I just stood in the middle of the cabin with my rabbit pressed against my collarbone, in the grey-gold light of a mountain morning after rain, and I let him see me hold her.
He let me be seen.
That was the whole of it. That was the beginning.
Chapter 6
Thecabinwasquietin a way it hadn’t been quiet since I arrived.
Dante had left at ten. Camera retrieval on the north ridge, maybe three hours, maybe four. On the table: a box of colouring pencils, still in their paper sleeve. A neat stack of printer paper beside it.
He‘d left them there this morning without comment. The same way he did everything. Set them down on the wood and went back to his laptop and let the objects be what they were, which in this case was an invitation with the weight of a dare.
I’d looked at them from the chair for an hour.
Clover was in my lap. Both of her eyes — the old black button, the new brown one — pointed at the ceiling with an air of patient neutrality, like she had also been observing the pencils and was reserving judgment. I had told myself several times that I was going to use them in a minute. The minutes had stacked. None of them had produced a hand extended toward the table.
I got up.
I made coffee instead. Three minutes on the camp stove, the filter over the mug, the water poured slow and even the way he poured it. I drank half the mug standing up. Washed it. Set it upside-down on the shelf to dry. My reflection in the window above the basin looked like a woman who had successfully completed a task and was now ready for the next one, and the next one sat on the table fifteen feet away and hadn’t moved.
I crossed to the table.
I picked up the pencils. The paper sleeve was the old-fashioned kind — twelve colours, cardboard, the brand name faded at the corners where someone’s thumb had worn it. He‘d bought them somewhere. A general store in another town, probably, one of the ones Pete’s wasn’t anymore. I pulled the pencils out and spread them on the table and looked at them.
Then I put them back in the sleeve by colour.
Warm on the left. Cool on the right. Black at the far end because black wasn’t a temperature, it was an absence, and absences belonged in their own category. The whole operation took four minutes. I knew because I was counting. When I was done, the pencils sat in their sleeve in an order so correct it looked like a display in a shop window.
I stood at the table with nothing left to do.
The paper was still blank. The paper was going to stay blank if I didn’t sit down, and sitting down required a decision, and I had been avoiding the decision for ninety-seven minutes.
I sat down.
The chair creaked. I slid a single sheet of paper out of the stack and squared it on the wood in front of me. White. Eight and a half by eleven. The surface faintly textured, the kind of paper that took pencil well. My hand hovered over the sleeve.
I picked up the black one.
Black was safe. Black was the pencil you used for pretending you weren’t drawing anything serious, because black-onlydrawings were just doodles, the kind of thing you produced while on a phone call, the kind of thing that didn’t count.
I drew a line.
Vertical, down the centre of the page, about four inches long. Then a circle at the top for the head. A horizontal line across the middle for the shoulders, wide — wider than the head, because the shoulders were the point. Two legs. Two arms, at the sides, not raised, because he didn’t raise them. He stood with his hands where his hands went.
I added the dots for the eyes. Small. Dark. I drew them close together and then corrected — they needed to be slightly further apart, because his face was wider than I had initially drawn, the jaw heavier. I adjusted the head, making it more square than round.
The mouth took me three tries.
The first was a straight line and it was wrong because it looked severe, and he wasn’t severe. The second was a slight smile and it was wrong because it looked friendly, and he wasn’t friendly exactly, he was something else. The third attempt was a line that curved up just barely at the corners, the kind of smile you‘d miss if you weren’t looking for it, and that was it. That was accurate. I sat back and looked at the page and the stickman on it and my chest did the quiet complicated thing it had been doing on and off since breakfast.
I drew a smaller stickman beside him.
I didn’t think about it. The hand just did it, the pencil moving of its own accord, and I watched the smaller figure take shape on the paper — thinner, shorter, hair long on one side. I didn’t draw a face on her. I couldn’t. The face was too much.
Between them, I drew a heart.
Not a careful heart. Not the kind you outline and shade and fuss with. Just a quick shape, two humps at the top, the point at the bottom, a thing a child would draw without calculating theproportions. It came out slightly lopsided. It sat between the two stickmen like it had always been there.
