Still Waters (6 page)

Hannah glanced at him. Maybe now was the time. They were almost halfway to the highway exit. She took a deep breath and twisted around to her duffel. Straining over the center console, she managed to unzip the bag and pull out the file. She placed it carefully in her lap.

Colin glanced over and then back at the road. “What’s that?”

Instead of answering, Hannah opened the file and held up the photo. She could feel a silly grin spread over her lips as she waited for his response.

Colin shot a glance at the photo. “I don’t get it. That’s the old picture from the attic. How’d you get that?”

“Colin.” Hannah shook her head. She couldn’t believe he still didn’t understand. “The lake house. Pine House. We’re going to Pine House. I have the map and everything, right here.” She held her breath, watching his face.

“Wait,” he said slowly. “This is the road trip? Going up to the old lake house?”

“Yeah.”

“And that’s why you told me to go this way.”

She nodded, still smiling, but a little worm of worry began to uncurl itself in her stomach. His voice was so calm and so cold, like a stranger’s. Was it the map? Was he mad she took it? Hannah felt her face flush with shame. She couldn’t look at him, fixing her eyes instead on the road ahead. Silence settled heavily over the truck, a long silence, which seemed to have no end.

After a few minutes, Colin glanced in the rearview mirror and then moved into the right lane. He pulled onto the shoulder and slowed rapidly, the rumble strip thrumming loudly under the truck’s wheels. Before Hannah could fully comprehend what he was doing, he parked the car, turned off the ignition, and then sat still with his hands on the wheel.

Without the engine, the cab seemed even quieter. The silence was broken only by the regular
whoosh
of cars zooming by outside, rocking the truck a little each time. For a long time, Colin stared straight ahead. Then he said very softly, “How’d you get the photo and the map, Han?” His breath whistled as he spoke.

Just relax. He’s surprised, that’s all
. She swallowed. “I … I took them.” She avoided the word “stole.” She hadn’t really, anyway.

He nodded without changing expression. “When?” The single word floated on the air between them.

Briefly, she explained—the spare key, the attic file cabinet.
“It was all for us, Colin.” She leaned over, trying to look into his eyes. “I wanted so much for us to have a place to be alone now, before you went to orientation. So we could talk about, you know, the, um, love thing.”

He swung his head around, his fingers clenched tight on the steering wheel. She shrank back against the door at the sight of his eyes blazing, standing out like glowing jewels against his suddenly pale face. “I never thought you’d be the type to steal, Hannah,” he said icily. “I must not know you as well as I thought. Just like you obviously don’t know me if you think I’d actually want to go up to that dump. I told you I hated it—nothing’s changed.”

Hannah recoiled against the door as his fury filled the cab. She stared at him, unable to reconcile this blazing stranger with her gentle Colin. She felt disoriented, like someone had spun her around and shoved her off into an unknown direction. She had to get out and get some air. Hannah fumbled for the door handle and pulled it. She almost toppled from the seat as she scrambled onto the gravel shoulder.

The
swishing
of the cars shook her as she stumbled across the drainage ditch at the side of the road. A wire and post fence stretched along the shoulder. Beyond it, a cornfield rose in a wall of emerald green. High up on a rise sat a tidy ranch house with an American flag fluttering outside.

Hannah clutched at the fence. The wire was cool under her fingers. The corn leaves rustled in the wind like paper. She inhaled a long hitching breath, trying not to cry. Her stomach felt sick and her hands and feet were icy cold.

Behind her, the truck door opened and closed. A second later, Colin’s hand touched her back. She didn’t turn around.

She heard him swallow. “Hannah.”

She stared at the corn.

“Han. I’m sorry. I totally overreacted back there.”

She turned around. He stood in front of her with hunched shoulders, his hands stuffed in his pockets. He looked smaller outside of the car, shrunken somehow.

“What’s the deal?” she asked. Her voice was thick with suppressed tears. “You’ve never been so angry before. I thought you wanted to go away with me.”

Colin stared at his feet. “I do. I really do. It’s just—I don’t know, the place gets on my nerves, even though I hardly remember it.” He looked up at her, his face pleading. “Does that sound totally crazy?”

Hannah hesitated. “Maybe it’s different than you remember.” She took both of his hands in hers and then dropped them in surprise. His palms were drenched.

“Are you okay?” she asked. The collar of his T-shirt was dark with sweat too. Damp patches had appeared under his arms.

Colin closed his eyes and squeezed his temples with his fingers. “Yeah, I’m okay. I just feel a little strange.” He tried to smile at her, but Hannah could see that the grin wasn’t real.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “So … what do you think? Can we go up? Colin, I think we’re going to have fun. It’ll be like a real vacation. What do you think? Please?” She clasped her hands in front of her chest in supplication.

Colin laughed hollowly. “Okay,” he said. “Anything for you.”

“Thank you!” She flung her arms around his neck and was relieved to feel him hug her back.

“Hey,” Colin said as they walked toward the truck. “Let me take a look at that old picture. I never really saw it when we were up in the attic.” His voice sounded normal at last.

“Oh, it’s so cool,” she said excitedly, running ahead to get the file. She grabbed it from the truck seat, first putting the map on the dashboard, and then handed the file to Colin, who stood on the shoulder, waiting.

He turned away from the road and opened the folder. “Careful,” Hannah said. “Don’t let it blow away.” She picked up the photo. “Look, you can see the lake.” She smiled, watching for the moment the creases smoothed from his brow.

He held the photo up in front of him, examining it in the sunlight, while the harsh highway wind pulled at their hair and the vague smell of cow manure drifted from the pasture, mixing with the diesel exhaust from the semis that rumbled past.

At last Colin snapped the file closed. “Cool. Hey, let’s go, right? It’s getting late. How much farther do we have?”

“Not too far, I think.” Hannah walked ahead of him to the truck and climbed in, grabbing the map to check the name of the exit again. Colin banged the driver’s door shut. He started the engine and with a quick glance in his side mirror, pulled out on the road, pressing the accelerator to the floor. The truck swung onto the highway, fishtailing slightly.

Hannah opened her mouth to say something about the speed
when she realized what was missing. She looked in her own side mirror. Behind them, just visible as a spot on the grassy shoulder, was the file.

“Colin, wait, the picture,” she cried. “You left it.” She twisted around in her seat, trying to keep track of the tiny cream-colored object behind them. But in another second, it was gone.

“Oh, shoot, sorry.” Colin reached over and patted her knee. “I must have dropped it.” He accelerated slightly. “There’s no place to get off here. Sorry,” he repeated.

Hannah opened her mouth to protest, but a glance at Colin’s blank face, his eyes fixed straight ahead, made her close her mouth with a snap. She faced forward and stared silently at the road unwinding before them.

“Okay, it’s coming up.” Hannah sat forward in her seat as the highway sign loomed in front of them.
KILGOUR
, it read. “This is the exit.” She pointed and Colin nodded. The light feeling had disappeared from the truck after the whole lake house argument. But at least the grim set was gone from his mouth.
He’s just tired from the drive,
Hannah told herself. She was too. They’d both feel better when they got there.

Colin signaled and swung down the exit ramp. “Which way?” he asked at the bottom. The ramp ended at a forked road. There were no signs. No other cars, even. Just pine trees and on one side of the road, a closed-up restaurant with weathered boards tacked over the windows. Weeds grew up through the cracked asphalt parking lot and a signboard read
SPEC L
.99
WICH
. On the other side of the road sat a tiny gas station with two pumps out front.

“Um …” Hannah unfolded the hand-drawn map. At the very bottom, a black curve indicated the highway they had just
left—the exit was marked with a tiny
X
. She squinted at the faint black lines. The thing was hard to read. So different than a printed map. “Left, I think. It’s not that clear.”

“Damn it, I wish I had a GPS. So, is this the right way?” Colin indicated the road to the left.

“I don’t know,” Hannah admitted. “I tried to get Google directions, but it wasn’t coming up.” She looked around helplessly, the map on her lap. Colin exhaled through his nose and then swung the car around and pulled up in front of the little gas station. “I don’t think this is open, Colin,” she said. The little building was the size of a toolshed, the big front windows smeary.

Colin killed the engine. “Well, let’s hope they are. We need some gas.” He got out. “Go in and buy a road map while I fill up, okay? And tell them we want ten gallons of gas. I don’t know how much it’ll cost.”

“You don’t remember anything about how to get up there?” Hannah asked hopefully.

He frowned and shook his head. “I told you, Han, I was ten. I barely remember the place, much less how to get up there.” He unhooked the gas pump. “How do you work this thing?” he muttered, examining the antique brass handle. Hannah left him winding a crank at the side of the gas pump and tried the cloudy glass door of the store. To her surprise, it opened.

A gaunt-faced guy in his thirties looked up from a stool by the window. A shock of ginger hair stuck out from under his dirty ball cap. The lights were off for some reason, which threw the tiny room into half gloom. On the scarred metal shelves, a
few items were sparsely arranged: a bottle of engine oil, a package of Dr. Scholl’s corn pads, a bottle of Prell shampoo. Near the counter, some tired candy bars sat in a rack next to a little spin rack of maps. Hannah sighed with relief.

Hannah felt the man’s eyes on her as she examined the rack. Two different state maps and three county maps. “Um, what county are we in?” she asked the guy. Instead of answering, he plucked one of the maps from the rack and handed it to her in silence. Hannah shot a quick glance at his impassive face and decided not to ask for directions. “And ten gallons of gas too, please.”

“Thirty-one fifty,” the guy said and Hannah jumped with surprise. His voice was like that of a robot, deep and metallic with an odd vibration to it. Then Hannah noticed a small round hole at the base of his neck, covered with white mesh. She swallowed and held out the money, trying not to touch his hand.

He accepted the cash and then sat back on his stool and resumed staring into space as Hannah escaped through the door, map clutched in her hand.

“Did you figure it out?” she asked Colin. He nodded, setting the pump back in its holder.

“Yeah. It’s a good thing too. You wouldn’t want to run out of gas out here.”

Hannah nodded and climbed into the truck cab. “It was weird in there,” she said to Colin. “There was like nothing on the shelves.”

Colin shrugged as he started up the engine. “They probably don’t get a lot of business.”

He pulled out. Hannah unfolded the new map on her knees. It rustled with reassuring crispness. “It looks like we want …” She brought the map closer to her eyes. “East. Would that be left?” She looked up at the road sign nearby. “So, I guess we want this one. Burnt Cabin Road.” She blinked. “What a weird name.”

“It’s descriptive,” Colin said dryly. He turned left and the highway quickly receded behind them, along with the familiar rush of cars. Patches of pinewoods flashed by, alternating with flat pastures on either side. The road was a gray chalk line drawn in the earth. Sodden haystacks reared up in the fields like boulders under the whitish sky. They passed a barn that looked as if it had caught on fire and a farmhouse long abandoned, the glassless windows gaping like blind eyes. No cars passed them either way, though they had been driving for almost half an hour.

Hannah stared out the window. The monotonous landscape made her feel half asleep, as if she was being hypnotized. The area was really desolate. She didn’t know it was going to be like this.

A stop sign loomed ahead, the first turn since the gas station. Colin pulled up. The intersecting road was just as flat and lonely. A small black and white sign on a post read 51.

“Is this us?” Colin asked. Hannah scrabbled for her maps.

“Um …” She spread both maps out on her lap and tried to compare the two. But she couldn’t match up any of the roads on the hand-drawn map with those on the county map. Hannah shook her head. “This map from the gas station is the same as
Google,” she told Colin. “It doesn’t have the roads up to the house on it. Weird.”

“Let me see.” He leaned over. Hannah gazed down at the top of his bright head.

“Well, we’d probably get even more lost if we were in New Zealand, right?” She tried for a light tone.

He glanced up. “Yeah,” he said briefly and bent over the maps again. Hannah bit her lip.

Colin straightened up. “Okay, look, that’s probably the lake.” He pointed at a small splotch of blue in the middle of a vast tract of green spread over the middle of the map, near the highway exit they’d taken. “Let’s just try to get there.”

“So why do you think the roads from the homemade map aren’t on the county one?” she asked.

Colin shook his head. “Maybe they’re too small. Plus this map is like a hundred years old. All the roads are probably different now.” He handed the maps back to Hannah. “My dad must have had the way up memorized,” he said and threw the truck into drive again. “Let’s just get up there. I’m sick of being in this car.”