Headlights(62)

I turn to the open garage door, to where she stands out in the cold. I let out a breath.

“We’re going this way,” she says, standing on the driveway that I’d bet anything is heated for the winter. Is this her house? This place? Her file said family wasn’t alive, but …

“Where are we?” I ask, stepping over to her.

In the driveway, I watch her input the garage code again to close the door, taking note of the numbers. She doesn’t answer me. And in the early morning stillness in a place that feels completely wrong and strangely, impossibly like I know it, I follow her. As she walks to the woods at the edge of the driveway. As she disappears through the trees.

I break through after her. Stand in a thick copse of aspen trees and towering pines. It smells earthy, damp, that slight decomposing smell of a fall forest, leaves beneath us.

“Watch for bears,” she says, from ten feet ahead. “They like to come swim in the pool this time of year.”

I glance behind us to see the lowest level of the house through the trees, where there is in fact a pool. Steam billows up from beneath and around the cover. It’s currently heated. “Is someone else here?” I ask.

Hannah doesn’t answer, just follows the pine needle and fallen aspen leaf path I now realize we walk, small glowing lights on either side of it, lining its edges. It’s dark still, here in the trees. I can’t quite see the colors, everything around us that faded dark gray-blue. Something rustles to my left, and a chipmunk crossing the path nearly collides with my leg. Early morning birdsong, the soft crunch of Hannah’s boots on the path, of mine. My breaths, nearly echoing in the quiet.

“Hannah,” I say. “Where—”

“Shh.” She turns back and looks at me. Her eyes once again obscured in the darkness of the woods. “We’re almost there,” she says. Then she turns away from me and continues down the path. I follow. Try to get my bearings. The path goes away from the house, and down. On the left side of the path is the upward slope to the street we entered the driveway from, which we can’t see anymore, and to our right, a drop down through the trees down the side of the mountain. I turn back behind me and can’t see the house anymore.

Something’s off. Everything is. I shouldn’t be here.

I turn back around, and I almost collide with Hannah.

Blood, bath—

She jumps back, puts distance between us, holds her hand over her nose. She closes her eyes, adjusts her nose plug. A look of pain on her face.

“What are you—” I say.

She takes another step backward. “I was just going to say,” she gets out through uneven breaths, “be careful. When you step in.” She turns her face away.

I realize there’s a building behind her, suddenly. Tucked back in the trees, a small wooden structure that sits on a platform stretched out over the edge of the mountain. I can only see its side from here, and I watch as Hannah takes the path to it and then steps off the path heading downhill. Her feet find particular rocks among the packed dirt, leaves, and pine needles, as though she’s done it a hundred times. Then she steps down to the front, and I can just see her legs through the gap between the slab the house sits on and the sloping mountainside below, as they suddenly lift off the ground and disappear inside.

I try to follow her steps down, but my foot slides once on the dirt, and I grab on to the nearest tree to keep myself from sliding down the mountain. I take hold of the platform the house sits on and go around to the front, the downhill side, like she did.

And I realize when I get there, there’s no wall on this side. The structure has three walls, and then just opens up to the elements on the fourth side, facing out from the mountain. Hannah in the three-sided cabin—maybe two hundred fifty square feet in total—flipping switches on one wall. I assume she just hoisted herself up over the side, so I do the same.

Her back is to me as she collects wood from where it’s bundled at the far left corner of the structure. She’s tense, I can tell. Three wooden walls with a wooden ceiling slanted up at the open side. Wooden floors, other than the circular black firepit built into the center of the space, and built-in cabinets along the back wall. In the far corners and along all the edges of the ceiling are strip heat lamps, which mercifully are turning on. I’m still in my jogging clothes, but I threw on a black leather jacket on the way out the door. Still, it’s cold.

Hannah sits down on the floor by the firepit and splinters off a piece of kindling from one of the logs with a pocketknife. Was that here, or has she had it with her the whole time?

“Where are we?” I ask. She smells of something spicy now, a new smell, something I can’t identify. She tucks a small white tube into her pocket. Touches the back of her hand to her nose.

She piles the kindling and then pulls a lighter out. She holds the flame to the splinters like she’s done it a million times. Her hands are red in the cold. “This is my place,” she says as she works. “I don’t own it, but it’s mine.”

“So you’re a … squatter? Part-time?”

The kindling catches. She takes a long breath, leans back, sitting on her heels in the glow of the beginnings of a fire. Looks up at me. “No. This shelter is mine. Just not in deed. Although it was offered to me that way.”

“Is the owner of the house here?” The one whose garage currently holds my car.