And then she couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of him, the stranger with the big hands and secretive eyes, kept scanning the catwalk for the sudden black shadow of him. If he came at seven in the morning, why not at three? What was to prevent him? There was no sound, nothing — the wind had died down and the night was clear and moonless. For the first time since she’d been here, for the first time in three long seasons, she felt naked and vulnerable, exposed in her glass house like a fish in a tank. The night was everything and it held her in its grip.
She thought about Mike then, about the house they’d had when he’d finished his degree and started as an assistant professor at a little state school out in the lost lush hills of Oregon. The house was an A-frame, a cabin with a loft, set down amidst the trees like a cottage in a fairy tale. It was all windows and everywhere you looked the trees bowed down and stepped into the house. The previous owner, an old widower with watery eyes and yellow hair climbing out of his ears, hadn’t bothered with blinds or curtains, and Mike didn’t like that — he was always after her to measure the windows and order blinds or buy the material for drapes. She’d balked. The openness, the light, the sense of connection and belonging: these were the things that had attracted her in the first place. They made love in the dark — Mike insisted on it — as if it were something to be ashamed of. After a while, it was.
Then she was thinking of a time before that, a time before Todd and graduate school, when Mike sat with her in the dormitory lounge, books spread out on the coffee table before them, the heat and murmur of a dozen other couples locking their mouths and bodies together. A study date. For hours she clung to him, the sofa like a boat pitching in a heavy sea, the tease of it, the fumbling innocence, the interminable foreplay that left her wet and itching while the wind screamed beyond the iced-over windows. That was something. The R.A. would flash the lights and it was quarter of one and they would fling themselves at each other, each step to the door drenched in hormones, sticky with them, desperate, until finally he was gone and she felt the loss like a war bride. Until the next night.
Finally — and it must have been two, three in the morning, the Big Dipper tugged down below the horizon, Orion looming overhead — she thought of the stranger who’d spoiled her breakfast. He’d sat there on the corner of the bed; he’d stood beyond the window with his sad bundle of flowers, devouring the sky. As she thought of him, in that very moment, there was a dull light thump on the steps, a faint rustle, movement, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. The seconds pounded in her head and the rustling — it was like the sweep of a broom — was gone, something in the night, a pack rat, the fleeting touch of an owl’s wing. She thought of those hands, the eyes, the square of those shoulders, and she felt herself being drawn down into the night in relief, and finally, in gratitude.
She woke late, the sun slanting across the floor to touch her lips and mask her eyes. Zachary was on the radio with the news that Oakland had clinched the pennant and a hurricane was tearing up the East Coast. “You sound awful,” he said. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Stargazing again, huh?”
She tried out a laugh for him. “I guess,” she said. There was a silence. “Jesus, you just relieved me. I’ve got four more days to put in before I come back down to the ground.”
“Just don’t get mystical on me. And leave me some granola this time, will you? And if you run out, call me. That’s my breakfast we’re talking about. And lunch. And sometimes, if I don’t feel like cooking—”
She cut him off: “Dinner. I know. I will.” She yawned. “Talk to you.”
“Yeah. Over and out.”
“Over and out.”
When she set the kettle on the grill there was gas, but when she turned her back to dig the butter out of the refrigerator, the flame was gone. She tried another match, but there was nothing. That meant she had to switch propane tanks, a minor nuisance. The tanks, which were flown in once a year by helicopter, were located at the base of the stairway, one hundred and fifty steps down. There was a flat spot there, a gap cut into the teeth of the outcrop and overhung on one side by a sloping twenty-foot-high wall of rock. On the other side, the first step was a thousand feet down.
She shrugged into her shorts, and because it was cold despite the sun — she’d seen snow as early as the fifth of September, and the month was almost gone now — she pulled on an oversized sweater that had once belonged to Mike. After she’d moved out she’d found it in a pillowcase she’d stuffed full of clothes. He hadn’t wanted it back. It was windy, and a blast knifed into her when she threw open the door and started down the steps. Big pristine tufts of cumulus hurried across the sky, swelling and attenuating and changing shape, but she didn’t see anything dark enough — or big enough — to portend a storm. Still, you could never tell. The breeze was from the north and the radio had reported a storm front moving in off the Pacific — it really wouldn’t surprise her to see snow on the ground by this time tomorrow. A good snowfall and the fire season would be over and she could go home. Early.
She thought about that — about the four walls of the little efficiency she rented on a dead street in a dead town to be near Todd during the winter — and hoped it wouldn’t snow. Not now. Not yet. In a dry year — and this had been the third dry year in a row — she could stay through mid-November. She reached the bottom of the steps and crouched over the propane tanks, two three-hundred-gallon jobs painted Forestry Service green, feeling depressed over the thought of those four dull walls and the cold in the air and the storm that might or might not develop. There was gooseflesh on her legs and her breath crowded the air round her. She watched a ground squirrel, its shoulders bulky with patches of bright gray fur, dart up over the face of the overhang, and then she unfastened the coupling on the empty tank and switched the hose to the full one.
“Gas problems?”
The voice came from above and behind her and she jumped as if she’d been stung. Even before she whirled round she knew whose voice it was.
“Hey, hey: didn’t mean to startle you. Whoa. Sorry.” There he was, the happy camper, knife lashed to his thigh, standing right behind her, two steps up. This time his eyes were hidden behind a pair of reflecting sunglasses. The brim of the Stetson was pulled down low and he wore a sheepskin coat, the fleecy collar turned up in back.
She couldn’t answer. Couldn’t smile. Couldn’t humor him. He’d caught her out of her sanctuary, caught her out in the open, one hundred and fifty steep and unforgiving steps from the radio, the kitchen knife, the hard flat soaring bed. She was crouching. He towered above her, his shoulders cut out of the sky. Todd was in school. Mike — she didn’t want to think about Mike. She was all alone.
He stood there, the mustache the only thing alive in his face. It lifted from his teeth in a grin. “Those things can be a pain,” he said, the folksy tone creeping into his voice, “those tanks, I mean. Dangerous. I use electricity myself.”
She lifted herself cautiously from her crouch, the hard muscles swelling in her legs. She would have risked a dash up the stairs, all hundred and fifty of them, would have put her confidence in her legs, but he was blocking the stairway — almost as if he’d anticipated her. She hadn’t said a word yet. She looked scared, she knew it. “Still camping?” she said, fighting to open up her face and give him his smile back, insisting on banality, normalcy, the meaningless drift of meaningless conversation.