The Cabin at the End of the World

  Dedication

  for Lisa, Cole, Emma, and for us

  Epigraph

  Then back in the ground / We look at our hands / And wonder aloud / Could anyone choose to die / In the end everybody wins / In the end everybody wins

  —Future of the Left, “The House That Hope Built”

  Meanwhile, planes drop from the sky / People disappear and bullets fly . . . Wouldn’t be surprised if they have their way / (Tastes just like chicken they say.)

  —Clutch, “Animal Farm”

  . . . because when the blanket of death came for us we kicked it off and were left naked and shivering in the world.

  —Nadia Bulkin, “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” She Said Destroy

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Come and See One

  Two

  Let’s Make a Deal Three

  Four

  Bloody Like the Day You Were Born Five

  Six

  This Is the End Seven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Paul Tremblay

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Come and See

  One

  Wen

  The girl with the dark hair walks down the wooden front stairs and lowers herself into the yellowing lagoon of ankle-high grass. A warm breeze ripples through the blades, leaves, and crablike petals of clover flowers. She studies the front yard, watching for the twitchy, mechanical motion and frantic jumps of grasshoppers. The glass jar cradled against her chest smells faintly of grape jelly and is sticky on the inside. She unscrews the aerated lid.

  Wen promised Daddy Andrew she would release the grasshoppers before they got cooked inside the homemade terrarium. The grasshoppers will be okay because she’ll make sure to keep the jar out of direct sunlight. She worries, though, that they could hurt themselves by jumping into the sharp edges of the lid’s punched-in holes. She’ll catch smaller grasshoppers, ones that don’t jump as high or as powerfully, and because of their compact size there will be more leg-stretching room inside the jar. She will talk to the grasshoppers in a low, soothing voice, and hopefully they will be less likely to panic and mash themselves against the dangerous metal stalactites. Satisfied with her updated plan, she pulls up a fistful of grass, roots and all, leaving a pockmark in the front yard’s sea of green and yellow. She carefully deposits and arranges the grass in the jar, then wipes her hands on her gray Wonder Woman T-shirt.

  Wen’s eighth birthday is in six days. Her dads not so secretly wonder (she has overheard them discussing this) if the day is her actual date of birth or one assigned to her by the orphanage in China’s Hubei Province. For her age she is in the fifty-sixth percentile for height and forty-second for weight, or at least she was when she went to the pediatrician six months ago. She made Dr. Meyer explain the context of those numbers in detail. As pleased as she was to be above the fifty-line for height, she was angry to be below it for weight. Wen is as direct and determined as she is athletic and wiry, often besting her dads in battles of wills and in scripted wrestling matches on their bed. Her eyes are a deep, dark brown, with thin caterpillar eyebrows that wiggle on their own. Along the right edge of her philtrum is the hint of a scar that is only visible in a certain light and if you know to look for it (so she is told). The thin white slash is the remaining evidence of a cleft lip repaired with multiple surgeries between the ages of two and four. She remembers the first and final trips to the hospital, but not the ones in between. That those middle visits and procedures have been somehow lost bothers her. Wen is friendly, outgoing, and as goofy as any other child her age, but isn’t easy with her reconstructed smiles. Her smiles have to be earned.

  It’s a cloudless summer day in northern New Hampshire, only a handful of miles from the Canadian border. Sunlight shimmers on the leaves of the trees magnanimously lording over the small cabin, the lonely red dot on the southern shore of Gaudet Lake. Wen sets the jar down in a shady patch adjacent to the front stairs. She wades out into the grass, her arms outstretched, as though treading water. She swishes her right foot back and forth through the tops of the grass like Daddy Andrew showed her. He grew up on a farm in Vermont, so he’s the grasshopper-finding expert. He said her foot is to act like a scythe, but without actually cutting down the grass. She didn’t know what he meant and he launched into an explanation of what the tool was and how it was used. He took out his smartphone to search images of scythes before they both remembered there was no cell phone service at the cabin. Daddy Andrew drew a scythe on a napkin instead; a crescent-shaped knife at the end of a long stick, something a warrior or an orc from The Lord of the Rings movies would carry. It looked really dangerous and she didn’t understand why people needed something so large and extreme to cut grass, but Wen loved the idea of pretending her leg was the handle and her foot was the long curved blade.

  A brown grasshopper, big enough to span the distance across her hand, with loud, rasping wings flies up from underneath her foot and bounces off her chest. Wen stumbles backward at impact, almost falling down.

  She giggles and says, “Okay, you’re too big.”

  She resumes her exploratory swipes with her scythe-foot. A much smaller grasshopper jumps so high she loses sight of it somewhere in its skyward, elliptical arc, but she tracks it as it lands a few feet to her left. It’s the same fluorescent green as a tennis ball and the perfect size, not much bigger than the clumps of seeds at the ends of the longer grass stalks. If only she can catch it. Its movements are quick and difficult to anticipate, and it leaps away the moment before the quivering trap of her hands is in place. She laughs and follows a manic zigzag around the yard. She tells it that she means no harm, she will let it go eventually, and she just wants to learn about it so she can help all the other grasshoppers be healthy and happy.

  Wen eventually catches the miniacrobat at the edge of the lawn and the gravel driveway. Cupped in the cave of her hands, this is the first grasshopper she’s ever caught. She whisper-shouts, “Yes!” The grasshopper is so slight she can only feel it when it tries to jump through her closed fingers. The urge to open her hands a crack for a little peek is almost a compulsion, but she wisely resists. She sprints across the yard and deposits the grasshopper into the jar and quickly screws on the lid. The grasshopper bounces like an electron, pinging against the glass and tin, and then stops abruptly, perches on the greenery, and rests.

  Wen says, “Okay. You are number one.” She pulls a palm-sized notebook out of her back pocket, the front page already gridded into wavy rows and columns with headings, and she writes down the number one, an estimate of its size (she writes, inaccurately, “2 inches”), color (“green”), boy or girl (“girl Caroline”), energy level (“hi”). She returns the jar to its shaded spot and wanders back into the front yard. She quickly catches four more grasshoppers of similar size: two brown, one green, and one a color somewhere in the spectrum between. She names them after schoolmates: Liv, Orvin, Sara, and Gita.

  As she searches for a sixth grasshopper, she hears someone walking or jogging on the forever-long dirt road that winds by the cabin and traces the lake’s shoreline before snaking off into the surrounding woods. When they arrived two days ago, it took them twenty-one minutes and forty-nine seconds to drive the length of the dirt road. Wen timed it. Granted, Daddy Eric was driving way too slowly, like always.

  The sounds of feet mashing and grinding into the dirt and stone are louder, closer. Something big is trudging its way down the road. Really big. Maybe it’s a bear. Daddy Eric made her promise she would yell for them and run inside if s
he saw any animal bigger than a squirrel. Should she be excited or scared? She doesn’t see anything through the crowd of trees. Wen stands in the middle of the lawn, ready to run if necessary. Is she fast enough to get inside the cabin if it is a dangerous animal? She hopes it’s a bear. She wants to see one. She can play dead if she has to. The maybe-bear is at the tree-obscured mouth of the driveway. Her curiosity shifts gears into becoming annoyed to have to be dealing with whatever/whoever is there because she’s in the middle of an important project.

  A man rounds the bend and walks briskly down the driveway like he’s coming home. Wen is not a good judge of height as all adults exist in that cloud-filled space above her, but he is easily taller than her dads. He might be taller than anyone she has ever met, and he’s as wide as a couple of tree trunks pushed together.

  The man waves with a hand that might as well be a bear’s paw, and he smiles at Wen. Given her many lip reconstruction procedures, Wen has always focused on and studied smiles. Too many people have smiles that don’t mean what a smile is supposed to mean. Their smiles are often cruel and mocking, like how a bully’s grin is the same as a fist. Worse are the confused and sad smiles from adults. Wen remembers presurgeries and postsurgeries not needing a mirror to know her face wasn’t like everyone else’s yet because of the crumbly, you-poor-poor-thing smiles on faces in waiting rooms and lobbies and parking garages.

  This man’s smile is warm and wide. His face opens its curtains naturally. Wen can’t fully describe the difference between a real smile and a fake one, but she knows it when she sees it. He is not faking. His is the real thing, so real as to be contagious, and Wen gives him a tight-lipped smile she covers with the back of her hand.

  The man is dressed inappropriately for jogging or hiking in the woods. His clunky black shoes with thick rubber soles piled beneath his feet stand him up even taller; they are not sneakers and they are not the nice dress-up shoes Daddy Eric wears. They are more like the Doc Martens Daddy Andrew wears. Wen remembers the brand because she likes that his shoes are named after a person. The man wears dusty blue jeans and a white dress shirt, tucked in and buttoned all the way to the top, squeezing the collar around his fire-hydrant neck.

  He says, “Hi there.” His voice is not as big as he is, not even close. He sounds like a teenager, like one of the student counselors in her after-school program.

  “Hi.”

  “My name is Leonard.”

  Wen doesn’t give her name and before she can say let me go get my dads, Leonard asks her a question.

  “Is it okay if we talk a little before I talk to your parents? I definitely want to talk to them, too, but let’s you and I chat first. Is that okay?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  “You’re right and you’re very smart. I promise that I’m here to be your friend and I’m not going to be a stranger for long.” He smiles again. It’s almost as big as a laugh.

  She returns it and doesn’t cover this one up with her hand.

  “Can I ask you what your name is?”

  Wen knows she should say nothing more, turn around, and go inside, and go inside quickly. She’s had the stranger-danger talk with her dads countless times, and living in the city, it makes sense for her to be vigilant because there are so many people there. An unimaginable number of people walk on the sidewalks and fill the subways and live and work and shop inside the tall buildings and there’re people in cars and buses that jam the streets at all hours, and she understands how there could be one bad person mixed in with the good people and how that bad person could be in an alley or a van or a doorway or the playground or the corner market. But up here, in the woods and on the lake, standing in the grass, under the sun and the sleepy trees and blue sky, she feels safe, and she believes this Leonard looks okay. She says so inside her head: He looks okay.

  Leonard stands at the border of the driveway and grass, only a few steps away from Wen. His hair is wheat colored and moppy, swirling in layers, swoops of icing on a cake. His eyes are round and brown like a teddy bear’s eyes. He is younger than her dads. His face is pale and smooth and he doesn’t have a hint of the beard-stubble shadow Daddy Andrew gets by the end of each day. Maybe Leonard is in college. Should she ask him what college he goes to? She could then tell him that Daddy Andrew teaches at Boston University.

  She says, “My name is Wenling. But my dads and my friends and everyone at school calls me Wen.”

  “Well, it is very nice to meet you, Wen. So tell me what you’re up to. Why aren’t you swimming in the lake on such a beautiful afternoon?”

  That’s something an adult would say. Maybe he isn’t a college student. She says, “The lake is very cold. So I’m catching grasshoppers.”

  “You are? Oh, I love to catch grasshoppers. Used to do it all the time when I was a kid. So much fun.”

  “It is. But this is more serious.” She juts out her lower jaw, a purposeful imitation of Daddy Eric when she asks him a question with an answer that isn’t yes right away, but will be yes eventually if she waits long enough.

  “It is?”

  “I’m catching them and naming them and studying them so I can find out if they are healthy. People do that when they study animals and I want to help animals when I grow up.” Wen is a little light-headed from talking so fast. Teachers at school tell her to slow down because they can’t understand her when she gets going like this. Substitute teacher Ms. Iglesias told her once that it was like the words leaked out of her mouth, and Wen didn’t like Ms. Iglesias at all after that.

  “I’m very impressed. Do you need any help? I’d love to help. I know I’m much bigger now than when I was a kid.” He holds out his hands and shrugs like he can’t believe what he’s become. “But I’m still very gentle.”

  Wen says, “Okay. I’ll hold the jar so the other ones don’t jump out, and maybe you can catch a couple more for me. No big ones, please. They can’t be big. No room. Just the small ones. I’ll show you.” She walks to the stairs to retrieve her jar. She goes up on her tiptoes and peers through the cabin’s open windows that flank the front door. She looks for her dads, to see if they are watching or listening. They are not in the kitchen or the living room. They must be out on the back deck, reclined in the lounge chairs, sunning themselves (Daddy Eric will most certainly get sunburned and then insist his lobster-red skin doesn’t hurt or need aloe), and reading a book or listening to music or boring podcasts. She briefly considers going out back to tell them about catching grasshoppers with Leonard. Instead she picks up the jar. The grasshoppers react like heated popcorn, pattering against the lid. Wen shushes her charges and goes to Leonard, who is in the middle of the lawn, already hunched over and scanning the grass.

  Wen sidles up next to him. She holds out the jar and says, “See? No big ones, please.”

  “Got it.”

  “Do you want me to catch them and you can watch?”

  “I’d really like to catch one at least. It’s been a long time. I’m not fast like you anymore, so I’ll just move real slow to not scare them. Oh, hey, there’s one.” He bends and stretches out his arms on either side of the grasshopper that is hanging upside down from the tip of a dried-out stalk. The grasshopper doesn’t move, hypnotized by the giant eclipsing the sun. Leonard’s hands slowly come together and swallow it up.

  “Wow. You’re good.”

  “Thanks. Now how do we want to do this? Maybe you should put the jar on the ground, let the ones inside calm down a little, and then we can open the lid and put this one in, too.”

  Wen does as he suggests. Leonard goes down to one knee and stares at the jar. Wen mimics his movements. She wants to ask if the grasshopper is jumping around in the darkness of his hands, if he feels it crawling on his skin.

  They wait in silence until he says, “Okay. Let’s try it.” Wen unscrews the lid. Leonard slides one hand over the other until he is holding the grasshopper in one mighty fist and then delicately tilts the lid open with t
he newly freed hand. He drops the grasshopper inside the jar, replaces the lid, and turns it once clockwise. They look at each other and laugh.

  He says, “We did it. You want one more?”

  “Yeah.” Wen has her notebook out and writes in the appropriate columns: “2 inches, green, boy Lenard, medeum.” She giggles to herself that she named the grasshopper after him.

  Leonard makes quick work of catching another grasshopper and deposits it inside the jar without incident or inmate escape.

  Wen writes: “1 inch, brown, girl Izzy, low.”

  He asks, “How many do you have now?”

  “Seven.”

  “That’s a powerful, magic number.”

  “Don’t you mean lucky?”

  “No, it’s only sometimes lucky.”

  His response is annoying as everyone knows seven is a lucky number. “I think it’s lucky, and I think it’s lucky for grasshoppers.”

  “You are probably right.”

  “Okay. That’s enough then.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “You can help me watch them.” She puts the jar down on the ground and the two of them sit cross-legged and across from each other with the jar in the middle. Wen has her notebook and pencil out. A gust of wind rattles the paper held beneath her palms.

  Leonard asks, “Did you punch the holes in the lid yourself?”

  “Daddy Eric did it. We found an old hammer and screwdriver in the basement.” The basement was a scary place with shadows and spiderwebs in all the corners and angles and it smelled like the deep dark bottom of a lake. The cement slab floor was cold and gritty on her bare feet. She was supposed to put shoes on to go down there, but she had been too excited and forgot. Ropes, rusted gardening tools, and old life jackets hung from exposed wooden beams, the battered bones of the cabin. Wen wished their condo in Cambridge had a basement like this one. Of course, once they were back upstairs, Daddy Eric declared the basement was off-limits. Wen protested but he said there was too much sharp and rusty stuff down there, stuff that wasn’t theirs to be touching or using in the first place. In the face of the no basement allowed proclamation, Daddy Andrew groaned from the love seat in the living area and said, “Daddy Fun is so strict.” Daddy Fun was the mostly playful nickname for the family worrier and the one quickest to say no. Daddy Eric, ever calm, said, “I’m serious. You should see it down there. It’s a deathtrap.” Daddy Andrew said, “I’m sure it’s terrible. Speaking of a trap!” and he pulled Wen into a sneak-attack hug, spun her around, and gave her what he called his “face kiss”: lips planted on the space between her cheek and nose and he playfully smooshed the rest of his big face into hers. His beard stubble tickled and scratched and she giggled, screamed, and squirmed out of it. She ran to the front door with her jar and Daddy Andrew called after her, “But we have to listen to Daddy Fun because he loves us, right?” Wen shouted, “No,” back and her dads reacted with mock outrage as she closed the front door behind her.