Page 6 of Call Off the Dark

They’d have carrots tonight instead, she decided.

Minutes later, she sat in the dirt and used a hand trowel to loosen the soil around the shoulder of a carrot. Then she grasped the carrot greens and tugged lightly, twisting. The carrot pulled free. It was nice and thick, and the orange shade was bright. She brushed off the soil before adding it to her basket.

As she worked, her eyes sometimes drifted to her surroundings. Peeking through the gray day, the early hints of autumn’s brilliant yellow and orange shouted their presence in the forest. Some of the thirstiest trees weren’t yet recovered from the dry summer, still brambly and dead-armed, but others were deepening into brown colors that signaled an approaching winter. Everything was in transition.

It was the beginning and the end.

Helen’s mind wasn’t really in the trees though; it was lost in the past.

Inside the kitchen, still deep in thought, she peeled the carrots for a dinner stew she’d made a million times before.

“Ow!”

She gripped her left hand in pain. After a moment, she stole a look and saw that she had cut her left index finger when the peeler had slipped. A tiny stream of blood trickled down across her middle finger and pooled around her wedding ring.

There were first aid supplies at the house. That had been one of her conditions when she had agreed to this lifestyle with Wade: She wanted modern medicine. So Helen sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub in the bathroom and tended to her cut with a tube of antibacterial ointment and a Band-Aid.

After she finished peeling the carrots, she put them in the refrigerator—another modern amenity that she had insisted upon—and went outside to get Wade’s work clothes from the clothesline. Washing clothes by hand was one of her least favorite tasks. The cold water made her hands hurt, and no matter how many times she rinsed and squeezed, she could still see soap suds in the water.

As she was folding Wade’s clothes into piles on top of their quilted bed, she noticed one of his shirts had a hole in the elbow. She retrieved her sewing kit and sat on the bed to thread a needle.

Helen often imagined that her own body had stitches running the length of her spine, barely holding her together. Take care of dangling threads, she wanted to warn people, or you might pull my entire soul loose.

She encountered few people though. There were the ones she saw in town during the once-monthly trip for supplies. And there was Agnes, the young woman who lived in the nearest house. Every so often, she hiked from her own property and through parts of the Olympic National Forest to visit Helen. Agnes hadn’t been by in weeks, and Helen was so ready to have a conversation with her, she was afraid she might start crying when she next saw Agnes emerge from the trees. Helen was keeping a list of things she wanted to tell her.

Town was twenty miles to the south. It had a grocery store that was really a glorified corner market that included general and tackle store items. There was also a post office, a library, a gas station, a pizza place, a flower shop, two taverns, a gun shop, several churches, and an elementary school. She wanted to check out books from the library, but the longest you could keep books was three weeks, and Wade said they didn’t need to go into town that often.

Each trip, Wade filled up his red gas cans with fuel for the generators, they bought food and supplies, checked their post office box, and Helen used the phone at the grocery store to call her parents. She always felt a flutter of anxiety beforehand, hopeful the call would go through and go well. She and Wade weren’t the only off-gridders who used that phone. A guy with a grubby beard had twice tied up the line until Wade had finally announced they had to “get back before dark,” as if dark were some pressing deadline. And since there was no designated call time, Helen’s parents had missed the call more than once. With no way for them to call her back, that meant she’d had to wait another month to try again. As much as she craved the familiarity of talking to her parents, the conversations were often disappointing: too brief and uncomfortably stilted. Helen was usually within earshot of shop employees or customers, and even worse, she and her mother were pretending Helen’s life hadn’t taken an utterly bizarre turn. The phone calls felt like a stage play, and everyone knew their part. Her parents were good at that.

They had been the only two guests at Helen and Wade’s courthouse wedding. Wade didn’t have any family to speak of since both of his parents were gone, and Helen hadn’t wanted to invite any of her friends because Tyler had been someone people adored. She didn’t want comparisons being drawn between him and Wade. Even her friend’s fear-aggressive rescue mutt had licked Tyler’s hand the first time they’d met. Everyone had laughed and rolled their eyes and said of course. She was just protecting Wade, she’d told herself. Helen’s parents had arrived ten minutes early with a beautiful bouquet of pink peonies. They were the type of parents who showed up without fail, but she had been able to plainly see the strain on their faces as they hugged her before the ceremony, and she could sense they wanted to ask if she was certain about marrying a man she’d known barely three months. But her parents were also the type of people who didn’t talk about hard things. Instead, they pretended things were okay, cosigners of an unspoken agreement that seemed to run through her extended family on both sides: aunts, uncles, cousins. Everybody just carried on. Helen sometimes wondered, if she’d had a sibling, would they have talked about the real things? She used to talk about real things with Tyler.

Even if the words were sometimes hollow, she still missed the sound of her mother’s voice in the weeks that stretched out between phone calls.

Helen hadn’t been able to call home in almost three whole months now, because she hadn’t gone to town on the last two supply runs. In September, she had been sick in bed when Wade went. Strange, since it’s hard to contract a virus when you have no contact with people. She’d been nauseous and vomiting and had briefly worried her IUD had failed. When her period had arrived four days later, she’d decided it was just a spell of heartsickness. She doubted that any regular doctor would diagnose it as such, but it was the only explanation that made sense to her. When Tyler had died, her heart had been broken into so many tiny pieces that sometimes it seemed like there was nothing left except for heart dust that stained everything she tried to touch. How could that not make her nauseous some days?

The month prior, August, Wade had gone into town without stopping by the house to pick her up. He’d driven directly from the trees and shown up after dark with bags of groceries. When she had looked out the window and seen him unloading the bags from his truck, she’d felt like a fist had closed around her throat. It was so thoughtless of him, and as she felt anger rising, the feeling was quickly replaced with something closer to humiliation. Was this a punishment of some kind?

She’d kept quiet as they’d unpacked the supplies together, rolling it over in her brain, and suddenly she’d wondered if it was because of their July trip. “Is this because I wanted pizza last time?”

Wade had looked at her like she was crazy, asked her what in the world was she talking about.

Helen wasn’t crazy. She still vividly remembered the way he’d reacted during their July trip when she’d suggested they eat dinner at the pizza place. He’d recoiled as though she’d suggested they drink the gasoline.

“Pizza is garbage food,” he’d said.

“So?”

“So why would you want pizza when we can eat good food?” He’d meant the animals he hunted and the vegetables she grew in the garden.

“Because I wouldn’t have to cook it,” she’d said, and she hadn’t masked the venom in her voice.

The following month, he’d gone to town without her.

Some things aren’t coincidences.

As the day plodded forward, the cold started to wrap around her. Despite the clouds, it had been a warm October morning, so she’d skipped making a fire when she woke up. Now she was beginning to feel the chill.

Outside, Helen gathered an armload of chopped wood from the tidy woodpile on the side of the house. In the living room, she arranged the wood inside the fireplace and struck a match. Then she just stood there, soaking in the warmth and gazing at her poetry books. She couldn’t face the dinner stew yet, chopping all those vegetables.