“You’ll leave him eventually,” Caleb had said after Jamie had gone to bed, when they were saying goodbye in the kitchen.
“And then what?”
“Whatever you want.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“I could help. We could buy a plane and take hunters out in it.”
“We?”
“Why not?” He looked intently at her.
“We’re not like that.”
“We could be.”
She shook her head.
“He’ll swallow you up if you let him,” Caleb said.
“It’s not the end of the world, being swallowed up.” But she thought of the crevasse.
“Sometimes I want to grab you and shake you until you see sense.”
“Go ahead.”
He put on his hat and stalked off into the night.
* * *
—
The day Barclay was due home, she returned to Bannockburn. She’d stayed three nights in Missoula.
From the bedroom, she watched Barclay emerge from the car and Sadler go around to pull suitcases from the trunk. Barclay stared up at her in the window, and she knew he already knew she had flown the plane.
It was late afternoon. She sat with a book but did not turn any pages. He burst through the bedroom door like a hot wind. He said, “Enjoy your trip?”
She thought she might brazen it out. “Yes,” she said. “I went to see my brother. You?”
Earlier she had inserted her diaphragm in anticipation of his return, armored herself at least in that one way, and when he took her by the arm and jerked her off the window seat, put her on the bed, she was glad she had. He got her trousers down around her ankles, turned her onto her stomach. Face to the quilt, she waited, but he leaned a knee into the small of her back, grabbing her wrists with one hand. He pushed the fingers of the other between her legs, digging and scraping—purposefully, as though in an effort to unclog a drain. He was trying to pull out her diaphragm. “Don’t,” she said. Inadequate, but what else to say? His knee pressed harder into her back. He seemed calm and intent, as though subduing an animal. His nails scratched inside her; there was a feeling of suction when he finally pulled the cap free. He shifted so he was straddling her, his knees clamping her arms to her sides. He held the diaphragm in front of her eyes and with his thumb pushed the rubber out into an obscene protrusion, stretching it until it tore. Tossing the ruined object to the floor, he undid his belt.
When she was a child and had wrestled with Jamie and Caleb, she had fought with her whole body, all her limbs, everything down to her fingers and toes. She’d writhed like a serpent even after she’d been pinned.
Under Barclay’s weight, she lay still as a corpse. She stared at a pile of logs stacked in the fireplace, noticed how the bark curled up like scraped skin, how the pale, splintery split sides had a faint sheen. She was conscious of fear, but the stronger sensation was of humiliation. To be bare-buttocked and immobilized was excruciating, but the worst of her shame was that she had not foreseen this.
There was pain, but it seemed distant, just over some horizon of herself. Barclay didn’t take long. He made intermittent gasping sounds, and she absorbed without interest that he was crying, or almost. She was waiting; that was all.
When he was done, he lay heavily on her. Eventually he climbed off, and she heard him dressing and sniffling but saw only the unburned logs in the grate. She did not move, nor did she shift after the door closed behind him. Some notion of washing twitched in her mind, but the effort seemed impossible. Where she was, her lungs continued to fill with air and her heart to beat, and so her situation was apparently endurable.
At night in bed she often imagined flying. She would choose a landscape to pass beneath her: mountains with lakes and rivers, perhaps rolling sand dunes if she was feeling adventurous, or tropical islands in a turquoise sea. Lying there with her trousers still around her ankles, she took off from the ranch, flew west over the mountains, flew until she was over the sea, fell asleep over a sheet of blue.
Her second day home in Missoula, she had driven Jamie and Caleb in her old Ford up the Bitterroot, stopped at a broad, flat stretch with no ice. Caleb had been first to plunge into the water. The cold had wrapped around Marian’s ribs when she followed, squeezed her malaise from her like spent breath. She and Jamie, in their underclothes, had only jumped in once and run right out again, but Caleb, naked, had splashed and whooped.
The third night, she had woken in the cottage to Caleb crouching beside her narrow bed. His face close to hers, his hand resting on her wrist, he had said in a low voice, “What do you think?”