Headlights(65)

“I just want to know where I am. I just want to know what the fuck is going on.”

“Well, that makes two of us! So please. Tell me. Where do we go from here? How do we fix this so that it isn’t our lives anymore? That’s your job, isn’t it? That’s what you’re good at?”

“I…” Is that what this is? She wants to get me here and have me play out this agent narrative while she pretends to need my help? For what? Why me? Why any of this?

Do I just … play it out? Pretend I believe her?

But I do. Part of me does. Part of me believes her enough that I came here with her. Or maybe that was just to get a little time, find something to clear myself or get a little closer to understanding. I know I didn’t orchestrate all this. Right? Of course I didn’t.

I grabbed all the file copies before we left. Turned my phone off and took the burner I keep on a prepaid plan in case of emergency. I guess I was thinking more like apocalypse and less like running from the feds, but here we are. I shiver, the cold penetrating my jacket, even with the heat lamps. I think through options. Hannah clocks the movement. She stands and goes to the cabinet with the bedding and opens one of the bins. She mumbles something.

“What?” I say, trying to clear my brain enough to think.

“I hate these things. It’s disgusting. I wish he would stop putting them in here.” She’s holding up two animal furs. “Keeps replacing my camp blankets with these.”

“What are they?”

She looks through for something else but can’t find it. She swears, then hands one of the furs over to me—drops it to the floor near me—and puts the rest back in the bin. “Mink, mostly. Lot of minks, stitched together. Foxes. The tails on the ends, those are all foxtails. That one in your hand, that’s three wolf pelts stitched together.”

I lift it up, hold it out. It’s not big. They’re not big animals. It surprises me. Makes me sad, and a little sick.

“There’s a taxidermied mountain lion in the main house. You might see it through the window.” She closes the bin and shoves it back in the cabinet. “Nothing makes a man look smaller than having to take down a threatened or endangered animal to feel a little power. When trappers came in the 1800s and killed off all the wolves, they would taxidermy them and put them back in the wild to photograph. Like they only realized after they were all dead that it would have been nice to see them in the wild. That these were wild, free beings that were a part of this place and should have been.”

Wild, free beings. Looking at her, I think … yeah. That’s it. Is that what’s made me feel drawn to her? Made it so I can’t stop thinking about her? Because I am tied to a haunted house and a haunted office and a haunted motel? Buildings that have trapped me my whole life, even when I’m not in them? Because what she is, what she has …

“The guy you’re talking about,” I say. “The owner of the house. Is he the one you sketched?”

She sits back down, sighs, then nods. “His name is James. I was in a tough time in my life, running from my past, from a bad thing that had happened. My … my best friend died, and it just sort of … I was passing through different towns. I met James in Sun Valley, and he just took me in. Didn’t ask a lot. I told him I … preferred outside. And he let me do this.” She gestures to the shelter. “Gave me a soft place to land when I needed it.”

I was right, it wasn’t the motel that made her like this. Then what was it? “And he left it here for you?” I ask.

“Some relationships are mutually beneficial. I hardly come here anymore, but he likes the idea that I might. And he did really help me. I owe him a lot. Can we—”

“How does this benefit him?” I ask, even though I can guess the answer.

She throws an angry look at me. “You never get lonely?” she asks.

The question. Hannah’s eyes on me. Her hair falling over her shoulder. The sun starts to reach over the floorboards, cuts across her legs. My heart beating so stupidly fast looking at her.

“So the indoors thing, the being-around-people thing,” I say.

“I don’t want to talk about me anymore,” she says. “What’s next? How do we fix this?”

I study her for a minute. Then I say, “I need to look at it all again. Go over the evidence I’ve got, see if there’s anything I missed before that I can somehow find now. Figure out next steps. Maybe if you want to sleep or something, I can work on this.”

“No, I’ll help,” she says.

I’m about to say no. Of course I am. I’m about to say just stay in my sight line at all times and don’t fucking stab me please. But … she was in that motel. She knows more than most people, whether she’s a part of orchestrating it or not. And if she’s not, then she’s got just as much reason as I do to figure this thing out. Our time is limited, and really, we are so, so fucked.

“I can help you,” she says. “I know we don’t know each other, and I don’t trust you either, but we’re in this, both of us, whether we like it or not.”

Birdsong, sun now streaming into the cabin, lighting her face. Her green eyes so light in the sun they look almost translucent.

“Okay,” I say.

I go up to the car and grab the files. Stop and take a piss on the way back to the shelter. The woods are so quiet, the air crisp and clear. This mountain air that John Denver loved. The yellow-orange aspen leaves shimmering in the wind, one over the other, the sunlight streaming in to make them seem almost golden. Again, I think, it doesn’t feel real. Hannah’s shelter in the woods something close to the life I’ve been imagining for myself—maybe even better. The life I was going to have after proving my worth once more. So much for all that, I guess.