Two years. Two years of safety. Of escape. Of freedom and nights disturbed only by her dreams and guilts. Two years' stewardship of that little cabin, her presence discouraging trespassers. Two years' keeping a place owned by those who could not be there themselves from falling back into the arms of the forest around it. Simple chores and minimal cost and the first peace she had ever known, in which to savor her modest successes.
The first success, the first thing she had finally sold - that triumph had been obscured in the escape it had permitted.
But there had been other successes since then. There had been the cautious sense of financial security. Of having found work which would allow her to survive in a way for which she had an ability. For which she seemed suited and into which she could pour all her energies.
A justification of sorts. Startled, she looked up and around at the darkened computer screen, inside which lurked the bones of the new book.
Justification? Was she still thinking justification was owed? Granted, these threads she wove were darker than those of the last book, more somber and twisted. She had thought she only dug more deeply into herself for the elements she set at each other. It had not surprised her that deeper layers held darker elements. But what if that somber note had been a reflection of troubles returning?
Had part of her felt what lurked in the undergrowth?
She looked back to the fire, less troubled by the concept of foreseeing, than of what that letter had revealed. In learning to survive, her definition of reality had grown elastic. Her beliefs had become more open even as her protective walls had heightened. If she HAD sensed something, she only wished she had completed the outline and so gained a sense of it before her conscious mind had the chance to interfere. Before what had been somber had the chance to become - what?
Leaving that warm firelit illusion of safety, she returned to the work table and revived the screen, peering first at the main thread and then at the secondary one, so recently completed and not yet fully interwoven.
Two hours later, when her eyes burned and her back ached, she pushed herself away from the computer, staring at the screen for a silent eternity before shutting the machine down. She saw just how those two threads would interweave. Awareness of how past and present had already mingled had fairly leaped from the screen. Dread of how far that weaving might go had demanded she stop before finishing.
She had already brought the past back to life, but that was not a surprise. Anything she did was drawn through the filters of her own life, filtered through the lenses of her own experience. Because it had not been a threat from the viewpoint of that Maine cabin, she just had not realized it.
She knew that, even as she knew the Spartan and isolated life she had turned to had found an outlet in the erotica which had become so profitable. What had not been done well in reality could be done excruciatingly well through words over which she maintained control, her own instincts propelling the story, her need for more than simple biological activity lending it a sophistication and elegance and complexity.
And with that shadow side periodically appeased, she would turn to a different kind of project, one where those fleshly instincts assumed their proper proportions, if honed possibly to sharper detail, where desire did not propel but only reflected.
All of it - fleshtones and darker worldly ones - all had been safe there. Protected from being overrun by geography itself, she had felt safe enough to risk any hidden deeps. In that place, she could poke and probe and use the things that woke her in the night, knowing that in the morning, she would not wake THERE. That there was always that difference between the two worlds...
Nearly three in the morning. Her eyes slid from the clock to the blackness beyond the windows.
In the night there, the stillness was unbroken by anything but the slow, heavy pulse of old forest sweetened by the bite of pine. The night roared in her ears with its silence. Her pulse thundered in her ears in the absence of other sounds. There was only the sturdy old cabin shifting from time to time as it rode the rocky earth, the owls, the wind dipping into that small opening and then rising to swirl away...
She had struck a balance there, made a pact with her ghosts and her guilt.
If she had to return... The night stilled to silence empty even of her own pulse. If she had to go back there...
What she had to do was go pay Russ for his 'service call'.
A few hours later, what she seemed to have done was disturb his unshakable calm.
Sitting on a sawhorse in his barn, Rae stiffened as she watched him go very still and then slowly start and set down his tools, the powersaw first, then the steel straightedge, a carpenter's pencil, a piece of wood he'd been using as a model, before turning and hoisting himself up to sit on the wood he'd been working on.
Even then, he reached for the small sack and his cigarette papers and finished that small routine before speaking. "Why do you insist on doing this?"
Rae just stared at him, flashbacks of other times, other discussions, another face flickering between them.
"Why do you turn up and insult me?" Russ set about making himself quite clear. "Trying to pay me for something I do for you by choice."
Choices. Everyone made their own choices. "I paid you the last time I asked you for help."
"Two years and two months ago," Russ said. "I thought we'd at least gone past that. I've done a few things for you since then." He studied her narrowly through his cigarette smoke, the sherry eyes seeming to darken. "But you didn't have to ASK," he said, answering himself. "Okay."
Rae perched on her sawhorse, stuck in silence, busy trying to decide why she'd started this, if he were surprising her or if she'd gone there just for this. To poke him and see what he did. Let him help her make up her own mind.
Bitter memories of another time, another skillful man flickered past and were banished. All her time alone and she thought she'd learned and then, her first step showed she'd learned nothing. Grown no wiser. Become no more honest with herself, still acting for more than one reason and most of those unclear.
"Okay," Russ repeated. "Maybe its time for something new." He picked up the two twenty dollar bills she'd set on the bench beside him and held them out to her. "Take this back. Accept I did you a favor," he said deliberately.
"I'd do more. If you'd allow me."
Choices. All this time, he'd been making his own, underneath the quiet calm where she couldn't see - where she hadn't bothered or wanted to look. Was THIS why she'd come? To confront herself with HER choices?
He was someone special. Rae had watched him long enough to know the muscular masculine lines of the man waiting for her answer. Good bones, strong arms and wide shoulders, warm eyes in a lean, quiet face, gentle ways, gentle mouth. A light touch and a peaceful inner control.
He'd be a far smarter choice than the one she'd made, more than once, in another lifetime. He was a good man, a proven man, sure of himself and of what he wanted. So much like the other one -
Too much like the other one. And not enough.
Once more, in her silence, Russ read his answer for himself, in her silence, in her ignoring the bills in his outstretched hand.
But this time, even through his silence, while he reached for the tobacco pouch again, withdrawing back into himself, she couldn't pretend she didn't understand him. After two years, the same question, the same sensitivity to ask, wait and accept an answer contrary to the one he'd wanted, she couldn't not see what she'd done.
Intentionally or not, she'd caused him harm. She'd taken advantage of his patience. She'd let herself see only what she wanted, letting herself take more than she had any intention of ever giving anyone.
Even through his small ceremony, he read her too well. "Maybe I'll just hope for a long muddy spring," Russ said. "You lose your temper enough, I'll be able to get a better winch."
She wasn't too proud to turn down the escape he allowed her. She slid slowly to her feet, keeping her movements slow and steady, as though sensing the intensity hidden within the calm exterior, she sought to sneak away from some jungle cat.
Good sense got her as far as the barn door before she had to turn back, finding his eyes on her, as she'd known they'd be. Somewhere in the corner, a cheap radio let some soft country music trickle into the dusty place. "Maybe you should go for a new tape deck for out here. Aim higher."
"I thought I was."
His quiet answer stuck in her mind as she escaped back to her cabin, back to the small pocket of safety she should never have left. The first safe place she'd ever had, the one these letters from another life threatened.
'I thought I was', he'd said. As she'd thought SHE was being careful. As she'd thought she did the right thing. As she'd thought coming to that cabin had been the right thing to do.
Only weeks before she had sold that first thing, the old cabin had been broken into. A handful of weeks before someone she had known had talked to someone they knew of a woman looking for a place to get away from things, write, live quietly, and back through a network of people had come the word of that cabin.
She had been there ever since and looking after the place, making occasional small repairs, keeping it warm and lighted, had insulated her from the world she had known up to that point. If she had to be away from there - if it took her much of any time - she could lose that toehold on sanity. She could lose that place. That life. She could lose it all.
Letting herself in, she stood just inside the front door, looking around her, cataloging the place that had held such peace for her.
Or she could, if she chose to rein in her sudden terror, if worst came to worst, find someone who needed a place just - for the spring and summer. She could do that. Then the worst would be having to share the place, for a time, before getting back to how it had been. Before she embalmed her sense of safety, she COULD do something like that.
This wasn't one of her 'skin' books. She could act like something other than a trapped, frenzied animal, willing to chew off her own paw in fear. She COULD do that.
She settled for something small and simple. She could go into the kitchen and make herself a sandwich. And when she'd done that, and then dragged herself away from the old dark places beneath the pines that crept up to the very back door, she went back and turned the computer on.
She COULD concentrate on what was at hand. She could complete this tangle in its electronic maze. THIS she could do, as she would have it. As seemed best. THIS could be managed.
When she finally lay down to sleep, it was nearly dawn. She woke in the mid afternoon and walked beneath the pines for an hour before coming back up across the narrow porch and letting herself inside. In the kitchen, she made up - something - ate and laying another fire, set a match to it before sitting down again at that work table.
It was nearly done, this outline. She had a sense of balancing two different expressions of a single problem. Or two different facets reflecting each other. Or two different things together reflecting upon the same third.
Depending on her mood it was all and none of those. But her mind could latch onto it and manipulate it and draw back, look for a balance or lack of it and then tug another place different.
Again she worked past the small hours and slept through the morning and beyond. In the disorientation was its own safety. In hours regulated by nothing but what she worked on, other things retreated.
But then she finished that stage. Tugged the two strands into perfect tension with each other and the invisible third watcher. Sat back and looked at it and liked what she had done, and felt herself sliding away from that small peak of achievement where the bones she had assembled had begun to take on a life, move in a world of their own, back into the clouds and mists and murk below.
In the late afternoon while a gentle drizzle gleamed on the blue-green pine needles and the damp trunks were dark pillars in a shadowed world, she sat on the porch steps, hugging her knees against her breast.
Like some Jesuit, or the concept for which that word stood in her mind, she felt stranded between two worlds, intensely aware of both, but most of all, of the gulf between the two. Seeing both but able to focus only on what lay between.
And between worlds for her was the notion that the lawyer's letter only brought to her attention a war she had already begun to wage, or one she had never really left, only shifted to a safer place. That she had not seen this, that she deceived herself about this, that was the bitter pill.
But if she had to leave there for any length of time... If it meant she had to go back there...
Lost in that place between worlds, darkness drove her inside where she curled up on the couch and stared unseeingly at the place no fire burned, finally sliding sideways into uneasy sleep.
She dreamed she wandered through a huge old house that turned into her cabin and back into a strange place, with rooms she knew but extra turnings in the hallways, and finally, a door, where noone had seen a door. Tucked away, a hidden, secret door, in the very heart of everything, and opening that, a long winding flight of stairs led up and around and off to the side, finally opening out into an attic.
An attic where old chairs clumped around one side of a big space and dust shrouded windows let in winter light and a big heavy footed worktable overflowed with old books.
A hidden attic, her own safe place, a magical, special place, a place right there in front of her all along...