He was here.
He had come.
I stood in the road and I stared at him and I did not know which of the two feelings was going to win.
He took his hands out of his pockets.
“Sadie,” he said. “Come here.”
***
The door closed behind us with its solid brass click.
The cabin looked exactly the way I had left it less than an hour ago. The face-down paper on the table. The colouring pencils in their sleeve, arranged warm to cool. The scanner muttering. The bed with its military corners.
I set the shoebox on the table. Harder than I meant to. The cardboard thumped against the wood and the tape on the lid flexed and I adjusted my grip and took my hand off it and stepped back.
The bag came off my shoulder. I dropped it by the chair.
“I’m still leaving.”
The words came out tight and fast, before he had finished taking his jacket off. I said them to the space between his shoulder and the door, because I couldn’t say them to his face. My hands were at my sides and I could feel them wanting to fold across my chest, which was a defensive posture, which was a tell, so I kept them down.
“You can drive me back here but you can’t keep me here. I signed a paper. Papers get unsigned. I‘m twenty-four years old and I can walk out of any door I want to walk out of and you said so yourself, the first night, you said I could leave whenever I liked, and I am exercising that, and the fact that you drove around the mountain to cut me off doesn’t change—“
He hung his jacket on the hook by the door.
“—doesn’t change the substance of it. You said I could leave. I’m leaving.”
He crossed to the wooden chair by the scanner — my chair, the one I had slept in the first night — and sat down. Slow. His right knee still stiff from the porch steps, though the swelling had gone down over the week. He settled his weight, put his elbows on his knees, laced his fingers loosely between them, and looked at me.
He didn’t say anything.
“I have a plan.” My voice was louder than I wanted it to be. “I have a place to sleep tonight. Hector Briggs. I have savings. I have a credit union in Pueblo. I have done this before — moved towns, started over, I have done it so many times it’s routine. It is a routine. For me. It’s not some big dramatic thing, it’s just what I do when a situation stops working. The situation here has stopped working.”
He watched me.
“The Diablos are a solvable problem. I‘ll go outside the corridor. I’ll go east. I don’t need — I don’t require — “
I heard my own voice.
It was doing a thing. A thing I had never heard it do before, or had heard it do once, a long time ago, in a room I didn’t have a clean memory for. It was climbing. The register was wrong. The sentences were getting shorter and the breath between them shallower, and the argument — the argument I had been rehearsing on the walk down the mountain, the clean practical argument with its clean practical columns — was coming out of my mouth and sounding, in my own ears, like a child reciting something she had memorized and didn’t entirely believe.
I stopped.
The silence came in and sat down beside his silence, and the two silences together were larger than the cabin.
My hands had come up to my chest without my permission. I made them go back down.
“I got scared,” I said.
It came out quieter. Flat. The tone of a person reading a line off a page.
He didn’t move.
“I got scared because — “
The sentence jammed. I had to push through it.
