The Aftermath

the second chapter of the "She Died with Two Subscribers" series

Spring had pushed the uneven remnants of winter further north, and only shrinking knuckles of snow still clung to the earth in the deepest parts of the woods.

When the temperature finally began to cautiously climb into the lower forties, the rains intensified and mud season arrived in northern Maine. With each step that Will Northcutt took as he hiked on his land seeking dead wood for his stove, the earth aggressively sucked on his boots as if it had an agenda to hold him in a single place.

It had been Will’s first winter in Oxbow, making it impossible to judge whether it was just his imagination or this coldest season had lasted longer than usual. Maybe it was because he hadn’t worked much. Other than some emergency jobs where a roof had collapsed under the weight of snow or ice had pried open a fissure to allow water to trickle into a home, Will had lived off his meager savings during the past few months like a squirrel rationing his store of nuts.

He’d spent the great majority of his time holed up in his cabin, working on his book. It was tough sledding. He never had viewed himself as a sentimental type, but Mrs. Eastergaard’s death and the events leading up to it had profoundly impacted him. His creativity had deserted him in the aftermath of her departure.

Day after day, Will did little but consume some dried foodstuffs. He spent long hours staring at his computer screen as if it was a live person. He thought that this was odd. Even if the glass and metal contraption had been a human female, he wouldn’t have been inclined to look at her for so many hours each day, no matter how attractive and interesting she might be.

Will was frustrated because winter was the season when he should have been able to complete Starting After Zero. The plot involved a guy who lost everything due to a series of calamities, and had to rebuild each facet of his life. Given that it mirrored his own journey, he felt that the words should have been flowing as freely as the rain-swollen creek up the hill from his cabin.

Being in the solitude of the woods with no distractions and days packed full of hours had allowed him ample time to advance his narrative and complete the first draft before April. Instead, he had written no new passages since Mrs. Eastergaard died. He’d only managed to rework some of what he’d already written, and that felt inconsequential.

He knew that by tax filing day, the Perrault Brothers Construction Company would need him to work full-time installing and repairing roofs in the County. His writing time would be limited to an hour each evening for at least half a year after that, so now was the time when he could still make headway. However, despite his attempt to feel a sense of urgency, his progress continued to be as slow as when he walked through the nearby beaver flow. Even the beavers seemed to be at work damming his progress.

Every few weeks, he ventured into Presque Isle or Masardis for provisions. He thought several times about going back to the Nadeau house where he’d noticed that pretty young woman who’d smiled at him a certain way when he was standing on her father’s roof, covered head to toe with splashes of tar.

Will had been hurt before. He’d gotten married way too young. Even if his instinct was right that she might be interested in him, he’d not had success with lasting relationships. In recent years, he’d courted despair about his prospects for finding a suitable mate and settling down.

However, the limited view he’d had of Mrs. Eastergaard’s marriage to her beloved Ernest had planted the thought that there are some relationships that are worth the periodic storms that virtually all romances encounter. Though it was incredibly sad, he admired the way that she’d cooked and eaten Ernie’s favorite meal on his birthday— even after his demise—right up through the year that she died.

Will was only nineteen when he’d married his high school sweetheart. She’d been in his graduating class. She drove off to college in Orono, and he clambered onto roofs every day as an apprentice. As much as they tried, it just wasn’t workable. They grew apart as she was headed toward the white-collar world, and he’d always be a blue-collar guy. They were divorced within two years. At least it was mostly amicable, and dividing their assets had been easy because they barely had any.

In the fourteen years since his divorce, he’d had girlfriends, but no relationship lasted more than six months. It was fortunate that Will was comfortable spending lots of time alone. Unlike most thirty-five year olds, he was not eager to spend much time on the internet. In fact, he didn’t even like to spend much time speaking on the phone, which likely didn’t help his relationship with his parents or his older sister. They all got along, but just didn’t share a lot and his having disappeared into one of the least populated areas of the country didn’t help. Every time he called home his mom asked him if he’d met a girl, which was a disincentive to staying in frequent touch.

Will had made some friendly acquaintances through his initial period of work. Occasionally he’d attend a football party at one of their homes or join them at a tavern for an evening, but that was rare.

Mostly, Will’s companions were the thousands of trees that stood on his land and the many critters that cohabited his acreage with him. Every single day, he could see the beavers at work maintaining their dam and lodge. Moose liked to visit his clearing and black bears would wander through. He never lacked for company—it was just that it was never human.

After the call from Brent Perrault, Will knew that he only had seven days before he started his busy season as a roofer. This accelerated his sense of urgency. He needed to go back to Mama Lou’s to stock up on provisions. He wanted to make some, at least incremental, progress on Starting After Zero. And he knew he should really find the Nadeau woman and ask her out.

He was no clairvoyant, but he was pretty certain the smile she gave him was an unwritten invitation. However, he was ambivalent. His first impression was that she was physically attractive, but he needed more than that. His family and few friends thought that this attitude of his was hypocritical. He’d been dumped by quite a few of his girlfriends for that exact same reason. They thought he was ruggedly handsome, but ultimately they found him to be aloof. He didn’t give them the something else—the anything else—that they needed to make the relationship sustainable.

Will sat on his deck chair that rested on some slates behind his cabin. From here, he could watch the trees as—in his imagination—they walked down the hill toward the Aroostook River. He wondered how much longer he’d procrastinate. It wouldn’t be hard to find her. He knew the house she lived in and her family’s surname. He even had her address on Main Street in Mapleton since her father had hired Perrault Brothers to replace his family’s roof and he’d worked there for the better part of two weeks.

People knew just about everything about everyone—even the recluses—in these small communities. It would just take wandering into one of the few local restaurants and asking about her, and he’d soon know where she worked and maybe the places she frequented. From there, he could figure out how he could bump into her. Heck, he’d not be surprised if she already knew about him—the little there was to know—since he’d probably been pretty obvious in staring at her from atop her father’s roof. That’s why she’d smiled at him in the first place. He really shouldn’t overthink this.

Down below the cabin was the area where the nearest beaver flow resided. Will could see it from his spot because there was a thinning in the trees which led to a large clearing. Through this alley, he could make out where the beavers had utilized a sizable natural depression in the ground as the focal point to build a small pond. They’d used their advanced skills to fell select trees and fortify the edges of the pond. Ingenious as these fur-clad engineers are, they’d left a small opening to Will’s far right because there was an intermittent stream that flowed downhill and into their pond to keep it full.

Other than the twitter of those birds that’d returned north already, the stillness of the water made it easy to detect sound and motion. About a half hour into his ruminating about the Nadeau woman, he heard a rustling of leaves straight ahead of him, and saw a large beaver beginning to drag a sizable branch toward the edge of the pond. It made him think of himself when he sometimes arrived at a worksite before the other Perrault-affiliated workers and started dragging pallets of his materials to where he’d need to lift them up to the roof. He identified with the solitary mammal—industrious and free—and living his life alone here in the wilderness.

Will’s eyes caught sight of a bush moving to the left of where his alter ego was lugging the branch to reinforce the margin of the pond. A second beaver with a mouth full of brush waddled after its mate. Geez, thought Will, even the forest won’t stop sending me messages about finding a companion.

Several more suns rose and fell over his Oxbow cabin, bringing Will even closer to the start of the roofing season. He’d taken no action with respect to the Nadeau woman or Starting After Zero. The only things that he’d occupied his time with were respiration, consumption, and a few other things he’d probably prefer not to mention.

Will sat at his small desk made from rough-cut maple. His aged laptop was on, and it hummed a song of inspiration to him and lit up his face with a flickering light. He thought about how the hero of Starting After Zero should pick up the fragmented pieces of his life after a fire destroyed his family’s home, and his wife later left him. But none of his ideas seemed interesting or worthy of his future readers. A sense of weariness flooded through his limbs, and he glanced at his clock. It was only 7:00 p.m. even though it seemed like midnight. It was way too early to go to sleep; He knew he wouldn’t be able to drift off at all.

He decided that maybe he should work on his Substack, Total Zero, which he’d neglected all winter. He logged in and winced when he saw that label and the fact that he’d been inactive since the night before he found Mrs. Eastergaard. He had nothing to show for his winter and he felt like the name of his publication.

Although he’d always been a loner as a child, Will never allowed himself to lapse into depression, but he felt like a penny circling the metallic drum in a children’s museum. He’d always felt a bit scared about what lies in the bottom of that hole where the coin disappears after its had its run, and he really didn’t want to find out.

Unlike many people his age, Will had always been cool with the concept of death; He accepted it as the egalitarian last chapter for all living things and didn’t wish to claim an exemption. He’d had his hand on his grandfather’s shoulder when his soul flew north. His grandpa seemed at peace, or perhaps just really tired. Mrs. Eastergaard had died with a smile on her face—excited to have a subscriber and relishing the anticipation of having a guest for breakfast.

The thing was—he was only thirty-five. He was way too young to be thinking this much about the afterlife. Most men his age were consumed with amassing some savings to buy a house, finding a woman to share it with, and maybe, for the most ambitious, locating a path to accomplishment.

These were Will’s thoughts as he clicked through his Substack dashboard. He tried to decide whether to do some reading before he figured out what to post on Total Zero to break his string of three months of inactivity, which was emblematic of his winter.

It was then that he noticed it. He rarely used the chat feature, but saw that there was an unread message waiting for him. He chuckled because for someone as relatively cloistered as himself, a message from a live human being was almost as common as a beachgoer finding a corked bottle that had washed ashore with a note someone had actually stuffed inside it. It was probably spam or something generated by that new AI crap the world was buzzing about but that he didn’t really care to interact with.

He clicked on the icon anyway and was surprised when he saw that the message was from NadeauStar. Nadeau? he thought. Could it really be?

He’d said nothing to nobody about the daughter Nadeau—not to any of the guys at Perrault Brothers Construction Company, not to anyone at Mama Lou’s, or even to his family and friends back in Massachusetts. He’d made no inquiries and conducted no internet searches about her. Heck, he wasn’t even sure if she had the same last name as her father. The only message he’d sent was with his eyes, directly to her. She hadn’t spoken to him at all; She’d just replied to his look with a smile.

Here he was procrastinating again. Open the darn message! his heart shouted at his fingers. His cursor hovered over the message and he clicked on it.

I’m not usually a stalker, but I noticed the look you cast my way last October, and have been wondering if you’d like to meet me for dinner at Taste of Home some Saturday? By the way, my name’s Nadine Nadeau.

She’d sent it three weeks ago. She must think I’m either a moron or not interested in females! Will thought. She might have a good argument on the former point, but definitely not on the latter.

Will wanted to respond but hesitated. He didn’t know Nadine Nadeau and just because she was a good-looking woman who smiled at him three months ago didn’t amount to a hill of beans. In Worcester, the city was populous enough that when he and a girlfriend broke up, it was uncommon for Will to run into her. If he did, it was usually years later when the sting had long since evaporated like a puddle in summer.

Northern Maine was completely different. There were few restaurants, grocery stores, and churches and so you couldn’t help but run into the same people over and over again. Here in the County, you’d better be extra careful. If your ex wanted to be vengeful and spread rumors about you, you’d better be even more content than Will Northcutt with spending the great majority of your time in a cabin cloaked by the forest while watching beavers maintaining a dam.

Going back to his initial musing after reading her chat message, Will believed that she’d have an excellent argument about his stupidity. Any self-respecting male would have already responded to her message and stopped dithering. He felt the guiding spirit of Astrid Eastergaard as he not-so-boldly tapped out a reply.

Sure

He immediately clicked on the red arrow pointing north to send his response because he was scared that if he didn’t act quickly, his usual thought process would take hold—the one that invariably led to his shunning human interaction.

Will instantly felt a pang of regret for sending a response which he thought that Nadine Nadeau might find unenthusiastic or standoffish, especially given his conceit that he was qualified to be an author.

She’d taken the time to write two well-constructed sentences that were informative and a bit playful just like the beavers in his pond. And his reply seemed like a small, dead branch.

Who knows? thought Will. Who knows what will happen?

The beavers invariably find a use for small, dead branches, and maybe Nadine Nadeau would be able to turn his pitiful reply into something worthwhile.

Photo credit to Daniel Diesenreither

To read the previous installment (chapter one) of the "She Died with Two Subscribers" series, please click here.

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