A Hundred Miles from Anywhere

The engine of the truck rumbled underneath me as I pulled down the open mouth of the driveway from the road. Like the road behind it had been, the driveway was little more than two tracks of bare dirt that wound between the trees. I'd left pavement behind about an hour earlier, when I'd driven out of Manitouwadge following Station Road north into the wilderness. I didn't mind. I'd grown up driving roads like these. The road which led up to my families' cabin near the eastern end of Stag Lake was far worse than this one, and I'd been driving that since I was old enough to reach the pedals on my father's tan-brown box van.

The van had disappeared to a scrap yard about five years ago, replaced by what I was driving now. A 2015 GMC Sierra, the paint once deep burgundy but now faded to a colour that more resembled day-old wine. Listening carefully as I drove, I made a mental note to check the oil levels once I got home.

If I got home. Assuming I wasn't serial-killed (is that a verb?) by Paul_Irons_54. We'd connected on Kijiji, after he'd posted a picture of a blue Westinghouse portable, gas-powered generator for $200.00. My family had been looking for one for couple of months now, but to buy one new was close to $1,300, which was a little bit outside--or a lot outside--of our budget at the moment. Paul_Irons_54 might have only had one profile picture uploaded, a partial headshot of a bald man in his middle-sixties, but there had been enough obviously non-stock photographs of the generator and the description had contained enough facts that I felt confident. Not just that I wasn't going to be serial-killed, which was definitely a priority, but also that he'd taken care of the five year-old generator enough that it would still run for a couple yet.

Underneath me, the driveway carried on straight through the trees for a couple of yards and then descended steeply. The forests here were dense enough that the branches touched far overhead, even over the small roadway. I slowed my speed as the ground fell away, tilting down toward a small opening in the trees. As I descended further, the opening widened into a clearing with two old-wood structures. One was a building, obviously some kind of toolshed, and the other was little more than a slatted wooden lean-to tucked between the trunks of two enormous oak trees. I hoped they'd kept the generator in the first of the two.

Taking one final turn at the bottom of the hill, I left the trees behind and pulled into the clearing. It wasn't flat. Another, much smaller hill led upward in the direction I was going. I parked the truck behind a black Honda CRV, which was pulled to the side of the clearing just under some trees. Reaching across the center console, I clicked open the glove box and fished around inside of it for a moment. My hand found what it was looking for. Round, metallic, about half the size of a spray-paint can. Bear mace.

After all, I was a hundred miles from anywhere.

I didn't think I was going to be serial killed. I was still a twenty-seven year old woman, very nearly far enough north to lose cell-phone service, meeting a stranger at a remote cabin. Insurance was nice. There was also a handgun, registered and kept in a locked plastic box, under the passenger seat. I considered it for a moment, but left it where it was. I tucked the can of bear mace into the front of my slightly oversized black University of Alberta sweater, causing it to hang down like the pouch of a kangaroo. Peeking at myself in the rearview mirror, I quickly gathered my loose hanging brown hair and held it in a ponytail while I slipped the elastic band from around my wrist to keep it in place. I pulled a black scrunchie on over it. Meeting my eyes and giving myself a final nod, I reached over and pushed open the drivers-side door.

It squeaked softly as I opened it. I made another mental note to pick up some WD-40 for the hinges on my way back through Manitouwadge. As I stepped out of the truck, and began making my way up the slowly sloping hill, the cabin came properly into view. Somebody had put down loose gravel, over the open swath of patchy grass, and it crunched under my shoes as I walked. As the building came into view, I mentally reassessed the place.

By the slightly grainy quality of the pictures on the advertisement, and from having grown up around cabins and hunting lodges my entire life, I thought I knew what to expect from Paul_Irons_54. I expected something homely and slightly run-down, which had been passed through his family for the last sixty years. I was wrong.

The building that stood on the far side of the hill, rising into view as I walked, was three-stories tall. It had obviously been standing for a while, but I wouldn't have put the age older than a decade. The exposed framing logs were heavy, brown-stained cedar wood. Between them, wide windows stood out between the whitewashed sideboards. A small wooden deck led up to steps to a screen door, with a more substantial one behind it. On the deck, a covered barbecue stood beside a picnic bench which was strewn with fishing supplies. A pair of hip waders hung on a nail beside the door. Chota Hippies--quite expensive. In fact, it wasn't just the waders that tipped me off to the fact that I might have misjudged Paul's financial situation; the entire building looked expensive. Less like a far-north cottage than a rural summer home. A summer home which had found itself being erected about ten hours further north than where it belonged.

Glancing around for a moment, I tried to see if anybody was home. I couldn't see any lights on through the windows, which wasn't a surprise--being the middle of the afternoon and a sunny day--but I also couldn't see any movement through the windows. Again, not particularly surprising. Besides the ones on the porch, most of them were too high to see much of anything. Especially with the bright reflection of the sun hitting them.

Drawing a breath, I climbed the two steps onto the porch. They creaked quietly in protest under my feet. Pulling open the screen door, I raised my hand and tapped the back of three fingers against the flat, unpainted wood of the inner door a couple of times. I waited a moment, with no response. Turning my hand and using the front of my fingers, I knocked slightly louder. I waited another moment before I heard the tell-tale sound of feet moving across floorboards. There was the familiar sound of a slide-latch detaching; the scrape and then quiet jingle of it muffled behind wood, and then the door swung open.

And there, beyond the look of the cottage, was a second surprise.

The woman who greeted me was definitely not Paul_Irons_54. It took me a moment, blinking and staring dumbfounded, to understand what--who--I was looking at. My initial guess, despite the fact that she stood about four inches taller than I did, was that I was a couple years older than the young woman on the other side of the doorway. My very first thought, as the door swung open to reveal her, was that she looked like a stripper. I don't mean that pejoratively--I mean it as the greatest compliment.

Her hair was blonde; not straw blonde, not dusty blonde, but the kind of blonde that borders of whiteness when the sunlight catches it at the right angle. Bleached blonde. A slightly darker shading toward the bottom told me that it was either natural, which I thought was true, or it was an extremely impressive dye-job. A slightly sharp jawline ended in a round chin. That chin was raised, giving her a look of proudness. Beyond it, I could see a pair of round-looking pink lips, that parted to reveal the bottom edge of white teeth as she smiled in greeting. The top of her eyes had been darkened, ever so slightly, by eyeshadow; despite that, I don't think mascara had anything to do with the way her eyelashes curled up from the top of her eyelids. It certainly didn't have anything to do with the eyes that stared out at me from beneath them, like two pools of deep, blue lakewater.

I swallowed, my mouth suddenly feeling dry. Even beneath sweatpants and a flannel sweater, I could see the slimness of her body. The fact that the slightly tighter bottom of the sweatpants didn't quite reach her ankles only accentuated the young woman's sense of height. She wasn't skinny. She was slim. I thought that if she were to lift the bottom of her sweater, I'd see the hard indents of muscle that made up her stomach. The thought, and having it while staring at the woman in surprise, nearly made me blush.

I changed my mental assessment slightly. She did look like a stripper, but the more I looked at her the more I began to think about the beautiful women in the back of the at-home aerobics DVDs that my mother used to follow along to in the middle of the living-room.

"You must be Vivian," she extended a hand to me, which I shook. As I suspected, her grip was light, but felt inflexible in the moment before she released my hand, "I'm Diane."

"I think--I'm looking for your father?" I hesitate for a moment, "Paul?"

"That's a shame." Did her smile go slightly meaningful for a moment? I think it might have; barely more than a subtle pressure of her teeth against her bottom lip, there and gone a heartbeat later as she continued, "He got pulled away for a fishing weekend on Kagiano with some friends. He asked me to make sure you were taken care of." And there it was again, a flash of white teeth so bright they matched the small pearls at the bottom of her ears.

"Oh," I spoke slowly, giving myself time to think "Well that's okay."

Into girls?--Not into girls? Into girls, my gut reaction told me. Let me tell you, if what straight people believed about gaydar was true, I'd have gotten laid way more than I actually did. Much more of my time was dedicated to trying to answer the previous two questions, usually with a frustratingly vague lack of results. It certainly sounded like Diane's words were meant to be insinuating, but I also thought that might just be the way she spoke. The kind of woman who flirted casually, the same way that most people breathed. Or maybe the subtext I was hearing under her words wasn't actually there, and it was only a combination of her beauty and my hopefulness that made me hear it.

"Can I offer you a drink, Vivian?" She held the door open slightly wider, "I just opened a bottle of white."

"I have to drive..." I hesitated. I wanted nothing in the world more than to drink wine with Diane. To give myself a few more minutes to decided whether I was hearing things or not. I rocked my head slightly, and then nodded, "Well, maybe one."

"One it is."

She waved me through the door, stepping aside as I stepped through and into the kitchen. It was a small space, but not so small that she couldn't step back enough that my arm didn't brush against the front of her breasts as I came through the door. Not far enough that I couldn't smell the heady mixture of her perfume and the lingering scent of woodsmoke.

The kitchen itself was rather small. A wrought iron cookstove stood in one corner, which I guessed was mostly decorational. A heavy black pipe led from the top up to the ceiling, so maybe they used it for heat. The counters and cabinets were all made of the same unfinished wood, while the sink, oven and stove were all stainless steel and looked recently purchased. A small stack of firewood stood beside an open doorway, through which I could see about a third of the wide living-room. Glass doors cut a pair of side-by-side rectangles out of the white-painted wood. Diane hadn't been lying. A bottle of white wine stood on the counter beside the refrigerator. Two glasses, I noticed. Before my curiosity could become disappointment, Diane picked up the bottle and pour a liberal amount into each glass. When they were about half full, she set the bottle back down and passed one of the glasses to me.

"Cheers," she smiled.

"Cheers," I replied. Our glasses clinked as we touched them together. While we sipped, I took the moment of silence to look around the cottage. Swallowing, I looked back at Diane, "Do you have company?" I cringed slightly at the phrasing of that question.

"No," her smile widened slightly, her eyelashes once again tapping against the top of her cheeks in a way I thought--hoped--was intentionally provocative, "Just me this week. Usually my dad's up here with me. But--fishing trip. And I'm catching up on some work anyways."

"Oh--" I fumble for words for a moment, "I just thought, the two glasses--" I pause, and she quickly moves to fill the silence.

"Do you have a boyfriend, Vivian?"

The question catches me slightly off guard. I blink, and then shake my head. "Not since I was thirteen."

This seems to catch her attention. She lifts her wine glass and takes a sip, and then speaks almost off-hand: "Girlfriend?"

"Not at the moment."

"What a coincidence," the deep blue of her eyes becomes slightly translucent for a moment, as she tilts her chin slightly to the side and the light from the kitchen windows catches them, "Come on in. Let me show you around."

I note, quite clearly, that she didn't actually answer the question that she herself put out.

The inside of the cottage was exactly as I'd expected from my first glance at the outside. A heavy leather couch took up most of the space on the far side of the living room wall, banked by a row of wide windows which looked out over a raised deck. There was another, much larger iron stove on the opposite wall. A pair of wooden doors opened to bedrooms, with another under the staircase that led to a miniature bathroom. Most of the space inside was taken up by wooden shelves; cans of soup, cleaning supplies, rolls of toilet paper and paper tissues. A couple of knit blankets had been tossed onto two chairs near the couch, made of the same wrought iron as the fireplace. A couple of lamps took up space near the corners, and a smaller one stood on a hand-crafted table on the far side of the couch. A heavy-looking wooden staircase led up that wall, to the upper floor. A small balcony looked out over the living room, across which I could see four more doors. A long ladder led upward to what I guessed was the attic.

"How long has your father owned this?" I asked, looking around the cottage. I didn't have to fake how impressive I found it.

Strangely, Diane glanced at me for a moment. This time, her smile seemed slightly reserved; almost embarrassed.

"He doesn't own it," she shrugged slightly, "I do."

"You--" I looked at her in surprise, "Come on. You're pulling my leg."

She shook her head. Despite my obvious disbelief, her expression looked genuine. "If it was up to my dad, he'd live in a one-bedroom bunkie on some unnamed lake with no plumbing and no electricity. I like to spend time with him, and that set-up sure as hell isn't going to work for me, so I had this built. A compromise. He won't admit it, at least not often, but I think he's actually happy with it."

I didn't ask the obvious question--how? But whether she was just continuing the conversation or whether she read the question in my eyes, she went on.

"My mom... passed away. An accident."

"I'm so sorry."

"Thanks," she gives me a smile, "It was fifteen years ago, now. Snowmobile brakes," a small shrug lifts her shoulders, "Nobody to blame, really. But there was a lawsuit anyways, and there was quite a bit of money. Anyways, that's how this cottage got built. We call it Grace's Place. In the mornings we pour a bit of coffee over the edge of the balcony, because she was always spilling it. That's her room. Nobodies ever used it." She nods to the second doorway on the first floor, closest to the stairs. Now that my attentions been drawn to it, I can see a small photograph of a young, blonde woman has been tacked to the side of the doorframe. If she hadn't just told me about her mother, I thought that the picture could easily have been a slightly faded picture of Diane herself. They had the same blonde hair, the same easy smile. Even the way the woman stood, holding herself in a way that almost said come get some, was the same way that Diane stood. If her face was slightly sharper at the edges, the lines just a little deeper, the lips a little more narrow, it could all be passed-off as a quality of the photograph.

Suddenly Diane laughs, drawing my attention back to her and startling me slightly, "Sorry--you came to buy a generator, and here I am dumping my life story on you."

"That's okay," I return her smile and take a sip of my wine, "I think it's very sweet. The things you've done."

"Let me show you that generator, then." She leads the way back through the living room. I wait a moment while she pulls on a pair of running shoes, holding the door open for me when she's finished.

"So," she speaks as we're walking down the gravel-scattered hill toward the covered shed, "Does your family know you're gay?"

I glance back at her, tapping two fingers against the round side of my wine glass. It dawns on me that we should have left them inside, but it's too late now. I consider the question for a moment and nod, "Yeah. I came out," my fingers make air quotes, "when I was fourteen."

"How'd they take it?--If you don't mind me asking." The second part follows quickly on the heels of the first.

"Fine," I say, mostly honestly. My father had taken it particularly well, merely shrugging and nodding in a way that told me he'd probably suspected as much for years. My mother had been all hugs and forehead kisses; and even though that seems like the nicer reaction, in the years since she'd made a couple of comments that I found... interesting. She never speaks badly about gay people. I just don't think she actually believes I'm a lesbian. Thirteen years. She'd never use a word like phase, but the idea is always there. Hinted at. Hiding around the corner of our conversations.

"Well," I amend quickly, "My dad's fine with it. I'm not sure my mom's totally... I'm not sure she understands it. Er, not understands. Accepts. I'm not sure she totally accepts it."

"I get that," Diane laughs, but the laughter has a slightly harder edge than I've heard from her before. It made me think, suddenly, that despite how friendly Diane had been up to this moment, she wasn't the kind of woman you wanted to get on the wrong side of. Her words also caught my attention--they weren't quite a confirmation, but it was closer than she'd come previously.

We'd nearly reached the shed. I could see that the door was slightly open, the interior hidden in darkness despite the bright sun overhead. As I stepped into the shade beneath the slightly overhanging edge of the roof, I heard Diane say my name. Something about the way she said it gave me pause. Made a small, bright spark of electricity travel from the base of my spine straight upward into the back of my neck.

"Vivian--"

I turned. Just in time for her to catch my mouth with hers. That's what it was, in the first moment. Not even a kiss. Not really. More just a pressure against my lips. Whether it was an intentional gesture or just a follow-through of her movements momentum, I suddenly found myself with my back pressed against the wall of the shed. My mouth opened slightly in surprise, the slight gasp of my inhale becoming decidedly shaky as she took the chance at the loosening of my mouth to run her tongue along the curve of my bottom lip.

In the moment of surprise, my grip on my wineglass slipped. It fell away from my fingers, the thin glass hitting a stray piece of gravel and shattering beside us. Instead of pulling away, Diane smiled against my lips. I could feel the rise of her cheeks against mine as it happened. Finally, after what might have been a full minute or only the space of a heartbeat, she took a step backward. She hadn't really been holding me against the wall, but as she stepped back I had to fight my bodies urge not to fall forward.