I tell myself I deserve it. I deserve a night of luxury.
The room is perfect. That's the problem.
It's a suite on the top floor, overlooking the Chena River. The walls are painted a soothing, neutral cream. The carpet is thick and silent. The thermostat is set to a precise, unmoving seventy degrees.
I drop my bag on the luggage rack and sit on the edge of the king-sized bed. The mattress is soft, too soft. It feels like being swallowed whole. I bounce a little, waiting for the comfort to set in, waiting for the relief of civilization to settle in.
It doesn't come.
Instead, the silence of the room presses against my ears. Wilderness silence is heavy and living, the kind that feels like a presence. This is a dead silence, a filtered, air-conditioned vacuum.
I stand up and walk to the window. Down on the street, cars move in silent lines, their exhaust puffing into the cold air. People are walking on the sidewalks, heads down, staring at phones.
"I'm safe," I say aloud. My voice sounds flat in the carpeted room. "I have a career. I have funding. I have a shower."
I go into the bathroom. It's an expanse of marble and glass, stocked with little bottles of verbena-scented lotion. I turn on the shower, letting the steam fill the room. I strip off my clothes, a flannel shirt I'd grabbed from the lodge, the jeans that are loose around my waist after weeks of hiking, and step under the spray.
The water is hot. Limitless. It pounds against my skin, scrubbing away the last of the woodsmoke and the pine resin. I wash my hair twice. I condition it. I shave my legs.
I step out, wrap myself in a robe that feels like a cloud, and look in the mirror.
The woman staring back at me looks clean. She looks professional. The windburn on her cheeks is fading. The wildness in her eyes is being tamed by humidity and high-thread-count cotton.
I hate her.
And still the sensible part of me builds its case, and it builds it well.Stay.I clawed eleven years to reach this tenure line. Thaddeus's old office is a ten-minute walk from this lobby. Down there is a salary, a department, a life that never once asks me to bet it all on a man I have known a matter of weeks, on an island that swallows people whole and mails their boots home. Going back means wagering everything I built against weeksin the field and a feeling. The smart move, the one Thaddeus would have charted for me in clean red ink, is to unpack the suitcase and let the wild become a story I tell at conferences. For the length of one slow breath, I believe I can do it.
I walk back into the bedroom and order room service. A Cobb salad and a glass of Chardonnay. The things I used to crave when I was eating freeze-dried stroganoff in a tent barely big enough for two.
When the food arrives, it looks perfect. The lettuce is crisp. The wine is chilled.
I take a bite. It tastes like water.
I take a sip of the wine. It tastes like acid.
I put the fork down. I look around the room. It's beige. The carpet is beige, the walls are beige. My life is beige.
Panic, cold and sharp, starts to rise in my chest. It's nothing like the adrenaline panic of a wolf attack. It's suffocating, slow-motion, the panic of a bird that has flown into a glass window and doesn't understand why it can't fly anymore.
Is this it?I think.Is this the prize?
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, startling me. It's my mother, calling from Seattle.
"Aris!" she gushes when I answer. "We saw the email about the grant! That's wonderful! When are you coming home? We should do brunch on Sunday to celebrate."
"Brunch," I repeat. The word sounds alien, like a language I used to speak but have forgotten.
"Yes! There's a new place in Ballard. Mimosas and crepes. You can tell us all about your little camping trip."
Little camping trip.
I look at my laptop bag slumped by the door, its strap still crusted with trail mud. That mud is older than the salad I'm trying to eat.
"Mom," I say. "I don't think I can make brunch."
"What? Why? You're done, aren't you?"
"I …" I look at the perfectly made bed. It's huge and soft. And it's empty.
