“I can sleep on the couch if you’d like the bed,” I offer.
“The couch is fine,” Marie says. She twists a strand of hair around her finger. “I’ll be good there. And more than likely, I’ll be gone by the time the two of you are up. Stew’s delicious, by the way.”
NINETEEN
After dinner, upon Finch’s insistence, Marie reads a page of The Book of North American Birds, and I wash the dishes and listen.
“‘Eastern Phoebe. Hailed by many as a harbinger of spring, the eastern phoebe migrates early. It’s characterized by its buoyant fluttering flight with shallow wingbeats.’” She’s a good reader, Marie, with a smooth, lulling voice. Which I guess shouldn’t surprise me, her being a librarian and the daughter of a literature professor. Still, with the woodstove pushing heat and the strain of the day and my hands in the hot, soapy water, there’s something in me that wants to go lie on the couch, just listening until I fall asleep.
Finch takes a good while to settle down, all wound up because of our guest and the day’s excitement, but at last, she curls up in her bed and sleep overtakes her.
Marie heats some water in the kettle and asks if I’d like some tea. I say sure because why not. The new candle on the counter flickers and flares, a small glow in the dark room.
“I forgot how beautiful it is here. How peaceful.” She leans against the counter and peers out the window. “Look, full moon.”
I move to stand beside her, and high in the sky the moon hangs round and white, pockmarked, stricken with gray. The ground glistens with a dusting of snow. Still a few weeks until the bigger storms usually come, but not entirely out of the realm of possibility that one could push through. “You ought to plan on an early start, just in case this snow amounts to something.”
Our arms touch and it’s nothing, arms touching, but it has been eight years since I’ve touched a woman and there’s something in that small contact, the converging of skin, the feel of another person, that nicks at a thing deep inside of me, that wounds and burns. And also thrills. Yes, I admit it. I’m a man, after all, with urges and needs: can’t be helped. I pull away and turn and move the kettle from the stove before it begins to sing. “How long has it been since you were here?”
“Oh, years. I haven’t been here since that time I tagged along with you and Jake. So, I don’t know. How long ago was that? A decade?”
I nod. I can’t help but think: Consider how much has happened. How a life can veer and stretch and retract and shatter. How it feels in this moment, as though things could crumble yet again with just the slightest alteration. Tenuous, this life. Nothing sure at all.
“My dad’s dream of living off the land,” Marie says. “This place. His father passed away and he built it with every cent of his inheritance. To my mother’s great disappointment, I should add. I was five when she finally said she’d had enough, so I don’t remember much. Bits and pieces. Picking raspberries, digging potatoes. Jake was older so he remembered a lot more.” She turns from the window.
I hand her two mugs from the cabinet. “Tell me about Jake. If you can.”
She pulls a fancy metal tin from her supplies and opens it. “It was bad at the end. He was so small and weak. I doubt you would’ve recognized him.” She places a tea bag in one mug and pours the steaming water over it. “Funny thing. When he asked me to come here, he was so heavily dosed on morphine, he was in and out of consciousness, and I honestly wasn’t sure if you were real, or a figment of his imagination.” She catches my eye, smiles a little. “I came anyway, obviously. Found the list—it was right where he’d said it would be—and went shopping. I questioned myself the entire time, wondering, doubting. I guess when I pulled up here, I really wasn’t sure what I’d find.” She tugs at the string on the tea bag and dunks it up and down, then pulls it out, places it in the second mug, and adds the water. “He came often?”
“Once a year.”
She hands me the mug and our knuckles graze and it’s there again, the shiver and sting at her touch. I realize right there in the moonlit kitchen that I have been lonely and that although I’ve been telling myself all these years that any primordial sense of desire died in me with Cindy, that was a lie. A thing I’ve believed, from the marrow out, so deeply that I didn’t know it was false. Foolish, though, the thought that the very pull and push of nature could die with a person, that it could only be about love.