“I look forward to it,” Gideon says, then nods at me. “I’d best be going.”
He hands over my pack, and he steadies me with a hand on my arm while I get the strap over one shoulder.
“Call me?” I ask, because I’m suddenly not sure what to say or what the rules are, here, on a front porch in what technically counts as polite society.
“Of course,” Gideon says, and he sways a little on his feet and glances down at my mouth and there’s a second where I think he’s going to kiss me, in front of Silas and Lucia, but instead he smiles at me and nods at Lucia and then he’s down the steps, striding back to his friend waiting in the car. I try not to be disappointed.
“Come on. I made pot roast with mashed potatoes and there’s ice cream for dessert,” she says, and yeah, those are basically the magic words.
“You’re amazing,” I tell her as I let her herd me through the front door.
“I know,” she says, and rests one hand lightly on my shoulder.
I’m moisturizing the ever-living fuck out of my entire body after my shower when there’s a knock on the bathroom door.
“I’m still naked!” I shout, because I like to give pertinent information first.
“Phone!” Lucia calls back. “Again!”
“How many times have they called?”
“What?”
I grab my robe, shrug it on, and open the door.
“For you,” Lucia says unnecessarily, holding out the cordless phone.
“Civilization treating you well?” my dad asks after I take it. “Lucia’s been having kittens all day.”
Sure. Lucia has been having kittens.
“It’s great. I love showers and running water,” I tell him. “And I’m fine. Safe and sound, no worse for the wear, newly appreciative of electricity.”
“It’s great stuff,” my dad agrees. We talk for a while, Rick getting on the other line eventually, and I end up telling him more than I mean to about the cabin: the water filters we used and the propane-powered fridge and the solar battery that was good enough to keep phones charged, because Dad and Rick love gadgets almost as much as they love discussing home repair.
“We ought to send a thank you note to Steve,” Rick says, after a while, the slight twang that twenty years in New Jersey haven’t erased crackling down the line.
It takes me a minute to figure out who Steve is. Shit.
“Not a bad idea,” says my dad. “You wouldn’t happen to have his address, would you?”
I should just tell them, and I know I should just tell them. I know. But I’m tired, and exhausted, and I don’t feel like explaining the truth and then explaining why I didn’t tell them the truth already and then explaining why the truth isn’t a problem, really, Gideon’s cool now and of course I’m certain of that after spending two whole entire weeks with him.
“I don’t, sorry,” is all I wind up saying.
“I’m sure we can find his work address, or at least close enough,” Rick is saying. “I imagine we can just send a card to Steve Wheeler care of Cumberland National Forest and sooner or later it’ll get to him.”
“What are you talking about?” my dad asks. “You can’t just address something to a forest and expect it to arrive at your intended recipient.”
“I bet you could in this case,” Rick says, and they’re off again, casually bickering with each other the way they’ve been doing since I was six or so, familiar as the kitchen table.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
GIDEON
“Hey,” Silas says, when I get back into the car. “You good?”
“I’m fine,” I tell him, which is true enough; I’m tired and a little rattled and the space behind my ribcage feels oddly wind-burned and raw, but all that is fine, honestly.
Silas keeps looking at me, like he’s waiting for a real answer. I feel a little more wind-burned, so I focus on buckling up. There are a thousand things that he could say right now, probably: he could say I’m here for you or you can tell me anything or something happened, didn’t it, but he’s too smart and knows me too well for that.
Instead Silas says, “There’s soup, those brussels sprouts you like, and brownies waiting back at your place,” and he starts the car.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Thank Wyatt, it was his idea,” he says, and we drive through the dark for a while.
Silas and I met in a veterans’ support group, and we both spent the first two months of it sitting quietly, talking when asked to, sharing all the expected trauma and horror. He was in for longer than I was, did more tours, saw more shit; Silas never quite shared anything too close to the bone but he was good at seeming like he did, good at welcoming the new people, good at making the circle of chairs in a church basement feel like a sacred ring of trust.
He’s half a decade older than me. He might be wiser. He’s sure friendlier, and it took me a couple months to understand that we’d become honest-to-God friends outside the support group. Before I knew it, we’d collected Javier and Wyatt, two other strays; when Silas floated the idea of building cabins on the site of an old campground still owned by the Forest Service, we all said yes and understood why.
Those three know almost everything about me.
They don’t know the story with Andi. Half because it was water under the bridge, or at least I wanted it to be; half because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to see the looks on their faces when I said I drove my best friend away because her dad had a boyfriend and most of all, I didn’t want to admit how I’d felt about it back then. That I’d been so self-righteous and proud of myself.
But Andi’s not angry anymore, and there’s brownies and soup waiting at my house, and all that makes me brave enough to lean on someone.
“Andi and I were best friends growing up,” I say suddenly, into the darkness of the country road, and Silas glances over at me.
“You were?” he says, and as he drives me home, I tell him everything.
There are two extra cars in my driveway when I get home, and I’m greeted by Dolly, who sits a foot back from the inside welcome mat and blinks at me slowly.
“Thanks, I’m glad to be home,” I tell her in a voice just above a whisper. I don’t need to hear what Reid thinks about me having conversations with my cat.
“Mrrp,” she says, so I come in, put my stuff down, get my shoes off, and scratch her under the chin. She accepts this as her due, tilting her head back and letting her eyes go closed. Voices drift in from the kitchen, and I ignore them for a moment.
“He treat you right?” I murmur, now down on one knee. “You can tell me if he didn’t, I’ll take care of it.”
She just turns her head slightly and shoves a different part of herself against my hand, so I keep scratching her and glance around the entryway. The place started life as a farmhouse somewhere around a hundred and twenty years ago, and every successive owner has made sure to leave their touch in the form of questionable flooring choices, add-ons with puzzling geometry, one very ugly stained-glass window in the front room, and two gargoyles flanking the front steps. Of a farmhouse. In the country. They’re awful and ugly, but I couldn’t bear to get rid of them.