At five on the dot, I gave Paul his tuna on toast. Just exactly that: tuna from a can, the brine squeezed out, beige meat mushed with a fork over a dry field of bread. Paul scarfed this down, then went in big for a dessert of broken animal crackers. Crumbs caught in the folds of his shirt and sprinkled to the floor when he stood up.
At seven, I gave him his bath. I filled the water first with stirred-up shampoo, making a boatload of frothy bubbles. Then I pretended to examine a bug bite on my ankle as he tugged off his pants and droopy diaper. Absentmindedly, I pulled the cap off my scab, which let out a trickle of blood like a brand-new wound. I took my time swiping my skin clean. Eventually, I peeked over at Paul in the bath, where he was briskly stacking two towers of bubbles on his knees. We did not talk. Only after I set out his pajamas, only after I’d tossed away the awful diaper and handed him his underpants, did he initiate a conversation. “Are you an explorer?” he asked.
The farthest I’d been on a bus was to Bemidji on a school trip to the Paul Bunyan statue. The farthest I’d been in a canoe was a six-day trip up the Big Fork River to the Canadian side of Rainy Lake. “Not really,” I told him, regretfully.
“Oh. Are you married then?”
I put my chin in my collar. I thought I knew what he was asking now. He wanted to know what category to put me in, whether I was adult or child, whether I was more like his dad or his mom or himself—or something else, some novel discovery. My fingertips felt heavy on his pajama buttons as I did them up. “No. Not really.”
At that, he looked so unreasonably dismayed.
I thought of Lily then. I thought of how she went from being seen as a stupid girl to being treated like a possible threat, how she did it in two months flat, and as I did I stole a look into Paul’s dark eyes, which seemed sometimes gray, sometimes green, sometimes almost black. I shrugged at him. “There was a guy once. Named Adam.”
“Was he an explorer?”
“He was from California,” I said, expecting to impress him a little. “He was an actor. Well, no. Actually, a teacher.”
“Sounds like my dad. He was a teacher to my mom in college.”
I would have liked to hear more about that, but Paul—now dressed, wet hair dripping down his neck—ran off to slay a bear and drink some dew and start the campfire.
At eight, Patra was still gone, so we crawled in the tent we’d set up on the rug and zipped the fly.
“Shoes off?” I said.
“Check.”
“Hatchet by your head for defense?”
He touched the wooden handle of the hatchet. “Yep.”
He made a ball of his body in his sleeping bag, tucked his leather glove up under his head, and then, like a stone tossed in water, sank straight into sleep. I lay down on the other side of the tent: it was very warm and quiet in there, it had an underground feeling. I meant to stay awake until Patra and the husband came back, but the tent inside the house muffled all the regular night sounds, so I couldn’t hear the crickets or the owls or anything. All I heard was Paul’s breath against the nylon, a very hushed sound. And I heard the black cat leaping off the windowsill, bell jingling across the room.
Sometime later—a few minutes? a few hours?—I heard Patra whispering. She was on her knees, halfway in the tent, hanging over us. She was a shadow and a scent, not much more than that, jacket drooping from her haunches.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“He’s fine,” I said.
She crawled in on her hands and knees and kissed Paul’s cheek, then, sighing, lay down between us. Her jacket smelled of fast food and wet woods. She must have come quickly from the car, because I could hear her heart pounding and then, little by little, settling down, getting back into its routine.
Though maybe it was mine I heard. Maybe I’d woken up afraid of something.
“Cozy,” she said. “So much better than being alone in a car for five hours. Or sitting in an airport parking lot.”
I turned toward her: “Where is he?”
She released a big breath. “Delayed. Delayed, then canceled.”
Patra hadn’t zipped up the tent fly, so I crawled over and did that for her. Lay back. When I did, I could feel Patra’s dry hair against my ear on the pillow. I could smell the cool woods in her hair, even over the scent of her coconut shampoo. She was still wearing her jacket, and every time she shifted I could hear it, the synthetic fibers crunching under her weight.
“I should take him to bed,” she whispered.
“Okay,” I said.
She didn’t move. She lay so still even her jacket was quiet. “I’m exhausted,” she whimpered. As she spoke, her voice did a U-turn in the dark. It drove right from exhaustion into despair, right off some invisible bridge between us.
I didn’t wonder what made her sound like that. I didn’t have to guess what upset her.
“He’s really okay,” I said.
She began to cry. She was breathing and then it was something else. She put her palm over her mouth, trying, unsuccessfully, to stop up the sound. Sorry, she might have said between breaths, or, for God’s sake, or stay here.