Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

“You were six and he left you behind in the woods?”

“He didn’t go very far, I think he just wanted to scare me a little. So, there I was, dragging behind, crying and spreading snot all over my face. I didn’t see the moose right away because I was crying, then I saw this large blurry shape moving out of the bushes, stopping right in front of me in the middle of the road. I wiped the tears off to see it better. I think I was hoping that this thing wasn’t real, that it was a shadow or a cloud or something. Yet, somehow I knew that it was real and dangerous. I kept raising my head, throwing it back to see where the thing ended. And then I saw its eyes. It looked right at me. It saw me. It knew I was there. It was just as aware of me as I was of it. That was the scariest thing of all—the fact that the moose knew I was there.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I possibly do? I peed in my pants. Then the moose crossed the road and went away.”

“Did you call your dad?”

“I don’t remember. I just remember being back at the cabin, my pants and underpants were drying outside, and I was sitting on the futon playing with my toy Indians, dressed only in a T-shirt and socks. My socks were wet too, but Dad didn’t notice.”

“How old was he when he died?”

“Fifty-six.”

“Cancer?”

“Heart attack. It was very sudden. He’d had heart problems for a while, but he insisted they weren’t serious, and he wouldn’t even take his meds.

“He made his last trip to the cabin a few months before he died. He had wanted to take me, but I refused at the last moment. It was a Memorial Day weekend. I was fourteen. Dad was packing, I was carrying things to the car. Food, clothes, his new fishing gear, a new teakettle that he had bought specially for the cabin, a checkered blanket that my mother hated. Over the years, my mother had developed this habit: whenever she would do a spring cleaning, she would put together a pile of things that she’d grown to hate and offer them to my father. ‘Honey,’ she would say, ‘these mugs are disgusting, just looking at them makes my skin crawl, why don’t you take them to the cabin?’ Or ‘I can’t stand the sight of this thermos, why don’t you take it with you?’ Things that she didn’t particularly hate, she would just throw away.

“So, that time Dad put all our stuff in the trunk and surveyed it, and saw that my backpack wasn’t there. ‘Hey, where’s your backpack?’ he asked. I said that I wasn’t going. I sat down in the rocking chair on the porch and started rocking, hoping that this nonchalant action would give me strength against Dad’s rage. But he just nodded, as if he’d been waiting for this all along, and went to the car. He was backing out of our driveway onto the road, when he stopped the car—mid-turn—and got out. I was still on the porch, still rocking like an idiot. He didn’t look handsome or frightening, he looked old and lost, as if his will and drive had just seeped out of him. He took a couple of steps toward me, and he raised his hand as if he was going to make a long speech with a lot of persuasive gesturing. I told myself to resist. But then he dropped his hand, turned around, got back in the car, and drove away. And the second his car disappeared from our street, I felt something break inside me. I felt like chasing after the car and begging him to take me with him. But it was too late.”

A car passed them with an angry honk. Then another. Lena flinched and looked out the window.

“Ben! We’re too slow,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re driving too slowly. All the cars are honking and passing us.”

“Oh, shit, you’re right. I guess I should stop talking about Dad. It’s just the thought of going to the cabin brings up all these memories. Look at me. I have a whole carload of my past.”

“It’s the same way with me and the camp,” Lena thought. She thought of her story as this pile of clunky, chunky pieces of baggage, stuffed into Ben’s car along with his books, papers, and strange household objects.

Soon after the exit, a village popped into view. A church. Another village. Another church. A pharmacy. A fire department. A compact shopping mall.

A diner.

The diner was empty save for two men in overalls finishing their plates of fish and chips, and a fat gloomy woman with a two-year-old squirming and kicking in his booster seat.

The waitress seated them at the dimly lit booth in the corner, which made their whole dinner seem mysterious and seedy.

“When was the last time you went to the cabin?” Lena asked.

“About two years ago. Leslie hates the cabin, almost as much as my mom did. She’s been trying to persuade me to sell it for years. I guess she’s right, because I hardly use it at all, but, you know, the idea of selling it pains me. I don’t think I’m ready to let it go.”

“Because of your dad and all those memories?”

“No, not really. Sometimes I think that the memories are better left behind. It’s just that the cabin is the only place where I can be alone.”

The waitress brought them two huge plates, where the sandwiches (tuna for him, roast beef for her) lay buried under piles of chips. She was a tall woman in her fifties, with red hair in braids. She didn’t smile.

Ben dug out his sandwich, swept some chips off the top, and looked it over, choosing the most convenient side for a bite. Lena bit into her sandwich in the middle, making mayonnaise and tomato juice drip out of the sides.

Ben smiled and wiped some juice off her chin. Lena was suddenly overcome with affection for him.

“Am I boring you with all that talk about the cabin?”

“No, no. I’m the one who asked you.”

“After Dad died, I couldn’t bring myself to go to the cabin for a long time. Especially not alone. Or even with a girlfriend. I would only go with large groups of friends. We did that a lot when I was in college. We would take tents and camp out there using the cabin as a base. That way it didn’t feel like returning to the cabin. For some reason, I thought that if I went there alone, I’d let the cabin get to me, and I didn’t want that.

“Then when Becky turned three, I decided to go there with Becky and Erica, my ex-wife. We’d had a difficult couple of months, we had been fighting, something was clearly wrong between us, but I couldn’t tell what. I thought maybe a couple of weeks in the woods would help. I’d mentioned to Erica that I had a cabin before, but I’d never suggested going there. I’d said that it wasn’t livable. But this time I said, ‘Let’s think of it as camping.’ Erica wasn’t a big fan of camping, but she was surprisingly enthusiastic about the cabin. She gasped when she saw it. She climbed out of the car and laughed: ‘Beautiful! So beautiful!’ She said she’d had no idea it would be so beautiful. How could I have described it as such a dreary place? How could I have hidden it from her? When everything was so poetic and wonderful?”

Lena took a sip of her coffee and looked around. The little boy had finally managed to wiggle out of his seat and was now parked in his mother’s lap, happily eating French fries off his mother’s plate, dunking them in his Coke from time to time. “Oh, come on, Brandon,” the woman kept saying. “No, stop. You’re asking for it. Yes, you are! You’re pushing it, Brandon.”

Ben kept talking. He was completely engrossed in his story now. As if he was transported into the past and was talking to her from there. Lena thought she could even see his younger self in his features. Strangely, this made her feel closer to him.

“Yes, that first day at the cabin was perfect. We had breakfast by the campfire. We made orange juice using that juicer that Erica had given me on my birthday. Erica took Becky for a walk, and she kept gushing about every little chipmunk that ran past. She made us pasta on the stove (‘Look! I’m like a Stone Age housewife!’), and after lunch she took Becky to splash in the lake. I watched them from the porch. Becky was wearing Erica’s big floppy hat. You couldn’t see her head or shoulders, just her tiny arms and legs, and her skinny bottom in bunched-up underpants, so fragile that it almost broke your heart. Erica was wearing a black swimsuit. Her body was soft, her skin very pale, the wind made her blond hair brush over the mole on her back. I wasn’t sure if I was still in love with her, but she was my wife. She was the closest person to me in the whole world.