Then I seen myself. Me, and Dad, and Scott, the three of us in the cab of the truck as we careened toward Jesse. It wasn’t his calm that kept him from moving but fatigue. I felt it, I become it. From the time I had spent in the woods, spying on this family, I had noticed that even though the paint on the house was peeling and the dog yard needed a good cleaning and there was a truck up on blocks in the drive, the kids seemed healthy and relaxed. Safe. The man coming toward me, saying, Help you?, he should of been scary, big as he was. The closer he come, though, the more certain I felt this man wasn’t dangerous or hateful. When he questioned me, suspicious as he was, his eyes seemed kind. Everything here telling me this place might be safe, at least for now. Even as the memory of so many other so-called safe situations going sour nagged at me. Help you? he said and I found my voice. I hope so.
You okay? Helen said.
I wiped at my face. Cleared my throat. Fine. Reckon dinner’s ready.
I started for the house without her, wishing not for dinner but for the ermine I’d just skinned. Since Helen was with me, I hadn’t drunk from it, but now I wished I’d found a way. Anything to blot out everything Jesse carried with him. What I carried with me now. Having him round was trouble, I was certain. But I couldn’t send him away, neither, knowing what I knew. Not if it meant another road, another sleepless night.
10
If I do nothing else before I die, I will see the northern lights.
i’ve seen them, you know. the northern lights.
What were they like?
like p.k. says. only stranger. like the sky is breathing light.
I can’t wait to see them. There’s so much.
so much?
World. Stuff I want to see. Stuff I want to do. Places I want to go.
Two different handwritings. Two different voices, two people talking back and forth. I could see it now that I was really paying attention, not just to what was wrote in the margins of Jesse’s Kleinhaus book but how it was wrote. Both in blue pen, one handwriting smaller than the other. I’d seen Jesse draw plenty, his tiny but neat writing describing the parts of the dog wheel he’d designed, the careful letters labeling the bins he’d organized in the kennel. So one set of notes was most likely Jesse’s. But the other?
It wasn’t late but Dad was already asleep. Helen had stayed after supper a good while, the four of us drug out a board game we hadn’t played since long before Mom died. Then we’d waved Helen down the drive. When the sound of her Jeep’s engine grew faint, Dad give me a look like he wanted to say something. Instead he put an arm round me, give me a squeeze, then announced he was awful tired, he thought he’d turn in early.
I took the Kleinhaus book with me downstairs, out the back door. Jesse’s lamp was lit. I walked the short distance to the shed, lining words up inside my head in neat rows then kicking them apart when they didn’t come out the way I aimed. I was outside his door before I wanted to be, could hear him rustling round inside.
I knocked.
He flushed when he seen me. His eyes gray as storm clouds.
Wordlessly, I held up the Kleinhaus book.
He stepped aside then, and I come in.
He’d found himself a new pack somewhere along the way and though he didn’t have too many belongings, they was all laid out on his table. His notebook and stub of pencil, a couple adventure novels, pairs of underwear and socks. Comb, harmonica.
You taking off? I asked.
He brushed past me and carried on packing.
You don’t have to, I said.
His face was red, sweat trickling down the side. He had to be hot, the sides of the woodstove glowed red, and he was dressed in his usual way, a too-big sweater over a flannel shirt. I had joked to Dad once about Jesse’s uniform, and Dad said, quiet, You ever stop to think that’s all the clothes he’s got? Later, he give Jesse some of his old shirts and a pair of Carhartts that was too small for him but plenty large on Jesse. Now I seen how his clothes was a sort of camouflage. Jesse was like them critters whose coats are brown in the summer but turn white in the winter to match the snow. They’re just about impossible to see even when they’re right in front of you.
I tossed the Kleinhaus book on the bed. I’ve read that book maybe twenty times, I said. You think I would of recognized parts of that story when I heard them.
He’d finished packing everything but the Kleinhaus book. Carried the pack across the small space then waited, watching me.
My dad don’t know nothing about you, I told him and it come out sounding like a threat, so I added, And I ain’t going to say nothing. To anyone.
He finally spoke up. Unless?
Unless what?
He stayed by the door. In case he needed to run, I realized. He’d been here before, tense and distrustful as someone used his secret like an object, something to trade for something else.
Unless nothing, I said. I ain’t warning you. Or threatening you. You can trust me.
But I heard the words in my head, said by a half dozen different voices. The plunging in his stomach when it turned out not to be true.
His hand on the doorknob, wariness radiated off of him.
You like it here, don’t you? I asked. You like my dad. You wouldn’t work so hard to make things nicer round here if you didn’t want to stay.
It doesn’t matter now, he said.
I sat down on his cot, the spot farthest from him. If you corner a nervous animal, even if you got good intentions, it won’t come to you willingly. Even your own dogs are likely to snap at you if they feel hemmed in and threatened.
Listen, I said. I don’t give a damn one way or the other. Stay or go. But I also know you. I know you want to stay. And I know you never lived in Maine with your grandparents. You never lived in Montana. You never went anywhere in your life, till you run off from home.
Congratulations, Jesse said. You can read.
Every muscle in him tense. He didn’t have no reason to trust me, specially when I had something on him. I could put us on equal ground, I realized, if I give him a secret of my own. I sighed.
I know stuff that ain’t in that book, too, I told him. I know you wish you could step out of your own skin sometimes. Take it off, like a coat. I didn’t get that from a book.
Jesse’s shoulders dropped the tiniest bit.
I know something happened between you and Tom Hatch, I went on. Behind the barn. Something bad. He hurt you. And you hurt him back.
The wood in the stove cracked loud in the still cabin. Jesse winced. How?
There’s two ways to get to know someone, I told him. One way, you learn them through their words and actions.
I dug into my pocket. It was awkward, seated on the bed like I was. But I didn’t want him to spook when I took out my knife. I laid it on the foot of the cot, closer to him than to me.
He glanced at it. The other way? he asked.
I can show you.
A long silence as he studied me. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking back to a moment in the woods when he come upon something he shouldn’t of seen. If he already knew my secret. I thought of the day I taught him how to handle Zip, how he’d reacted when I told him seventeen was awfully young to travel clear across the country alone. You’re seventeen, aren’t you? And you spend almost every day alone in the woods. A lot of people would ask about that. His eyes, unreadable as ever. I braced my hands against the stiff mattress, held myself where I was, against the urge to take the knife and cut past my own wondering into the truth of him.