The Doorbell

The trail up to the hut nearly killed me, and I mean that in the most dramatic way possible. Two and a half hours of switchbacks with a backpack full of wine and chocolate, at altitude, after a winter spent chasing toddlers at work and then sitting in a flat apartment that still smelled like him. My legs were shaking by the time I saw the roof.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Hi, I'm Darcy, I'm thirty-four, and three weeks ago I caught my boyfriend of eight years texting things to a woman named Bianca that no man should be texting to a woman who is not me. Eight years! We had a cat together! I bought matching flannel! And his apology was, and I quote, "it wasn't physical, so does it really count?"

So when Shana, who sells fish at the Saturday market and who I'd gotten to know over a year of buying trout I didn't need just to talk to her, mentioned she was volunteering as caretaker at a mountain hut for a weekend and I should come visit, I said yes before she finished the sentence.

The hut sat on a shelf of rock at 2,500 meters, all weathered wood and tiny windows, with the wind absolutely hammering the walls like it had a personal grudge. Smoke curled from the chimney. A faded sign by the door read the hut's name in three languages, and underneath it, absurdly, a doorbell button.

A doorbell. On a hut. In the Alps.

I rang it, because of course I rang it.

Footsteps, then the door swung open and there was Shana, thirty-six years old, cheeks pink from the wood stove, wearing a fleece and an expression of pure delight.

"You actually came!" she shouted over the wind.

"You actually invited me!" I shouted back.

"Get in here before the mountain eats you!"

I stumbled inside and the warmth hit me like a hug. The main room was small and perfect, a wood stove crackling in one corner, a hammock chair hanging by the window, a little kitchen along the far wall with a kettle already steaming. It smelled like woodsmoke and something earthy I couldn't name.

"Okay, boots off, sit down, wine or tea?" she said, already moving toward the kitchen.

"Is that a real question? Wine. Obviously wine."

"Good answer." She poured two glasses from a bottle that was already open, which told me she'd been expecting this moment for a while, and handed me one. "So. You look terrible."

"Wow. Thanks."

"No, I mean, you look like someone who hasn't slept in three weeks. Which tracks, because you texted me forty messages the night it happened and then nothing for sixteen days. Sit. Talk."

I sat in the hammock chair, which promptly tried to swallow me, and told her the whole stupid story. The texts. The cat, whose name is Pickle and who I kept, thank God. The flannel. The "does it really count" line, which made her actually hiss like a kettle.

"He said that?" she demanded. "Out loud? With his mouth?"

"With his actual mouth, Shana."

"Okay, I'm glad you came up here. Seriously. You need air and silence and somebody who won't tell you it'll be fine, because who knows if it'll be fine, but the mountains don't care either way and that's sort of restful."

"That's exactly what I needed to hear, actually. Somebody who won't lie to me."

"Never promised you the truth would be nice, just that you'd get it." She clinked her glass against mine. "To bad decisions and the people who survive them."

We drank. The wind howled. And then, from somewhere near the door, the doorbell chimed.

Both of us looked up.

"Were you expecting someone?" I asked.

"Nope," she said slowly, getting up. She opened the door onto nothing but wind and gray sky and a corner of cloud chewing at the trailhead. She looked left, looked right, shrugged, and shut it again. "Well. That's a thing that happens."

"The doorbell just goes off by itself?"

"Old wiring, wind, something. The last caretaker told me about it. Sometimes it rings when nobody's there. I've decided to find it charming instead of terrifying."

"That is a very healthy coping strategy and I support it."

"Thank you. I work hard on my delusions." She dropped back into her chair and studied me over her wine. "Okay, real question. How did you get up here?"

"Walked? The trail from the cable car station?"

"Two and a half hours with a bottle of wine in your pack?"

"Two and a half, actually, and I'm very proud of myself."

"You should be, that's brutal. But here's my issue. You need to leave Monday, right? And the forecast says the storm coming in might dump a foot of snow. Which means walking down might get genuinely stupid."

"Oh. Huh. I hadn't thought about that."

"Which is why you have me." She stood up, all business, and pointed out the window at a shape I'd noticed on the way in and dismissed: a boxy little 4x4 parked under a lean-to, dusted with old snow. "The hut keeps a vehicle. Supply runs, emergencies, hauling the caretaker's ego around. I drove it up Thursday. It's a manual, and it's ancient, and it's ugly, but it will get down that track in weather that would eat you alive on foot."

"Okay... so you'd drive me down Monday."

"I could," she said, and then grinned in a way that made me nervous immediately. "Or. Hear me out. I could teach you to drive it. Because if the storm comes in hard, you might need to get yourself down, and also because it's fun and I've been stuck up here talking to a wood stove for two days."

I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my wine. "Me? Drive that? I drive a little city hatchback with an automatic. I've never touched a stick shift in my life."

"There's a first time for everything, and this is the safest place in the world to have one. It's a track with no other cars, no pedestrians, and a student who doesn't scare easy."

"I scare extremely easy."

"You climbed two and a half hours with wine to escape your feelings. You're the bravest person I know."

"That is a horrible metric for bravery and also possibly the nicest thing anyone's said to me this month."

"Come on." She was already pulling on her boots. "Suit up. We'll start slow, just getting it moving and stopping. The rest of the track can wait for tomorrow."

The wind outside nearly took my hat, which I didn't have, which tells you how hard the wind was. We crunched across the frozen mud to the lean-to and Shana opened the driver's door of the 4x4 with a squeal that set my teeth on edge. Inside it smelled of diesel and old rubber, the seats cracked vinyl, the gear lever poking up like something you'd negotiate with rather than operate.

"Okay, seatbelt, then watch my feet," she said, sliding in beside me, close enough that her knee bumped mine. "Clutch, left. Brake and gas, right. The whole game is that the clutch and the gas have to be friends. You introduce them gently. You rush them, you stall. That's all stalling is, rushing the introduction."

"That's weirdly romantic framing."

"I'm a fishmonger, I work with what I have. Now, press the clutch all the way down. All the way. Yes. Turn the key."

The engine caught with a rattle that I felt in my back teeth. The whole vehicle shivered like a wet dog.

"Good! Now a tiny bit of gas, tiny, and lift the clutch slow. Slow. SLOW."

I lifted it like it owed me money and the 4x4 bucked once and died. Silence. Wind.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, that was a stall, I know that word, I've seen movies."

"That was a textbook stall, honestly, beautiful work. Again."

The second try I got two meters before it died. The third try I got across the entire flat stretch in front of the hut, engine screaming, both of us yelling, and when I finally stomped the brake we lurched to a stop and sat there breathing.

"See? You're driving," Shana said, thumping the dashboard. "That was actual driving."

"That was terror with wheels."

"Same thing, basically. Okay, turn it around, we're going to the top of the track. There's a loop, you can drive it as slow as you want, nothing to hit but rocks and me, and I'm very durable."

"How durable, exactly?"

"Fish market durable. You ever seen two women fight over the last whole sea bass? I survived a decade of that."

The loop track was exactly as advertised, rutted and empty and utterly unloved by anything with a license plate. And something strange happened on my third lap. I stopped gripping the wheel like it was the last lifeboat and started actually feeling the machine, the engine's grumble through the seat, the way the clutch had a sweet spot if you listened for it with your foot. The wind slammed the side of the 4x4 and the little 4x4 just shrugged and kept going, and I thought, huh, maybe that's what I want to be.

"You've got a grin happening," Shana said. I could feel her watching me.

"I'm having fun. Is that allowed? Am I allowed to have fun? I broke up with James, it's been three weeks, is there a waiting period?"

"You've been allowed since the day you were born. Forget the waiting period, that's a rule sad people made up."

I coasted to a stop at the top of the loop where the track overlooked the whole valley, gray and churning below us. Through the windshield I could see the hut, tiny and stubborn, its windows glowing.

"Okay," I said, "so tomorrow, if the storm comes, could I actually drive down this thing by myself? In snow?"

"With a foot of snow I'd ride shotgun, no arguments. But in a dusting? Yeah. You could. You've got good hands."

"You haven't even seen my hands, they're in gloves."

"I've got good instincts," she said, and something in how she said it, light on the surface with a little weight underneath, made my stomach do a thing I hadn't felt it do in years. A long time, actually. Longer than I wanted to admit sitting three feet from her in a rattling truck at the top of the world.

And then, faintly, muffled through the wind and the engine ticking as it cooled, came the sound of the doorbell.

We both turned to look at the hut. Nobody had gone inside. Nobody was anywhere near the door.

"Shana," I said slowly, "tell me you heard that too."

"Oh, I heard it." She was quiet a second, then laughed, but her eyes stayed on the hut. "Like I said. Charming. Not terrifying."

"Are you sure about the order of those words?"

We sat there in the cooling truck, watching the hut like it might apologize. It didn't. The wind shoved us again and the doorbell did not ring again, which was somehow worse.

"Okay," Shana said, unclipping her belt. "We're going to go inside, and we're going to make tea, and we're going to establish that the doorbell is a wiring problem and not a ghost, and then I'm going to ask you a question."

"What question?"

"The one I was going to ask you before the truck interrupted us."

"The truck interrupted us? The truck asked me a question?"

"Drive us back down, you've got good hands, apparently." She was grinning. I rolled us back down the track in first gear the whole way, slow as a funeral, and parked crooked under the lean-to, and she clapped like I'd parallel parked in Zurich. Inside, the stove had burned low and the light had gone that blue-gray color that means the mountain is closing shop for the day. I hung my gloves by the stove and Shana fed it two logs like she was born doing it.

And then the doorbell rang.

Both of us screamed. I am not embarrassed about that, or I am, but we both did it, so it cancels out. It was that cheerful little two-note ding-dong, totally clear, totally domestic, totally insane, coming from a door that opened onto a ledge at 2,500 meters with nobody on it.

"WHO IS IT?" Shana bellowed at the door, and then we both lost it, laughing so hard I had to sit down in the hammock chair and hold my ribs. She laughed too, bent over with her hands on her knees, and when she finally straightened up she wiped her eyes and pointed at the door like it had personally offended her.

"That's a wiring problem. That is wind and a loose wire and a cheap Swiss doorbell, that's all that is."

"Then why is it ringing RIGHT NOW?"

"Because the wind picked up. It'll ring when the gusts hit, it's mechanical." She put the kettle on, still chuckling. "You want to know the funny thing? I've been here since Thursday and it hadn't rung once until today."

"Oh, that's not comforting."

"It's charming."

"It is NOT charming, it's the opening of a film where everyone dies except the final girl!"

"Fine, it's ominous, sit down." She pushed a mug into my hands and dropped onto the bench across from me, and the laughing drained out of her face slowly, like water out of a sink, and I knew the question was coming. "Okay. Real talk. How are you? Not the fun answer. The real one."

I looked into my tea. "I keep waiting for it to hurt in the way people say it hurts," I said. "Like in films, where she cries and eats ice cream and there's a montage. And instead I just feel... flat. Like someone unplugged me. Three weeks. James texts Bianca, and my whole eight years just goes poof, and I don't even cry, I just keep feeding the cat and