Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

‘Ah.’ Frank put a hand onto the table, reaching toward her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what to think. You know – we never have had much time. Whenever we’ve gotten together, there’s been more to say than time to say it.’

She smiled. ‘Too busy with other stuff.’ And she put her hand on his.

He turned his palm up, and they intertwined fingers, squeezed hands. This was a whole different category of questions and answers. Do you still love me? Yes, I still love you. Do you still want me? Yes, I still want you. Yes. All that he had felt briefly before, during that hard hug on the garden path, was confirmed.

Frank took a deep breath. A flow of calmness spread from his held hand up his arm and then through the rest of him. Most of him.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘We’ve never had enough time. But now we do, so – tell me more. Tell me everything.’

‘Okay. But you too.’

‘Sure.’

But then they sat there, and it seemed too artificial just to begin their life histories or whatever. They let their hands do the talking for a while instead. They drank tea. She began to talk a little about coming to this place when she was a girl. Then about being a jock, as she put it – how Frank loved that – and how that had gotten her into various kinds of trouble, somehow. ‘Maybe it was a matter of liking the wrong kind of guys. Guys who are jocks are not always nice. There’s a certain percentage of assholes, and I could never tell in time.’ Reading detective stories when she was a girl. Nancy Drew and Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, all of them leading her down the garden path toward intelligence, first at the CIA (‘I wish I had never left’), then to a promotion, or what had seemed like a promotion, over to Homeland Security. That was where she had met Ed. The way at first he had seemed so calm, so capable, and in just the areas she was then getting interested in. The intriguing parts of spook work. The way it had let her be outdoors, or at least out and about – at first. Like a kind of sport. ‘Ah yeah,’ Frank put in, thinking of the fun of tracking animals. ‘I did jobs like that too, sometimes. I wanted that too.’

Then the ways things had changed, and gone wrong, in both work and marriage. How bad it had gotten. Here she grew vague and seemed to suppress some agitation or grimness. She kept looking out the window, as did Frank. A car passed and they both were too distracted by it to go on.

‘Anyway, then you and I got stuck in the elevator,’ she resumed. She stopped, thinking about that perhaps; shook her head, looked out the kitchen window at the driveway again. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said abruptly. ‘I don’t like … Why don’t we go for a drive in your van. I can show you some of the island, and I can get some time to think things through. I can’t think here right now. It’s giving me the creeps that you’re here, I mean in the sense of … And we can put your van someplace else, if I decide to come back here. You know. Just in case. I actually have my car parked down at the other end of the lake. I’ve been sailing down to it when I want to drive somewhere.’

‘Sailing?’

‘Iceboating.’

‘Ah. Okay,’ Frank said. They got up. ‘But – do you think we even ought to come back here?’

She frowned. He could see she was getting irritated or upset. His arrival had messed up what she had thought was a good thing. Her refuge. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said uneasily. ‘I don’t think Ed will ever be able to find that one call I made to Mary. I made it from a pay phone I’ve never used before or since.’

‘But – if he’s searching for something? For an old connection?’

‘Yes, I know.’ She gave him an odd look. ‘I don’t know. Let’s get going. I can think about it better when I get away from here.’

He saw that it was as he had feared; to her, his arrival was simply bad news. He wondered for a second if she had planned ever to contact him again.

They walked up the road to Frank’s van, and he drove them back toward Somesville, following her instructions. She looked into all the cars going past them the other way. They drove around the head of the sound, then east through more forests, past more lakes.

Eventually she had him park at a feature called Bubble Rock, which turned out to be a big glacial erratic, perched improbably on the side of a polished granite dome. Frank looked at the rocky slopes rising to both sides of the road, amazed; he had never seen granite on the east coast before. It was as if a little patch of the Sierra Nevada had been detached by a god and cast over to the Atlantic. The granite was slightly pinker than in the Sierra, but otherwise much the same.

‘Let’s go up the Goat Trail,’ she said. ‘You’ll like it, and I need to do something.’

She led him along the road until it reached a frozen lake just under the South Bubble, then crossed the road and stood facing the steep granite slope flanking this long lake.

‘That’s Jordan Pond, and this is Pemetic Mountain’ – gesturing at the slope above them. ‘And somewhere here is the start of the Goat Trail.’ She walked back and forth, scanning the broken jumble of steep rock looming over them. A very unlikely spot to begin a trail. The pink-gray granite was blackened with lichen, had the same faulted structure as any granite wall shaved by a glacier. In this case the ice resting on it had been a mile thick.

‘My friend’s father was really into the trails on the island, and he took us out and told us all about them,’ Caroline said. ‘Ah ha.’ She pointed at a rusted iron rod protruding from a big slab of rock, about head high. She started up past it, using her hands for balance and the occasional extra pull up. ‘This was the first one, he said. It’s more of a marked route than a real trail. It’s not on the maps anymore. See, there’s the next trail duck.’ Pointing above.

‘Ah yeah.’ Frank followed, watching her. This was his Caroline. She climbed with a sure touch. They had never done anything normal together before. She had talked about being a bicyclist, going for runs. This slope was easy but steep, and in places icy. A jock. Suddenly he felt the Caroline surge that had been there waiting in him all along.

Then the dark rock reared up into a wall of broken battlements thirty or forty feet high, one atop the next. Caroline led the way up through breaks in these walls, following a route marked by small stacks of flat rocks. In one of these gullies the bottom of the crack was filled with big flat stones set on top of each other in a rough but obvious staircase; this was as much of a trail as Frank had yet seen. ‘Mary’s father wouldn’t even step on those stones,’ Caroline said, and laughed. ‘He said it would be like stepping on a painting or something. A work of art. We used to laugh so much at him.’

‘I should think the guy who made the trail would like it to be used.’

‘Yes, that’s what we said.’

As they ascended they saw three or four more of these little staircases, always making a hard section easier. After an hour or so the slope laid back in a graceful curve, and they were on the rounded top of the hill. Pemetic Mountain, said a wooden sign on a post stuck into a giant pile of stones. 1,247 feet.

The top was an extensive flat ridge, running south toward the ocean. Its knobby bare rock was interspersed with low bushes and sandy patches. Lichen of several different colors spotted the bedrock and the big erratics left on the ridge by the ice – some granite, others schist. Exposed rock showed glacial scouring and some remaining glacial polish. It resembled any such knob in the Sierra, although the vegetation was a bit more lush. But the air had a distinct salt tang, and off to the south was the vast plate of the ocean, blue as could be, starting just a couple miles away at the foot of the ridge. Amazing. Forested islands dotted the water offshore; wisps of fog lay farther out to sea. To the immediate right and left rose other mountain tops, all rounded to the same whaleback shape. The peaks to both east and west were higher than this one, and the biggest one, to the east, had a road running up its side, and a number of radio towers poking up through its summit forest. The ice cap had carved deep slots between the peaks, working down into fault lines in the granite between each dome. Behind them, to the north, lay the forested low hills of Maine, trees green over snowy ground.