These Silent Woods: A Novel(40)

“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.

Marie takes a sip of her tea. “Jake said you lost someone very dear to you. That you were staying here until you got your footing.”

So that’s what he told her. Just like Jake to figure out a way to explain our circumstances without lying.

“That’s right,” I say. “Awful generous of him to take us in the way he did.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A while.” Best to avoid specifics.

“And do you envision yourself staying?” She traces the handle of her mug. “I mean long-term.”

“Jake said—he told me we could stay as long as we needed to.”

“I see.”

The situation dawns on me: We’re not living in Jake’s cabin, anymore. We’re living in her cabin. Which means. “You were thinking of selling the place, weren’t you?”

“I considered it. Before. Like I said, I wasn’t sure what I’d find, coming here. But, you’re using it. Living here.” She runs her fingers through her hair. “Obviously, that changes things.”

“We can pay rent. I have money.”

“Please forget I mentioned it. I’m not thinking clearly. It’s been a long day.” She leans forward, elbows on her knees. “It’s been a long year, really.”

I nod, take my first sip of tea. This is a concern, of course, and one I hadn’t thought of. The possibility that our home could be sold right out from under us. But my mind goes to Jake. I think of his drawn-out decline: the years of suffering, the way his body had taken the initial hit with such mettle. How he’d fought and recovered but not really, how for so many years he was slowly wearing and withering, his own body deserting him, cell by cell. I wonder if maybe holding Cindy in the two minutes between when the car stopped rolling and she died, maybe that was the better way to go. Finch wailing in the back seat but Cindy quiet and breathing but barely, and bleeding bad on the inside. In the newspaper they would write that she died upon impact, but I know the truth: she was alive for two minutes. She blinked and blinked. She squeezed my hand.

Of all the nightmares and memories that surface and blend and cycle through my mind, of all the terrible things I’ve seen and done, that one is the worst. I run my finger around the rim of the mug and take a sip of the hot tea, shake it off, that image. Cindy at the end.

“He was all I had left,” Marie says. “My parents are gone. Thomas.”

I look at her, small boned and plain and somehow also pretty, in an old-fashioned, innocent way. “Thomas?”

Her voice quavers. “My husband. Ex. He had an affair and I told him it was over.” She turns and rifles through the bag where she got the tea bags and pulls out a box. “Want some? Dark chocolate with caramel and sea salt. The best.”

“How long ago?”

She uses her fingernail and struggles to break the seal on the box. “What?”

“Your husband.”

“Oh. Not long. Seven months.” She hands me the box. “Can you help with this?”

I pull the pocketknife from my jeans, flip it open, and slide it along the edge of the box. “Heck of a year,” I say, handing it back.

“It wasn’t the first time. So yes, a bad year, but really, it’s been bad for years. I should’ve ended it a long time ago, but I didn’t. I just kept hoping maybe he would change. Maybe I would somehow be enough for him.”

Here we go again: people spilling their secrets to me. My Confessional Curse. “Naw, don’t say that. It has nothing to do with you,” I tell her. “Men like that, it’s just how they are. Nothing you could’ve done to change that.” I don’t know where that comes from, advice. Words to soothe. All these years, all the times this has happened—the woman at the café, Mr. Marks in eighth-grade detention—never once have I offered any solace. Never once have I uttered a single word of response.

She plucks a chocolate and offers me the box. “Usually I slice each one thinly and eat a little sliver at a time. You savor each piece. It melts in your mouth.”

I hand her the pocketknife.

“Finch is a wonderful girl.”

“She is.”

“Her mother?”

“Car accident. Finch was a baby so she remembers nothing.”

“Were you married?”

One of my biggest regrets in life, not marrying Cindy. I’d bought the ring right after we’d discovered she was pregnant. It was a nice ring, too. I’d proposed down at the river where she’d first kissed me. But she’d wanted to wait on the wedding. Didn’t want it to be a shotgun type of thing, didn’t want to be pregnant in her wedding dress, didn’t want her parents to think that the only reason we were getting married was because there was a baby on the way. I understood all of that but I also thought maybe things would be a little easier, a little better, if we were married. I’d insisted and then one day we got into a big fight over it and I figured, who gets into a fight over when to get married? Cindy pregnant and crying and telling me I just didn’t understand and why couldn’t I just trust her. I’d pulled her into my arms then. The fullness of her, everything about her bigger and puffier with the pregnancy, not just belly but arms, legs, ankles, face. We’ll do it when you’re ready, I told her. Just say the word. You know I’ve loved you since that day on the bus. It was something I would say to her sometimes, and she would tilt her head and smile, only that time, she just buried her face in my neck and cried.