“How did you know my name,” I asked, “when we first met?”
“I don’t think I did,” he said. “You introduced yourself. Thank you for asking me round, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, trying to remember if he was correct or not. “I only did it so I would get a return invitation.”
Reuben made a vague “hmmm” and shifted to avoid a steady drip which was coming through the fern roof.
“I’m sorry it’s not very big. I was thinking of building a glasshouse, south-facing to catch the winter sunshine.”
“Then you could grow ferns all year round.”
“Orchids and grapes.”
“With birds of paradise showing off their tail feathers.”
“Pooping on the cane furniture.”
“Lovely,” he said.
We were quiet. I plucked a thistle head from the ceiling and pulled out the strands bit by bit, letting them float between us.
“What’s it like where you live?” I asked.
“Similar to this. Trees, forest, river.”
“But is it a cabin, or a tent, or what?” I tried not to let my irritation at his evasiveness show.
“It’s below the ridge, amongst the trees.”
“I’ve never been up there. Except when we arrived, before . . .” I trailed off.
“Do you want to?”
I had imagined the Great Divide many times. It still came to me in dreams. I would stand teetering on the brink, my feet tipping pebbles into the dark, pebbles that never reached the bottom. Or I would fly above our patch of land, the mountains like cupped hands with the river running through the valley they made. But as I flew higher, I could see that we floated in an infinite black sea. I searched for other islands of life but saw nothing.
“I could take you,” he said, shifting onto his back, stretching his legs and hitting the woven sticks at the bottom end.
“Maybe.” There were strands of moss in his beard.
“Now.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re always too afraid to do anything,” he snapped. “You’re going to end your days in that tumbledown hut with your weird father without having done a single thing for yourself.”
“Die Hütte is not a tumbledown hut,” I said. It was the only answer I was confident of.
“I could blow it down with one breath.” He blew through his mouth and a few white thistle tufts flew around us.
“OK, let’s go now,” I said, but neither of us moved. I continued to lie on my back, watching a woodlouse crawl across the roof. I was waiting for something, without knowing what.
“Woodlice have their lungs in their hind legs,” he said, and then, “You don’t have to come back here.”
I didn’t say anything, although I knew it was a question and he was waiting for an answer.
“You could stay, on my side of the river.” He didn’t say “stay with me.”
“Do you have a piano?”
“No, of course not.” With some effort he turned onto his stomach and crawled out of the nest, and I wondered if my chance for something I didn’t fully understand had just been lost.
We walked in the rain, heads down, to the flat rock where every day my father lowered the bucket into the pool. It was an open and dangerous place. We stood together on the slippery green lip and looked over the edge. Drops of rain joined the river water many feet below.
“You just have to jump,” said Reuben. “The current will take you downstream to the other side.”
The opposite bank was stepped through several layers of rock until it became level with the river. Here, thick bushes and trees crowded the water, thinning out where my father and I had crossed when I was a child.
“Can’t we go in farther down, past the reeds?”
“And get swept downstream, hit our heads on a rock, and never come up again?” he said, and I shuddered.
I contemplated the still pool again and knew I wouldn’t be able to jump. My body would resist leaving solid rock for air and water. They were the wrong elements, not meant for me.
“For God’s sake, Punzel. It’s only a small jump.”
“I can’t do it.” I shook my head and moved backward.
He was angry—shouting that I was a pathetic child, that he had no idea why he was bothering with me at all and it would be much better for both of us if he jumped now and never returned. I tucked my chin into my chest, letting the raindrops follow the curve of my head and run cold into the secret hollow in the nape of my neck. I wondered if he was right, whether everything would be better if I had never met this strange man and just let things play out with my father. Eventually Reuben was quiet and we left the river and went up through the trees, skirting the clearing. By the time we were sitting under my favourite wintereye, the rain had stopped, leaving beads of water clinging to the ferns. The sun came out and shone on the cabin, nestled in the crook of the mountain’s elbow.
“My father told me that he and I are the only two people left in the world,” I said.
“He’s lying,” Reuben said. “I’m here too.”
He pointed to an eagle far above us, its wing tips outstretched like fingers as it circled in an updraught. I caught the smell of blackberries again on Reuben’s words and leaned closer, breathing him in.
He looked down. “You aren’t watching,” he laughed, and I thought maybe he had forgiven me for not being able to cross the river. He took my chin in his hand, tilted my head upward, and kissed me.
23
For the remaining days of summer I stayed out of my father’s way, keeping a physical distance between us—pressing my back against the piano or the shelves when he squeezed past. Sometimes he still caught me though, made a grab for my dress and pinned me between his knees. I stood rigid and kept quiet, so that later I could be sure I had done nothing to encourage these episodes of weeping or anger, and subsequent apologizing.
He often called me Ute, and I gave up correcting him. He reminisced about the fuss made when they were newly married, laughing at how they had run away from a newspaper photographer who had hounded them. He became frustrated when I couldn’t join in with the names and locations of the hotels they had hidden away in when they were on honeymoon. At other times, he talked about how the three of us should be together again. This idea grew so gradually it was impossible to remember one conversation, one defining moment, when the course of our lives changed and his decision was made. Most nights after I was in bed, he wrote more words on the cabin’s walls, elaborate schemes and lists. He said he had a death list and laughed at his joke. In bed I sometimes heard him crying, muttering and burying his head under his pillow. The nights of weeping made me feel insubstantial, as though I existed only inside my father’s head, but it was worse when, in the dark, he tried to engage me in his plans.
“If we had dynamite—yes, dynamite would do it. Kaboom!” He gave a bitter laugh. “We could blow up die Hütte. Bring the mountain down on our heads.” He let out a groan as if he were in pain. “She left me—Ute. It’s easy to die when you don’t have to do it yourself, but you and I, Punzel, we have to work it out. We’ll do it together, won’t we?”