out again. The man waited.
In a while, there was a quiet sound.
It was a rustling. Not quite a shuffling. A sense of something moving a little at the far end, turning away from the wall, perhaps. Just after the sound, there was a low waft of a new odour, as if the movement had caused something to change its relationship to the environment, as if a body long held curled or crouched in a particular shape or position had realigned enough for hidden sweat to be released into the unmoving air.
Miller froze.
In all his life, he’d never felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. You read about it, hear about it. You knew they were supposed to do it, but he’d never felt it, not his own hairs, on his own neck. They did it then, though, and the peculiar thing was that he was not afraid, or not only that.
He was in there with something, that was for certain. It was not a known thing, either. It was. he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. He just knew that there was
He wasn’t sure it was male, though. Something said to him it was female. He couldn’t imagine where this impression might be coming from, as he couldn’t see it and he couldn’t hear anything, either — after the initial movement, it had been still. There was just something in the air that told him things about it, that said underneath the shadows it wrapped around itself like a pair of dark angel’s wings, it knew despair, bitter madness and melancholy better even than he did. He knew that beneath those shadows it was naked, and not male.
He knew also that it was this, and not fear, that was making his breathing come ragged and forced.
He stayed in there with it for half-an-hour, doing nothing, just listening, staring into the darkness but not seeing anything. That’s how long it seemed like it had been, anyway, when he eventually emerged back into the forest. It was hard to tell.
He closed the cabin door behind him but he did not lock it, because he saw that the man was back, standing once more at the far end of the bridge. Miller clasped the key firmly in his fist and walked over toward him.
“How much,” he said.
“For what? You already paid.”
“No,” Miller said. “I want to buy it.”
It was eight by the time Miller got back to his house. He didn’t know how that could be unless he’d spent longer in the cabin than he realised. It didn’t matter a whole lot, and in fact there were good things about it. The light had begun to fade. In twenty minutes it would be gone entirely. He spent those minutes sitting in the front seat of the car, waiting for darkness, his mind as close to a comfortable blank as it had been in a long time.
When it was finally dark he got out the car and went over to the house. He dealt with the security system, opened the front door and left it hanging open.
He walked back to the vehicle and went around to the trunk. He rested his hand on the metal there for a moment, and it felt cold. He unlocked the back and turned away, not fast but naturally, and walked toward the set of wooden steps which led to the smaller of the two raised decks. He walked up them and stood there for a few minutes, looking out into the dark stand of trees, and then turned and headed back down the steps toward the car.
The trunk was empty now, and so he shut it, and walked slowly toward the open door of his house, and went inside, and shut and locked that door behind him too.
It was night, and it was dark, and they were both inside and that felt right.
He poured a small scotch in a large glass. He took it out through the sliding glass doors to the chair on the main deck where he’d spent the morning, and sat there cradling the drink, taking a sip once in a while. He found himself remembering, as he often did at this time, the first time he’d met his wife. He’d been living down on East Cliff then, in a house which was much smaller than this one but only a couple of minutes’ walk from the beach. Late one Saturday afternoon, bored and restless, he’d taken a walk to the Crow’s Nest, the big restaurant that was the only place to eat or drink along that stretch. He’d bought a similar scotch at the upstairs bar and taken it out onto the balcony to watch the sun go down over the harbour. After a while he noticed that, amongst the family groups of sunburned tourists and knots of tattooed locals there was a woman sitting at a table by herself. She had a tall glass of beer and seemed to be doing the same thing he was, and he wondered why. Not why she was doing that, but why he was — why they both were. He did not know then, and he did not know now, why people sit and look out into the distance by themselves, or what they hope to see.
After a couple more drinks he went over and introduced himself. Her name was Catherine and she worked at the university. They got married eighteen months later and though by then — his business having taken off in the meantime — he could have afforded anywhere in town, they hired out the Crow’s Nest and had the wedding party there. A year after that their daughter was born and they called her Matilde, after Catherine’s mother, who was French. Business was still good and they moved out of his place on East Cliff and into the big house he had built in the mountains and for seven years all was good, and then, for some reason, it was no longer good any more. He didn’t think it had been his fault, though it could have been. He didn’t think it was her fault either, though that too was possible. It had simply stopped working. They’d been two people, and then one, but then two again, facing different ways. There had been a view to share together, then there was not, and if you look with only one eye then there is no depth of field. There had been no infidelity. In some ways that might have been easier. It would have been something to react to, to blame, to hide behind. Far worse, in fact, to sit on opposite sides of the breakfast table and wonder who the other person was, and why they were there, and when they would go.
Six months later, she did. Matilde went with her, of course. He didn’t think there was much more that could be said or understood on the subject. When first he’d sat out on this deck alone, trying to work it all through in his head, the recounting could take hours. As time went on, the story seemed to get shorter and shorter. As they said around these parts, it is what it is.
Or it was what it was.
Time passed and then it was late. The scotch was long gone but he didn’t feel the desire for any more. He took the glass indoors and washed it at the sink, putting it on the draining board next to the plate and the knife and the fork from lunch. No lights were on. He hadn’t bothered to flick any switches when he came in, and — having sat for so long out on the deck — his eyes were accustomed, and he felt no need to turn any on now.
He dried his hands on a cloth and walked around the house, aimlessly at first. He had done this many times in the last few months, hearing echoes. When he got to the area which had been Catherine’s study, he stopped. There was nothing left in the space now bar the empty desk and the empty bookshelves. He could tell that the chair had been moved, however. He didn’t recall precisely how it had been, or when he’d last listlessly walked this way, but he knew that it had been moved, somehow.
He went back to walking, and eventually fetched up outside the room that had been Matilde’s. The door was slightly ajar. The space beyond was dark.
He could feel a warmth coming out of it, though, and heard a sound in there, something quiet, and he turned and walked slowly away.
He took a shower in the dark. Afterward he padded back to the kitchen in his bare feet and a gown and picked his scotch glass up from the draining board. Even after many, many trips through the dishwasher you could see the ghost of the restaurant logo that had once been stamped on it, the remains of a mast and a crow’s nest. Catherine had slipped it into her purse one long-ago night, without him knowing about it, and then given the glass to him as an anniversary present. How did a person who would do that change into the person now living half the state away? He didn’t know, any more than he knew why he had so little to say on the phone to his daughter, or why people sat and looked at views, or why they drove to nowhere on Saturday afternoons. Our heads turn and point at things. Light comes into our eyes. Words come out of our mouths.
And then? And so? Carefully, he brought the edge of the glass down upon the edge of the counter. It broke pretty much as he’d hoped it would, the base remaining in one piece, the sides shattering into several jagged points.
He padded back through into the bedroom, put the broken glass on the nightstand, took off the robe, and lay back on the bed. That’s how they’d always done it, when they’d wanted to signal that tonight didn’t have to just be about going to sleep. Under the covers with a book, then probably not tonight, Josephine.
Naked and on top, on the other hand.
A shorthand. A shared language. There is little sadder, however, than a tongue for which only one speaker
