The Cabin at the End of the World(39)
“Yeah, I know. Don’t worry about me. I don’t believe them.”
“I know you don’t. I know you don’t.”
“I don’t.”
Sabrina says, “That’s enough. Please. We all need to sleep.”
“Hey, Eric?”
“Still here.”
“I’m sorry, and I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
There’s another beat of silence that both men want to fill but don’t know how they possibly could. Then Andrew says, “Hey, can you guys untie me? I want to keep the fire in the stove going all night. Don’t worry, I won’t fall asleep on the job. I promise. And I’ll go outside and gather more wood—”
Adriane says, “Shut up or we’ll shut you up. Put, like, gags over your mouth or something.”
Leonard says, “Easy, Adriane. It’s okay. Everyone is good, everyone is fine. We can all go back to sleep now.” Leonard prattles on in a low voice and Sabrina joins in with empty we-won’t-hurt-you avowals.
Eric is stung by Andrew thinking that he might, even in the smallest of ways, believe the others are telling some version of the truth. It stings because Andrew would be more than a little correct in thinking that. Eric’s fear gives way temporarily to shame and anger, and it leaks out as he says, “If any of you attempt to put something over my mouth, I’ll bite your fingers off.” Then he silently prays for God to help them.
Wen
In Wen’s bedroom back home there’s a night-light plugged into the wall across from her bed. It has a simple white bulb that isn’t shaped like a cartoon character or a comic book hero or an animal or the moon or anything in particular. She likes it that way; she doesn’t want any funny shapes because funny shapes make scary shadows. In addition to the night-light, she insists the hallway light stay on as well, and the bathroom light, too, with the door open. Her parents have tried to wean her off sleeping with lights on, explaining her still-growing brain needs the dark for proper rest. Wen once told them she doesn’t want her brain growing too fast for her head, anyway. Sometimes, after she falls asleep, one of her parents shuts off the bathroom light, the hall light, or (gasp!) both. She thinks it must be Daddy Eric because he always complains about her and Daddy Andrew leaving lights on everywhere in the condo, wasting electricity, but she has yet to catch him in the act. Shutting off the bathroom light is a grievous betrayal and it once angered her enough to announce at the breakfast table that she will have a terrible day. When her parents asked why, she dramatically pouted and said, “You know why,” and then couldn’t hide her snarky smirk in the brightness of the kitchen.
Wen is sitting up on the mattress without the memory of waking. She looks around, moving only her eyes at first; she doesn’t move her head until she’s convinced everyone else is asleep. It’s dark, but less dark than it should be with almost no lights on in the cabin. The bathroom light doesn’t count as being on because the door is shut.
She wonders if anything happened while she was asleep. She wonders if it’s possible she slept through an entire day and it’s now the next night instead of the same one.
Wen slips out of her blankets and crawls to the edge of the mattress. If this were another evening under different circumstances, she would jump mattress to mattress, pretending they were rafts in a vast, cold sea, or the mattresses were rocks stubbornly maintaining their lifesaving heft and shape within a bubbling lava flow. Instead, she’s careful to not disturb Sabrina (she sleeps on her back with her arms over her head, dangling off the mattress, her mouth open slightly) and Adriane (she sleeps rolled up into a ball, like she’s hiding because she’s mad at everyone in the room; only the top half of her head sticks out from under her blanket, exposed to the cool night air).
To her left are the screen slider and deck. The blanket covering Redmond ripples in a breeze like it’s considering a transformation into a wing and flying away. She wonders what Redmond looks like now. Is he all broken and mashed up, squished like a stepped-on caterpillar, or does he look the same as he did before but like he is sleeping? She’s never seen a dead body before. She has asked adults what a dead body looks like and the only one who somewhat answered her was Daddy Andrew. He told her a dead body looked like the person but not like them at the same time because there was something missing. She joked, “Like a nose or an ear?” and he laughed. Wen never felt more proud of herself as when she made one of her dads laugh. She asked him to explain what he meant, and Daddy Andrew pretended (she knew he was pretending and she hated when he did this to her) with loud hmms, a finger tapping his lips, chin rubs, and other I-don’t-really-want-to-answer-this stalling tactics. She thought he was never going to explain further, but she played it smart. She didn’t press, didn’t whine, didn’t demand. She waited him out. She waited until he shrank down a little under her stare, and he smiled the you-win smile. He said that the dead bodies he saw reminded him of slightly deflated birthday balloons, ones that hung around limply a day or two after the party. She didn’t like the answer and wanted to ask him more, but he said, “Don’t tell Eric we were talking about dead bodies, all right?”
Wen doesn’t think Redmond would look like a balloon. Even though she didn’t see any of it, she knows they hit him repeatedly with the weapons, and she did see all the blood after and she could smell it. She heard him screaming. She heard it all and she can hear it now if she lets herself, those awful, hollow thumps and the final, wet crack that shook the floor and her legs. But what if it sounded worse than it was and he just got hurt badly and was knocked out like Daddy Eric? What if Redmond is alive and he wakes up? What if he’s awake now and waiting for someone to come outside, or he’s waiting for her to make a run for it and he’ll reach out and grab her and pull her underneath the blanket and she’ll be stuck there with him forever?