Page 15 of True North
Misha followed him down the hall and back into the central part of the house. Instead of returning to the kitchen, JT turned right to continue down a section of the hallway Misha hadn’t seen before, which let out into a great room with vaulted ceilings and a wood stove prominently situated in one corner with a surround of flat gray stone. This was no formal sitting room: like the den he had briefly glimpsed before, the furniture had clearly been chosen for comfort. A fleece blanket was folded up on the back of an overstuffed recliner, and a big television was mounted on the wall beside the stove. The expansive built-in bookcase on one wall was cluttered with an assortment of beat-up old paperbacks, trophies of varying sizes, a few bedraggled houseplants, and a coffee mug. Misha liked the warm, lived-in atmosphere. This was somewhere you could sit down and stay a while.
“Here’s the TV,” JT said, a simple enough sentence that Misha could understand. JT picked up one of three remotes on the coffee table and pushed a few buttons, then picked up a separate remote and pushed a few more, at which point the TV finally turned on. Misha was never going to remember what to do. And what was the third remote for? It was probably best not to ask.
After the bewildering TV tutorial, JT crouched to open a sliding door on the TV console and showed Misha an array of DVDs neatly lined up in their cases. He would have no shortage of entertainment—assuming he could ever figure out how to turn on the television.
Next, JT took him down another hallway to a room that had been set up as an office, with a large, cluttered desk and dark wooden bookshelves that unlike the shelves in the living room were nearly empty aside from a few framed photographs. A computer and monitor sat on top of the desk, surrounded by stacks of papers and the useless junk that always seemed to accumulate on desks, paper clips and rubber bands, a stapler. Misha opened the stapler to test a hunch, and sure enough, there wasn’t a single staple inside.
JT made a rueful face and said something. Misha grinned. He couldn’t imagine JT did much stapling.
He watched over JT’s shoulder as JT sat in the desk chair and turned on the computer. JT clicked around a little and then typed Misha’s name in a box, and then scrolled through a sequence of pictures until he came to one of a black bear. He was making a user account for Misha, Misha realized when JT returned to the main screen and logged in. It would be nice to be able to use the computer whenever he wanted, and with his own account, he could change everything into Russian and not have to worry about confusing JT.
He could email his parents. They probably thought he was dead.
He ruthlessly quashed that train of thought. He didn’t want to think about any of that.
He didn’t have to email anyone. He could use the computer for plenty of other things. Maybe JT had some computer games. The human parts of Misha’s personality were waking from hibernation one by one, prodded out of dormancy by JT’s patient attention. He had liked video games at one time. He remembered playing them with his cousins, back home in Russia, when they could be bothered to be human; that entire side of the family spent most of their time in bear form. Or he could brush up on his English, or buy impractical things to have delivered to JT’s house. Not that he had any money.
Apparently satisfied that Misha understood how to use the computer, JT took him to yet another room, the den Misha remembered seeing on the day he took a shower. This room held yet another TV, different from the other in that it only required a single remote to operate. Misha decided he would spend most of his time here. The den was much smaller than the living room, and more out of the way, so he would feel less like he was invading JT’s space. The leather sofa looked big enough for a nap. And the windows looked out on the woods, a calming reminder that Misha wasn’t trapped here and could leave any time he wanted. JT had the house closed up, but Misha could see the trees outside gently swaying in the summer breeze, laden with green leaves. He liked this room.
He turned from the window to see JT smiling at him. JT said something too quickly for Misha to parse. Misha shook his head and shrugged, and for once, JT repeated himself more slowly so that Misha could actually understand. “Do you like it?”
“Yeah,” Misha said, his heart lifting with the sudden conviction that he would be happy here, in JT’s home. “I like.”
* * *
Misha went out into the woods after dinner, driven by his bear instincts to take a few laps around the house before turning in for the night. Nothing was amiss in the forest as dusk settled over the ground. He heard owls and smelled the rich earth and found no signs at all of anything to give cause for concern. The world was full of hardship and danger, but at least here, in this small corner of the planet, everything was well.
He went back to the house, somewhat sheepishly, and let himself in with the code JT had taught him. JT was in the living room, stretched out on one of the sofas, reading a book in a pool of yellow lamplight. He glanced up and smiled when Misha came in. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” Misha said. He hovered there awkwardly, not sure if he should stay or go, but JT returned his attention to his book: permission for Misha to do whatever he wanted, or maybe an unspoken request for him to leave. With no way to know which it was, Misha slunk off to the den to watch some television.
He lost track of time, staring at the TV in a daze, overwhelmed by the events of the day. So much had happened that he still couldn’t fully process. Here he was, wearing JT’s clothes, sitting on JT’s sofa, watching JT’s TV, after having eaten the dinner JT had cooked for him. Nothing about this made a shred of sense. Who got this lucky in real life? Not Misha, who had never had much in the way of luck.
At last, a knock at the doorjamb snapped him out of his fugue state. JT stood in the open doorway, smiling. He said something and tipped his head in the direction of the stairway, and mimed rubbing his eyes. “Time for bed,” he said then, carefully enunciating each word.
“Yeah,” Misha said, and nodded to show he understood. They looked at each other for a moment. Then JT made an awkward sort of salute and left.
Misha stayed where he was for another ten or fifteen minutes, watching beautiful people on the screen saying things he couldn’t understand. Then he turned off the TV and walked through the dark house to the bedroom that was his now. He brushed his teeth and pissed and, after a moment’s consideration, slid between the sheets still dressed in his shorts and T-shirt. His thoughts churned like whitewater, but even so, he fell almost at once into a thick, dreamless sleep.
He woke in the dark, not sure what time it was or how long he had been asleep. The house was silent, which unsettled him. The woods were alive with sounds even in the middle of the night, like the earth itself was breathing underfoot. He wasn’t used to being indoors in such silence and safety.
He lay there for a while, staring up at the ceiling. Moonlight poured through the half-open blinds and cast odd shadows. He considered leaving the house to spend the rest of the night in the forest, but it would be weird to leave like that, like a thief sneaking out under the cover of darkness. He was trying to be civilized now. He didn’t want to disappoint JT or make him feel that his hospitality was being rejected. Misha was a man as well as a bear. He could spend a full night indoors. He wouldn’t fail so soon.
He couldn’t fall back asleep. He tried as hard as he could: he tried to focus on his breathing and nothing else; he tried to clear his mind of all concerns. He counted backward from ten thousand. He summoned a mental image of a peaceful glen in the forest. But even when his mind was as perfectly blank as the sky during a snowstorm, he couldn’t sink back into sleep.
There was no clock in the room, so he wasn’t sure how long he lay there. But finally, his eyes gritty with exhaustion, he rolled out of bed and walked down the dark hallway, trailing one hand along the wall not for guidance—his night vision was good enough even in human form for him to see where he was going—but to ground himself, to remind himself of where he was, and in which form. Fingers instead of claws.
He went up the stairs, treading carefully on each step to avoid making any squeaks. He followed the smell of JT’s body and the faint noises of JT’s sleeping breaths to the end of the upstairs hall, where JT’s bedroom door sat open, an invitation that JT probably hadn’t meant as such. Misha took it anyway, shamelessly. He was a bear, after all. He had been in the woods for so long that he’d forgotten all human customs. There was nothing strange in what he was about to do.
JT was sprawled out on his back with one arm flung above his head, breathing quietly through his open mouth. Instead of stretching out in the middle of the bed, as Misha would be inclined to if he had that much mattress real estate available, JT occupied only the far left side, closest to the nightstand, as if he were saving space for someone.
Misha cautiously drew down the covers on the other side of the bed and clambered in. The mattress dipped. JT stirred and sighed. Misha settled himself against the pillow and drew the duvet up to his chin. The heat of JT’s body warmed the linens even where Misha lay, faint but detectable. JT stirred again, turned over, went still. Misha closed his eyes and let the sounds of JT’s steady breathing lull him at last to sleep.
Eight
JT wasn’t innately a morning person, but he’d trained himself to be after years of crack-of-dawn practices before school. Practices in the NHL were usually mid-morning, but he liked to be at the rink early to eat and warm up, and it was easier to keep up the same schedule all year, even in the summer. He woke up with the sun or shortly thereafter. He rarely set the alarm and instead relied on the growing light to wake him.
Today, he woke with the feeling that something was different. He lay with his eyes closed for a moment, trying to figure out what it was. Then he remembered: Misha was asleep downstairs in the guest suite. JT had invited him to move in, and Misha had finally taken him up on the offer. That was for sure a big change.