The entire world is quiet. Everything is at peace. I’m sure I’ve never experienced a night as perfect as this before. She tells me that it’s impossible to believe that somewhere out there, the world is at war. People are starving. Children are being abused. We’re removed from civilization, she says, “Two tiny figurines in a snow globe that some child has turned over.” I picture it: us trudging across ceramic mounds while glittery snow encircles us in our own bubble.
In the distance I’m certain I hear an owl hoot. I stop her and say, “Shhh,” and for a moment we listen. This is where the snowy owl migrates in the winter. We’re freezing to death, but he comes here to keep warm. We listen. It’s quiet. She looks toward the sky and watches the clouds burst at the seams. They shower us with snow.
The tree is heavy. We haul it in together, her in the front, me in the back. We slide it across the snow, and four or five times one or both of us slides on the snow and falls. Our hands are so cold, they’re hardly able to grasp the trunk of the tree.
When we get to the cabin, I take the base of the tree. Moving backward, I heave it up the steps. She stands at the bottom. She pretends to help, but we both know that she does nothing.
We force it through the front door and prop it against a wall. I collapse. The tree must weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, sopping wet and overflowing with heavy snow.
I kick off my wet shoes and gulp water right from the kitchen faucet. She lets her hands wander across the juvenile leaves, still filled with snow. She smells the pine. It’s the first time neither of us complains of being cold. Our hands are raw, our noses and cheeks red. But under layers of clothes we sweat. I stare at her, her skin alive from the cold.
I go into the bathroom to clean up and change my clothes. She wipes the moisture from the floor, from under the tree and where our shoes pooled snow. I can smell the pine on my hands. I feel the sticky sap. I breathe hard, trying to catch my breath. I drop to the couch when I return.
She heads into the bathroom to strip the wet clothes from her skin. She sinks into an extra pair of long johns that had been drying on the window curtain, and when she comes out she says, “No one’s ever given me a tree before.”
I’m rekindling the fire as she passes through the room. She watches my calculating hands manipulate the wood just right, bringing the fire to life. She says that I do everything that way, with a certain expertise I pretend doesn’t exist. I don’t say a thing.
I sit back on the couch and drape a blanket over my legs. My feet rest on a coffee table. I’m still breathing hard.
“What I would give for a beer,” I say.
She watches me sitting there for I don’t know how long. I can feel her eyes on me.
“You, too?” I ask after a minute.
“A beer?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she says.
I remember the two of us sitting side by side, drinking beer in that bar. I ask her if she remembers and she says yes. She says it seems like a million years ago, long before someone glued us to the lid of an empty baby food jar and filled our world with glitter.
“What time is it?” she asks.
My watch rests on the table beside my feet. I lean forward for a look. I say that it’s 2:00 a.m.
“Are you tired?” she asks.
“Getting there.”
“Thank you for the tree,” she says. “Thank you for getting us a tree,” she adds. She doesn’t want to be presumptuous.
I stare at the tree, leaning against the log wall. It’s misshapen. Homely. But she says it’s perfect.
“No,” I say. “It’s for you. So you stop looking so damn sad.”
I promise to find lights for it. I don’t know how, but I promise I’ll do it. She tells me not to worry about it. “It’s perfect the way it is,” she says. But I say I’ll find the lights.
She asks if I ever ride the “L.” I give her a dumb look. I say yes, of course I do. You can hardly get around Chicago without riding the “L,” the city’s rapid transit system. She says that she rides the Red Line most of the time, flying under the city as if all that commotion aboveground doesn’t exist.
“Do you ever ride the bus?” she asks.
I wonder where the hell she’s going with this. “Sometimes.”
“Go out. To bars. Stuff like that.”
“Sometimes.” I shrug. “It’s not really my crowd.”
“But you do?”
“I guess. Sometimes.”
“You ever go by the lake?”
“I know a guy who’s got a boat at Belmont Harbor.” And by that I mean some lowlife like me. Some guy working for Dalmar who lives in a boat, a used cruiser he keeps gassed and docked, in case he needs to run. He’s got enough provisions on that boat that he could last for at least a month, traveling up the Great Lakes to Canada. This is how people like us live. Always ready to run.
She nods. Belmont Harbor. Of course. She says she runs by there all the time.
“I could have seen you before. We might have passed on the street, ridden together on the bus. Maybe waited underground for the same ‘L’?”
“Millions of people live in Chicago.”
“But maybe?”
“I guess. Maybe. What are you getting at?”
“I’m just wondering...” Her voice trails off.
“What?” I ask.
“If we would have ever met. If it wasn’t for...”
“This?” I shake my head. I’m not trying to be an ass. It’s just the truth. “Probably not.”