The Cabin at the End of the World(15)
Leonard says, “I’m sorry for yelling, and I’m not yelling at you or your family. That was directed at Redmond.” There’s a beat of silence that is almost as terrifying as anything that’s been said to this point. “There’s no need for a gun, Andrew. We are not here to—to harm any of you. We just need to talk face-to-face. I think I’ve said all that I can say while we’re out here. So I’m coming in now, okay?”
The doorknob twists and the bolted door rattles in the frame. Andrew, Eric, and Wen watch and say nothing and do nothing as though Leonard’s abrupt segue into attempted entry is the chess equivalent of saying “checkmate.”
Andrew breaks through their collective stupor and yells, “No, not okay!”
Eric throws his body against the door. He says into the darkly stained wood, “We’ve been very understanding and we’ve asked you nicely to leave us alone. Go away.” He adds, running out of breath, although he instantly regrets saying it, “You’re scaring Wen.” Then he turns to Andrew and says quickly through gritted teeth, “What do we do? What do we do?”
Leonard says, “Please, just open the door.”
“Fuck off! Go away!” Andrew pulls his green hat tighter onto his head and spins himself in circles. He doesn’t know what to do.
Wen is sitting on the floor, leaning against the back of the couch. She covers her eyes and screams “Go away, Leonard! You are not my friend!” repeatedly.
The woman in the black button-down shirt peers into the window to the left of the front door. She sees Andrew and raps on the screen with the wooden end of her tool like a child tapping on the glass of an aquarium. She disappears and says something to the rest of the group. There’s a quick and hushed discussion outside, and a red shape blurs past the window on the other side of the door. Andrew thinks he can hear Redmond’s plodding steps tracing the exterior of the cabin, heading toward the back deck.
Leonard is still talking. Since shouting at Redmond, his voice hasn’t again raised or changed pitch; he might as well be a recording. His evenness and manners are proof of their collective madness. “We are not here to hurt you. We need your help to make things right, to save what must be saved. Only you can help us. You can start by opening the door . . .”
Andrew sprints to the front windows and pulls the threadbare, see-through curtains closed. He then vaults into the kitchen and pulls the dark blue curtain, as thick as a winter blanket, across the glass slider, eclipsing most of the sunlight. The space below the slider frame and above the curtain rod glows radioactive light as does the window above the kitchen sink. The rest of the cabin darkens.
Wen carefully turns on the small lamp with the buttercup-yellow lampshade on the end table. She stands trapped in its spotlight, holding her closed fists, with her thumbs curled up safely inside, against her mouth.
Andrew goes over to Wen and hugs her. She doesn’t hug back. He reaches behind him, to the wall between the kitchen and bathroom, and he flicks on the wagon wheel ceiling light. Only four of the six bulbs work. He anticipates Wen asking him if everything will be okay, and if she does, he’ll do what any good parent would do; he’ll lie to her.
Wen says, “I’m scared.”
“We can be scared together, all right?”
She nods. “They’re coming in?”
“They might try.”
He kisses the top of Wen’s head. His lips and mouth are dry. He takes off his hat and places it on her head. It’s too big for her but she doesn’t take it off. She pulls the brim over her eyes and tucks as much of her hair as she can fit under the hat.
Eric says, “Andrew,” and wanders into the common room. Leonard has stopped talking and stopped trying to open the front door. “Did they go away?”
Andrew knows it’s a rhetorical, an I-have-to-say-something-or-scream kind of question. Of course they haven’t gone away, not yet, and a part of him believes they will spend days, years, the rest of their lives trapped in this cabin, under siege. Andrew would rather hold on to that hellish image and dare not hope the others left because right now hope would be an intoxicant, a mind-duller; hope would be dangerous. Andrew plays along because Wen is listening and he plays along because he must. He says, “I think they’re just trying to scare us, right? Too goddamn cowardly to actually—”
Heavy footsteps pound up the stairs that climb to the deck platform. Eric and Andrew eye the couch at the same time and Eric runs to the far end. Andrew momentarily considers telling Wen to hide in the bathroom and lock the door and don’t come out no matter what. Instead he clears a path to the back slider, pushing the dinner table, the chairs, and love seat away from the couch, the legs scraping and rumbling across the hardwood floor before sliding onto the kitchen linoleum. Wen helps, too, moving the end table and lamp toward the bathroom.
“Good job, Wen.”
Andrew and Eric lift the couch. It’s an old sleeper sofa as heavy and unwieldy as a tank. Andrew shuffles to the slider, but Eric abruptly lowers his end, pitching Andrew back toward the common room. Eric says, “Wait, turn it around. We have to spin it around so the back goes against the glass.”
Andrew wants to say, Does it fucking matter? If the others break the glass slider, what way the couch faces won’t really stop them. He doesn’t say anything even as it feels like a mistake, a panic move, a waste of precious time, and the two of them stutter-walk, grunt, and groan through a quick semicircle and drop the couch in front of the back slider. The guts of springs and metal framing crash and clang discordantly.