These Silent Woods: A Novel(7)

THREE




December 14th arrives. Finch rises early, climbing into my bed before I’m awake, so that the first thing I see when I open my eyes is her face, three inches from mine.

“Oh, good,” she says, grinning. “You’re awake.” She presses her palms into my cheeks, scrunching my face. “Chubby cheeks. Chubby, chubby, chubby.” She laughs, then rolls off the bed and begins hopping around the room like a rabbit, hands curled by her chest.

“What time is it?” I can tell by the darkness in the room that it’s early. Maybe the middle of the night, even.

“Don’t know. Jake’s coming today. It’s the fourteenth. You didn’t forget, did you? Don’t tell me you forgot.”

“I didn’t forget.” I sit up slowly. “Finch, I think it might still be nighttime.”

“I can’t sleep. I just can’t. I’ve been lying there awake, all night.”

I know this isn’t true: she was breathing heavily, deep in sleep, when I came to bed, but I don’t correct her. “You know he doesn’t get here till late afternoon,” I say. He leaves at first light, but even with an early start, he drives all day to get here. Takes it out of him, that drive: I can tell. But he’s always smiling ear to ear when he pulls in.

“You think you could go out in the main room and read for a while?” I ask Finch.

She shakes her head. “No.”

It’s a rare thing for Finch to say no to a book.

“All right. How about you make us some breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry,” she says, “but sure.” She bounces out of the room, hands still bent at her chest.

I lie in bed, listening to her. Hear her cranking the knobs on the stove, all the way left, waiting, then opening the draft and then finally adding wood from the stack in the little box. She pulls a chair from the table and climbs up to get the skillet, places it on top of the woodstove. Pours water into the kettle and sets it on to heat as well.

I doze off for a while, I realize, because all of a sudden she is back, holding a cup of coffee out for me to take. I sit up in bed, prop the pillows at my back. “Thanks, sugar. Breakfast in bed. I could get used to this.”

She shrugs, hops out of the room again, and returns a minute later with a plate with an egg and an apple sliced down the middle. She climbs up beside me with her own plate, but she barely eats breakfast, saying her stomach is doing somersaults and there’s no space for food. By the time we’re finished, it’s just getting light. She reads for a while, sets up a target with an old can and takes her slingshot out to practice, fusses over her cardinal drawing for Jake, writes him a note.

I try to keep her busy. We get three apples from the root cellar and cook them in the Dutch oven with the last of the cinnamon. We chop some firewood, take a walk south of here and try to rustle up a grouse. The hours slog past with a painful slowness, with Finch’s demeanor shifting from excitement early in the day, to bursting elation, to a heartbreaking sense of disappointment. She wanders out of the yard, peering around the bend, leaning.

As dark folds in, she stands at the window, watching. “Where is he?” she asks, nose pressed to the glass.

Since suppertime a sense of dread has been tugging at my chest, heavy. I wipe my hands on my pant legs. Swallow, force my voice to hold strong. “Well, Finch, maybe he isn’t coming this year.”

“Not coming?” Finch asks. She narrows her eyes and wrinkles her nose: an almost-scowl. “Why would you say that? He would never just not come.”

“I know, sugar. He would never leave us high and dry if he could help it. He’d never give up a chance to see you. But you’ve got to realize: if he couldn’t come, he wouldn’t have a way to tell us, would he?”

“He probably just got a late start. Or something.” She leans against the window again. “He’ll be here,” she says, looking out into the dark, her breath fogging the pane.

I agree to let her stay up late. We sit on the couch and she reads to me while I add another square to the quilt I’ve been working on. All the clothes that no longer fit her have been in garbage bags up in the loft, just taking up space, and I’ve decided to put them to use. The blanket she uses at night was fine when she was little, but now it’s a tad small. So I’ve been cutting squares out of her old things—onesies, shirts, dresses—and sewing them together, piece by piece. Which is taking longer than I anticipated and I sort of regret deciding to do it, but we’ve got the whole winter stretching ahead of us, long evenings since dark sweeps in early these months. Anyhow, there’s no getting out of it now, since she’s excited about having a bigger quilt. Plus she gets a kick out of looking over her old things. And, me being the sentimental fool that I am, I figure this is a good way to preserve for her a piece of her history. A way to remember those early days of our time out here.

After a while, sleep overtakes her—she has been awake for nineteen hours—and she lies on the couch, knees tucked tight to her chest, while I finish sewing.

I stack the squares and tiptoe over to the door. Slip into my jacket, pull the beanie down over my ears. I step outside into the night, frost diamonding the grass, the air cold and dry. A jet blinks red across a sky that is bright and full of stars. I shove my hands into the pockets of my jacket and lean against a porch beam.