Reunion

The cottage was standing. That was the first thing. Standing, brown, the porch wrapped halfway around, the canoe upturned in the weeds, exactly as we'd left it. The leaning pine. The stuck door. Five days of a killing on the lane and the cottage looked untouched, looked almost smug about it, like it had slept through the whole thing.

Eli was on the porch.

He was sitting in one of thecanvas chairs with his knees up, and he stood when he heard the car, and he was whole, he was entirely whole, and I was out of the car before Mae had the handbrake up, running across the gravel in shoes not made for running, and he caught me, and he was solid and warm and alive and he smelled like woodsmoke and being alone and I couldn't stop shaking against him.

"Hey," he said, into my hair. "Hey. I'm here. I'm right here."

I hit him. I hit his chest with the flat of my hand, once, hard, and he didn't flinch, he just caught my hand and held it, and that made me cry, that he didn't flinch, and Mae was crying too, coming up the steps, and even Theo's face had done something soft and unguarded that I'd never seen on it before, watching Eli from the bottom of the porch stairs, hands in his pockets.

We went inside. There had to be a story. Five days locked on a lane with a dead man at the end of it and a killer somewhere in the dark, alone in a cottage, and Eli had to have a story. He gave it to us in pieces. He'd heard the sirens the first night. He'd seen the lights down the lane. He'd gone out, but they'd turned him back, hard, told him to stay inside, lock up, don't move. So he'd locked up. He'd checked the locks every hour. He'd rationed what was in the cupboards. He'd kept the lights off at night so the cottage looked empty from the road, because the road, the lane, the dark beyond the porch light, had felt watched. He said felt watched like it was a small admission, like he was embarrassed to say it.

"Watched by who?" Mae asked.

"I don't know," Eli said. "That's the thing. I never saw anyone. But three of the five nights, something moved out past the tree line. Just once, then nothing. A shape. Then gone." He rubbed his face. "I told myself it was deer. Deer spook easy. It was probably deer."

Theo, by the window, said, "Probably."

We opened the wine that night. We shouldn't have. We did. We needed to be people again instead of people who had been waiting to find out if someone they loved was dead. We cooked the canned-not-beans-and-other-things we had left, and Eli ate like he hadn't eaten, two plates, and we lit the firepit because the night was cold and fire is the oldest comfort. We sat around it, the four of us, and the lake was black beyond the yard and the trees were black beyond the lake and somewhere out in the black was the place where a man had died, and we did not look at it.

Mae leaned into Theo. Eli's arm was around me, his hand on my shoulder, his thumb drawing the same slow circles against my skin that I'd drawn on his seat on the way up. The fire popped. Sparks went up and went out. I felt, for the first time in five days, almost safe, almost back to the golden afternoon on the bench, and that is the cruelest thing a safe feeling has ever done to me, because the safe feeling was a door held open, and something was already walking through it.

We toasted marshmallows. We laughed too loud. Mae told the story of the clerk who'd sold us the wine and Theo did the voice and Eli laughed for the first time and his laugh was a relief in the room like a window opening. I leaned against him and watched the fire and didn't look at the tree line, and the night was very dark, and very still, and very wrong, and I did not look, I did not look, I did not look.