Page 29 of Trapped with the Mountain Man

“Do you think you might ever visit Portland?” she asks softly.

But really, she’s asking so much more: Is this it? Can we try? What if? Why not?

Knowing my propensity for saying the worst possible thing at times like this, I pause and scramble to think of an answer to all of her questions, including the ones she wasn’t flat out asking.

Does she want to try? How would that work?

“I don’t travel much,” I end up saying. It’s like my mouth and my brain are completely unacquainted with each other.

Fuck.

“Well, you spent five months hiking through more than a dozen states, so it sort of seems like you travel,” she says with an insincere little laugh.

“Guess I mean that I don’t travel much in the traditional sense,” I say, digging my hole even deeper. “That was a long time ago and I haven’t really been out of Tennessee since.”

“Oh.”

It’s the saddest one syllable anyone has probably ever uttered. It’s Abby accepting the dismissal I didn’t mean to give. She slumps slightly against my shoulder.

Panic wells up in my chest. It’s like every foreign feeling is attacking me at once, paying me back for all the years of detached, unemotional splendor I’ve had. Of course, it feels a lot less like splendor now. It feels like years of loneliness while I waited for her.

“But I think Portland might be nice,” I say.

“Oh?” she asks. It’s a placeholder until she realizes what I might be saying. “I think you’d like it. I mean, it’s a big city compared to Gatlinburg but it’s surrounded by some of the most gorgeous forests and parks you’ll ever see. There’s so much to do outdoors there.”

“I’m sold,” I say, pressing another kiss to her hair. I’m sold simply by her presence there; everything else is just a bonus. “When do you go back to work? I could probably swing a trip around winter break.”

Abby tenses. It’s a stark contrast to the calm that settled over me the minute I agreed to visit her.

“I need to tell you something,” she finally says. The soft, shaky works strike me right in the chest as I immediately assume the worst. Maybe she has a husband or boyfriend back home. Maybe she didn’t expect me to actually agree to visit. I brace myself for whatever she’s about to say.

Abby pulls herself up until she’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, her knees brushing my ribs and thigh, as she looks me right in the eye. I straighten up a little, too, knowing that she’s about to tell me something serious.

“I’m taking the whole year off from teaching,” she starts. Diverting her gaze, she adds, “at the advice of the principal…and my therapist.”

The pause that follows is long, but I don’t interrupt because I can see that she’s working out the best way to say whatever comes next.

Abby sighs, but it isn’t a normal sigh – it’s the type that’s meant to ward off tears. I can see them forming at the corners of her eyes. Instinctively, I rest a hand on her knee reassuringly.

“Last April there was a shooting at the school where I teach.”

“Holy shit, Abby. That’s horrible.”

Her nod is accompanied by a sniffle.

“Yeah, um, it actually happened in my classroom. There was this boy in my sixth-period class. He moved to town in the middle of the school year and he just never really managed to fit in with the other kids. He grew up in a really small, middle-America farm town. He was an only child, homeschooled his whole life…you know, not the most socially adept kid because he’d never really had the chance to be around other kids. His dad had recently passed away, and his mom moved them out to Portland to be closer to her sister. She couldn’t take care of the farm by herself and needed to get a job to support them, so that meant also sending him to public school for the first time.”

I nod along, chilled into a frozen stance by her story.

“Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this, but Portland has this sort of unofficial slogan: ‘Keep Portland weird.’ A lot of people sort of pride themselves on their weirdness there, but the thing is, you have to be the same kind of weird as everyone else to fit in there. Like, beanies in summer and quirky bumper stickers weird. This kid never really fit in. The other kids gave him hell. It’s like somehow they can tell that he’s wearing his high-water jeans un-ironically. The bullying got pretty bad, even though the school tried to intervene. I did what I could to intervene, too, but there’s a lot of red tape when it comes to this sort of thing and the kid was never very receptive to any help. Anyway, one afternoon, I could tell something was wrong with the kid. He was sweating a lot and being uncharacteristically jittery. It was just after the bell rang and everyone was taking their seats that I saw him reach into his backpack and pull out a handgun. Afterward, the police found a notebook where he had mapped everything out and made a list of people.”

“Did he shoot anyone?” I ask, too stunned to filter myself.

She nods.

“Did they survive?”

She pauses this time before nodding.

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