Page 65 of The Cabin
“No, I think you’re right.” She turns in place, taking in the vista; the crown of the hill is high enough and bare of trees enough to provide an amazing view of the lake. “I don’t think I ever realized how much stress I was under. Just in general. Add in the grief and trauma of losing Adrian…?” She trails off, shaking her head, as if the rest of the statement is self-evident. Which, to me, it is.
“It’s a killing kind of stress,” I say. “Your body may not die right away, but your…your spirit does. Your soul. Your mind. Your heart. It all dies. And eventually, your body will give out too.”
“What’s the answer, though?” She leans her shoulder against the nearest tree, staring out at the lake and the now-distant cabins. “We’re lucky, Nathan. Not everyone who loses someone can just…up and move to a cabin on a lake in the middle of nowhere and not work.”
“No shit. I didn’t even know I needed this.” I hesitate. “It kinda…fell into my lap.”
“Same here.”
We’re quiet awhile, just absorbing the vista.
Eventually, she pushes off the tree. “Well. Onward around the lake?”
“I’m ready.”
Conversation loosens a bit, then, as we walk. Nothing in-depth or serious, just little stories from childhood. The few times her dad tried to get her to go hunting with him went comically wrong, and made for good stories. And I, of course, have a wealth of crazy but true stories from growing up with an antiestablishment survivalist father: bear hunts, being chased by wolves, making an igloo in a blizzard so we didn’t die of exposure.
We both keep it light, innocent, nonpersonal.
It is nearing sunset when we reach the cabins. I pause on the bottom step, glance at Nadia. “I put a roast in the crockpot this morning. Just about the only thing I get right every time.” I laugh self-consciously. “Care for some?”
She’s hungry, but hesitant. “I, um.”
“I can bring a table and another chair out onto the porch.”
“Okay, then.” Her face illuminates with a grin. “I can provide the wine this time.”
And so we find ourselves on my porch, sharing roast beef, red wine, and a loaf of bread she bought from the little bakery in town. We don’t talk much, which seems to be the usual. When we’re done eating, I move with my glass of wine to the railing, watching the last of the sunset mingle and fade into dull crimson-orange becoming umber and purple.
“I enjoyed this,” I say. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
I shrug. “I dunno. Walking with me. Talking.”
She’s in my rocking chair, feet curled under her, hands pulled into her sweatshirt sleeves so only her fingertips show, wrapped around her goblet. I can feel her chewing on how to say what she’s thinking. “I’m sorry if I’m…standoffish.”
“Nah.” I sigh, with a little huffed chuckle lost in it somewhere. “I’ve been standoffish and prickly for years. I mean, I’ve never been a super sociable Chatty Cathy typa guy. Dad didn’t talk much, so I never got the habit. But then after Lisa died, I’d go days, weeks without saying much of anything but monosyllabic answers to direct questions, and sometimes not even that.”
“If you grew up in the wilderness, how’d you go to school?”
I snort. “Good question. Answer is, I didn’t. Dad was older, see. Right on the edge of draft age eligibility. He’d been an adjunct professor before he got drafted. So, he homeschooled me, but that’s a generous term for it. Taught me to read, write, do math. Enough that I wouldn’t come across as this illiterate, uneducated bumpkin, which I was. He had old copies of things like Herodotus and the Illiad and Mark Twain, and he’d carry them with him on our treks, and I learned to read on those. For those stretches of months we spent at home, he’d check out books from the library, books on science and history and biographies and stuff like that, and that’d be my education in that subject. Most of what he taught me was woodworking and woodcraft, and survivalism. Book learning was basically just to keep me from being a complete outcast when I left home. I was anyway. I left home at seventeen, apprenticed myself to a carpenter, and he set me on track into trade school, and I only got halfway through before a friend’s dad noticed the quality of my work and hired me on at his construction company, and things went from there.”
“You had a really unusual upbringing.”
“Yeah. I guess I did.”
“Where’s your dad now? Passed on?”
I shrug. “I dunno. After I left home, he vanished. Went off into the woods somewhere and never came back.”
Silence.
“I’ve talked and thought more about my childhood these last few weeks than I have in years,” she says.
“Same.”
“Why, do you think that is?”
