Still Mine (3 page)

A
gleaming black pickup truck is parked in the driveway. Clare stops her car at a distance. The Merritt property is large and untended and dotted with old outbuildings, everything on an incline, up or down, the land climbing toward a ridge that gives way to the mountains. Even the house appears to be leaning.

At the slam of her car door, a rottweiler rounds the side of the house in a barking sprint, its teeth bared, eyes two angry slits. Clare cannot fumble fast enough for her car keys. Just as the dog lunges, its leash snaps taut and it flails backwards with a yelp.

“Timber!”

A man leaps off the porch and yanks on the leash to draw the dog back. The hair. A mop of blond gold. He is tall and strong with bulky muscle. His beard is thick, and Clare’s husband was clean shaven; not an exact match, but close. The hair, that same blond hair, the hue golden like a young boy’s, rare among grown men. A knot ties itself in Clare’s stomach.

The man secures the dog to the porch and approaches.

“That’s quite the guard dog,” Clare says.

“He’s trained to scare strangers.”

Clare takes the trailer ad out of her pocket and hands it to him.

“The number was out of service,” she says. “I looked up your address and figured I’d try you.”

“Where’d you get this?”

“At Ray’s. On the notice board. Are you Charlie Merritt?”

“This is five years old.”

“Thought I’d take a chance.”

“On what?”

“That the trailer is still standing. I’m short on options.”

“You moving here?”

“No. Just staying for a bit.”

“You’re the one who showed up at the motel. The so-called photographer.”

“Right. And the motel’s closed. So here I am.”

This morning Clare had washed her face with the last of her bottled water and thrown a cardigan over a clean shirt, strapping her camera over her shoulder. Now the lunging dog has made her edgy, made her tongue dry. In the breeze she can smell gasoline and smoke, the remains of a doused fire.

“Well, thank you anyway,” Clare says.

“Wait a minute. What’s your name?”

“Clare.”

“Clare the photographer. Who sent you here?”

Clare adjusts the strap so her camera rests above her hip. “No one.”

“You’re not on the job?” Charlie asks.

“Do
you
have a job?”

“No one shows up here for no reason,” Charlie says.

“I have my reasons.”

It is written plainly on Charlie’s face as he sizes her up, the sense of intrigue, curiosity. He reaches for her camera, his hand brushing against her sweater as he lifts it and turns it over, gauging its authenticity. Charlie looks to the woods.

“The trailer is still standing. You’d have to rough it.”

“I slept in my car last night. Can’t be rougher than that.”

“I could show it to you.”

“Sure,” Clare says.

The dog lies next to the house and gnaws on something clutched between its paws. Charlie is disheveled, his shirt is dirty, his hair hanging over his eyes. When he starts toward the woods, she follows. From behind, the resemblance to her husband is even stronger, his shoulders the same width and rounded forward. He even walks with the same lumbering gait.

“My father dragged this trailer up the hill twenty years ago,” Charlie says. “Planted a bunch of trees to box it in. Made good rent when the mine was open.”

“Have you always lived here?” Clare asks to Charlie’s back.

“Forever.”

Charlie stands aside so that Clare might walk up the hill in front of him.

“I ran hydro up here last year. For something to do.”

The trailer is an old silver Airstream, thirty feet long and resting on cinder blocks. A fire pit has been dug in front, three lopsided lawn chairs clustered around it. Clare can see a makeshift shower, a steel vat held on a platform between two tall pines, the showerhead directly below it, nature’s water pressure.

“Water’s clean enough to drink. No hot, though. Unless you boil it.”

Charlie yanks the trailer’s rounded door open and ushers Clare in.

“I could change the propane tank for you, I guess. I’ve got a spare somewhere.”

The trailer feels surprisingly roomy on the inside, a kitchenette and a little seating area, the bedroom to one end and the toilet to the other. The stench brings tears to Clare’s eyes. She pries open the curtains, releasing a poof of dust that prompts a coughing fit.

“Pretty grim,” Charlie says. “It’s been empty a while.”

“It’ll need a once-over.”

“I can get you some cleaning supplies. Bedsheets and whatever.”

Of course, Clare thinks, it would never occur to Charlie to clean it himself.

“I’ll give you fifty bucks for a week,” Clare says.

“I’d say a hundred is fair.”

“I’d say fifty is better than nothing.”

“Fine,” Charlie says. “Fifty. Fine.”

Clare fishes the money from her backpack and hands it to him, a share of the kitty Malcolm gave her at the diner.

“And I park my car down by you?”

“As far up to the woods as you can pull it.” Charlie rubs his beard. “What else? Keep the windows open if you turn on the burners. The stove’s old. You don’t want to get gassed.”

“You have neighbors up here?” Clare risks asking.

“Only to the north. Through the line of birch trees. We’re not very neighborly.”

“Bad blood?”

“You could say that.”

Clare thinks of the waitress, the way she leaned forward in the booth, stirring the pot with her tidbits. Bad blood. Clare’s husband would fit in well here.

“Be wary of the old man. He’s been known to point a gun at me if my dog so much as takes a piss in his general vicinity,” Charlie says. “It’s just your typical small-town crap.”

“I get it.”

Clare would like to press him, but she must pace herself. Charlie shifts and scratches at his mess of hair.

“You look like someone I know,” he says.

“So do you.”

Charlie laughs. “I don’t hear that too often.”

Tension passes between them, two strangers alone in close proximity. Charlie doesn’t seem menacing, but Clare can’t trust her instincts with men, won’t let herself be fooled by friendly banter. Neither Charlie nor his dog would be so easily defanged.

“I’ll get you a key,” he says. “And a couple of flashlights.”

“I thought you said there was hydro.”

“For outside. These woods get pretty dark. You got a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Reception’s spotty. Walk up the hill. You might get lucky.”

“What about your dog? Is he going to attack me?”

“I’ll introduce you. Let him pick up your scent. He doesn’t bite friends.”

It is unexpected, the warmth that comes to Clare, the familiarity of his smile. Charlie starts back down the hill. Clare lifts the camera and clicks at his back, then angles her gaze upward, absorbing the landscape that surrounds her. She digs for her phone, its signal bars flat. It is still morning. Malcolm said he would send word within two days. Clare could always make contact first, walk these hills in search of a signal, punch in an account of events so far that might suit him.
I’
m settling in.
Any words she could muster to avoid sounding distressed.

Back at her car, Clare finds a bucket filled with cleaning supplies and a garbage bag of clean sheets he left for her on the hood. Charlie emerges from the house and introduces Clare to Timber, allowing the dog to sniff around her legs. Then he hands her a flimsy-looking key and heads back to his porch, settling in with a beer. Clare collects her bag and whatever else lay strewn in the car, possessions few enough that she can drag them up the hill in two trips. She fishes her camera case from the trunk, the few rolls of film she’d been able to find along the way jammed into it. Her camera belonged to her brother, a gadgety old film contraption, small and portable enough, the only thing she’d taken from home.

Her brother. Christopher.

It was Christopher who taught her how to develop a roll of film in his makeshift cellar darkroom, who taught her how to frame shots, to focus on the unexpected subject, to forgo the immediacy of digital. Christopher lives in the family home now, Clare’s father transplanted to a cabin at the property’s rear corner after Clare’s nephew was born. The last time Clare saw her brother he’d clicked his front door closed, her money handed over. He was tired of it, of forgiving Clare over and over for the same lapses, of keeping his family shielded from the worst of it. He was scared of what she might do. You can’t change what you did, Christopher said. Clare imagines her brother now thinks her dead. She hopes her nephew doesn’t remember much of her, that Christopher changed the story in her absence, rendering her a better person, allowing the truth to dissolve into her nephew’s young memory.

Only one day in Blackmore and already it feels harder to stave it off, these memories that blindside her. Though it forces her to stay composed, Clare has to admire the unabashed way Charlie surveys her from his perch. She makes a show of hauling the darkroom starter kit from her trunk, a yard-sale find at some town in between, and heaving it in a circle so that Charlie might read the box. After slamming the trunk closed she carries the box to the trailer, swerving against its weight, surprised at herself for hoping Charlie will follow.

By the time she reaches the trailer again, her legs burn and her back is sticky with sweat. She drops the darkroom kit next to the fire pit. These woods are replete with color, greens and yellows and browns. Without Charlie standing in front of her, without that blond hair as a trigger, Clare’s physical memory of her husband evaporates. How has her mind so quickly rubbed out such a familiar face? What does Jason picture when he thinks of her? Clare doubts he could conceive of mountains as vast as these. He’d never give her credit for getting this far. He might only think her dead or lost rather than running.

Clare digs the folded poster from her pocket. Odds are that a woman missing for weeks is dead, but Clare stands in these ghostly woods as proof that this isn’t always the case. Sometimes people vanish for good reason, leaving an entire life behind to escape just one part of it. Clare can feel Shayna’s story weaving into her thoughts, however it varies from hers. She can picture Shayna in the gorge, alive, others with her. Clare sees that part clearly. But she cannot see what happened next; Shayna dead, or lost, or running.

T
he trailer is hot. It takes all of Clare’s might to pry the windows open. When she succeeds, the effect is a decent cross breeze. Outside the trailer Clare strings a length of rope between two trees and hangs the blankets she’d found on the bed. Though they’re moth-eaten and ragged, Clare can tell by the stitching that these quilts are handmade, probably by a mother for her young sons, both blue, one themed with trains and the other with trucks. Clare finds a long stick in the woods and beats the dust from them until their patterns brighten.

At the back of the sink cabinet Clare finds a sticky trap coated with the mangy corpses of two dead mice. The stench makes her gag. She flings the trap out the door, and the rotten smell that’s hung in the trailer since she arrived is instantly gone. When the kettle whistles she goes back inside and fills the bucket with boiling water. Starting at one end and working her way on hands and knees to the other, Clare scrubs ceiling to floor, windows and countertops, cupboards and drawers, every nook and corner in this small space. When is the last time anyone cleaned here? Men don’t like mess, Clare’s mother would say, but they sure can tolerate filth.

When she’s finished Clare carries the bucket and cleaning supplies down the hill and sets them on the front steps of the house. Charlie’s perch is empty, the truck gone, the dog too. Charlie appears to live alone, and Clare knows that a man alone in his family home speaks to some kind of mitigating event, a tragedy or a death or an exodus, in this case an exploded mine with Charlie’s family inside it. When Clare met her husband, he’d been living alone on his parents’ farm for years, acting the part of the orphan, unable to cope with the basic logistics of a household, an only child whose father got drunk and veered his car into the path of an oncoming truck—swerving, purposefully or not, so that the truck would hit his wife’s side first.

When the insurance settlement came through, Jason bought himself a pickup truck, no hired help or vacations, though he was flush with money. He rented his fields to a farmer up the road and took a job in a factory. A lot of money and only a truck to show for it. She’d admired that in him, taken it as a sign of humility. After they were married, Clare moved in and took the reins on the house and its care. She found her mother’s cleaning habits had sunk in, that she too carried the need to scrub.

In the trailer bedroom Clare stuffs her things under the bed and drops Malcolm’s folder on the counter. Clipped together under the photographs of Shayna are the news articles about the mine accident. A blast at the Blackmore Coal Mine five years ago killed thirty-two men and trapped eighteen others underground for three weeks. Clare flips through the clippings. The photographs of the mine site show cranes and bulldozers, the rescue crew in hard hats, huddled together, faces strained by the uncertainty of what lay beneath them, how many dead or alive. Until they could make contact below, there was no body count. The story still cried out for a happy ending.

Though it must have been international news, Clare has only vague memories of this story. Five years ago was the summer she was married, leaving her no time to take in the miseries of the outside world. No one she knew back home read the newspaper—nighttime television was reserved for game shows and sports—all of them well versed in ignoring anyone’s misfortunes but their own.

In a later article, photos of the thirty-two dead line up alphabetically down the page. Midway Clare finds the three photographs with the Merritt name, each one with that same golden hair as Charlie. Clare scans the text. “Russell Merritt and his two sons found dead. A third son, also a miner, was off shift at the time of the accident.” Charlie.