Page 17 of Cut Off from Sky and Earth

Seventeen

Emily

I reach for my mug and raise it to my lips, my eyes still on my laptop screen, immersed in my story world. I open my mouth to drink, and nothing happens. I shift my gaze to the mug. It’s empty. I laugh at myself.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been this caught up in my work.

The buzz, the dopamine hit, has been driving me forward for hours.

It’s time for a quick break. I should stretch my legs, pee, and get something to drink.

After overimbibing last night, I need to stay hydrated.

I scan the last few paragraphs I wrote, then I hit save and stand up.

I mull over the story as I walk out into the kitchen in a daze.

Ruth’s predicament resonates. Maleen’s her closest friend, yes.

But she’s also her boss. They aren’t social equals, and Ruth’s boxed in long before she’s walled up in a lightless tower.

The trick is to make Maleen relatable in this scene.

Why does she need Ruth to side with her against the king?

He’s Maleen’s father. She should stand up to him by herself, shouldn’t she?

I pour a glass of water and drink it absently while I ponder the question.

It comes to me all at once. This happens sometimes. These flashes of insight are rare for me, which makes me love them all the more.

Maleen’s character arc is one from passive to active, patient to impatient, awaiting rescue to rescuing herself.

At this point in the story when the king has forbidden her to marry the man she loves but hasn’t yet threatened to imprison her, she believes someone will take care of this problem—take care of her.

It can’t be her lover, she knows the king will simply kill him.

And it doesn’t occur to her that it can be her.

She hasn’t had the life experience yet that will allow her to defy her father and walk away.

So, she turns to her truest friend for support.

Maleen’s need for Ruth’s help is myopic and she’s thoughtless, but she doesn’t realize the enormity of what she’s asking.

She can’t understand what it would mean for Ruth to back her against her father.

I nod to myself, satisfied, drain the rest of the glass, and place it on the counter beside the sink. Maleen needs to grow as a character, and she will. But her desperate need for Ruth’s support makes sense at this point in Maleen’s journey. She doesn’t know what’s coming.

Just as I didn’t know that I was condemning Cassie to die an unimaginably horrible death when I asked her to cover my shift for me that night.

March 2017

“I’ll owe you,” I wheedled, fixing Cassie with a wide-eyed look.

“Em, I’m tired.” She pursed her lips and raised an eyebrow, unimpressed with my puppy dog eyes.

I gnawed at my lower lip, trying to work out how to convince my best friend to do this favor for me.

I really want to hear Roland James read from his latest poetry chapbook.

He’s my favorite poet, hands down. And I completely lucked into this ticket.

The bookstore hosting him is two hours away, the reading doesn’t start until 8 PM, and Professor Lindell is not a night owl.

I was in the professor’s office, dropping off some research she’d asked me to pull together, when I noticed the ticket on her desk.

I’ll admit it, I squealed. “Ooh, you’re going to hear Roland James read? He’s amazing!”

She peered at me over the tops of her glasses, confused. I pointed to the ticket and her eyes traced my finger.

“Oh, that.” She waved a hand. “Rolly sent it over. But Pages and Sages is all the way over in Greenwich Springs, and I have an early committee meeting in the morning.” She paused. “If you want it, take it.”

My eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

She nodded. “Of course. I’m not going to use it.” Then she studied me closely “You like his work?”

“Roland James? Of course. His writing is so evocative and lush.”

“Huh, go figure. I find it smarmy.” She plucked the ticket from her desk with her thumb and index finger and extended it toward me as if it had cooties. “But I might be conflating the man and the work.”

I snatched the ticket as if she might change her mind. “You know him? Mr. James?”

She lifted her silver eyebrows. “Yes, I know Rolly. Or I knew him, at least. I was the literary magazine advisor a million years ago when I was an adjunct and he was an undergrad.”

“Wow.” I pocketed the ticket. “Lucky you.”

She lifted one eyebrow and gave me a wry smile. “Good night, Emily.”

“Good night, professor. And thank you so much. ”

I felt like Charlie scoring the Golden Ticket. Now I needed to persuade Cassie to cover my shift at the restaurant, so I could use it.

I took a breath. “Cass, you know Roland James is my favorite poet.”

“I do,” she agreed.

“And seeing him read is one of my dreams.”

“I know.”

“But this isn’t just a reading.” I pulled out the ticket and read from it. “It’s an opportunity to take part in an intimate conversation with the Midwest’s premier voice of our generation.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Isn’t he, like, forty?”

“Late thirties at most,” I corrected before conceding, “Okay, not our generation. But a generation. Cassie, please. I’ll give you my tips from next weekend. And I’m working brunch. On a football weekend.”

“All your tips?”

“All of them,” I confirmed.

“You make poor financial decisions,” she told me. Then she grinned. “I’ll do it.”

And that decision, which would turn out to have no financial consequences for me, had terrible life consequences for both of us—her more than me, to be sure.

When Cassie dragged herself home from the sports bar a little before 3 AM, dog-tired and smelling of fry grease, I was two hours away in Roland James’ hotel room nursing a scotch while he asked question after question about my writing.

My enthusiasm and his attentiveness bubbled over into something more, something tangible, and we ended up in his bed—a slow, sensuous tangle of bodies and sheets that left me floating over my body.

By the time I charged into our apartment, dripping wet from the rain and bursting to tell my best friend about the most transcendent sex of my life, she was lying beside my bed in a puddle of her own blood, her sightless eyes staring up at my bedroom ceiling.

I drag myself back to the present, my chest heaving.

“I didn’t know,” I remind myself fiercely.

It’s true that I couldn’t have known what would happen to Cassie that night. And there’s no guarantee that if I’d been there, the killer wouldn’t have killed us both. But still, I can’t shake the belief that I’m responsible.

I swipe angrily at the tears pooling in my eyes. “Channel this into a scene,” I say aloud. “Make the reader feel Maleen’s regret once Ruth’s locked up in the tower with her.”

I take a deep, shuddering breath and am halfway back to the small writing desk when a loud thump hits the door.

I freeze. The pounding continues, and I peer through the window, catching a glimpse of Alex’s profile.

A flash of irritation blazes in my chest at being interrupted before I’ve even started again.

Part of me wants to ignore her and simply return to my work. But I don’t have it in me to be so rude, so I sigh and cross the room.

I unlock the door and greet my host. “Yes?”

Alex stomps her feet and rubs her hands. Two bright red patches flame on her cheeks. The cold, biting air swirls around her. I shiver. I hadn’t planned to ask her in, but the alternative is to let the whooshing frigid air fill the small cabin, so I step back and gesture for her to enter.

She reaches down and grabs something off the porch before she storms inside. I edge around her to close the door against the wind and then eye her cautiously.

“Is everything okay?”

Alex scans the room. I don’t know what she’s looking for, but she makes a slow, thorough inventory. This woman is creeping me out. And she’s gripping an axe.

“Alex?” I repeat.

Finally, her eyes land on my face. “I don’t know if you listened to the weather this morning, but we’re in the track of the storm.”

Listen to the weather? I couldn’t if I wanted to. “No.”

As if reading my mind, Alex says, “There’s a battery-operated radio in the dining room. You won’t get a lot of stations, but the station out of Boone usually comes in.”

“Oh, I wasn’t ... I’m not planning to go anywhere, so I don’t really have a need to monitor the weather,” I tell her.

“Right. You’re here to write.” Alex’s tone suggests this isn’t true.

I frown. “Right.”

Alex walks past me to the small writing desk and peers at the words on my screen, making no effort to hide the fact that she’s reading my manuscript.

What the hell?

I push past her and close the laptop lid. “Hey! I don’t let people read my works in progress.” I shake with anger at the violation. I take a few seconds to breathe and regain control before continuing. “Not to be rude, but aside from letting me know that a storm’s coming, why are you here?”

“It’s not just any storm. It’s an enormous storm. They’re saying it’ll be at least as bad as the Storm of the Century.”

I look at her blankly.

“The Storm of the Century? March of 1993?”

I laugh. “I wasn’t even born yet.”

“I was ten. We got a foot and a half of snow. No school for almost a week.” At the memory, her mouth relaxes—not into a smile exactly, more like a less severe frown.

“It’ll be rain here, though, right? This storm, I mean.”

“Don’t be so sure. That superstorm in 1993 dumped two-and-a-half feet of snow here in the mountains. And the temperature dipped down to negative twelve.”

I stare at her. She mistakes my mounting anxiety for disbelief.

“I looked it up,” she assures me.

“Do they plow up here?”

She barks out a laugh. “No.”

“But the roads will clear by the time Tristan needs to come and get me next weekend. Right?”

Alex shrugs. “We have more immediate concerns than your departure.”

“Like what?”

“You’ve never lived in the country, have you?”

I flush and shake my head, feeling foolish. “No.”

“We could lose power. We likely will lose power. The unplowed roads will be impassable. There’s a good chance the pipes will freeze.”

I process this. “Does that mean we won’t have refrigeration or running water?” My face and hands tingle. A sign of an impending panic attack.

“It’s a possibility.”

I have to get this woman out of here before I melt down in front of her. I slow my too-fast breathing and focus on the feeling of the cold, hard floor under my thick wool socks in an effort to ground myself.

She cocks her head to the side like a bird and watches me with concern.

I take another breath and croak, “How likely is it that this storm will hit us?”

“There’s no question. It’s bearing straight down on us.

The wind’s already picked up. The storm is moving faster than the models predicted.

The front edge will be here by this evening and we’re in for a wild ride overnight.

Make sure all the windows are shuttered and the doors are locked.

You have flashlights and candles and more than enough wood to make fires in case the electricity goes out. How are you on food?”

“I’m all set. Thanks for checking on me. But I really do need to get back to my manuscript, especially if I’m going to lose power and won’t be able to charge my laptop.” I flash a shaky smile and hope she gets the hint.

Alex’s eyes flick to the pile of notebooks on the desk. “I guess you’ll have to write longhand.”

“I guess.” My tone is dismissive. I’m not usually this rude but she pissed me off by looking at my work and I’m staving off a panic attack through sheer effort. I need her to leave.

She turns to go. Finally.

I’m crossing the room to open the door, when she wheels around, swinging the axe.

I jump back. “Watch it!”

“Did you take this from my porch?”

“What?”

“The axe disappeared from my porch this morning. And when I got here, I saw it leaning against the cabin wall.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Yet, here it is.”

What’s her game? She’s got to be gaslighting me. But why?

I draw my eyebrows together and crease my mouth into a frown. “Alex, I didn’t take your axe. I haven’t been outside since my walk yesterday evening. Why would I take it? You already brought me all the wood I need.”

I stop short of noting that I’ve never split wood in my life. From the way she’s eyeing my thin arms, I can tell she’s thinking it. I hug my cardigan around my midsection in a self-protective gesture, as if I can ward off her judgment.

“It didn’t walk here by itself,” she persists.

“Maybe whoever was outside this morning put it there. Why, I have no idea.”

Alex blinks. “Who was here? When?”

“I don’t know. Before sunrise. I don’t sleep well.

I decided to come down here and write. On my way past the window, I saw the beam of a flashlight, like someone was standing in the clearing near your barn.

But when I looked again, the light was out, and I couldn’t see anything in the dark.

I assumed it was you checking on your farm. ”

“What time was this?”

“Um, around five. Maybe a little later.” But not much later, because I know exactly when I woke up.

Her face pales, and her jaw tightens. “That was me. But I didn’t move the axe. You didn’t see anyone else?”

“Like who?”

“Like anyone—a delivery person or maybe a hunter or hiker who wandered off the public lands.”

“I don’t know,” I say after a long pause. I’m uncomfortable at being put on the spot. “I’ll be honest, I drank a lot of wine last night. Too much. I was a little hungover this morning. I’m not sure what I saw, but I am sure I didn’t take your axe. That’s all I can tell you.”

Alex holds my gaze wordlessly for several seconds that feel like hours, then she nods. “I’m taking this with me.” She hefts the axe.

I lift my hand. “You should. It’s yours, after all.”

She finally leaves. I lock the door behind her and then slide down the wall to the floor, where I tuck my legs under me, rest my head against the cool wall, sweating and dizzy, and close my eyes.