“I’m going for a walk,” I announce, heading back into the main room.
“Now?”
“No, tomorrow, I just thought I’d let you know,” I tell him, pulling a sweater over my head. “Yes, now.”
“You can’t leave,” he says, and there’s a note of panic in his voice. “It’s freezing, it’s past sundown, it’s hard enough to find your way—”
“I’m not leaving, I’m stepping outside for a minute because this cabin is about five hundred square feet and I need some space,” I tell him with all the calm I can muster.
“Do you know how hard it is to find someone in the woods when there hasn’t just been a blizzard?”
“I have a general idea, yes,” I snap, because my patience is gone. “Maybe that’s the point.”
Gideon looks horrified. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I think his eyes go wide and his face goes pale. “Andi,” he starts. “It’s surprisingly easy to die of exposure even in conditions—”
“I’m not going for a hike,” I say, practically growling it through clenched teeth. “I’m going to go out there—” I point for some reason, as if there’s a direction that isn’t outside, “—and I’m going to stand there in the snow and enjoy not being in the same space as you for a while. Maybe if I decide to get really crazy, I’ll stomp around the cabin a little. I’m not going anywhere besides not here.”
He looks so relieved that it’s like I didn’t just explicitly tell him that I want to be where he’s not. Maybe he’s used to that sort of thing.
“Take a flashlight,” he says, and somehow, instead of biting his head off and saying of course I’m going to take a flashlight, obviously I’m going to take a flashlight, I’m not a five year old I just nod.
“I’ll be back,” I promise, very calmly.
“Don’t leave visual range of the cabin,” he says.
“Do you want me to wear a beacon?” I ask, sarcastically.
“Do you have one?”
I don’t answer and settle for zipping up my coat instead, then pull on my scarf, hat, and boots.
“Try to wait at least thirty minutes before you send a search party,” I tell him, and then leave before he can say anything else.
CHAPTER TEN
GIDEON
A slamming door sounds like a cataclysm when it’s this quiet. I swear it shakes the whole cabin. Rattles the windows. There’s a moment where I feel like the whole place ought to simply fall in and bury me, but it doesn’t; instead, her footsteps cross the porch and scuff on the path beyond and then I can’t hear her any more.
I stand and limp to the window at the front of the cabin, where I shove back the ugly floral curtain and watch her stomp away from the cabin, through the snow, and then stand there, her hands in her pockets. After a moment I decide to trust her and let the curtain go.
I spend the next ten minutes limping back and forth the length of the entire cabin because Andi isn’t here to tell me to sit down. I silently curse Andi and Andi’s stubbornness and Andi’s stupid magical thinking and Andi’s willingness to lie to her parents. I curse her for acting like she does and for being the way she is and for the tangled-up way I feel around her and for crashing back into my life like this when I wasn’t prepared. I stop short of cursing her for all the years she was gone, because I can’t curse her for that.
By the time I’m finished cursing, I’ve calmed down a little.
Once I’m done stomping I stand in front of the wood stove, soaking up the warmth and staring at the fire through the window. There’s something imprinted on the iron top of the stove, and the light in here right now is too low to see what it is, but I’ve never looked at it before. Probably flowers or wheat or a horse or something else pleasantly domestic and reminiscent of some past era, just like everything else in this cabin.
Including me, probably. Maybe that’s why I like it here so much. I never grew out of the pseudo-olden-times of my upbringing, the one my younger siblings don’t remember, the childhood where I got eggs from the hens every morning before I started school, where half the time the washing machine was broken so we took turns washing things in the tub, where everything was mended within an inch of its life and it had to be nearly freezing before we were allowed to turn on any heat except the fireplace and regardless of all that, my parents kept having kids. God would provide, they always said, and then when friends brought over firewood or neighbors gave us hand-me-downs or relatives fed us, my parents would give the thanks to God.
It was a long time before I realized my family wasn’t normal. It was a long time before I realized that almost no one else my age had to go pick a switch when they were about to be punished. It was a long time before I realized that no one else was responsible for waking up in the night with a toddler sibling when they were only six themselves, that no one else with a little brother or sister was in charge of changing them and their sheets if they had an accident at night. Turns out most first-graders don’t really know how to change a diaper or clean a scraped knee or calm down a hysterical two-year-old.
It’s here, with the oil lamps and the wood stove and the fading wallpaper, that I feel more like I’m in the right place than anywhere else. It’s old, and it’s a little hard and a little odd, but there’s no one to worry about but myself and I can handle all that.
Usually there’s no one to worry about but myself. I swallow hard, still staring into the fire, because I know what I’m about to go do, and I don’t want to. Every instinct I’ve got is telling me that I need to leave it alone, that she’ll come back and we’ll be at our weird detente again, where she pretends she’s not still angry with me and I pretend I don’t know that anything ever happened, but I don’t think I can. I feel like my skin might split open if I stay quiet much longer, and it’s probably better to face her wrath for the next few days than keep all this bottled.
I stare at the top of the wood stove a little longer. I think the picture stamped into the metal is a basket of flowers, after all. The faint promise of springtime in the dead of winter.
I sigh and start the ugly process of getting my boots on, because I know what I have to do.
She’s fifty feet from the front door of the cabin, off to one side, sitting on a fallen tree. I know she hears me coming because it’s dead quiet out here and walking through the snow is loud, but she doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t even look over when I sit next to her.
“I had enough sense not to wander into the woods like a lost child in a fairy tale,” she says, eyes ahead.
“I know,” I say. The tree is maybe eighteen inches off the ground, pretty low, and I prop my feet in front of myself and put my hands in my coat pockets. There’s a lighter in one and a rock in the other, and I rub my thumbs over both. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Yes, you did.”
Okay, she’s right. When she said I’m going out I jumped to the worst-case scenario and assumed that she was going to do something drastic, like try to get back to the Parkway alone, at night, in the snow, and I panicked.