The Remedy for Love: A Novel (22 page)

Forty-Three

THEY LAY CRUSHED
together in surprise. The cookstove smoked where its chimney had been torn away. “Here we go,” Eric said firmly. They scrabbled up the inclined floor, collected Inness’s clothing, collected every garment they had—the clothing would keep them alive—put it on piece by piece and very fast, Inness her underpants backward, her jeans, her shirt, the robe, Eric his sports jacket, Inness the smelly coat, Eric the wool blanket. Dressed, their sense of emergency began to abate: the cabin wasn’t moving any further, though you didn’t want to stay: the loose edge of the roof might easily fall; the floor was cocked at a crazy angle; the sky was up there where the loft had been.

“Let’s keep moving,” Eric said. “Food. And find your cap, your cap!”

She found it, also his gloves. She said, “Holy shit,” and just kept repeating it.

Eric found the FedEx envelope under the stove and stuffed it up under the blanket and into back of his pants, loosened his belt to accommodate the bulk, tightened it back again. He found the jar he’d put water in unbroken.

She found the extra tortillas and the bag of carrots and the jar of peanut butter amid kitchen debris. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”

“Calories are heat,” Eric said. “Let’s take everything we can.”

They stuffed their food finds into a doubled plastic grocery bag, hurry, hurry,
holy shit
was right. Eric dumped out a loose jar of dry beans on the floor, scooped another quart of water from beneath the broken ice in the slipper tub, capped it. He stuffed that into another bag along with the nearly empty jar of peanut butter and one apple, grabbed the two oranges still left, upturned the slipper tub onto the ashes and coals that had spilled on the floor, the absolute end of their fire and water, one gesture. He remembered the duct tape—found a roll under the drainboard, jammed it in his jacket pocket. And then they scrabbled up to the high edge of the floor where the side wall had slid away, climbed down and right into Eric’s snow yard, its surface nice and hard and dry, barely dawn, the first sun in the very tops of the highest trees across the river.

Inness said it one more time: “Holy fucking shit.”

But they were safely outside, their heavy breaths coming in clouds of steam.

Heaped in his blanket, Eric kept running through an inventory in his head. Their shoes! His would be somewhere under the wood stove. Hers, no clue. The rain boots were in the shed covered in duct tape. They hurried to the makeshift door he’d cut: great danger of their socks getting wet as their feet heated the hardened snow. The shed was whole, only torn from its mother ship and a little twisted—it had never been a show building. A show building would have been dragged into the sky. Inside it, up high on the workbench, Inness helped him arrange the blanket into a cloak with a big pocket on the shoulders, duct-taped the whole generously so it would keep its shape, tucked their bag of food into the pocket, their jars of water. She packed his feet wrapped in pieces of scarf into the rubber boots, duct tape, duct tape, duct tape. They trimmed squares off the train of his blanket, no discussion, wrapped her feet over her warm wool socks, made shoes out of duct tape, ten layers, slipped her feet into the child-size pair of water skis, duct tape, duct tape.

She put her hands inside his blanket and then inside his shirt and he flinched at the cold and at the thought she’d find the FedEx mailer and the letters he’d salvaged, but she did not and soon her hands warmed. He gave her his fine leather gloves—like evidence in an O. J. Simpson trial at that point, but still functional—and she taped his feet to his skis generously. She had her Rasta cap, not warm, but the old coat had a hood, too loose: duct tape, duct tape. They could smell smoke from the stove; he thought of those hot coals on the floor in there, very doubtful he’d gotten them all put out.

“Gotta go,” Inness said. “I mean, I’ve really gotta go.”

“All right. And while you do I’ll go back in, see what we’ve forgotten.”

“You’re not going back in there!”

“Matches, for one thing.”

“I burned all the matches. I’m so sorry, Eric. I’m so sorry.”

“Okay, but I’ll make sure the fire’s out.”

“You’re not going back in there.”

“I need something for a hat.”

“You’re
not,
you’re
not,
you’re
not.
Do you hear me? You’re not going back in there!”

She was right about that: he was already taped into his skis. She turned effortfully on the bench in her own skis and shuffled them out the door he’d made. Eric quick grabbed the calendar off the wall, folded it closed, the August girl safely inside, tucked the thing back behind him under the blanket and under his shirt with the letters from Jim, a lot of fuss for talismans. Finally he got himself aimed at the makeshift door and shuffled out. Inness had waited for him, but now she tested her water skis, slid them awkwardly step-by-step to the snow-carved lady’s room. From the privacy of his own pretend outhouse he could see the cabin—the giant fallen pine trunks had shifted maybe three feet. The front wall had been pushed back, but was otherwise intact, the door swung open to nothing but snow. The entire rest of the cabin was tilted hard, almost forty-five degrees, the window side hanging over the river, nothing to stop it but the huge mountain of snow that had slid off that side of the roof in the night, more than precarious.

Danielle had eaten his ring. He laughed and kept laughing. Tomorrow, if they survived, maybe she could recover it.

“What’s so funny?” she called.

“You ate my ring.”

And then she was laughing, too.

Reunited, they stood side by side and ate more: tortillas with peanut butter. They sipped some of their water, broke into giggles, a function of spent adrenaline, he thought, not a word between them. After a while, the cabin groaning and creaking ominously, she pulled off her wedding ring—not the diamond ring below it, that she would keep—offered it to him. It was very small compared to his, hardly a Cheerio’s worth. He ate it. And that ended anything funny about it. They gazed at one another, but briefly.

And grew anxious simultaneously. Her Advil! His Leatherman knife! Both were in the cabin somewhere, necessary survival tools. He said so and she said, “No, no. Eric. No, no, no.” Like she was talking to a grade-school kid.

The cabin lurched and lifted, the cement piers giving way and falling. Eric and Inness shuffled backward and away in their skis. The cabin lurched again. And then the heavy bank of snow holding it on the precipice over the river let go, a secondary avalanche straight into the river. All that snow formed an island that slowly became saturated and rolled and sank, moving downstream quickly.

Like a toboggan, very slowly at first, then gaining momentum, Professor DeMarco’s family cabin slid off the high rock bank, the roof collapsing with a roar and clatter as it progressed, slid until the heavy beam of the front sill almost touched the coursing river, then slid a little more, notch by notch till the sill was dipping in. And then a little more, and more yet, enough finally that the deep current caught hold. The cabin jerked and turned, spun sideways, then fell the rest of the way off the bank with groans and sighs and the cracking of boards, spun in the river current, bumping and heaving, began to break into pieces.

“Holy shit,” Inness said. “That was
us,
mister.”

Forty-Four

HER SKIS WERE
bright red, very wide. His were blue, narrower, might have been sporty back in the fifties or even the forties when they were bought, back when the flats dam was still in place and people boated down here. He had his hoe; she had two bamboo poles he’d broken mosquito torches off of, everything secured with duct tape, plenty of damn duct tape. His shoulder was already sore again. They crossed between the flattened cement piers of the missing house, and then they were on their way. He found the path he’d started. They looked back—you had to look back before you moved forward. The cabin had gotten stuck out in the middle of the river, three big pieces that would eventually be reduced.

Holy shit was right.

Those first thousand feet were heartening, smooth and fairly easy in the hardened track he’d made the day before. Inness immediately said that her ankle hurt, but only that once. He thought of her tossing everything out of the loft, grinned, couldn’t help it: if they’d been up there when the cabin fell, they would most certainly be dead, or worse: hurt very badly and about to drown. Little stabs of regret: the Advil, various items of food, his Leatherman.

Well, fuck that. “My house by nightfall,” he said. And he kept repeating positive thoughts: “We’ll have hot showers when we arrive.” And, “If the road isn’t plowed, there’s that big house by the bridge. If no one’s home, we break in.” And, “Steady progress.”

Inness kept up a stream of curses, but she didn’t make fun of him, didn’t complain. A leader’s a leader and Eric had assumed command. And she didn’t say a word about Jimmy’s letters, Obama’s letter, K-Bomb’s. You’d think she’d wonder where they were, or care.

The long curve in the river was as easy as it had looked—windswept sand, just a few inches of snow. But of course all that snow had been blown downstream, and so their progress slowed in the next leg, slowed further, one step at a time, long rests. The sun finally reached them, warmed their backs. Eric pressed his chest through the drifts ahead, moved a ski forward, moved the other forward, pressed his chest into the drift ahead, always keeping an eye on the river—at least they couldn’t get lost—feeling with the hoe handle for holes and obstacles, skirting rocks, skirting the tops of tall shrubs that tangled him. Inness had it easier behind him, but that was only relative. He felt impressed with her uncomplaining courage.

She said, “Do I stay with Patty Cardinal tonight?”

“Later for Patty,” he said after a few steps. “I have a guest room. You’ll have your own bed.”

A few more steps. “And a bathtub?”

“And a Jacuzzi, never used. All to yourself.”

“And I’d like a massage.”

“Well,” Eric said, her tattoo coming unbidden to mind, that ribbon of ink. He pressed forward through the snow.

“That’s a joke,” Inness said at length. “No massage. You keep your fucking hands off me, mister.”

“Yo,” Eric said.

They made a few more yards of progress.

She said, “And you have, like, cognac.”

“Scotch, I think it is. A client gave me a bottle of thirty-year-old something-something, supposed to be very
smooooooth.
”

“We will drink in moderation, mister.”

The banter was good; it kept up their spirits. They worked through a difficult stretch, came out of it, proceeded.

Inness said, “In your house. Are there a million photos of Alison?”

“Probably a few, yes.”

She thought about that. “Well, you go in first. You go around and take down the photos. Easier than a tattoo. Just do it. All the wedding shots, all the shots of her family, all the cute kisses on the back of some motor scooter you rented on some honeymoon island, and put them away where I won’t ever see them not ever.”

“Roger.”

“And don’t use military lingo.”

“Check.”

And again they giggled, not for long. They came to another wind-cleared sandbar after several torturous hours of the deep stuff, scant progress. Eric was wary of resting, but they stopped long enough to sit down on exposed rocks and drink small amounts of water, tear up tortillas and eat them, open an orange, drink more water, eat snow.

Forty-Five

THEY GOT A
workable rhythm going, and in fact the way was inexpressibly beautiful. Twice more they had to stop to laugh, snow caving in all around them, just something funny about swimming out of drifts with their arms. The sun grew warmer, and then warmer yet, and then the danger was sweating, and increasingly wet clothes. Heavy drifts then bare areas, slow progress then quick, no progress at all at the old dam site and so turn back, try a new route, success, the river roaring at their sides as the way downhill got steeper, more treacherous. But steeper took less energy, practically a glide. Eric’s shoulder began to click, distinctly to click. Two o’clock, at a guess, only an hour more of the day, two hours more light, maybe two and a half if lucky, no sense of their progress. Gradually, Eric’s thoughts grew black. Inness was slowing down, repeating that her ankle was fine, over and over, “My ankle is super fine,” which meant it was not. Burst pipes to look forward to, if the power were down in town. If they made it to town. Inness close to tears: that ankle. Advil left in the cabin.
Click-click
. A long, costly rest. A creaky rising back to their feet. And onward resignedly, one heavy ski before the other, exhaustion looming, harder and harder to concentrate, sunset a terror. Ahead, suddenly, the oddest horizontal, a freaky illusion, like the sky had fallen sidewise, a great gray chunk of dusk, which resolved even more suddenly into a cement span: the 138 bridge! They’d practically forged their way under it!

“Bridge!” Eric cried.

To get up the embankment and to the highway was going to be the worst work of the day, a long, slow traverse. But gloriously, 138 had been plowed, it seemed. They’d made it! The resulting snowbank, however, was like a talus slope on a mountainside. Eric started the ascent, no more sliding along but instead a tough, lateral climb in soft, loose material—killer on Inness’s ankle, no way around it, and impossible without the skis, so no relief. Leaning back to her awkwardly, he removed a glove and wiped her tears away with his bare hand, full of the feeling that they might topple and fall all the way back down and into the river.

“We’re about there,” he said.

“I’m crying,” she said.

Where was his hoe? Her poles?

Long lost.

They made their slow way, incremental progress, long rests, the sky going dark, Jupiter appearing yellowy in the crystal sky, then the brightest stars one by one, then in the dozens, gradually the millions. And painfully they reached the top of the bank, no triumph. Because success unveiled the next trial, and then more. For one thing, Eric had been wrong about the house near the bridge. There was no house near the bridge. Which meant there were no houses at all until they reached Houk’s Corners, a mile or more.

And maybe a couple hundred yards back up the road the other way, toward the veterinarian’s, another discouraging sight: one of the enormous state plow-trucks, its lights flashing faintly under fresh-blown snow, stuck in a drift as high as its cab, higher in fact. The plow job the driver had abandoned was hopeless in any case, what the state called FRAO, First Responder Access Only, Eric knew from lawsuits, but a proven lifesaver and a lifesaver now: even in the dark of night he and Inness could walk to Houk’s Corners and not lose their way: the banks were canyon high.

Inness said, “We’ll have to think about names.”

And maybe Eric was drifting, too, because somehow that made sense. A queer sensation came over him, the strongest feeling that the bridge they had to cross was unsafe, and further, that they had to think of names. The night upon them, the bridge’s clear deficits making his heart pound, lists of names forming (Disraeli, DiGiacomo, Dirigo), he worked at unwinding duct tape—no Leatherman to cut it with, goddamn—gradually freed Inness from her skis as she said names, dreamy lists of names.

“You’ve got to stay awake,” Eric told her. He lifted her chin. “Tell me another name,” he said.

“Louise,” she said. She sat on the crest of the bank.

Eric freed himself, then, stood in rain boots and duct tape, propped his skis in the snowbank, propped hers beside them neatly. “Maybe we’ll come back for these,” he said.

“Mementos,” she said clearly.

The plow driver had escaped, and so would they. There’d be a radio in the truck! Eric said, “Let me check something.”

Inness slumped.

Eric sat her up again. “More names,” he said.

“Eleanor,” Inness said.

“You’ve already said that one,” Eric told her.

“Eleanor,” she said again.

“Move your arms,” Eric said. “Can you swim your arms? Can you roll your neck? Keep moving? I’ll be right back.”

“No. Eric.”

“You’ll see me the whole way. You can see in starlight. I just have to check that plow. Think of more names.”

He slid himself down the bank, but a miniature avalanche started and grew and the bank caved and Danielle came down with it and on top of him on the road as he tried to stop her. He struggled from under her, and brushed himself off as he stood. She hardly seemed to know what had happened, still muttering names. He lifted her, sat her on a chunk of ice, and she fell off. He sat her in the road then and she slumped over.

“Right back,” he said. And trotted all too blissfully unencumbered up the road and to the plow, climbed the huge bank of snow using the driver’s footprints as toeholds, he realized, difficult going in rain boots, found the driver’s door unlocked, the window opaquely netted in frost, dug barehanded to find the handle, yanked hard at it, got an inch, yanked again, bashed the snow with the door, yanked and bashed till he could squeeze himself bodily into the cab. Freezing in there. Why had he expected it to be warm? No keys, of course. And the radio was gone, just a steel rack and a couple of loose cables, electronics removed per Schedule Six DOT operator regulations, each driver assigned and responsible for a radio set. This cut down on thefts. Alison had helped write that boring bit of policy as part of a mitigation program she’d designed for this or that senate committee against the costs to the state of vandalism and petty theft, back when she was taking any work the state would offer. Upshot: DOT drivers took their radios with them. Likely the guy was picked up by his supervisor in a smaller state truck—looking at the road, Eric detected the tracks of a tortured triple k-turn beneath the fresh dusting.

He slid and shuffled back down to Alison, who lay in the road now—no, Inness,
Inness
lay in the road, in the middle of 138, which on a clear day you drove to town in ten minutes, give or take. He dreaded crossing the bridge to Houk’s Corners, the surest feeling that the thousands of tons of cement and steel were about to fall, that he and Inness would be plunged into the river among smashed concrete and the crushing debris of the cabin, the cabin that even then was floating and bumping inexorably their direction, the jagged pieces of the cabin. Against panic he held his breath, he let it out, he held his breath, he let it out, he held it long and let it out. He reached Inness, said a few soft words about the snow plow, how it had saved them, urged her to her feet, got her under the arms and lifted her, made a soft joke about dancing, got a weak smile and a little effort from her. She stood on her own feet, swaying.

“Ready?” he said.

“Yo,” she said.

He took her elbow and focused on her walking and they reached the bridge and began to cross over it (just a regular highway bridge, low steel railings, fairly new), and he tried not to think of the river and all the ice below but couldn’t shake the image of the butcher’s block knocking its way through the rocks down there, though of course it could never have made it this far, not through the jammed ice, the mess of tree trunks, docks, and all that must have come by in the night. Inness leaned heavily upon him and so all his focus was on her and she hobbled in her duct-taped socks and led him, whether she knew it or not, led him across the span, which held.