"Please," I say again. Then I chastise myself for saying please.
"Leave."
They go. The curly-haired one first, moving toward the door without argument. The quiet one follows. The big one goes last, and at the threshold he does something that would almost be funny under different circumstances: he reaches back for the door handle out of pure reflex, the automatic motion of a man pulling a door shut behind him. The broken latch catches against nothing. The door swings back open. Cold air moves through freely.
He looks at it.
Then he goes.
I listen to their boots on the porch boards, then the creak of the steps, then snow compressing under their weight. Then nothing.
The cabin is quiet. The fire has burned low. The smell of damp wool rises from my clothes at the hearth. The broken door sits open on its cracked frame, and the cold comes through steadily.
I got them out.
I'm standing in the middle of the room in a towel with bare feet on a cold floor and a door that doesn't lock anymore, in a cabin that looks nothing like the photographs, at the end of a day that has been, by any reasonable measure, a complete disaster.
3
MAYA
I wake up on the floor with the fire dead and my breath visible in the grey light.
Not disoriented. Not confused. I know exactly where I am and why I'm here, and that knowledge is already pressing down before my eyes are fully open.
I spent the night as close to the fireplace as I could manage, the cedar chest blankets piled around me in layers that never quite got warm enough. The armchair is still wedged against the door where I left it at midnight, the back of it jammed under the handle in lieu of a lock that no longer functions. It held. The door stayed shut. I know this because I checked it four separate times between midnight and dawn.
Sleep came in pieces and went the same way.
Every time the fire shifted I was awake. Every time the wind found a gap in the siding and the cabin creaked around it I was awake, lying still, running the same calculation I've been running for months. The crawl along the back of my neck inan empty room. I carried that sensation through two thousand miles of interstate.
I don't know if it will ever leave.
I lie still for another moment and take inventory.
My lower back aches, the kind that comes from a hard floor and not a mattress. My shoulders are worse, the muscles along the tops of them pulled tight from yesterday's wood runs: four trips around the back of the cabin in wet clothes over uneven frozen ground, hauling split logs in my arms because I couldn't find anything to stack them in. My calves are stiff from the hike in. My neck has developed an opinion about the folded jacket I used as a pillow.
I am twenty-five years old and I feel like eighty-five.
Montana. Not for the weak. Which raises the question of whether I qualify.
I sit up. The blankets fall. The cold arrives immediately, sharper than yesterday because the fire has burned down to ash and coals and there is nothing between me and the cabin's baseline temperature, which is not good.
I look around and let myself see it clearly in the morning light for the first time.
Water stain on the ceiling above the kitchen, old enough to have yellowed at the edges. The window frame to my left is warped, a thin line of grey light visible where it no longer meets the sill. The floorboard near the hearth gives under my weight, a soft yield that means moisture damage underneath. The door, held shut by the armchair, has a crack running the full length of the left side of the frame from where it was kicked in. The lock is broken. The latch doesn't catch. I could list more but the inventory is already longer than I want it to be and I haven't had coffee.
The quiet man from yesterday said Mrs. Smith probably didn't know. From my one conversation with her she'd seemed likesomeone who meant what she said, a woman in her seventies who described the cabin asrustic but functional. She didn't seem like someone who knowingly rents derelict property.
I used to be a decent judge of character. Used to bbe.
I get up and roll my shoulders until the right one pops in a way that's unpleasant but necessary. My clothes from yesterday are dry, which is the first good thing since I crossed the Montana state line. They're yesterday's clothes, but they're all I have access to until I get back to the car. I add it to the list.
Coffee first. Mrs. Smith left basics in the upper kitchen cabinet: instant coffee, a tin of powdered creamer, salt, a few cans of soup with dust on the lids. Not generous. Functional. The coffee is the only thing I've been grateful for since I arrived.
I go to the kitchen and fill the kettle.
That's when I hear it.
