“We’ll have to,” he said. “To cook. To clean. To brush our teeth. To wash before bed.” He rolled down his sleeves as hebrushed past me. Not rudely, but he was in a hurry. “I need to turn the switch, and the junction box is beneath three feet of snow. Plus, it’ll take until morning before it thaws.”
While I put the groceries away, Wolfe grabbed a shovel from the workshop, shrugged on his parka, and went outside into the twenty-below weather. The sunshine was a lie; the air felt like knives as I stood in the doorway and watched him tamp the ground with his shovel until he found the spot he wanted.
“I’ll build a little hut for this when it warms,” he said, to himself, more than to me, and I sensed that was because he was used to being alone. “Should have done it before.” And he began to dig.
The digging looked like self-punishment for having neglected to build a little hut over the junction box, for having neglected to flip the switch earlier, or at least before we’d left for Billings, which meant that the cabin had stood empty while the temperature dropped as though someone had let go and watched it fall.
After about ten minutes, he set the shovel in the snow, took off his coat, and laid it on top of the small pile of snow that was forming. Quickly, I went out and picked up his coat, shaking off the snow. He deserved not to wear a snow-dampened coat.
And yes, it was a pleasure to watch him roll up his sleeves, showing densely muscled forearms between his gloves and his shirt. He bent and dug and grunted and tossed, mechanical, steady. Inch by inch, the junction box was revealed amidst the snow: a low wooden frame, inside of which was a metal box that had switches inside it, and thin copper wires leading off beneath the ground.
“This is the confluence of cistern pipe from the well and the pipe to the house,” he said as he knelt down, knees digging into the snow. I watched his shoulder tighten, heard a small click, then he sat back on his heels and itched his nose with a glovedhand. “It seemed simpler at the time to put it here, so I wouldn’t have to redo the piping.” He shook his head as he stood up, as if stopping himself from further disparaging self-talk. “It still is. I just need to build a hut when it gets warm. Make a relay, so even if the snow is three feet deep, I can just take off the lid and flip the switch.”
“It’s cold,” I said. I didn’t have my coat on, a fact which he made very clear as he looked me up and down.
“Here,” he said. He took his parka from my arms and slipped it around my shoulders, making me shiver with the sudden warmth. Then he looked over the horizon, in the direction of his beloved mountains, which were now slipping behind a long rope of gray clouds. I sensed he enjoyed moments like this: the quiet, the clean air, the solitude. Well, except for me.
“We have time before it gets dark,” he said. “Let’s gather clean snow and put it to melt on the stove. But go get your coat.”
I went inside while he put snow back on top of the junction box to insulate it. I paused in the doorway to shake the snow from his coat, putting it on the wall hook where he could get it, then put my own coat on. We used two empty five-gallon buckets and filled them from clean banks of snow, and took turns dumping the snow into a large pot that Wolfe had put on the stove.
The snow melted from the low heat of the burner. We had to go slowly, Wolfe told me, or we’d evaporate the snow rather than melting it.
“Each bucket of snow gives us a gallon of water or thereabouts,” Wolfe said, watching me peer over the top of the pot. “This is a twelve-quart pot, which will give three gallons when full. We’ll pour it off into one of the gallon buckets when we get to that point. I figure we’ll need around five gallons of water. Let’s keep going until we get there.”
It became a game: seeing who could fill their bucket fastest, who could race inside to put the snow in the pot and be back outside before the other. We shed our coats and sweated in the cold, bright air, hot and cold all at once, tracking snow inside and laughing. I don’t remember the last time I laughed, and it was a joy to watch Wolfe toss his head back, gasping as he snorted because I’d thrown a snowball at him, hastily made with my bare hands, to slow him down.
“That’s cheating,” he said, but he didn’t really seem to mind.
We poured snow into one of the buckets and pretended to fight over the other bucket, ending up shoulder to shoulder at a pristine snowbank just beyond the workshop, scooping snow into the five-gallon bucket and packing it down.
I could smell Wolfe’s scent beneath his Henley and flannel shirt, a low dusky salt, soap, leather oil, and it felt warmer to be near him, especially as we grew still and the air snapped around us.
“It’s justcold,” Wolfe said, straightening up. “This should be enough. We’ll have maybe seven gallons by the time this all melts.”
We went back inside and dumped the snow from the bucket into the pot. Then Wolfe shed his parka and shook his head at the amount of snow we’d tracked in.
“If you sweep that snow out the front door,” he said, “I’ll get something going for dinner.”
It was a little early for dinner, but I was starving, so I nodded and swept snow and bits of autumn leaves that had found their way inside. By the time I’d finished and taken off my boots, the laces still stiff and new, Wolfe had set the small table. He built a fire in the fireplace and called me to eat, and when I sat down, everything was on a plate in front of me. Beans on toast, sausage links, and over that, a fried egg.
“Didn’t take any water to cook, so we can save it for other things,” he said, pointing at my plate with his knife.
“Looks good to me,” I said. Who was I to turn down such a meal, in a warm, cozy cabin that smelled like pine and salt and egg. Everything was delicious, making it impossible to eat slowly.
“We can rinse everything off and leave it to wash properly when the hot water comes back.”
“Okay.” Everything Wolfe said made sense to me, and felt a large swathe of contentment sweep through me. If I had amnesia, if I didn’t know who I was, who I’d been, I was glad it was here, with him.
CHAPTER 13
blue
When the sun went down, the sky outside the windows went black, speckled with stars that blinked and danced in the icy air. It felt like it’d gotten even colder, in spite of the fire Wolfe had built and kept feeding strips of wood into. I sat across from it, on the couch, feet crossed beneath me, leaning forward as though my body wanted me to roll in the flames to warm myself.
“It’s nearly forty below out there,” Wolfe said. Hunkered in front of the fire, he stared at it for a long moment, looking over his shoulder at me from time to time, sensing me there. “I’ll wash up,” he said. “Then you can. We each get a gallon of water.”
Wolfe heated up his gallon of water in a regular-sized pot, the kind you might cook spaghetti in. He poured this into a blue rubber bucket and took it into the bathroom with him. I imagined he’d bathe in the tub, standing up, using the water and soap where he needed it.
