There are times she’s too far away, even when she’s in the same room.
She teaches me to count to a hundred in Spanish. I teach her the fox-trot. When the lake freezes completely over, we ice fish. We never stay out long. She doesn’t like to watch. So she walks on the lake as if Moses has parted the waters for her. She likes the newly fallen snow. Sometimes there are animal prints. Sometimes we hear snowmobiles in the distance. When she’s frozen solid she goes in. And then I feel alone.
*
I take her outside. I bring the gun with me. We walk through the woods for a while, to a place so desolate I’m sure no one will hear the sound of a bullet exploding from the muzzle.
I tell her that I want her to know how to shoot the gun. I give it to her flat, on both hands, like a piece of fine jewelry. She doesn’t want to touch the damn thing.
“Take it,” I say lightly.
“Why?” she asks.
“Just in case.”
I want her to learn to shoot it so she can protect herself.
“That’s what you’re here for.”
“What if one day I’m not?” I ask. I tuck a strand of her hair behind a raw ear. I watch as the wind frees it again. “It isn’t loaded.”
She loops her thumb and forefinger through the trigger guard. She lifts it from my hands. It’s heavy, the metal cold in the freezing temperatures. The ground is coated with snow.
I place her finger on the trigger, wrap her palm around the grip. I move her thumb downward. I pull her left hand up to meet the right. My hand on hers assures her that she will be all right. That this will be all right. Her hands are cold, like mine. But they come to me without reserve like they used to, pulling away when we touched.
I tell her about the parts of the gun: the barrel and muzzle and trigger guard. I pull a magazine from the pocket of my jeans and show her how to attach it to the gun. I tell her about the kinds of guns there are: rifles and handguns and semiautomatics. This is a semiautomatic. When one round is fired, another round is loaded from the magazine into the chamber. All with the pull of the trigger.
I tell her never to aim the gun at something she doesn’t intend to kill.
“I learned this the hard way,” I say, “when I was seven. Maybe eight. Some kid in the neighborhood. His old man owned a gun. He used to brag about it all the fucking time. I called him a liar. He wanted to prove it to me, so we went to his house after school. No one was home. His dad kept the thing in a bedside table, unlocked and loaded. I grabbed it from the drawer like it was a toy. We played a round of cops and robbers. He was the cop but I had the gun. The kid said, ‘Hands up,’ and I turned and shot him.”
And then we stand there in the freezing cold. We remember the times she stared down the barrel of the gun. There’s guilt. And sorrow. I’m sure she sees it in my eyes. I’m sure she can hear it in my voice when I say, “I wouldn’t have killed you.”
I’m clutching blindly to her hand.
“But you might have,” she says. We both know it’s the truth.
“Yeah,” I admit. I’m not one to say I’m sorry. But I’m sure the look on my face says it all.
“But that was different,” she says.
“How so?” I ask.
She lets me shadow her from behind. I raise her arms and together we aim at a nearby tree. I part her legs and show her how to stand, and then we cock the hammer and pull the trigger. The sound is deafening. The release of the bullet nearly knocks her off her feet. Bark explodes from the tree.
“Because if I’d have had the chance, I would have killed you, too,” she says.
This is how we settle all those things that happened between us in the early days. This is how we make up for all the mean words that we said, for the horrible thoughts that ran through our minds. This is how we annul the violence and the hate of our first days and weeks in the cabin, inside the log walls that have now become our home.
“And your friend?” she asks. I’m nodding to the gun in her hands. This time, I want her to try by herself.
“Luckily for him, I had no aim when I was a kid. The bullet grazed the outside of his arm. A scratch.”
Eve
Christmas Eve
Gabe called early in the morning to tell me he was on his way. It was just after 5:30 a.m. when my cell phone rang, and unlike James, who slept like a baby, I’d been awake for hours, plagued by another sleepless night. I don’t bother to wake him. I find my robe and slippers and step outside.