The Cabin at the End of the World_A Novel Read online

  Leonard says, “Yes, there are more people coming. You are my friend now, Wen. I wouldn’t lie to you about that. Just like I won’t lie to you about them. I don’t know if I’d call them my friends, exactly. I don’t know them very well, but we have an important job to do. The most important job in the history of the world. I hope you can understand that.”

  Wen stands up. “I have to go now.” The sounds are closer. They are at the end of the driveway but not quite around the bend and the trees yet. She doesn’t want to see these other people. Maybe if she doesn’t see them, refuses to see them, they’ll go away. They are so loud. Maybe instead of bears it’ll be Leonard’s giant monsters and dinosaurs coming to get them both.

  Leonard says, “Before you go inside to get your dads, you have to listen to me. This is important.” Leonard crawls out of his sitting position and onto one knee, and his eyes brim with tears. “Are you listening?”

  Wen nods her head and takes a step back. Three people turn the corner onto the driveway: two women and one man. They are dressed in blue jeans and button-down shirts of different colors; black, red, and white. The taller of the two women has white skin and brown hair, and her white shirt is a different kind of white than Leonard’s. His shirt glows like the moon, whereas hers is dull, washed, almost gray. Wen catalogs the apparent coordination in how Leonard and the three strangers dress as something important to tell her dads. She will tell them everything and they will know why the four of them are all wearing jeans and button-down shirts, and maybe her dads can explain why the three new strangers are carrying strange long-handled tools.

  Leonard says, “You are a beautiful person, inside and out. One of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, Wen. Your family is perfect and beautiful, too. Please know that. This isn’t about you. It’s about everyone.”

  None of the tools are scythes but they look like menacing, nightmarish versions of them, with rough scribbles at the ends of the poles instead of smooth crescent blades. All three of the wooden handles are long and thick, perhaps once owning shovel blades or rake heads. The stocky man wearing a red shirt has a flower of rusty hand shovel and/or trowel blades, nailed and screwed to the end of the handle. On the other end of his handle, pointed down by his feet, is a thick, blunt, red block of dented and chipped metal, the head of a well-used sledgehammer. Now that he’s closer, his handle looks bigger, thicker, like he’s holding a boat’s oar with the paddle sawed off. Even as Wen walks backward, toward the cabin, she sees the tops of screws and nail heads haphazardly ringing both ends of his wooden handle like fly hairs. The shorter woman wears a black shirt, and at the end of her wooden handle is a pinwheel of raking claws, crooked metal fingers jammed together into a large ragged ball so her tool looks like the most dangerous lollipop in the world. The other woman wears the off-white shirt and at the end of her tool is a single blade head, bent and curled over itself at one end, like a scroll, and then tapering into a right triangle with a sharp point at the other.

  Wen’s choppy, unsure backward steps become deep, equally unsure, lunges. She says, “I’m going inside now.” She has to say it to ensure she will enter the cabin and not stand and stare.

  Leonard is on his knees with his great and terrible arms outstretched. His face is big and sad in the way all honest faces are sad. He says, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault. You haven’t done anything wrong, but the three of you will have to make some tough decisions. Terrible decisions, I’m afraid. I wish with all of my broken heart you didn’t have to.”

  Wen fumbles up the stairs, still going backward, with eyes only for the confusing amalgams of wood and metal the strangers are carrying.

  Leonard yells, but he doesn’t sound angry or distressed. He’s yelling to be heard over the expanding distance between them. “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. Tell them they have to. We are not here to hurt you. We need your help to save the world. Please.”

  Two

  Eric

  Small whitecaps dapple the water like little paintbrush strokes and quietly collapse against the rocky shoreline and the metal pipe posts of the cabin’s functional but dilapidated dock. The wooden slats are bleached gray and warped, looking like fossilized bones, the rib cage of a fabled lake monster. Andrew promised to teach Wen how to fish for perch off the dock’s edge before Eric could suggest everyone stay off the creaky, ill-kept structure. Eric suspects Wen will give up on fishing as soon as the first worm is impaled on a hook. If the worm guts, roiling squirms, and death throes won’t do it, then she’ll quit after she has to yank and tear a barbed hook out of a perch’s button mouth. Then again, it’s possible she’ll love it and insist upon doing everything, including baiting the hook, herself. Her independence streak is so fierce as to be almost defiant. She has become so much like Andrew that it makes him love her and worry about her safety all the more. Late yesterday afternoon, as Wen changed into her bathing suit, Andrew rebuffed Eric’s attempt to start a discussion about the rickety dock by sprinting across its length, the structure earthquaking under his feet, and then he cannonballed into the lake.

  Eric and Andrew lounge on the elevated back deck overlooking the sprawling Gaudet Lake; deep and dark, its basin was gouged out by glaciers fifteen thousand years ago and ringed by a seemingly endless forest of pine, fir, and birch trees. Behind the forest, looming as distant and unreachable as the clouds, are the ancient humpbacks of the White Mountains in the south, the lake’s natural fortress, both impenetrable and inescapable. The surrounding landscape is as spectacularly New England as it is alien to their everyday urban lives. There are a handful of cabins and camps on the lake, but none are visible from their deck. The only boat spied since their arrival was a yellow canoe gliding silently along the lake’s far shore. The three of them wordlessly watched it fade from view, falling off the unseen edge of the world.

  The nearest cabin to theirs is two miles farther down the onetime logging road. Earlier that morning, well before either Andrew or Wen were awake, Eric jogged down to the unoccupied cabin, which had been recently painted a dark blue and had white shutters and a pair of snowshoes decorating the white front door. He resisted an inexplicably strong urge to peer into the windows and explore the property. Only an irrational fear of being caught by the absent owners and then having to stammer through an embarrassing rationalization of his behavior turned him away.

  Eric lays half reclined in a chaise longue under the bright light of the sun. He forgot to drape a towel over the chair and its weave of plastic bands sticks to his bare back. He is probably mere minutes away from a slight burn if he doesn’t apply sunscreen. As a child he used to suffer through the stinging pain of sunburn on purpose so that he could later gross out his older sisters with his peeling skin. He’d carefully pry up large flakes and leave them attached to his body like miniature back and tail plates of a stegosaurus, his favorite dinosaur.

  Andrew sits a few feet away from Eric, but not a patch of his pale skin is exposed to the sunlight. He is curled up with his legs folded on a bench seat under a nearly see-through umbrella that shades the old picnic table. The table sheds large strips of red stain. He wears baggy black shorts and a gray long-sleeve T-shirt adorned by Boston University’s crest, and his long hair is pulled back and tucked into an army-green flat cap. Andrew is hunched over a collection of essays about twentieth-century South American writers and magical realism. Eric knows what the book is because, since arriving at the cabin, Andrew has told him three times what he’s reading, and in the twenty minutes they’ve been on the deck, Andrew has read aloud two passages about Gabriel García Márquez. Eric read One Hundred Years of Solitude in college, but to his shame very little of that book has survived in his memory. That Andrew is not so subtly showing off and/or seeking Eric’s approval is endearing and irritating in equal measure.

  Eric reads and rereads the same paragraph of a novel that everyone is supposedly talking about this summer. It’s a typical thriller involving a disappearanc
e of a character, and he’s already weary of the contrived and borderline absurd plot. But it’s not the book’s fault that he can’t concentrate.

  He says, “One of us should go see what Wen is up to.” It’s carefully worded and not a question to which Andrew can quickly say no. It’s a statement; something he’ll have to address directly.

  “By one of us, do you mean me?”

  “No.” Eric says it in a way that he expects Andrew to be able to instantly translate as a yes, of course, I wouldn’t have said anything otherwise. Eric doesn’t know how he’s become the hovering parent, the disciplinarian (God, how he hates that word), the one who obsesses over worst-case scenarios. Eric prides himself on being western-Pennsylvania friendly, easy to talk to, levelheaded, always willing to build toward consensus and compromise. The second youngest of nine children from a Catholic family, his ability to talk to and charm most everyone was how he survived his confusing teenage years and downright turbulent early twenties after he came out and his parents refused to pay for his final semester at the University of Pittsburgh. Eric’s response was to couch surf with the help of many generous friends and work at a popular sandwich shop near campus for two years until he paid the remaining tuition and earned his degree. All the while he talked to his parents (mostly his mom) on the phone and remained confident they would come around. And they did. The day Eric received his diploma, his parents showed up at his friend’s apartment in tears, apologizing, and they gave him a check equal to the amount of the college bill with a little extra thrown in, a check Eric promptly used to make a move up to Boston. Now a market analyst for Financeer, because of his obvious people skills he is occasionally called in to help mediate contentious meetings between administrators and his department director. Eric is laid-back in his approach to everything in his life, with the one exception of parenting. Andrew had to practically drag him out to the back deck instead of letting him remain inside, staring out the front windows and dutifully watching Wen playing alone in the yard.

  Andrew doesn’t look up from his book and says, “Bears. Wen is up to her neck in bears.”

  Eric drops his book and it claps loudly on the deck. “You are not funny.” The owners left strict written instructions, all capital letters, to not leave any unsecured garbage bags outside because it would attract bears. There’s a mini shedlike structure on the property for the sole purpose of housing and hiding trash. They are to bring trash to a town dump (which is only open to nonresidents on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday), a forty-minute drive away with a charge of two dollars a bag. They could’ve rented a property on popular Lake Winnipesaukee, a tourist hot spot in the southern/central part of the state, where Eric wouldn’t be obsessing about bears (as much), instead of this beautiful but remote cabin, as lost in the woods as Goldilocks (more bears . . . ), a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. Eric sits up and rubs his bald head, which is hot to the touch, and most definitely sunburned.

  Andrew says, “Yes, I am.”

  “You are not funny right now.”

  “I can yell to her from here. But that might spook the bears. Make them more likely to attack.”

  Eric laughs and says, “You are such a dick.” He stands, walks to the deck railing, and stretches, pretending that he’s looking out over the lake and that he is not going to walk inside the cabin or down the deck stairs and directly to the front yard.

  “Maybe it’d be okay if some bears showed up. I like bears.” Andrew closes his book. His dark brown eyes and smile are aren’t-I-clever-and-cute big.

  “She can come out back and search for grasshoppers.” Eric gestures below the deck but there isn’t much backyard at all, and what little they have is a mixture of sand, pine needles, mossy patches, and a small row of pine trees that yields to the shoreline. Eric twists his beard at the end of his chin, turns around, and says, “She probably needs a drink, or a snack, or more sunscreen.”

  “She’s fine. Give her another five or ten minutes and then I’ll go see her, or get her. She’ll probably come looking for us before then, anyway. So sit, please. Stop worrying. Enjoy your sun. Or stand there and block it for me. Though you are getting a little pink. You burn even quicker than I do.”

  Eric plucks his white T-shirt with the team usa soccer logo from the picnic tabletop and puts it on. “I’m trying not to hover. I’m trying to let her—” He pauses, leans against the deck railing, and folds his arms. “I’m trying to let her be.”

  “I know you are. And you’re doing great.”

  “I hate feeling this way. I really don’t like it.”

  “You need to stop beating yourself up. You’re like the best dad in the world.”

  “Like? So I’m almost the best dad in the world.”

  Andrew laughs. “Hmm. Akin to, maybe.”

  “Can you be more specific as to my ranking? Put a percentile on it?”

  “You know I’m not good with numbers, but you’re near the pinnacle, the apex of best dads, the kind who earn the coffee mugs and T-shirts saying so.” Andrew closes his book and is clearly enjoying teasing Eric.

  Eric is losing the playful joust and his patience. He blurts out, “And you’re one of those best dads, right?” even though he knows he isn’t being fair. “Now I know what to get you for Christmas.”

  “Come on now, Eric. We’re clearly tied for like the best.”

  “I think I prefer ‘akin to.’”

  “That’s the spirit. But listen, even the best dads in the world worry and nag and fuck up, and you have to give yourself permission to fuck up and allow Wen to mess up on her own, too. Accept that none of us will ever be perfect.” It’s the start of a spiel that Andrew has given before, usually followed by references to their weeks-long discussions prior to adopting Wen, and how they talked about not giving in to the lizard-brained fear that rules too many parents and people in general, and Andrew would then switch into academic mode and quote studies that cite the importance of unsupervised play in a child’s intellectual and emotional development. Eric isn’t sure when Andrew became the whimsical, carefree sage who in his professional academic life is as persnickety and precise as an algorithm. But these are the roles they have fallen into since welcoming Wen into their lives. These are the roles they’ve embraced and find comforting in a way that acknowledges the wonderful, frightening, fulfilling, alienating, and all-consuming what did we do to ourselves? existential parental condition.

  “Yeah, I know, I know. And I’m still going out front to see how she’s doing—”

  “Eric!”

  “—only because I’m getting burned. I’m thirsty, and I’m bored. My book totally sucks.” Eric walks to the sliding glass door that opens to the small kitchen.

  Andrew sticks out both legs, blocking the door. “None shall pass.”

  “What is this, the world’s hairiest toll bridge?”

  “That’s not very nice.” Andrew doesn’t move his legs and pretends to read his book. He obnoxiously licks a finger and turns a page.

  Eric pinches some of Andrew’s leg hair between his fingers and yanks quickly.

  “Ow! You’re such a bully.” Andrew swipes at Eric with his book. Eric steps back and avoids getting hit initially, but Andrew lunges forward again and swats him in the back of his left leg.

  “Don’t hit me with magical realists!”

  Eric slaps Andrew’s hat brim down over his eyes and then snags the book out of midair while a laughing Andrew tries to hit him again. Andrew clamps down on Eric’s arm and pulls him stumbling onto the picnic bench. The two of them wrestle for the book. They trade light, playful jabs, and then a warm kiss.

  Andrew leans away, smirking like he won something, and says, “Okay, you can let go of the book now.”

  “Are you sure?” Eric tries to quickly yank it out of Andrew’s hand.

  “Don’t—you’ll tear off the cover. Let go so I can hit you with it again.”

  “I’m going to throw you and the book—”

  The back slider
opens with a rattling crash, loud enough that Eric instinctively looks for a shower of broken glass. Wen runs out onto the deck, talking at supersonic speed. She jumps back and forth through the doorway, inside to the cabin then out on the deck then back inside again. She looks around wildly like she’s afraid to be outside, and she’s still talking and now waving frantically at them: come here, come inside.

  Andrew says, “Wen, slow down, honey.”

  Eric says, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  She’s not crying so she likely hasn’t been stung by a wasp or physically hurt by anything. He briefly imagines a scenario in which Wen heard something rustling out in the woods and got spooked, but she’s more than spooked. She’s clearly frightened, and Eric’s own alarm and panic rises.

  Wen doesn’t stop dancing between the deck and the cabin. She does, however, take care to enunciate and slow down. She says, “Come inside, now. Please come in. You have to. Hurry. There are people here and they want to come in and they want to talk to you and some of them scare me.”

  Wen

  She doesn’t answer any more questions until after she herds her confused, concerned dads inside the cabin. With the slider shut behind them, she places a sawed-off hockey stick in the frame so the glass door can’t glide over the track even if the lock isn’t latched. Daddy Andrew showed her how to do that last night before she went to bed.

  She pushes her dads out of the kitchen and toward the locked front door. The common area, which is a living room space and kitchen, takes up almost the entirety of the cabin’s interior. The walls are made of unstained wooden planks. Wen has already walked around most of the room, knocking and testing for loose ones. A map of the lake and forest, a framed mountain landscape at dusk, and a plaque with hand-carved loons hang haphazardly on the walls along with what look to be antique skis and poles and old baking soda and Moxie advertisements stamped onto sheets of tin, the kind of kitsch one can find at any general store in New Hampshire. A small sliver of a bathroom with the world’s skinniest shower stall is to the kitchen’s left. The showerhead leaks water more than it actually showers. Across from the back slider and to the right of the front door are the two rectangular bedrooms. Wen’s room has bunk beds, the frame built into the walls. Wen has slept in both beds already and has decided she prefers the bottom bunk. To the right of the two bedrooms is the open mouth of a stairwell that spirals down into the basement. A short, thigh-high wrought-iron fence rings the perimeter of the stairwell landing. Next to that and up against the back wall are a stone-and-mortar fireplace and chimney. Squatting on the hearth is a woodburning stove, a small stack of firewood, and a rack of black pewter stove tools: minishovel, brush, tongs, and a poker. A long, army-green couch, the upholstery as prickly as a cactus, cuts a diagonal claim through the common area. Offset to its left is the puffy blue love seat paired with a spindly-legged end table ready to topple at the slightest nudge. A small lamp with a bright yellow lampshade rests on the end table like a toadstool. To the left of the love seat and almost in the small kitchen is a rectangular table, an abandoned game of solitaire spread out on its top. A dusty and cobweb-tinseled wagon wheel turned folksy chandelier hangs from the vaulted ceiling and between two wooden beams wide enough to be footbridges. On the wall to their right and directly across from the front door are a window and a flat-screen television. The only modern appliance in the cabin (the refrigerator and stove have to be older than both Andrew and Eric), the television is tethered to a satellite dish, a lonely lump of plastic stationed on the roof. The flat-screen is so out of place as to be anachronistic. It seems impossible that it functions as intended and is less an accoutrement than it is a blackened window, forever night beyond its glass with its sash permanently nailed shut.