Page 18 of Trapped with the Mountain Man

Abby reaches over and rubs her hand softly over my forearm. She doesn’t speak, letting me decide if I want to continue, and oddly, I do. It sort of feels good to tell someone. Even Ryan doesn’t know much about my family.

“I always tried to look out for Harlie, but I sort of let her down in the end.”

Abby lets the silence linger, but eventually asks, “How?”

I feel oddly relieved when she presses me for more information.

“The summer that I graduated high school, I decided to hike the Appalachian Trail. I’d always liked being outdoors. Our parents never really took us to do anything; they never gave us any money to entertain ourselves with. I would take Harlie out to the woods or the lake to play when she was little. It sort of became our thing. Of course, I didn’t want to leave her alone with our parents while I did the hike, but she found a summer camp that she wanted to go to. I saved up some extra money from my after-school job and paid for the camp, just to get her out of that miserable house. We both needed a break from it, I think. I know I did. Anyway, my parents were in a car accident – Dad was driving drunk – while we were away. They both died at the scene.”

“That’s horrible,” Abby says quietly, “but it’s not your fault. It sounds like you did a lot for your sister. I can’t imagine you let her down.”

“Well, I did. They called up the summer camp where Harlie was and arranged for her to come home early. I was on the trail and unreachable. There was no will, of course, and no other family. Everyone else had cut my parents off years ago; I’d never even met anyone in our extended family. Harlie was about to become a ward of the state, but an aunt we didn’t even know about came forward in the final hour and filed for temporary guardianship. That was two months before I got back from my hike and found out what happened. Harlie was so excited to see me when I finally got home. She thought I would get custody of her, but I just couldn’t…”

“That’s understandable. You were still a kid yourself. Most eighteen-year-olds are not qualified to raise another child. How old was your sister?”

I know Abby is right, but I’ll never forget the disappointment and anger on my sister’s face when I told her she couldn’t come live with me.

“Harlie was about to turn thirteen. She was a handful back then, too – like this erratic, emotional ball of hormones and hair dye. She pierced her own belly button with a safety pin at one point while I was away.” I laugh a little, even though it definitely didn’t seem funny at the time. “I had no idea what to do with her or how to give her a good life. Our aunt seemed nice though. She never had kids of her own, but she seemed real motherly, you know?”

Abby nods along sympathetically.

“Anyway, it all worked out, I suppose. Aunt Tracy ended up being more of a mother to Harlie than ours ever was, and Harlie and I are still pretty close. I tried to stay involved, but I always feel like she’s held it against me a little.”

“You did the right thing,” Abby says with a smile.

Somehow, the aftermath of this conversation is even more awkward than the aftermath of our almost hook-up her first night here. Neither of us knows exactly where to look or what to do with our hands. Is it weird that I’m rubbing mine on the thighs of my jeans? Why am I doing that?

I stop abruptly and give Abby a shrug of a smile. I’m terrible at this emotional shit. Even Abby seems a little uncomfortable with my sudden outpouring of personal history. She’s dividing her attention between fidgeting with her nails and staring out the window at the endless rain.

“Any other snooping you want to do?” I ask. Despite my effort to make this sound like a joke, it comes out stiff and slightly hostile.

Abby isn’t fazed by it though.

“Yeah, and I’m going to start with the fridge. I’m starving,” she says, hopping off the bed with a laugh.

Chapter 11

Abby

I stand in front of the stove, stirring the pot of leftover chili that I’m warming up for dinner. Hunter is across the room, adding logs to the fire.

The glimpse into his personal history caught me off-guard. There’s a flutter of panic still winding its way through me. Hunter just shared his more traumatic memory with me, and I can’t help but feel that I now owe him mine. Once I say it though, it will irrevocably fill the space around us, poisoning this reprieve that I’ve found from the outside world. Once I let it in, there’s no shooing it out. And who knows how Hunter will react.

Pity, most likely. And that’s the last thing I want.

There are a million questions I would have liked to ask Hunter about his past, but the whole exchange already felt so lopsided. It’s hard to imagine him ever being a kid, or having to care for his younger sister in the absence of decent parents. It’s hard to imagine him ever being anything but this: a rugged mountain man seemingly beamed down by some higher celestial power to look after this vast forest.

“Chili’s ready,” I call across the cabin.

Hunter makes his way over, wiping his hands on jeans as he crosses the cabin. I divide the chili into two bowls and adorn the plates with a fan of plain, semi-stale crackers. We both take a seat at the table, in the chairs that have somehow become assigned to us in the past few days.

Coldness has permeated the cabin in a way that not even the roaring fire can cure. Neither of us says much while we slurp down large spoonfuls of chili. The rumble of thunder overhead is constant now and I’ve forgotten the silence of sunny days. There is only the drizzle of rain and the growl of thunder.

I think of Portland, but even the promise of home isn’t enough to make me dismiss the knot in my stomach that I get each time I think about returning. Going back to Portland means facing the media that’s waiting in Gatlinburg, and maybe even more once my plane lands in Oregon. It means returning to a life that has been thrown eschew. Instead of days spent teaching and nights spent reading, or having dinner with friends, or grading papers, there is the infinite drag of nothingness. Some of that still exists, of course, but it’s only a blip on the radar rather than a constant buzz. In between the blips, nothingness spreads long and weary.

The boredom of the cabin is different. It’s a relaxing sort of boredom, the type to be treasured rather than analyzed and cured. Instead of feeling like I have to find some way out of it or it will consume me, I feel like I can wrap myself up and luxuriate in it.

Granted, I am stuck here with a man that seems to always keep me on edge. The edge of what…I’m not exactly sure.

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