Surveying

The twenty-second chapter of the "She Died With Two Subscribers" series

A typical human gazes at the vast unspoiled wilderness of Maine and doesn’t think a single thought about boundaries. Nadine Nadeau was atypical.

She stood on a bluff and looked down at the rugged forest and saw lines cut through the trees and granite with her laser-like vision. She’d soon employ her surveying Total Station equipment to mark the actual property lines. However, she had an uncanny ability to see the boundaries in the craggy woods based upon the descriptions that she’d read in the deed, and the rudimentary maps that she’d glanced at on her phone.

If only relationships were so easy to delineate, she thought as she walked along a ridge in the middle of nowhere. Was she always fated to be alone like she was now, and would that be the worst thing in the world?

All of her previous relationships had failed. She was intimately familiar with that fact. The key question was why. Was it because of her lack of trust, a tendency which had reared its head again when she confronted Will in front of his father about why she’d not been notified in advance about his father’s unprecedented visit to Maine? Or was it the secret she’d been keeping for decades, including from Will?

She acknowledged her hypocrisy as she parsed through her thoughts as the wind tried to whisper wisdom into her ear. She had been accusatory about Will not sharing the fact of his father’s arrival for a completely justifiable reason, yet she’d not yet shared something that might be of make or break importance to Will after six months of dating him.

She knew that her feelings about Will were deeper than for the men she’d had relationships with in the past. But fear followed her everywhere, including to this hill overlooking the Aroostook River. It rode with her in her RAV4. It accompanied her to work meetings. It ate meals with her. And it climbed into bed with her at night, and whispered into her ear even as she drifted off to sleep.

Will’s father had left on Sunday at the crack of dawn. He’d insisted on carrying his own suitcase to his truck, and foregoing breakfast to start his journey back home to Massachusetts before the sun could peek over the horizon.

Will knew better than to argue with his father as attempting to reverse a lifetime habit would be futile. He settled for a briefly manly shoulder hug, with father and son gently slapping each other on the back outside the cabin, and a then a brief salute as his father rolled out of Will’s gravel driveway toward the main road.

The sun had still not climbed into the morning sky, and only a few wisps of light spilling from his cabin allowed him to see his father’s black truck rolling slowly along the drive, getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared into the forest. He wondered if the positive momentum caused by his father’s visit would continue into the future, or whether the distance between them would be more than the actual mileage once his father returned to Worcester.

Will felt his father’s absence almost as soon as his hearse-black truck had evaporated into the landscape. He thought that was a good sign—missing his father. It was a newer emotion and one he was not familiar with.

Two men, father and son, living isolated in their own homes, Will thought. Both trying, with only partial success, to forge a relationship with each other, and with women. Always battling an odd combination of awkwardness and loneliness.

Will wondered if he’d grown up to be more like his father than he reckoned, and whether his move to the remote wilderness of Oxbow was a decision born of more than the happenstance of his unexpected inheritance of this rustic cabin and surrounding thirty acres

He wandered down to the beaver flow to seek company. The two beavers were busy repairing their lodge in advance of the winter, tirelessly swimming back and forth across the pond with branches to reinforce their home. There was no drama, only hard work and a commonality of purpose. They were monogamous and seemed content to build their home, and live their lives, together. If only human were so reliable and resolute, thought Will.

He sat on a log facing on the pond and watched the beavers at work for what may have been many hours. One sitting in the heavens could see Will sitting on his natural bench by the pond, while his father’s truck inexorably moved toward the New Hampshire border.

The temperature eventually dipped to the point where Will shivered, and realized that he needed to abandon his favorite place, and bid the beavers adieu. He wondered if they were aware of his presence and would miss him when he retreated into his own lodge, or, like the majority of humans, they were exclusively focused on their own activity.

Will retreated into his cabin. He had gotten in the habit of leaving the single bolt unlocked except when he left his property since it was so rare for him to have a visitor and, when it did happen as with his father or Nadine, they always let him know in advance. He figured he didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway.

He went to his bathroom and prepared a hot bath. Fully submerged, excepted for his head, he allowed the heat to invigorate his muscles. He draped a hot, wet hand towel over his eyes as he leaned back, resting his head on a small cushion he’d cleverly installed at the head of the tub. While he was generally an early riser, he didn’t normally get up at 5 a.m. like he did this morning to accomodate his father’s unreasonable desire to hit the road before the crack of dawn. His eyelids drooped and he started to drift off to sleep.

Only his head eventually sliding into the water with small splash saved him from sleeping in the tub for who knows how long, and jolted him to his senses. He was unsure how long he’d drifted off for. He considered whether to retreat to his bedroom and get dressed or instead put on his pajamas and climb into bed for an hour or so and set his alarm so he’d be dressed and ready for Nadine’s expected visit for a simple brunch.

The falling temperature in the tub ultimately caused Will to self-evict. He climbed out and observed his naked frame in the mirror. He dried his hair and body, looped the white towel across the bar on the back of the bathroom door, and walked the few steps to his bedroom.

Will immediately rubbed his eyes because it certainly could not be that there, grinning at him, in the full glory of her pink-and-white altogether, was his neighbor, Dane Eastergaard, with a lascivious grin on her face, looking him up and down.

“Well it took you forever, while I waited freezing, but it was certainly worth the wait,” she said, leering at him.

Just then, Will heard footsteps moving toward them.

photo credit: Valerie V on Unsplash

To read the previous chapter in this series, please click here. To start reading the series from the beginning, please click here.