeping through the pine needles. Sarah closed her eyes and smiled, turning her face up toward the sun. She had come to the right place today.

She didn’t walk far down the trail, just enough that the view of the road and parking lot was hidden behind a veil of trees. Once she found a tree with an inviting patch beneath it, she walked a few feet off the trail and took a seat beneath it. She pulled her laptop out of her shoulder bag and opened it in her lap. The battery would give her a couple hours of life, which might not be enough to finish writing the article, but it would certainly be enough to get far enough into the project that it would be downhill from there.

She started by reviewing her notes, pulling the scraps of conversation at the bar back into her head where she could begin to structure the story. She knew that the main question readers would have in their heads is why – and how – a former football star ended up in Tall Pines. Sarah knew she would not be able to give them what they wanted to hear. Brad had come to town because he had nowhere in particular to be right now. He wasn’t here against his will, exactly, but neither was he in town because this was where he wanted to be. But now that he was here, there was nothing that suggested he was particularly unhappy to be here. His dreams would take him away eventually, but for now Tall Pines was a pleasant enough place to piece those dreams together.

Sarah looked up from the screen of her laptop and let her mind wander along those lines. Brad’s dreams would certainly take him away from Tall Pines, and they would take him away from her as well. For that matter, Sarah had dreams of her own that would sooner or later take her back to San Francisco, where she had a number of loose ends to tie up, not to mention a large group of warm and supportive friends and former co-workers who no doubt were wondering where she had gone and why she wasn’t checking her voice mail. There was no story she could imagine in which she and Brad stayed in the same part of the country for much longer. No matter which way she turned the situation over in her mind, that point seemed irrefutable. The sand was running out of the clock that measured their time together.

The thought made Sarah a little sad, and she thought about the sadness for a while. This was a familiar place for her, this feeling. It reminded her of high school, and the many times when she had felt lonely and isolated from the other kids at school. What had come so easily to Ellie was always a struggle for Sarah, and there were times when she felt friendless and unlovable. Those times were always accompanied by a feeling like a hole in Sarah’s chest, a hole that was filled with a sense of loss. Many years had gone by and Sarah thought that she had left that feeling for good, but now she could feel the hole opening within her again.

Angrily she shook her head and blinked away the tears that were beginning to form in her eyes. She was being silly, she knew. She was acting like a schoolgirl with a crush on a boy she hardly knew. This was not who she was; this was not who she wanted to be. She would not cry and feel sorry for herself. She would write the article she had come here to write and then she would get on with her life. She returned her fingers to the keyboard, swiped across the touchpad to awaken the screen, and began to type.

Sarah didn’t write the piece the way she usually would – logically and methodically. Most times she would have begun with an outline, carefully and thoughtfully building the structure of the piece before she began the actual writing. This was the way that Sarah had learned to write everything, from a business plan to a letter to her father, but this time something felt different and she began somewhere in the middle with the phrase, “Brad occupies his life like a man wearing borrowed clothes that fit him perfectly, but who knows he’ll need to return them later.” She didn’t know where that phrase came from, but it felt right somehow, and she followed it down into deeper description, letting her instincts guide her rather than her thoughts and her plans.

Later she would not have been able to tell you how long she spent writing under that tree. The sun moved in the sky, certainly, and her butt began cramping from sitting on hard-packed ground. She felt him before she could hear him, the gentle crunching of his boots along the trail, and if Sarah had been a Wiccan like some of her friends in college she would have been sure that she had conjured him somehow with her need or with the concentrated focus of her thinking. When the boots – and the jeans-clad legs they were connected to – came within her field of view, Sarah didn’t need to look up to know that it was Brad. Of course it was Brad. In that moment, who else could it be?