Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“Twice a week.”

“If I can.” Her mouth was still pursed unhappily. She shook her head. “It’s better to have a regular time that you’re sure you can meet, and keep to that schedule.”

“Okay, once a week. And where?”

“ I don’t know.” She seemed to be getting more frustrated the more she thought about things.

“How about where we were making out, back there in the trees?” Frank suggested, trying to press past her mood. “Do you know where that was, can you find it again?”

She gave him a very sharp look, it reminded him of Marta. Women weak at geography—he hadn’t meant it that way. Although there were women who didn’t have a clue.

“Of course,” she said. “Down there by the mouth of the creek. But—it should be a place where we can tuck notes out of the rain, and be sure we can find them and all.”

“Okay, well, we can go back out there and bury a plastic bag in the leaves under a tree.”

She nodded unenthusiastically. She was still distracted.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back up to Mount Desert Island?” Frank asked.

“Of course I do!” she snapped. “But I can’t, okay? I’ve got stuff I’ve got to do around here.”

“What? Maybe I can help.”

“You can’t help! Especially not if you stay exposed in your job and all!”

“But I have to do that.”

“Well. There you are then.”

He nodded, hesitantly. He didn’t understand, and wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Shall we go back out there and pick a spot?”

“No. There’s a pair of roots there with a hole between them. I felt it under me, it was under my head. You can put something in that gap, and I’ll find it. I need to get going.” She checked her watch, looked around, stood abruptly; her metal chair screeched over the concrete.

“Caroline—”

“Be careful,” she said, leaning down to stare him right in the face. She brought her hand up between their faces to point a finger at his nose, and he saw it was quivering. “I mean it. You’re going to have to be really careful. I can see why you want to keep going to work, but this is no game we’re caught in.”

“I know that! But we’re stuck with it. Don’t be mad at me. Please. There’s just things we both still have to do.”

“I know.” Her mouth was still a tight line, but now at least she was looking him in the eye. “Okay. Let’s do the dead drop, every week. I’ll check on Saturdays, you check Wednesdays.”

“Okay. I’ll leave something there for this Saturday, and you get it and leave something for Wednesday.”

“Okay. But if I can’t, check the next week. But I’ll try.” And with a peck to the top of his head she was off into the dark of Georgetown.

Frank sat there, feeling stunned. A little drunk. He didn’t know what to think. He was confused, and for a moment overwhelmed, feeling the indecision fall hard on him. When you feel love, elation, worry, fear, and puzzlement, all at once, and all at equally full volume, they seem to cancel each other out, creating a vacuum, or rather a plenum. He felt Carolined.

“Fuck,” he said half-aloud. It had been that way from the moment they met, actually; only now it was intensified, fully present in his mind, still felt in his body. Abruptly he finished his drink and took off into the dark. Over the creek’s footbridge, back to the spot where they had kissed.

One of the trees on the river side of their impromptu layby had the two big roots she had referred to, growing out in a fork and then plunging down into the rich loamy earth and reuniting, leaving a leaf-filled pocket. He tore one of the clear plastic credit card holders out of his wallet, took a receipt from his pocket and wrote on the back:

I LOVE YOU I’LL LOOK EVERY WEDNESDAY WRITE ME

Then he put it in the sleeve and buried it under leaves shoved into the hole. Topped it all with leaves and hoped she would find it, hoped she would use it and write him. It seemed like she would. They had kissed so passionately, right here on this very spot, no more than an hour or so before. Why now this edge of discord between them?

Well, that seemed pretty clear: her desire for him to disappear with her. Obviously she felt it was important, and that he might even be in danger if he didn’t join her. But he couldn’t join her.

That feeling was in itself interesting, now that he thought of it. Was that a sign of decisiveness, or just being balky? Had he had any choice? Maybe one would never go into hiding unless there were no other choice. This was probably one cause of Caroline’s irritation; she had to hide, while he didn’t. Although maybe he did and just didn’t know it.

Big sigh. He didn’t know. For a second he lost his train of thought and didn’t know anything. What had just happened? He looked down on the bed of leaves they had lain on. Caroline! he cried in his mind, and groaned aloud.

HE WAS SITTING WITH RUDRAat the little table under their window, both of them looking at laptops and tapping away, the room itself slightly swaying on a wind from the west. After the heat of the day, the cool fragrance coming off the river was a balm. Moonlight broke and squiggled whitely on the black sweep of the water. Frank was reading Thoreau and at one point he laughed and read aloud to Rudra:

“We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains on the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for three score years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them.”

Rudra nodded. “Henry likes the same things you do,” he observed.

“It’s true.”

“A treehouse is a good idea,” Rudra said, looking out the windows at the dark river.

“It is, isn’t it?”

Frank read on for a while, then: “Here, listen to this, he might as well be at the table with us:

“I live so much in my habitual thoughts that I forget there is any outside to the globe, and am surprised when I behold it as now—yonder hills and river in the moonlight, the monsters. Yet it is salutary to deal with the surface of things. What are these rivers and hills, these hieroglyphics which my eyes behold? There is something invigorating in this air, which I am peculiarly sensible is a real wind, blowing from over the surface of a planet. I look out at my eyes, I come to my window, and I feel and breathe the fresh air. It is a fact equally glorious with the most inward experience. Why have we ever slandered the outward?”

“What say, speak bad?” Rudra asked. “About this?” He waved at their view. “Maybe that is your third good correlation. The outer and the inner.”

“I want something more specific.”

“Maybe he means we should stop reading, and look at the river.”

“Ah yes. True.”

And they did.

But the next night, when Frank drove into the farm’s parking lot after work, late, and got out of his van and headed for the treehouse, Qang came out of the big farmhouse and hurried over to intercept him.

“Frank, sorry—can you come in here, please?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Rimpoche Rudra Cakrin has died.”

“What?”

“Rudra died this day, after you left.”

“Oh no. Oh no.”

“Yes. I am afraid so.” She held his arm, watched him closely.

“Where is he? I mean—”

“We have his body in the prayer room.”

“Oh no.”