She hates the way she feels alone on the porch in the fading light. Maybe that’s its own kind of answer. Maybe this trip is exactly what she needs right now. Off the grid, no phones. Time in which she doesn’t have to make a decision about Jane or Annabelle, doesn’t have to stare at the same four walls inside her cabin, doesn’t have to go through this roster of horrible deeds committed by this person who is supposedly her father. Just being with Adrian, the two of them their own little world. S’mores and sex and instant coffee, the pleasant exhaustion in her arms after an afternoon spent paddling on the river, the cathartic click and fizz of popping the cap off a beer bottle after a long day. She will empty herself, reset, come back into her life in a few days. It might be exactly what she needs to see everything straight.
When she getshome she sees it from the base of her driveway: the lump on her porch. A heap of fur. She can’t see the blood yet but knows it is there. Leaking onto the floorboards. Soaking her doormat. Before she even gets out of the car she pulls up the camera app and checks the feed from today.
Even after what she just learned, she’s surprised.
Surprised to see Damien sliding a tarp from the bed of his truck. Surprised to see him ease the animal onto the doormat with the same graceful patience he uses to carry a sleeping Opal from her car seat into the house. Surprised at the grim set of his mouth as he uses his knife to cut a line through the creature’s belly, releasing a tide of blood.
CALLIE
The campsite is only reachable by kayak. They leave at dawn, Adrian’s Subaru packed with wetsuits and wicking layers, kayaking booties, wool hats, whistles, food, headlamps, dry bags stuffed with extra clothes. She finds she likes the ritual of it all, the preparation. It feels good, applying her mind to a practical task with a clear goal, versus the mess of Jane and the drugs, of Annabelle and her confession. It strikes her, as they pack, that she’s never really had a hobby as an adult. As a child there had been piano, but she gave it up when Jenna stopped showing up at her recitals, and by then keeping the house up and making sure Jenna didn’t pass out with the stove on more or less edged out any hobbies anyway.
And then college, work, all about getting ahead, about being the best and the sharpest, edging free time, pleasure, out of her life. She had been so focused on survival, on keeping everything together from such a young age, she never learned: Life didn’t have to be a grim, gray slog. It didn’t all have to be so hard all the time.
She looks over as he drives. He got up before she did to make them breakfast sandwiches and wrap them in tin foil, eggs on English muffins with melted cheese and a generous spread of pesto. A thermos full of French press coffee. She teases him about this, how particular he can be, but really she loves the way he cooks with care, with joy.
Or maybe what she loves is him, she realizes. And even though it scares the shit out of her, she can’t help but smile. He is the one solid thing in her life.
“What? What’s that look for?” But he slides a hand over her thigh, squeezes, like he knows. Like he’s thinking the same thing.
Just say it, Hauser, she tells herself.Tell him.
She’s distracted by a buzz from her pocket. Jane.Callie, we need to talk. Please, please call me back.
Jane had called her twice before 6:00A.M.Callie let it go to voicemail both times, even as she felt that tick of worry, same as the night she heard Fauver knock on her door. Something is wrong. But she can’t talk to Jane. Not until she sorts out what she’s going to do.
She turns herphone off and shuts it in Adrian’s glove compartment as they pull up to the boat launch. He looks at her with approval. “Look at you, committing to a weekend in nature.”
“I need the break.” She hasn’t told him the details about Jane, or anything about Baby Doe—only that she’s been looking into a cold case, that it’s been getting under her skin. He asked her how the drug case was going and she only shook her head. “And who says anything about committing to nature. I’m committing to being shacked up with a hot guy all weekend. Nature be damned.”
He smiles, leans over, and plants a kiss on her neck, precise and firm and that she feels between her legs.
“You’re really gonna make me kayak for two hours to get more of that?”
“Yup.”
“Ah, fuck you.”
“Eventually.”
She reaches a hand underneath his jacket, under his shirt, to the bare skin and taut muscles of his stomach, desire crackling through her.
They get theboats in the water, and as they push off a shiver runs through Callie, despite all the gear. The cold radiates off the river, presses against the place where her neck meets her hair. Adrian told her the rule for winter paddling was dress to swim. The surface is flat and easy, but still, she can’t help but taste the cold in her mouth, imagine the plunge.
She warms up as they get moving, and the work of paddling feels good, the freedom of pulling out and navigating the bend, the car disappearing behind them. She looks around at the winter-stilled forest and thinks that there is a part of her that likes this place. But since the fight with Jane she’s also been thinking about what it would be like to leave. She only rents her cabin on a monthly basis. She could try to get her old job back. Get a new apartment, finally get all of her boxes out of storage. Jane is getting better, maybe as good as she’ll ever be.
And she would forget about the Baby Doe case. Forget her own connection to it, allow the question of her paternity to go dormant again, the way it was for so long. Let Annabelle live her life. Tell her she’s sorry, but she doesn’t know what happened to Sabrina, that they don’t have enough to go on. A broken bracelet, an old lighter, a hunch. Especially not without the resources she’s used to. Sometimes it is impossible to find the end of a story like that. Some cases just go that way, even though it hurts to admit as much. She won’t look for her father, this faceless man who cast such a shadow over so many lives. For once in her life, she doesn’t want the answers. Doesn’t want to know what she might have inherited from him, if they share any mannerisms, if she would look into his eyes and see her own staring back at her. Maybe it was never Jenna’s unruly nature she was reacting to, with her obsession with order, but something uglier and more primal, a cruel strain encoded in her DNA, something about herself she can never run away from or change.
Adrian is the only loose end. It feels dangerous to shape her life around him. And she couldn’t possibly live here in the Pines if she and Jane were—what?—not friends anymore. And if she stays here, will she be compelled to study every man of a certain age at the supermarket, wondering if perhaps his hands are the same shape as her own? If there isn’t something familiar about the turn of his jaw? She’d never stop torturing herself. Adrian could come see her in North Jersey. But even as she thinks it, she knows he wouldn’t. His life is here. The house on the river. His boats. Maybe he would make the trek up to see her a few times, but it would get old, the tug betweentwo places. It wouldn’t work. Though the thought of ending things feels unbearable. She’s already lost too much.
As though he can feel her thinking about him, he turns and smiles at her, the laugh lines around his eyes fanning out in that way that makes him look mischievous. She paddles faster to catch up, to move her body so that she might make her thoughts go still.
The tent ishumid with the heat they’ve created—since dinner they’ve already fucked twice. He laughed after she reached for him the second time—“I’ve barely had time to catch my breath”—but she’s eager for oblivion, the way only sex can smother her ticking brain, all her thoughts pressed flat to the back of her skull.
After, she lies against him. He traces a finger around her ear.
“So, Callie Hauser, is it time we had a conversation?”
“We’ve had lots of conversations.”
