Just Friends (46 page)

People streamed past her as she stood in the rain, muttering and shouting at her to get out of the way. Freya looked around her—at the cars, the lights, the buildings that stretched out and out, up and up. This was a big city, full of people. If Cat abandoned her, she could find another friend.

Yet still Freya didn’t move. She had a sudden, fearful vision of this whole, huge sea of humanity receding farther and farther away until she was left standing quite alone, marooned on a desert island of her own making. Freya hugged her coat tight as the rain spattered and bounced. Either she could retreat to her silent apartment and lock herself in, alone and safe; or she could go back up to Cat and Michael, dispel the shadow she had cast on their happiness, and readmit herself into their lives. Which was it to be?

CHAPTER 32

Jack slowed the car on the rutted track, braked to a halt, and reached for the piece of paper on which he had scrawled directions to the cabin. This was the third time he had stopped in the last hour: once to fix a flat tire, once to move a sunbathing turtle gently out of his path, and now to check if he was as lost as he felt.

He’d been to the mountains before, naturally. The Madisons had a place down near Asheville, a summer playground for moneyed Carolinians where Jack had spent vacations swimming and rafting with his brother Lane. As a student, he’d come roistering up here with friends, to ski in winter and hang out in summer, listening to bluegrass and country bands. But he’d never been so far north before, practically within hiking distance of Virginia and Tennessee. And he’d never come alone.

Jack gazed out across the scene with a flicker of misgiving. Blue afternoon shadows lay on the steep, wooded hillsides. Down in the valley the grass looked smooth and soft as billiard-table baize. A dark, snaking line of pine and dogwood marked the course of the New River, and far in the distance he caught the greenish gleam of its rushing passage. The country was beautiful, but wild and lonely. The comfortable, cutesy resort towns had petered out. For the last several miles he’d climbed steadily along winding dirt-and-gravel roads, past apple orchards and Christmas tree plantations, past tiny white-steepled churches and lonely farmsteads with their big red barns and grazing cattle. There didn’t seem to be a lot of holiday cabins, as Jack understood the phrase. Still, he’d burned his boats now. His apartment was in the hands of a realtor; his belongings were in storage—all except the things in the trunk of his car. The car itself he had rented at the airport in Charlotte, and would return to the nearest drop-off point as soon as he found an old jalopy to buy. Studying the map again, Jack concluded that he was on the right road, unpromising as it looked. He pulled on a battered fishing hat to shade his eyes from the sun, and pressed on.

It hadn’t taken him more than twelve hours back in New York to realize that he had to get out of the city. After Cornwall, Manhattan’s frenetic pace jarred; everyone, it seemed, had a purpose except himself. The double-whammy of losing his allowance and his book contract meant that he couldn’t afford to stay anyway. Most tormenting of all was the knowledge that Freya was on this same island, only a mile or two away, despising him. He could almost sniff her corrosive contempt in the grimy air.
Lazy . . . spoiled . . . dilettante.

What he needed, he decided, was a writer’s retreat—nothing fancy, just somewhere peaceful so he could shut himself away with his computer and concentrate on his novel, free of city distractions and mundane household responsibilities. His stepmother Lauren lived in Virginia now, in a very pleasant, comfortable house which she left each day to work as head of an outreach program for disadvantaged and “problem” children; it occurred to Jack that her guest room might be the perfect place, and he called her up to suggest it. To his chagrin, Lauren did not share his enthusiasm for this plan. In fact, her questions about his sudden desperation to leave New York and devote himself to his writing were uncomfortably probing. That was the trouble with intelligent women: they could never accept a simple statement at face value; they always had to read their own meanings into the smallest nuance.

“Don’t tell me someone’s got under your skin at last, Jack,” she’d drawled affectionately, as Jack’s explanations became increasingly tortuous. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he had responded gruffly.

Still, Lauren had come up with the goods. Within twenty-four hours she’d called him back with an offer, which she strongly recommended he accept. A friend of hers owned an old vacation place up in the mountains that had been in the family for generations. Last year the cabin had been broken into by survivalists on the run from the police, and no one had got around to fixing it up. There was no electricity, and her friend wasn’t sure exactly what state it was in, but Jack was welcome to stay there rent-free so long as he repaired the house and made it secure. Jack had accepted eagerly, fantasizing himself into the role of a latter-day Thoreau, Southern-style—at one with nature, free to let his imagination roam unfettered, the epitome of rugged American individualism.

There was a hand-painted sign coming up on the left. Jack pushed his glasses into position and ducked his head to peer through the windshield. FEED STORE, he read. Good. According to his directions, he was to drive a further mile, then turn right by the twin pines and keep going until he reached the cabin. He felt a surge of excitement; the adventure was about to begin. And here at last was the private track, so overgrown that he almost missed it. He heard the whisper of long grass and the crunch of pine needles under the tires. Overhead, the trees grew close, admitting random shafts of deep golden light. He gunned the car up a sudden incline, rounded one bend, then another, then coasted to a stop as his foot slid off the accelerator in shock. Ahead of him was a miniature forest of shoulder-high hogweed, above which he could just discern a sloping tin roof swathed in creepers and the upper half of rough log walls, with the outline of a window crudely barricaded by crisscross planking. Jack stared. This wasn’t a place where one could spend a vacation. It was barely a cabin. It was a shack, a wreck.

Switching off the car engine, he swung the car door open and climbed out. Silence enveloped him like a shroud, and for a moment he experienced something akin to panic. Then he pulled himself together, excavated the jack from the trunk of the car and used it to beat a path to the narrow raised porch and pry off the defensive planks from the front door opening. Behind, the door itself hung ajar off broken hinges. Jack took a step inside, ducking in alarm as a bird swooped out of the gloom and flew past his head. He was now standing in a biggish room, maybe fifteen feet by twenty, with roughly sawn floor and walls. At one end was a square pine table and a rickety gas stove; at the other, pulled close to the stone fireplace, were two chairs and a couch with the stuffing half torn out of them. Either the survivalists had had a fight, or small creatures had found a very cozy spot to make their nests. There were mouse droppings everywhere, as well as drifts of dead leaves and a choking layer of dust. Jack discovered two small windows, covered by makeshift shutters, and a further door that led into a tiny back room, furnished with a bare bedstead, a plain country chair, and a splintered rail that must once have been used for hanging clothes. That was it.

Jack went back outside and sat on the porch steps, fighting down his dismay. He wondered about trying to find an inn or a hotel, just for tonight, but it would be dark in an hour and the likelihood was that he would get lost first. Anyway, that would merely postpone the problem, and he didn’t have money to squander. The key question was whether he was going to stick this out, or give up now. A rustle in the bushes made him look up. A groundhog had emerged from the undergrowth and was sitting on its backside, front paws hanging limp, potbellied and inquisitive as an old man. It stared at Jack and Jack stared back. In his head he heard his own voice explaining,
“You see, I was going to finish my book, but unfortunately the cabin was uninhabitable. I always wanted to be a writer, but unfortunately I ran out of time. I was going to do something different from my father, but it didn’t work out. There was this woman I always liked, but . . .”
Woodland noises resumed as he sat for a long time, thinking. Finally he gave the groundhog a comradely nod. “You and me, pal,” he said, and rose purposefully to his feet.

He used the remaining span of daylight to gather a stack of brushwood, reconnoiter a source of water, and sweep out the cabin with a surprisingly serviceable broom located in a lean-to shed. When the mosquitoes began to bite and the bats to swoop, he exchanged his shorts for jeans, pulled on an old sweater, and carried a selection of items from the car to the cabin. By the time he had finally wedged the broken door shut, the sky was black as pitch. Clouds had drifted in on the evening breeze, obscuring the stars and a fingernail of moon. Jack built himself a fire, more for light and comfort than warmth, and sat on his sleeping bag in front of it, munching his way through a megasandwich, two apples, and a package of Krispy Kreme doughnuts while he made a list of all the things he would need to buy tomorrow. Outside, the temperature dropped and the wind rose. Unknown creatures crashed in the woods outside (deer? possums? skunks?
black bear??
). Around ten o’clock it began to rain. Raindrops pinged on the tin roof and dripped through multiple leaks. The chimney smoked ferociously. Jack took off his shoes and slid fully clothed into the sleeping bag, resting his head on his folded jacket and staring into the flickering flames. Arthur Miller, he remembered, had built his own cabin with his own hands before moving into it to write
Death of a Salesman
. Jack conceded that he was not Arthur Miller; he would never get to marry Marilyn Monroe, for one. But his Madison pride was seeping back. He would not be beaten.

It took him five days to make the cabin livable. He fixed the small generator that pumped water up from a hillside spring, scythed the hogweed flat and piled it in the woods, patched up the roof and rehung the door. He replaced the mosquito screens and cleared the chimney of birds’ nests. In the small, sleepy local town he bought a secondhand stove and fridge plus the gas canisters to fuel them, and invested in three brand-new kerosene lamps. He got himself a fishing license and a stack of local maps with the hiking trails marked. He solved the problem of a bed by slinging a hammock across one corner of the cabin, and was almost getting used to sleeping in it. The small back room he turned into his study, with a desk made from an old door propped on sawn rounds of pine logs, securely nailed. Parked outside under the trees stood his new vehicle, a wheezy pickup bought cheap on account of the way it had been painted by its previous hippie-girl owners—screaming pink decorated with flowers. Farm boys on tractors honked their scorn as he passed. Jack just grinned back and turned up the yingle-dangle-doo music on his radio.

Finally he was ready to start writing. His portable typewriter sat square and neat on the makeshift desk, alongside a high stack of virgin paper and several folders containing his notes and unfinished manuscript. Jack made a ceremony of his first day of real work. He got up early, shaved in front of the mirror he had hung on a tree outside, fixed himself coffee and a ham-and-eggs breakfast, dressed in shorts and a clean T-shirt, and seated himself in his bare wooden cell. Pumped full of hope and determination, he reached for a folder and took out the familiar manuscript. Ah, yes. “The ship lumbered into harbor . . .”

Five hours later, Jack slammed his hand on the desk in frustration and strode outside to the front porch, glowering at the magnificent view. He was still stuck. The story was there, but it was dead on the page; he could not breathe life into it. For the rest of that day and the next two days Jack wrestled with the problem, scribbling phrases, typing paragraphs, rolling paper into his typewriter and tearing it out again, to screw up and toss away. He wondered if he should change the ending—or the beginning—or rewrite the whole book in the first person. Sweat poured off him as the July sun beat on the tin roof and turned his study into an oven. He cursed himself for all the hours he’d wasted back in New York when he could have been writing in comfort, with all the conveniences of air-conditioning and a computer. Yet he craved distraction, and had to practically tie himself to the chair to stop himself jumping in the truck and driving into town for a beer and companionship. Time was ticking by. On a budget of fifty dollars a week, his money might just last for three months. This time, his deadline was immovable.

On the fourth day he rose at first light, pulled on his hiking boots and slung a rucksack over his shoulders, and set off into the woods. Morning cloud hung thick and damp over the trees. The pine-spiced air was alive with the whistle of birds and gurgle of cold, clear streams. Once he surprised a herd of deer, who bounded off in a flurry of white rumps. His eyes absorbed the scenery, as a strengthening sun turned it from misty sepia to vibrant color, but his mind was focused on the story he was trying to write. It hung there like a hologram: he could see it, but he couldn’t feel it. As the miles passed and the path wound upward, Jack’s thoughts began to drift—childhood memories, scenes from movies, whether he had enough bread to last the week, and then—without warning—Freya. He had been trying to shut her out of his thoughts, but suddenly she was achingly close. He could feel the bouquet in his hands, the prick of thorns; he could see the twist of her body as she clutched the sink.
“You have no respect for the human heart.”
The memory brought shame and tenderness, regret and self-doubt in a powerful, swirling mix.