The Tent: A Novella (2 page)

That blonde
is not as pretty now, and he knows not all of that can be blamed on the weather. Her red slicker clings to a body made shapeless by the years, the disappointment, and the stress of being married to a man crippled by the ever increasing weight of his own failure and unrealized dreams. Her hair, which has lost its luster and faded in synch with her expectations of him, is pasted to her pallid face, but not enough to hide the doubt from eyes made darker by the shadow of his presence in their marriage.

“I think so, yes,”
he tells her, and even to his own ears it sounds like a “no”. But the lies seem to come easier the deeper into the woods they go, and he doesn’t care if they’ve become as transparent as the rain-horses riding through their flashlight beams. He can see on her face and in her posture as she hugs herself against the relentless battering of the storm that she recognizes the lie, but knows better than to challenge it, especially when she is not the only one who might suffer from its exposure. With a smile of feeble wattage, she turns away from him and drops to her knees on the sodden, steaming carpet of dead leaves. Cody, their thirteen-year-old, who has been trailing them soundlessly and with a complete and enviable absence of worry, finds her face with his flashlight beam.

The boy smiles, and as he looks from his mother’s face to the storm-wracked woods around them
, Mike sees the twin sparks of wonder in his son’s eyes, and feels a tightening in his throat. The boy has a spirit he could not possibly have inherited from his parents, the genesis of his cheerful disposition an equal mystery. Tears prick the corners of Mike’s own eyes and he does not bother to sleeve them away. The rain will excuse them.

I don’t want to lose my son
, he thinks.

Whatever Emma is saying to the boy is lost in a peal of thunder that sounds like the roar of some forest god enraged by their intrusion, and even as Mike winces against the
violence of it, he tries to read in Cody’s face the impact of Emma’s words.

I don’t want to
lose my boy
, he thinks,
don’t take him from me
. The dread that lies like a cold hard stone in the pit of his belly is a wicked thing, an ever-present thing, and with it comes an irrational certainty that whatever his wife is saying, it is designed to undermine the child’s confidence in his father’s ability to see them through this nightmare.

Worse, he knows such speculation may be depressingly close to the mark
.

It’s time we had a talk about Daddy
, he imagines his wife telling their child.
It’s time for you to realize the sad truths we’ve been keeping from you. First of all, we’re lost because your father thought taking us into the wilderness would somehow keep us together. But it won’t, because I hate him, and in time, you’ll learn to hate him too. But don’t worry; I plan to get us both away before he can destroy your life like he did Mommy’s. That is, if we don’t die out here first.

Cody picks that moment to nod in agreement, compounding Mike’s paranoia, and abruptly he is reminded of his o
wn childhood, specifically his mother’s habit of turning the volume on the TV down to nothing whenever a character started using foul language, like “damn” or “heck”, or discussing subjects she deemed inappropriate, like alcohol, or drugs, or romance.
Not for your ears, Mikey
, she would tell him, and he would wait impatiently for the sound to come back. Sometimes the silence only lasted until the scene changed, or until the commercials. Sometimes his mother would get distracted and forget to turn it back up at all, and he would be sent to bed with a headful of questions about what those characters might have been discussing that was so terrible he’d been forbidden from hearing it. He would learn it all in the schoolyard when the other kids discussed the latest episodes of
Hawaii Five-O
and
Bonanza
, and he would laugh right along, pretending he was one of them, knowing he wasn’t. Since then, he has been an outsider, and he is made intrinsically aware of that feeling again now as he stands watching his wife counseling his son in a dire situation of Mike’s own making, helpless to do anything but hope he’s wrong about the weight of their words.

As the thunder rolls
away into the woods to the left of them, Emma touches the boy’s cheek and rises. As she approaches Mike, she folds her arms again—a natural reaction to the hostile weather, but also, according to their marriage counselor, a defensive posture, the manifestation of which seems directly proportional to her proximity to her husband. When she reaches him, he sees that she is shivering.

“Is it safe to be out here with all this lightning?”

“It’s not like we have a choice,” he says. “But we’ll be fine.”

“We
ll, whatever the case, we should keep going,” she says, a bead of rain suspended from a nose the cold has made red and raw.

He nods. “I think we should be close to the campground offices. Can’t be more than ten, twenty minutes from here.”

She looks at him for a long moment before speaking again. “What makes you think that?”

It’s a question he had hoped she wouldn’t ask, because the truth is that he
doesn’t
think that, has no idea how far they are from anything except lost. The truth is that he knew an hour ago, right around the time he felt the ground begin to rise ever so slightly upward instead of down, that they had gotten completely turned around. The campground offices were in a small valley between the hills. This much, he remembered. If they were headed the right way, the going would have been easier because they’d have been on a decline. The trees would have thinned out too, but the longer they walk, the denser the woods become. The reality, as terrible as it is, is that, yes, he has them well and truly lost, probably miles away from anyone who might be able to help, and all he’s doing now is walking in the hope of finding a cabin, or a lodge, or any kind of shelter.

H
e knows Emma knows this too, and that the long look she gave him was her way of parting the veil of his deception and looking at the complete truth of the matter for herself. He decides the best thing to do is to change the subject, and what better subject than the one that’s hanging over them as heavy as the storm.

“About earlier…” he says.

She shrugs, but does not meet his gaze. “Forget it. You were upset.”

“Yeah, but still,
I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It wasn’t your fault. The tent was a cheap piece of crap anyway.”

The slight smile is very slight indeed, but more than he hoped for, so it will do just fine for now. “Yeah, it was. I did try to tell you that. Made a better kite than a tent.”

The levity, here in this frightening, storm-washed darkness, is so unexpected and so desperately needed, he bursts out laughing. Cody, still enthralled by the hissing, weaving, thunderous woods around them, looks in their direction and smiles.
Such a happy child
, he thinks.
So unflappable. He didn’t get that from me
. But in the extensive catalogue of his failures, he’s thankful that he can at least count his son as a success, a good thing, the one bright spot in the Rorschach pattern of his uneven life, even if ultimately he cannot find a way to keep them all together.

And yet you didn’t want him here
. This is yet another unpleasant truth. It isn’t that he doesn’t love the boy, because he does, more than anything. It was just that he’d wanted to be alone with Emma, to get her out of the quagmire of routine of which their son was an integral part, and to discuss with her the kinds of pressing issues not meant to be spoken aloud around children for fear of shattering their illusion of familial security. That she had insisted on bringing Cody with them gave the impression that she wasn’t nearly as enthused at the idea of being alone with him as he’d been. Even his choice of destination had left her nonplussed.

“If you want to take a trip, why don’t we go to a resort somewhere and enjoy a little luxury for a while?” she’
d said, and even now he can’t say why that had rankled so much. Perhaps it was the implication that she had
never
enjoyed luxury with him and would have embraced the opportunity to do so. Either way, it has been a disaster from the start, and nothing that’s happened since has improved the quality of the situation. Until now.

Emma’s
smile has grown, just a bit, but these days that might as well be a brilliant lighthouse beam in the dark, scalding away the shadows, at least for a little while. It gives him hope, however tenuous, that maybe things
can
get better.

“It sure did fly, didn’t it?” he says, and pictures their miserable old tent, picked up from the clearance section at their local Wal-Mart for a song.
Less than five minutes into the storm, and with the sound of staggered applause, the wind tore it free of the pegs and sent it flying away like a pterodactyl to tangle itself high in the canopy above their heads, where it flapped and twisted and snapped like a creature chastising them for trying to keep it tethered. In retrospect, the image was comical, but at the time, exposed to the sudden shock of the cold rain and biting wind, and yet another goddamn disaster in a year, a
life
, replete with them, his initial reaction had been to blame Emma for not hammering the pegs in deep enough. If he was honest, he still believed that, but if accountability was the game du jour, then he’d already beaten her by a wide margin. She might have lost the tent; he had gotten
them
lost. And considering his fears about the fragility of their marriage, it had been foolish to rebuke her for anything at all.

“Have you checked your phone?”
she asks.

“Yeah.
I’ve been keeping it off to save the battery, but I checked it about ten minutes ago. Still no signal. That was kind of the point of coming here, but it sure doesn’t help us much in a pinch, does it? How about yours?”

“Left it in the car. Didn’t think we’d need it.”

The idea of the battered old Toyota (itself so cheap and old, it has contributed to multiple instances of Mike’s bad luck) with its shelter and warmth, is like an oasis to Mike. In daylight, he figures it might even be visible from here, but at night, with the storm raging around them, he might as well have parked on the moon.

“What about that compass app thingy you downloaded for Cody?”

“It would need to know our location via the GPS,” he says. “And if we had the GPS, we’d have the location, and we wouldn’t be lost.” As the words leave his mouth on a cloud of staggered vapor, he realizes they represent the first honest answer to the question she asked in the beginning, and his smile fades. “I’m sorry,” he says, wincing as a fresh gust of wind sprays rain into their faces. “I messed up.”

She chooses not to acknowledge his confession, and that is somehow worse than if she had. It suggests her expectations of him are right where he has always feared they would one day end up
, and where they themselves are now: somewhere south of nowhere.

“Let’s not let Cody hear that, all right? I don’t want to scare him.”

He nods his agreement. “I don’t think we have anything to worry about there. If anything he seems to be
enjoying
this.”

“Well, you promised an adventure. Looks like he’s having one.”

It was supposed to be an adventure for them all. A more stable, more carefree couple might still have been able to view it as one. But stable they are not, and labeling this an adventure now would only be a form of denial.

“I still can’t believe it’s even possible to get lost in this day and age,” she says.

“People get lost all the time.”

“I know, but…” She gestures helplessly at the dark theater of their surroundings, her flashlight illuminating the
sinuously moving boughs above their heads. “We didn’t camp that far from the trail, did we? I mean, shouldn’t it have been easier to find? How did we go so far off track?”

There is no accusation in her tone, but his conscience is a lot less forgiving. He had, in actual fact, disregarded the
suggestion (warning) from the camp attendant in favor of a more out of the way (prohibited) area, a more great outdoorsy (unincorporated) place rather than the large, fenced-in patch of worn earth they would have had to share with two other couples (both of whom had had much more impressive tents and so were probably safe and dry right now). In his youth he’d gone camping with his father a few times, and those occasions were some of the best moments of his life. He had hoped in keeping with the wildness of the location, he could recreate the spirit of those cherished trips, could reproduce with his own family the bond he’d forged with his father. Back then you didn’t need to book a place, or get anybody’s permission. You just geared up and went hiking until you found the perfect spot to set up stakes. The real, honest-to-goodness camping experience. And if something went wrong, well, that was part of the adventure too.

But
now, in place of adventure, there was only misery and panic that increased exponentially with every mile they covered.

“After the tent blew away,” he admits, “I thought I was leading us back to the trail. I guess I got turned around.”