Page 4 of Call Off the Dark

“Yeah. My wife outside, shouting.”

She stared at him. This man had been curled up under blankets in his cozy flannel pajamas while she’d been the one making sure their home wasn’t under attack. This time it was nothing. Next time it could be something, and if it was, she’d be ready. But apparently her vigilance was a nuisance. Perhaps he wanted an ax driven into his skull.

“There’s no one out here, Helen.”

“I heard something.”

“Because we’re surrounded by one thousand three hundred and fourteen acres of wild.”

One thousand three hundred and fourteen acres. A perfect place to hide.

Wade extended his hand, and at first Helen thought he was reaching out to comfort her. Then she realized he was demanding she hand over the gun.

“There was no one out here last time,” he said, “and there’s no one out here this time.”

Wade was a man who kept score. He couldn’t just say thirteen hundred acres like a normal person. No, he had to say one thousand three hundred and fourteen acres like some kind of accounting maniac. And he couldn’t just reassure her that she was safe. He had to remind her that she was wrong, yet again.

Seeing her expression, he softened his tone. “Come here.”

He opened his arms and she stepped into them, an automatic response. In the beginning, Wade’s protective embrace had reassured her.

“You’re safe with me, Helen.”

He gently removed the gun from her hand.

In the living room, Wade put the gun back into the box on the mantel and explained to Helen how her lack of sleep was putting her on edge. “If you can’t sleep, the last thing you should do is get out of bed.” He was using his patient voice that belied his actual impatience with the situation. “No one ever fell asleep standing in the middle of their kitchen.”

She wanted to say “Have you ever considered opening a fucking sleep clinic?” with extra emphasis on fucking. Instead she said, “I know that,” with no emphasis on any syllables.

Wade had met Helen when her mind was in tatters, when she was washing down a doctor-prescribed pill each morning with a glass of orange juice and trying to ignore the dry mouth and dizziness it gave her. That first night in a sticky neighborhood dive bar, she’d told him she kept thinking she was seeing her dead husband in the streets, in the stairwell of her apartment complex, at the grocery store, but Wade hadn’t really understood. People who have never lost their mind don’t really comprehend it when you tell them that you have.

The gun safely stowed away, Wade turned back from the mantel and approached her with a sympathetic look. “You just need to stop thinking so much.”

He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed tenderly.

She nodded. He wasn’t wrong.

So far, reading poetry was the best method Helen could come up with to get rid of unwanted thoughts. Wine just made her feel like openly weeping, and cookies and cake stuck in her throat and settled like cement in her stomach. Words took her away from her body.

In some ways, words had also brought her to this place.

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau had written, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”

Helen had seen it quoted on the side of a Seattle city bus that was idling while she waited on the corner. She had been on a lunch break from the marketing job she was barely holding on to in the months after Tyler’s death. The bus exhaust had been acrid in her nose. Not very romantic, but the message had been so blatant that she couldn’t help but wonder if Tyler had sent it to her from the afterlife.

And so she had thought to herself, Maybe I could do that. Maybe I could get away from the city and the memories that hurt too much.

After Thoreau’s sentence had found her, she began to repeat it in her mind. Whenever she’d been struck hard with flashbacks to the violence or whenever she felt the ache of despair, the recitation distracted her.

Only two weeks later, she’d met Wade at the bar, and it felt like a second sign. Wade was new to the city, but he was a man who wanted to live off the grid, who wanted to revert to an old-fashioned life. She had looked at him and imagined that his angular jaw equaled persistence and sincerity, so when he’d told her his dreams, she’d listened to them with an unguarded curiosity. He was only a few years older than her, but his aspirations made him seem worldly and wise. He’d painted pictures of it in her mind, and she’d been able to see it so clearly: planting a garden, sewing her own dresses, stitching his work shirts, and cooking over a cast-iron stove. He was planning to power a few necessities with a battery system and generators, but otherwise, there’d be no reliance on modern technology. It was the farthest thing she could imagine from the fast-paced city life she’d once shared with Tyler. The idea was so radically different that it had seemed like it might be the only thing that could make sense of the mess.

Wade was salt of the earth. A little handsome, a little more gruff, and when he’d kissed her at the end of their first date, she’d felt the protection in his callused hand against her cheek. He wore a Carhartt jacket like he’d been born in it and was built like he’d been destined to be a college linebacker. He told her he’d never played any sports, though.

“No time,” he’d said. “Not with how busy I always was working the family farm.”

The family farm? In that moment, Helen had barely even realized people still were farmers. Of course, yes, she held a vague notion that the food she bought at the grocery store was grown in the earth by farmers, but she was such a city girl that sometimes it seemed like the whole world was run by machines. If any real people touched the crops, that was something special that happened in faraway places with faraway people. Farming felt like a thing of the past, something from the History Channel documentaries that she watched about Depression-era people fighting the grasshoppers and the rabbits. But Wade was a real farmer, and he’d been right there in front of her. That curious man had looked at her with hooded hazel eyes and said potatoes like he was talking about something godly. It was so enchantingly different that it made her forget herself for a while, and she felt the first sparks of something like attraction. All she’d known since Tyler’s death was the tight coil of grief, and the possibility of feeling something else had overwhelmed her with relief.

Even now, Helen knew that when Wade looked at her, he saw the damage there but only the surface of it. Mostly, he saw pretty and he saw creative. The dark circles under her eyes were just a sign to him that she needed a little saving, while the vintage furniture she’d refinished herself that he had seen in her city apartment signaled to him that she was resourceful and artistic.