Marry or Burn (13 page)

She said he didn't look good; he looked as if he had just crawled out of a cave. “Here.” She dug in her purse. “Here's the key. Make sure you get it back to me because it's the only one I have now.” In the old days they would have had three or four keys to the cabin, on hooks and stashed in drawers. But he couldn't inquire. Her tears had made him worse—and hadn't those eyes once seemed to fill her whole face when they
shimmered with tears? He got up abruptly and went to the men's room. What was he doing leaning on a bathroom door with his eyes fixed on a hand dryer? With a diffuse spasm in his chest, a need to bear down after catching a breath, as if to keep something where it belonged. The dryer had a stiff logo of joined hands. From the wall the urinals gaped with their stains. How easily people ignored the real acts of the body, even people like himself, doctors who saw into the interior clenching, the explosions and expulsions. To how many people had he said the word
spasm
over the years, in reassurance?

When he opened his fist the key fell onto the floor. He picked it up and washed it. He dried his hands under the gasp of the blower.

“We haven't been over there in a month,” Rosalie said when he came back and sank into his chair. “Somebody needs to check on the place. We were going to go this weekend but I can't, I'm off to lose weight.”

We were going to go.
She liked to hint at that part of her life. “You don't need to lose weight,” he said. Her hips had squared a bit but she was small and still compact.

“Oh, now I do. Now I do. Lynn's taking me away to a spa. We're going to eat spinach leaves and do yoga and meditate. We'll have four days. So promise me you'll go. I mean it, Stark.”

He thanked her in the parking lot. “Just go over there and take it easy,” she said again, as if she were one of their daughters, looking out for him. He didn't go home; he drove straight out of town and into the mountains. He hadn't packed anything; he would have to wear what he had put on that morning. His feet hurt, in his good shoes. At Washington Pass he pulled in and changed into the running shoes he kept in the trunk. He left them untied.
Because he's a bum,
he said to himself, in Katya's voice. He walked on old snow that still, in May, covered the short path to the
overlook, and gazed down at the dizzying switchbacks. If you climbed over the fence and dropped, you would go straight down hundreds of feet before there was a thing to stop you.

On the way back he made new footprints, in the grip of a childish, sentimental urge to point himself out to somebody.

At the cabin—which was not a cabin at all but a log and timber house built with the first real money he had made, with five bedrooms and a river-rock fireplace, quilts Rosalie had found in country stores, scattered floor cushions still in their buttoned denim—he realized he had brought no food. He found a potato to slice and fried it in olive oil in a familiar pan. He was not one who advised his patients not to fry. How would anyone who lived alone not fry? And Katya—who liked to present herself as a peasant and believed, or said she believed, that a fried potato was a meal if you had a glass of vodka to drink with it—Katya could have fried everything she ate. What use would any curbs have been? Should he have said more than he did, when he sent her to Bernstein? This was a young woman. A woman with nothing, seemingly, the matter with her. Before the day she seized his hands she had come to his office twice with the complaint of having lost or almost lost consciousness. Something about the lazy way she related this history made him doubt it. Nevertheless he proceeded, because persistence and care were what he was known for. He uncovered a common thing.

He must have suspected, by the time she made the third appointment, that she came only to see him. Over the years he had accumulated a few patients who did that. And had that affected his judgment, made him less careful? Exactly what had she said, that first time? And what about afterwards, with Bernstein?

“Nothing. Nothing but what we saw,” Bernstein said. “The
thing might have showed up the next time, it might not. Could have forced it in the lab? You didn't do that; I didn't do that. A year she was my patient. Don't beat yourself up.”

He should never have put his weight on her, with that heart inside her that was going to stop. He should never have raised his voice. What had he been thinking of? She had slapped him. He had thrown her down on the bed.

But he had not killed her by throwing her on the bed. She had stood up to slap him again and lived another year. Standing in the kitchen eating his potato from the pan, he groaned.

He made his way along the downhill path, overgrown now, to the river, which was running so high it had carved out a new branch. He couldn't see in the semidark whether the branch veered back to the river where the woods began, or tore on into the trees. In the middle of the two courses was an island, with a big cottonwood at either end. Loud, tumbling water had claimed so much ground that he could not be sure exactly where he was. It blocked his way to the sand between the two trees where he wanted to sit. Once he and the girls had dragged a picnic table all the way out to the river's edge. The table was long gone—stolen, Rosalie said. Bikers. They snooped around the empty vacation places now. A picnic table taken away on a motorcycle? “They scout stuff out and they come back for it,” she said defensively. He had to consider the question of whether he had encouraged this kind of thinking in Rosalie, who had been so ready to take his word. How conventional he had been, despite his “ways.”

“Thiefs should keep what they get.” So Katya said, haughtily. “Or how can we have balance? Not like those guys in the movie.” They had seen a movie about a heist. “Real thiefs, I mean.”

“So should they get this ring? If they don't hurt this hand?”

Why had he said this? She had hidden the hand with the emerald on it behind her.

The branch was running fast, too deep to wade across. Deep enough to be black. You could see tall grass being rushed and flattened. There was no real bank. He put his foot in. Instead of dragging at it, the current lifted it like a leaf and pushed him onto the other leg, making him totter. Had the river ever come this far? He shook his wet foot, his body creeping with goose pimples.

His ears were full of the loudness of water, and for a moment on the path he had the sensation the river was moving up behind him. Lifting his head he saw, standing in the kitchen, a woman. Tall.
God, God . . .

Of course it was not her. This woman was heavy. The woman was just standing in the kitchen without a sound, even though she must have seen him coming up the steps. She must have seen him at some distance, a figure approaching the house. She had his spatula in her hand, and she was holding the other hand out as if to soothe him. “Hi there,” she said.

“Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”

A man stepped into the kitchen. “I'm Ray Rollins.”

“I said somebody was here.” The woman held up the spatula with a surprising calm. “We were out there admiring your car.”

“Whoa!” the man said. “I don't know, man, this is—here I thought we—thought we
had
the place. This weekend.” So they weren't burglars. Or probably not. But then the man said uneasily, “What's the date, anyway?”

“Well now,” said Stark, “it's the twenty-first, and I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be here.” He wasn't going to say “God damn it, I built this house,” or anything like that. He wasn't going to say Rosalie had given him the key because that would give away her name, if they were burglars.

“Whoa,” the man said again. Ray. Ray something. He had a crew cut. He looked like a football coach. “So now, did you . . . you must know the owner?”

Stark said, “I do.”

The man came forward with his hand out. “Ray Rollins,” he said for the second time. He gripped like a blood pressure cuff.

“Phil Bernstein,” said Stark. He wasn't going to get into any explanations.

“This is Beverly,” Rollins said after a second.

The woman said, “Beverly Lanier,” and held out her hand. She smiled as if the situation struck her as nothing out of the ordinary. She turned to the man, and because she was big herself, Stark saw for the first time how large and muscular were the arms, now folded, of the man standing beside her, how thick his neck. Not somebody he could tackle, if the two were there after all to steal from an empty house. But wasn't the guy too clean-cut to be a thief? The girl, surely, too simple. “Well,” she said cheerfully to Stark, “you were here first.”

“Right,” said Ray Rollins. “Right. So you're a friend of Rosalie's. Jeez I'm embarrassed.”

All right. He knew her. Stark said, “Drive over from Seattle?”

“Yeah, we did.”

“Quite a way,” Stark said. It was a three-and-a-half-hour drive if you did it fast.

“Had to leave in rush hour, had to work.” Stark could see the man placing him: older guy, white-collar, someone who left before rush hour.

“Well, hmm, what shall we do?” said the woman, Beverly. She had sat down on one of the stools Rosalie had had made to line the counter. The stools had arms, you could swivel in them and see the whole house spread out with its comforts.
Open Plan
. For months the words had echoed in their lives as they made
trips to watch the place go up. “Not my room,” Lynn had said, at twelve. “I want to be downstairs. I want the Closed Plan.” Now Lynn was what, twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Older than this solid girl on the stool.

Stark waited for Rollins to answer her. He was going to back down, Stark could tell. He was the one who had made the mistake; Stark had received the key from Rosalie's hand that very afternoon. She couldn't have already lent it, if that was the only key she had.

It came to him slowly, as he was thinking of the key. He was bending, in his mind, to pick it up from the sticky floor of the men's room. It came to him who the man was. He raised his eyes from the counter where the girl had wrapped her square hands around the basket of river rocks Rosalie kept there. The man had stepped away from her, scowling. It was the fireman.

So he had come anyway, the fireman. He had come without Rosalie. With a girl instead. He must have his own key. He had brought a girl to Rosalie's cabin.

Beverly said, “I'm sure we can find a motel in town.” Hearing the word gave Stark a rude pleasure. Motel. Where this kind of thing belonged. Not in Rosalie's cabin, where Rosalie must have come more than once with the fireman, the bastard.

Ray slapped his hands together. “I need a phone book.” His moment of shame and confusion was over. “And more important, where's the bathroom?” He grinned. Of course he knew where they were, phone book and bathroom.

“Oh gosh. But it doesn't matter.” Beverly stretched and smiled. “I know the area, I worked up north of here one summer, with the Forest Service. I was a smoke jumper.” So. It was out. Firemen, both of them. Firefighters. The bastard had brought a girl from work.

“No kidding,” Stark said. He never said “no kidding.” But he was Phil Bernstein. “That must be rough work.”

“I liked it. I was young,” she said, in the nostalgic way young people had of saying that. “They kinda made me prove myself a few extra times. But I like that.” When she smiled the plumpness of her cheeks made the lower lids spring up and almost close her eyes. On one side she had a deep dimple. “You don't even want to know how much retardant is up there in some of those stands of Doug fir.”

Without deciding he was going to do it, Stark said, “Why not just stay here. This is a big house. I have the room down the hall, there.” It was Lynn's room. He hadn't wanted to go upstairs. “There's a big second floor. Four rooms.”

She said, “Really? That would be great!” Ray was coming back. He walked with his hands on his legs, on the seams of the tight jeans, and a dreamy, private look on his face.

“Did you hear that?” the girl asked him. “Mr. Bernstein doesn't mind if we stay here tonight, if we want. It's late maybe, d'you think, to get a motel? We could do it tomorrow?”

“Jeez, I hate to do that. I don't know how I got this so turned around. What a dumb shit thing to do, excuse me.” As if Stark were an old fogy.

Stark said nothing. He was doing it for the girl, with her dimple. It was the kind of thing Katya would do, and if he stopped there, if he didn't expose the guy, punish him, he would still be in the region of the kind of caprice that was Katya's. Katya did harm but she tended her victims. When she had her accident, for instance, a few days later she tracked down the driver of the other car. Not because the man was hurt; he was up and around
and he was the aggrieved party, since Katya was a danger behind the wheel. She was trying to find out what the connection was between them.

“I don't know, Bev . . .” Stark could see the guy wanted to be let off the hook for bringing her here when somebody else had the place. He wanted persuasion, the bastard. “That would be . . . I don't think we . . .”

“I bet your neighbor just got confused about who was when,” Beverly said.

“So Rosalie's your neighbor, is she?” Stark said heartily.

“No, no, I'm the one,” said Ray, ignoring him. “I'm the one who screwed up. I bet it was next weekend. Jeez.” He grimaced.

Stark was tempted to let him go on in this vein, getting himself into trouble. But Beverly said, “So, can I go get my stuff out of the car?”