Page 82 of The Cabin
“Wait, when you say track a rabbit…”
I laugh. “I mean, like, track it. Find its footprints and figure out where it went, where it is, and how to kill it.”
“You can’t track a rabbit. They barely even leave footprints.”
“But they’re predictable. You snare them, more than you’d actually hunt them.”
“What does that mean?”
“Figure out where it’s likely to routinely go, and set a trap. They walk through it, trigger the snare, and it catches them. The most effective ones break their necks pretty much instantly.”
“Poor little rabbit.”
“Yeah, but poor you when you haven’t eaten meat in a week because the deer are hiding and a rabbit is all you can get.”
“And that was your childhood.”
“Yup.”
“You seem so…normal.”
I laugh. “Thanks, I think?” I sigh. “But as regards my dad, and the guitar. I knew I had to go my own way. He expected it. He was just mainly trying to get me close to adulthood so I could figure my life out. So, as soon as I felt ready, I knew it was time to leave. My dad was difficult and weird. My childhood was difficult and weird. But my dad loved me. He just had his own way of showing it. So when I left, I missed him. I don’t hate him. He didn’t abuse me. He never yelled at me, never hit me. He taught me a lot. He taught me how to craft things from wood, how to take pride in what my hands can do. How to see what the wood wants to be and help it come out.” I swallow hard; I haven’t talked about Dad like this in a long, long time. “I missed him. I missed his voice, those songs he’d play. He always packed that guitar with us, wherever we went. We’d sit in the shelter by the fire and he’d play. Teach me a few chords, and we’d sing songs together, whatever he could figure out by ear. So yeah, once I was on my own, I really missed him, and picked up a cheap old guitar from a pawn shop and learned how to play all his favorite songs, because it made me feel…closer to him, I guess. Like maybe we were playing the same song at the same time. Him out in the woods somewhere, me in my shitty sub-level one-room roach- and rat-infested apartment.”
She blinks hard. “That’s really sweet, Nathan.”
“You asked.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
Our food comes, and we take a few minutes in silence to dig in. By unspoken agreement, we save the rest of the wine for after. The food is really, really good. The piano player is teasing out a romantic rendition of a pop song I recognize but can’t name. The sun is setting, and it’s probably the most gorgeous one yet.
We finish eating and I let her give me some folded twenties toward dinner, and I put it on my card. We take our wine out onto the dock and walk along—it extends around the shore quite a ways, and there are benches every few yards.
We find one not far from the restaurant, and we sit. Too far away from each other, at first. I slide closer; extend my arm across the back, my wineglass resting on my thigh. She sits upright, prim, not quite in the shelter of my arm, but not shying away either.
Several loons paddle in a gaggle, creating complicated V ripples in the sun-stained lake. Geese honk overhead.
There’s nothing to say for a moment. We just sit, and somehow, inch by impossible inch, Nadia seems to slouch closer and closer to me. Until she’s nearly against me. My heart is beating, hard. I want to curl my arm, let it drape around her. Maybe she feels it, maybe I let it slump lower a little, I don’t know.
She looks at me, and in this light her eyes seem lit from within, star-shine jewels of iridescent green. Smoothed by olive skin, her high cheekbones now seem elegant and exotic. Her hair is the purply gloss black of a raven’s wing in the summer sun, long and thick and shimmering, loose and twisted to fall over one shoulder. Her lips are plump, red, damp.
God, she’s beautiful.
My eyes must show my thoughts.
“Nathan, I…” she murmurs, and her voice catches.
She shoots to her feet, pauses, staring at the last sip of wine in her glass. Shakes her head, and sets the glass on the arm of the bench.
“I…I have to go.” She swallows, refusing to look at me. “I need to go. I’m sorry.”
And she’s gone, speed walking around the side of the building to her little red convertible, the black top forward and closed. She’s in, the engine starting with a smooth purr, and then she’s squealing out of the parking lot too fast. She had two glasses of wine spaced out over a meal and more than an hour, so that’s not an issue.
