Caribou Island

She chewed her sandwich and didn’t say more. She didn’t feel like talking. For a moment, things had seemed bright. And that moment had lasted about half a minute. The tent a void before them, beckoning. She wanted to lie down again.

We need a roof, Gary said. We get to that stage and everything will seem a lot better.

The almond butter was too salty, the sandwich gumming in her mouth. I miss Rhoda, she said. She used to visit every day or two, and now she can’t.

Once we’re done, she can come out and visit us.

You’ve separated me from everyone. And I don’t mean just now. I mean for thirty years. Separated me from my family, from your family, from friends we could have made here, from the people I worked with, who you didn’t want coming over to the house. You’ve made me alone, and now it’s too late.

Whoa, Irene. Slow down there. You’re hitching up a hissy eighteen-wheeler.

You’ve destroyed my life, you fuck.

Fine, he said. I’ve destroyed your life. Gary left his uneaten sandwich, stalked off to hammer at his own ill-shapen temple.

And what was the point? Irene asked. Why did everything have to be taken? Retired from work, her children grown, friends and family fallen away, everything that her marriage had once been, who she had been. All gone. What was left?

She finished her sandwich then stood in the rain and wind that had no power to purify, empty water, and walked to the cabin, climbed over the back wall, stood beside her husband to push so he could fit a clumsy brace, a couple pieces of two-by-four tacked together. She didn’t speak and he didn’t speak. They only worked, first one side of the window and then the next, Gary down on his knees, driving his shoulder into the lower wall, pushing the logs back to the edge of the ply, driving nails.

Irene knew she should feel sorry, but she felt nothing. She left Gary to carve out the window, a void in the wall that would become their only view, something that seemed an obvious symbol of the narrowing of their lives, and returned to the tent to lie down.

The tent so loud above her over every other sound, she finally slept, faded away into the only real shelter.

When she awoke, it was night and Gary was in his sleeping bag beside her. Are you awake? she asked.

Yes.

What are you thinking about?

The Seafarer. Calde gethrungen, he recited to her, waeron mine fet, forste gebunden, caldum clommum, thaer tha ceare seofedun hat ymb heortan.

And what’s that mean? she asked. You want me to ask.

Pinched by cold were my feet, fettered by frost, by cold chains, caldum clommum, there the anxieties sighed hot around my heart.

Yeah, you have it tough, she said.

Who are you to know?