What We Should Have Done

I got to the station on a Thursday. The dirt track from the trailhead took forty minutes in the truck, and the last stretch I walked, because the footbridge over the creek was too narrow for anything with wheels. I made two trips with my gear. By the third load I was sweating through my shirt and telling myself I should have packed less.

The station is one room. Woodstove in the corner, a cot against the far wall, two kerosene lamps on the shelf next to the field guides. Windows on the meadow side, which was overgrown and going gold at the tips. The pines behind the building stand dark all day. Margaret had told me about this place for six years. She'd worked seasons here when she was younger. She knew which floorboard squeaked and where the mice got in. I'd never seen it until now.

I swept first. Then I built a fire and set water on to boil. Then I did the thing I always do in new places, which is walk the perimeter and touch the walls. Log walls, chinked with gray mortar. Somebody's initials carved near the door, low down, at knee height. Somebody bored, decades dead probably.

I set my sleeping bag on the cot and then moved it, because I figured we'd share. We've shared for six years. That wasn't the question. The question was everything else.

Here's what I kept coming back to, while the water heated. The summer I met Margaret, we were both twenty-two, at a ranger training course outside Missoula. Eight weeks of classroom and fieldwork. She was in my small group. First day she shook my hand and said her name like it was two separate words, Mar-garet, and I remember thinking her grip was too firm for how quiet she seemed. Then a week later she caught my arm on a steep trail section when I slipped, just her hand on my shoulder, steadying me, and I felt that hand for the rest of the day. For the rest of the summer, honestly. She had a way of putting her palm flat on your shoulder, no squeezing, just weight, like she was saying I've got you and not making a speech about it.

We nearly kissed behind the equipment shed in week six. I know it was week six because that was the week of the fuel-reduction practicum, and we'd both been hauling brush all afternoon. We were catching our breath in the shade. She had sawdust in her hair. She looked at me and I looked at her and we both leaned in, maybe two inches each, and then somebody dropped a chainsaw inside the shed and we both stepped back like we'd been caught at something. Which we hadn't. That was the entire crime. Two inches.

I transferred that fall. A job opened in Oregon and I took it and I didn't say goodbye to her properly. I told myself it was cleaner that way. It wasn't cleaner, it was cowardly, and it cost us both about a decade. We found each other again in our mid-forties through a mutual friend, and by then there were other relationships and other states and a lot of water under the bridge. We married six years ago, on a Tuesday, at the county courthouse, because we both hated weddings and loved Tuesdays.

But we never talked about that shed. Not once in six years. I'd start to bring it up and lose my nerve, and I don't think she was avoiding it so much as waiting for me, the way she waited for everything back then. Patient. Flat palm on the shoulder.

The water boiled. I made coffee and sat in the doorway with the mug and watched the meadow do nothing. It was good at it.

She came up the trail around five. I heard her before I saw her, boots on the wooden bridge, that knock of her trekking pole. Then she came around the bend of the trail with her pack on and her hair tied back and she smiled the quiet smile she saves for me. Not the ranger smile. The other one.

"Hey," she said, shrugging the pack off her shoulders. "You found it."

"Found it. Swept it. Almost burned it down." I nodded at the stove. "The chimney draws weird. Drafts sideways or something."

"It always did that." She dropped the pack by the door and kissed me. Quick, familiar, the hello kiss we've done ten thousand times. Then she stepped back and looked around the room with her hands on her hips, taking inventory the way she does. "Lamps are out of fuel."

"I brought extra. Top shelf, behind the Sibley guide."

"Of course you did." She pulled her boots off and set them by the door, toes out, exactly straight. Twenty-two years of fieldwork will do that to a person. Or maybe she was always like that and the fieldwork just gave her somewhere to aim it.

We fell into it easy. That's the part people don't understand about long marriages, how much of it is just logistics done well. She washed, I dried. She built the fire back up, I cut onions. We'd brought steaks packed in ice in a cooler, which was a ridiculous thing to haul over a footbridge, and we both knew it, and neither of us said so. The stove top is a flat plate over the firebox and it heated unevenly, so I kept rotating the pan. The onions took forever.

"Your smoke alarm is a mouse," she said, from the floor, where she was stuffing a rag in a hole behind the cot. "I trapped him out of here in August. He's back."

"They always come back."

"Not always." She looked up at me from the floor. Just looked. Then went back to the rag.

See, that's the thing. We're good at this. We're so good at this it scares me sometimes. Six years of cooking and packing and driving and listening to each other's breathing at night, and it all runs smooth, and underneath the smoothness there's this one sealed room, and we both walk around it every day like furniture.

I put the steaks on and the pan hissed and the room filled with good smoke and bad. We ate at the little table by the window. Two chairs, mismatched. Mine wobbled. She put a folded matchbook under hers without being asked, without looking, the way you fix something you've fixed before in a place you know by heart.

"Walk me tomorrow," I said. "Show me your trails. The ones you always talk about."

"All of them?"

"The good ones. The ones you'd defend in an argument."

She laughed. She laughs with her mouth closed, mostly. "There's a lake up past the saddle. Frozen eleven months of the year some years. You'd hate the climb and love the lake."

"That sounds about right for me."

We washed up. She wound the clock on the shelf, which I hadn't even noticed was a clock. It was nearly dark by then, just the last gray in the meadow window, and she lit one of the kerosene lamps and the whole room went orange and soft. She sat on the cot in her wool socks and unlaced her hair and rubbed her scalp with both hands, and the lamplight caught her jaw, the lines at her eyes. She's fifty-three. So am I. We are not young women and we do not need to pretend otherwise and I have never once wanted to.

I stood by the stove with my dish towel over my shoulder like some diner waitress, and I looked at her, and the old pull came back. It never left, that's the truth of it. It just went quiet for years at a stretch. Two inches. That's all we ever gave each other behind that shed. I've thought about those two inches my whole adult life. What a strange thing to carry. Not even a kiss. A vector.

"Tyra." She said it the two-part way. "Come sit down. You've been standing up since you got here."

"I've been standing up my whole life," I said, before I could stop myself.

She didn't laugh at that. She turned on the cot to face me, lamp behind her, and the orange light was on one side of her face and the dark on the other, and she waited. That was her move then and it's her move now. She waits like someone who already knows what you're going to say and is giving you the dignity of saying it yourself.

The fire ticked. The clock on the shelf, which I hadn't heard until that moment, made its small dry sound. Outside, somewhere down the meadow, something moved through the grass and stopped.

I hung the towel on the nail by the stove. It seemed important to put it somewhere specific first. Then I crossed the room and sat next to her on the cot, which squeaked under both of us like it was filing a report.

"Margaret," I said. "Week six. Behind the equipment shed."

"I knew you'd get there," she said.

She didn't say anything for a second. Then she got up and went to the stove. Put the kettle on. That's Margaret. Big moment arrives, she makes tea.

"I've been thinking about that shed for thirty-one years," she said, with her back to me. "You don't get to just drop it out at nine at night and then have us go to sleep like it's the weather."

"I know that."

"Do you?" She turned around. The kettle was already starting to tick. "Because you dropped a lot of things out over the years, Tyra. You're good at it. Trained for it."

That stung. I won't pretend it didn't. I sat there on the squeaky cot and took it.

"Fair," I said.

She got down two mugs. The good ones she'd packed up, the ones without chips. I noticed that. She noticed me noticing.

"They were always your mugs," she said. "I just brought them."

The tea was the black tea from the tin, the kind that tastes like a campfire even when it's not near one. We sat shoulder to shoulder on the cot because there's nowhere else to sit. The lamp threw our shadows on the far wall, huge, two shapes leaning into each other.

"Tell me about Missoula," she said. "Your side of it. I've only ever had mine."

"My side." I looked into the mug. "You know my side. First day, you shook my hand and said your name like it had a hinge in it. Mar-garet. I thought, well, there's a person who takes herself seriously."

"I do take myself seriously."

"I know that now." I let a little steam off the tea. "Week two I was drowning. Everyone else had done a season somewhere. I'd done a summer at a nature center, that's it. You tutored me on the map and compass nights. You never said one word about it after."

"You needed it."

"I needed it." My throat did that thing. It's been doing it all day, off and on. "Week six, the fuel-reduction practicum. It was hot and we smelled like two-stroke smoke and we went behind the equipment shed to get out of the sun for five minutes, and you leaned against the wall, and I leaned against the wall, and there were maybe two inches left."

"Two inches," she said. Quiet. Like she was checking the measurement against her own memory and it came out the same.

"And then the last Friday you found out I'd taken the Oregon job. And you never said a word about the shed. You helped me carry my boxes to my car. You shook my hand again." I laughed and it came out wrong. "We shook hands twice in our whole first year of knowing each other."

"You didn't tell me you were leaving."

"I didn't tell anyone."

"Why."

"I don't have a good answer. I had a job offer and a fear and I picked both at the same time." That's the truest sentence I've said in years, and it took a shed to get it out. "I told myself it was cleaner that way. No goodbye scene. I was twenty-two. I thought clean was the goal."