And you’d know to come and find me there. That was the best part of it-knowing that when you came back and found the trailer taken over by tramps, or empty, you’d guess where I was. That’s if you even had to guess! Standing where I was now and looking across, you’d be able to see me sitting on the jetty, waiting, the cabin door open. Oh, Anna, I can see you watching me. I would hear you the moment you called out for me.
I went back inside and shook Ron.
“Ron! Ron, wake up! Will you help us? Can you get us back over the river? To our new place? Come, come and see. I need to take everything; it will be many times across and back. Please, will you help?”
It was Silva’s idea entirely. I let her excitement enter me; even so, it floated only on the surface of my feelings. Underneath, dread at what I was doing and where it was leading me, like a dragging undertow, pulled and ebbed. I had to get away, and yet I did not go. I did not go. In small, unguarded moments my fear swamped me, physically, leaving me nauseated and struggling for breath. I fought it down; I ascribed it to pregnancy, to shock, to the pure panic of displacement, to anything but my guilt and the need to outdistance it. I denied and resisted it. I was determined to erase the picture in my mind of Col’s face as he stared at the wrecked bridge. I would not test my reasons for disappearing from my life with him, for fear that the ingenuity of my excuses might fail. Yet I did not go.
I had to inhabit the here and now, I told myself, live in the present and pay no heed to the past. So, wanting to believe that the future would take care of itself and that meanwhile constancy to Silva would make me a little less reproachable for what I had done, I went along with her excitement about the new place. Maybe I could be on my way once I’d seen that she was settled and safe. It did not feel like a trick of avoidance, quite, to dwell on her pleasure in her plans for the cabin, and to share in it. It was simply that, for the moment, for the sake of Silva, the baby, and me, I could not leave her now.
Ron set off early along the road to get back to the boat and work his shift, promising to return later. Silva was surprised when I asked if it was all right for her not to turn up for work.
“Sometimes I have other things I have to do,” she told me. “Vi doesn’t care. I’ll go tomorrow.”
“But shouldn’t you call Vi and let her know?”
“Sure, I’ll call.”
I don’t believe she did. Soon we saw again, downstream, bonfire smoke in the air and slow, dark figures moving at the river’s edge, and we began loading Silva’s belongings into bags. With our arms full, we made our trips singly to the old jetty upriver, so that the trailer would not be unattended for even a few minutes. It did not take us long to strip the place; although the jetty was a few hundred yards away over difficult ground and we made several trips each, the bags and implements and tools did not amount to much as a whole family’s belongings. When we had finished, there was nothing to do but wait in the trailer, not just for Ron to finish work but, as he’d warned us, for the tide, which would not be high at the jetty until about six in the evening.
The light was fading when we heard the boat and watched it chug past us and up to the jetty. When it was moored, Ron helped us with the heaviest things. He disconnected the gas burner and brought it along with the tank, and went back for the water containers and mattresses and seating. There was nothing we might not need, he said. The cabin might be completely empty. Silva shrugged. Ron and I exchanged a glance, but neither of us added that it might not even be weather-tight, it might not be habitable at all.
I waited while Ron and Silva took the first load over. Ron returned alone and made four more crossings, bringing me over on the fifth with the last load. The jetty on the far side creaked and swayed, and the white rowing boat moored there was a useless wreck, half-submerged and filled with rotting river flotsam. I could not see how it even stayed afloat.
Silva had been all around the place, trying to peer in through the curtained windows. Up close, the cabin, set on a plain concrete platform, was unromantic. What had looked like silvery, weathered timber from the other side of the river was a scaly wash of gray paint over blistering, prefabricated hardboard. The flat, sloping roof of cracked bitumen sheeting was covered with a ragged blanket of fallen branches and cones and dead pine needles, and bright green streaks ran down the back and side walls as if the embrace of the forest were an encroaching stain. Moss and tree debris clogged the gutters that were supposed to channel rainwater into a covered water barrel at one corner. The door was cheap, with a plastic handle, and was padlocked. Ron had a toolbox in the boat. Now he took a hammer, split the thin paneling around the hasp, and dug into the frame with a chisel until the door hung open.
It struck me later, not at the time, that Ron stepped across the threshold and held the door open as if it were his own place, and that as we followed him in, all his attention was directed to us and not to the room we were all seeing for the first time. The disturbance of stagnant air as we entered raised dust and the warm, peppery smell of wood and linseed, and I sneezed, catching also the sharpness of old fire ash and cigarette smoke. The patchy linoleum floor was grainy with dirt and dead insects and soot blown down from the stove. Ron pulled back the curtains on their sagging wires, watching us like an eager host, scanning our faces for signs of disappointment.
In silence but for the scrape of our feet and the hollow creaking of the floor, we roamed and inspected the place as if each of us were there alone, privately assessing it against the unspoken measure of our own hopes for it, and our own needs. Within the small space, the distances between us expanded and grew vast.
The cabin must once have been a restroom or shelter for forestry workers. A black stove stood in a brick alcove, and a pile of magazines, a bucket of logs, and a poker sat alongside. The magazines, all dedicated, unsurprisingly, to naked girls, were dated between 1999 and 2002. In one corner a plywood tabletop and its two trestles were stacked against the wall next to a shelf holding a beer glass and three pub ashtrays. Two wall boards were marked with fuzzy, darker rectangles where notices and pinups must have been displayed. The gingham curtains bore shadow stripes of pale gray where light had fallen on the original dark blue. They were oddly homey, perhaps made by a wife or a girlfriend; perhaps there had been times when the workers had stayed here overnight. Behind the main room was a windowless kitchen with a sink and plastic-fronted cupboards. A small fridge stood open under the counter, the handle encrusted with dirt and rust. A door at one side led to a tiny vestibule, where a back door, sagging in its frame, led outside. We could have squeezed through it instead of busting the lock on the other door; now both would have to be mended. Off the vestibule there was one other door, behind which was a chemical toilet and a shower of the kind people use in caravans.