“I’d like that,” she says, and means it.
“Great. Meet you downstairs in ten.”
He whisks her tray away. She pulls her sock back on, feeling disappointed. The touch of her own fingers is not the same as his.
She puts on her mask and finds Caleb in the kitchen, rustling through a paper takeout bag. He gives her a heavy foil-wrapped burger that takes both hands to hold.
“I can’t eat all of this. Can I cut it in half?” she asks.
“All the knives are in the dishwasher. I’m afraid you’ll just have to deal with it.”
There’s a third burger in the bag, which he leaves on the table. For Elijah, she guesses. She hasn’t seen or heard him since she got downstairs. Caleb holds her burger while she laces up the boots and puts on the parka. Now that she’s met Elijah, the cedar and turpentine scent is comforting, like an old blanket.
Outside, the sky is a muted grey, choked with low-hanging clouds. To Sarah, it feels like a ceiling pressing her into the ground. Every day, every hour, the space she occupies shrinks. It’s like those last months of lockdown with Ben. His resentment and restlessness had ballooned as he lost yet another job while she continued to work, forcing her to make herself as small as possible.
At the bottom of the porch steps, Caleb takes off his mask and inhales deeply. Sarah takes that as permission to remove her own mask. He turns to her and smiles. He’s shaved. She wants to think it’s for her.
She takes a deep breath as well. The air has a crispness to it, like biting into an apple, but it’s not frigid enough to prick the inside of her nose. Graham had said winter was different up north. The temperatures plummeted lower, yes, but it’s a dry cold, not the damp from Lake Ontario that burrows under your skin and into your bones. She can almost understand why he took that job in Timmins.
The long shape of the Suicide Motel crouches in the distance, its roof blanched white from the blizzard. Sarah can’t see the broken glass the vandals left behind, but she knows it’s under the carpet of snow. Such is winter, good at hiding ugly truths. Beyond the motel, the grey ribbon of Highway 11 unfurls into the horizon. It’s far enough away that she can’t hear the trucks grinding by. She can’t hear anything, only her ragged breath and her boots crunching on the driveway.
She follows Caleb to the back of the house. The woods that hug the property stand impossibly tall, their top branches shaggy as waterlogged feathers with the weight of the snow. It hurts Sarah’s neck to look up at them. A path trampled between the trees weaves into shadow. She wonders who carved that path, Caleb or Elijah. Elijah, she decides. It explains the souvenirs of the woods in his studio.
“I can’t imagine growing up with a forest in my backyard,” Sarah says, because there’s nothing complimentary she can say about this ragged landscape. She wouldn’t have wanted to play inthesewoods if they were behind her parents’ home. She would’ve wanted a pretty forest out of a fairy tale, with lush green leaves and a sky the color of Caleb’s eyes. Not skeletal trees clustered together for warmth, the base of their trunks naked and prickly from lack of sun.
“We were lucky to grow up here. I liked living in Toronto when I was in college, but I missed the outdoors.”
Sarah wraps her arms around herself. “I prefer the city.”
“Really? Our hefty tourist population begs to differ.”
Her mouth twists. “I didn’t grow up going to the cottage on weekends.Myfamily doesn’t have lakeside property that Grandpa bought in the 50s for a song.”
He smiles apologetically. “Fair enough.”
“It’s nice to visit, but I don’t feel safe.”
“What’re you talking about? It’s totally safe.”
And here it is, the conversation she’s had with Ben and past boyfriends, and even white girlfriends, who are always mystified that she prefers the city’s bustling anonymity. She’s tired of explaining how she feels and being told she’s wrong. Instead, she says, “I don’t like that no one can hear you scream.”
Caleb grins. “Well, if you scream in Toronto, they’ll hear you, but no one cares.”
Sarah can’t help laughing, because it’s true.
“It’s safe as houses here. Well, maybe not this house.” He gestures toward the swelling plastic tacked onto the end of the unfinished sunroom. A shadowy figure stands on the other side, but when Sarah blinks, it’s gone.
“Dad was in the middle of building a sunroom before he died. I didn’t have time to put in the back windows before the first snowfall, so I put up the plastic. Elijah turned it into a studio, and it’s been that way ever since. He’s very talented. You’ve seen his paintings?”
“Paintings?” she says, playing dumb. He can’t know she’s been in the studio.
“The ones in the motel. The dark trees.”
“Oh! Yes, they’re very good. Does he exhibit anywhere?”
“Just the motel.” Caleb shakes his head sadly. “He’s much too sensitive for the outside world.”
A picnic table stands in the clearing before the woods. Caleb brushes the snow off the bench and sits down, gesturing that Sarah should join him. She sits on the opposite end, grateful to have the pandemic as an excuse to not sit too close.
