The kitchen goes dark.
I turn the lamp back on.
I want to scream. Where is she? Where is Evangeline?
I can’t live without Evangeline.
I put my coat on.
I open the door, and I go out.
---
I run.
I run off the porch and across the gravel and onto the trail at the side of the cabin that goes up into the pines. The trail is dark. There is no moon under the trees. I have run this trail five hundred times. I have run it in the dark. I have run it in snow. I have run it in rain.
I run it now.
I am crying without making the sound of crying because I do not know how to make the sound of crying and I have not made it since I was eight years old in a kitchen on Wells Avenue when my mother told me my father was not coming back.
I run.
The trail forks at the half-mile. I take the left fork up the ridge. The trail gets steeper. The trees thin. There is a clearing at the top of the ridge with a flat rock the size of a kitchen table and a view of the valley that on a clear afternoon you can see Boise in.
I run past the clearing.
I do not stop at the rock.
I keep running.
I run past the clearing. I run up the back of the ridge. I run along the spine of the ridge to the place where the trail ends at the down-fall pine across the path where I have not cleared the trunk yet, and the trunk is at my hip, and I go to put a hand on it to vault it, and my left palm hits the bark.
I scream.
I scream once into the trees.
I do not scream her name. I do not scream Val's name. I do not scream a word. I scream like an animal in a snare and Iscream until there is no air in me and then I bend over the trunk with my forehead on the bark and I breathe.
I breathe.
I breathe in fours.
The pine smells of sap. The bark is cold. The wind in the top of the pines is a small thing.
She made a chicken.
She made a chicken in my kitchen, and she made bread on my board, and she put the wine on the side table and the book on the cushion and the lamp on in the window, and she waited for me, and a woman I have loved for fourteen years drove out from the city and told her what I did, and she walked out of the cabin and now she is gone.
I know what you did.
I lift my head off the bark.
I push off the trunk.
I sit down on the ground with my back against the trunk and my legs out in front of me on the trail, and I put my face in my hands, and I cry the way I have not cried since the day on Wells Avenue. I cry with my elbows on my knees and my hands over my face, I cry until my breath is even, and then I cry a little more.
I am in love with her.
