Page 65 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“I trust him not to kill us all in our beds,” Kerry replies. “Or steal from us or anything stupid like that. But do I trust him not to just walk away when he feels like it?” There is a hurt, bitter edge to her voice that I don’t think I have heard before. “No, I don’t trust him not to do that.”
“We can just ask him to help us with this, you know,” I tell her quietly. “We don’t have to invite him into our lives.”
“I know.” She recovers some of her old insouciance as she glances at me with a hard smile. “Don’t worry about me, Alex. I’m not going to go soft.”
Kerry heads over there that very afternoon, taking the rifle. I offered to go with her, but she said it was better if she went alone.
“Kevin doesn’t like visitors,” she explained, which made me wonder just what kind of mountain man we were inviting into our lives.
Mattie and Ruby are both intensely curious about the possibility of a visitor, the first new person we’ll have seen since Kyle.
“He’s Kerry ex-boyfriend?” Mattie exclaims, round-eyed; somehow, I’d managed to let that slip. “Seriously?”
“He’s going to help us skin the beaver,” I explain. “That’s all, Mattie.”
“Okay, sure.” She laughs, and I shake my head.
I’m starting to feel uneasy about asking this stranger into our midst; all I know about him is what Kerry has told me, and she admitted she hasn’t even seen him in several years. He might not be living in his cabin in the woods, or if he is, he might have gone off the deep end, cabin fever turning him into a conspiracy theorist or an axe-wielding serial killer, never mind what Kerry insisted about his character. I thought I’d learned my lesson—more than once—about being reckless, but maybe I haven’t.
And really, I can skin the beaver myself, can’t I? Even if it isn’t done well, I’ll learn and do the next one better. We don’tneedTrapper Kevin…except, considering the state of our food stores, maybe we do. Or, I wonder, maybe Kerry does. She certainly seemed willing to go in search of him.
I try to distract myself as we wait for Kerry to return with Kevin—or not. Ruby retreats into reading, and Mattie has gone ice skating; she’s become more than proficient, practicing her figure eights all alone on the ice, a solitary figure swirling through the snow.
Kyle is flicking through theArchiecomics in the loft, the same ones I read thirty years ago. I haven’t been able to get him to read anything more challenging, not that I’ve tried too hard; he does enough without me nagging at him to improve his mind, much as it could probably use some improving.
I tidy up the kitchen and get started on supper, survey the food stores in the pantry that grow paltrier by the day and try not to worry. It’s the middle of February, and we still have four or five months before we can hope to harvest anything much, although the potatoes should be ready soon. But eventhen…we’ve learned to go without so much already, we’ll simply have to learn to go without even more.
I remind myself what it will be like here in summer—raspberries and blueberries bursting from bushes; apples and plums hanging low and sweet in the overgrown orchard by the old barn; wild rhubarb and sumac and chicory and who knows what else growing wild and rampant. I have been studying a book of wild herbs and plants, with beautiful watercolor drawings of each one, in the hopes that I will be able to identify these edibles and not poison everyone in the process.
If we can make it to summer, we can find a way. It’s been my motto, my mantra, and I say it again now as the sky starts to whiten the way it does before twilight, and Mattie skates to the dock—repaired by Kyle and Kerry—to unlace her skates. In the loft Kyle sighs and tosses aside theArchiecomics, and Ruby drifts up to me, a question in her eyes.
“I think they’ll be here soon,” I tell her, just as I hear the porch door open.
“Hello?” Kerry calls, and we all hurry to the kitchen, apprehensive, expectant.
Kerry is walking into the cottage with a man following silently behind her, and although I try not to show it, I’m taken aback by the sight of him. He’s not at all what I expected—which was some sort of modern-day Jeremiah Johnson, complete with bushy beard and camo clothing. Trapper Kevin is dressed in a pair of jeans and a fisherman’s knit sweater, hiking boots and a hunting vest bristling with knives, so yes, he’s alittleJeremiah Johnson-like, but what surprises me about him is how quiet and sensitive he looks—a thin, fine-boned face, dark hair worn a little long. If you took away the hunting vest, I’d think he was a musician or an artist.
“Kevin,” I say. “I’m Alex. Thank you so much for coming.” Which makes it sound as if we’re hosting a party, but he just nods without saying a word. “Can you help us with the beaver?” I ask, and he merely nods again. Kerry smiles at him, and there isa softening in her face that touches me. I don’t think Kevin even notices.
He stays for a single night. He skins and guts the beaver, and slices the meat off so neatly and efficiently I feel like if I blinked, I’d miss it. Like a miracle we have stewing-sized chunks, steaks and roasts, all wrapped in wax paper and stored in the root cellar—around thirty pounds of meat, which is enough for quite a few meals.
“Does it taste like chicken?” I ask him, teasing, and he replies seriously, although with the faintest glint of humor in his eyes, “More like gamey beef.” When he smiles, barely, I understand what Kerry must have seen in him. “Slow-cook it in broth,” he adds, “or it will be as tough as an old boot.”
That evening, he and Kerry sit outside on the deck in the frosty moonlight, while Kyle and Mattie play Go Fish and Ruby watches them. I watch Kerry and Kevin, pretending I’m not, but Mattie notices.
“Give them some privacy, Mom,” she tells me after twenty minutes, when I’ve sat down, got up again, stoked the fire, sat down. “Jeez.”
“If they want privacy, they could go just about anywhere else,” I tell her, and she rolls her eyes.
When they come back in, an hour later, Kerry is pink-cheeked but quiet, and Kevin goes to bed, sharing Kyle’s little box room, without a word. I tell the girls to get ready for bed, and when I try to catch Kerry’s gaze, my eyebrows raised in query, she doesn’t look at me.
That night I lie in my own bed, feeling the empty space next to me in a way I haven’t let myself in a long time. I crave the warmth of Daniel’s body, the sense of security I felt resting in his arms. I picture myself with my head against his chest, his slowand steady breathing as he drifted off to sleep. I want that so much it’s like a physical ache inside me, relentless, pulsing.
The resentment I felt for his deception, the anger at how our life had been so disastrously dismantled—none of it matters now. It isn’t even that life as it is now has put it into perspective, although of course it has. It’s more that I’ve changed, that the things that once were important to me aren’t anymore. All I want is my family back. Whatever life we can forge for ourselves, we’ll do it together.
And yet…Daniel might be dead. It’s a thought I try not to let myself think too often. It’s been almost three months since he left. Threemonths. It seems an unbearable amount of time; when I think how new and raw everything was when he left, how we were all still reeling, having no idea what the world was like, it feels like an absolute eon. I’ve changed so much, and so have Mattie and Ruby. Has Daniel? Has Sam?
Sam. If Daniel is dead, is Sam? Did he even manage to find him? The thought that I will most likely never know tears at me, and alone in my bed, in a spill of silvery moonlight, I give way to my grief—silently, my face pressed into the pillow, my body shaking with sobs, the emptiness stretching all around me. I don’t feel any better for it; in fact, I realize, I feel worse. It was better when I repressed all the fear and sadness, and soldiered on. Now that I’ve opened that Pandora’s box of emotion, I have no idea if I’ll be able to close it again.
