Quinn, startled by a knock on the cabin door, flipped her laptop shut. “Who is it?” she called out.
“It’s Annika.”
Quinn rubbed a kink in her neck. If she was going to write this much, she’d have to start doing it at a desk, she thought, getting up and going over to the door.
“Wow, Annika,” she said, when she’d opened it. “I’ve seen you more in one day than I saw you all during high school.” Annika looked embarrassed and Quinn realized that she might have sounded sarcastic. “I mean, come in,” Quinn said, with a smile.
“I brought you these,” Annika said, holding out a stack of towels. “The housekeeper told me that you needed a couple more.”
“Thanks,” Quinn said, taking them from her. “These are great.”
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” Annika asked, with a slight frown, looking over Quinn’s shoulder into the cabin. Quinn turned to look too. It did look as if she might have been napping. When she’d started writing, it had been light outside, and the only light she’d turned on was the bedside table lamp. Since then, though, dusk had fallen outside, and, except for the pool of lamplight around the rumpled bed, the cabin was full of shadows, and its corners had receded into darkness.
“Oh, no. I wasn’t sleeping,” she said. “I lost track of time while I was writing. I’m a journalist,” she explained. Annika nodded. Quinn moved around the room, setting the towels down on a chair, turning on lights, and straightening the blanket.
“Would you like to come in for a minute?” she asked Annika, who was still standing in the doorway.
Annika came in, a little tentatively, closing the door behind her. “Do you write every day?” she asked.
“Usually,” Quinn said, sitting down on the bed. “I’m not compulsive. It doesn’t have to be something weighty or long. But I want to, I need to, write almost every day. Even if it’s a short description of a person or a place or a conversation. I feel kind of off-kilter if I don’t write, kind of out of balance. I feel the same way when I don’t run. Which, unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to do since I’ve been in Butternut.”
Annika cocked her head, as if she was considering this. She was one of those rare people, Quinn realized, who was a good listener. As a journalist, listening—listening actively and thoughtfully—without interrupting was something that Quinn had had to learn how to do. But some people did it naturally.
“Annika, please sit down,” Quinn said. She was making Quinn nervous standing there, like a fugitive about to take flight. Quinn pointed toward one of the chairs in the sitting area and Annika moved away from the door and sat down on the edge of it.
“Could I ask, though, what you’re working on now?” Annika said. “I’ve read some of your articles in the past.”
“Really?” Quinn was flattered. “Where did you come across them?”
“Online. I read one about a woman’s professional softball team.”
“Oh, the Chicago Bandits,” Quinn said, smiling. She’d really wanted to write about them and had had to convince a reluctant Theo to let her. “I had a blast writing that article. Mainly because I got to go out drinking with some of the team at a bar in Rosemont. Suffice it to say, they can hold their own,” she said of them. Quinn, on the other hand, had had to be poured into a cab at the end of the night and had woken up the next morning with a deadly hangover.
“It was fun to read, too,” Annika said, her animation overcoming her reserve. “And so was the one about the Cape Cod Room closing. I mean, that one wasn’t fun. It was sad. But it made me feel like I was there, in those final days.”
Quinn nodded. “Say Good-Bye to the Cape Cod Room” was an article she’d written for Windy City Today, about the last days of the iconic seafood restaurant in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. Her dad had actually taken her there once when she was a kid, when they were visiting Chicago. It was dark and cozy—the tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and copper pots hanging from the ceiling—and despite the fact it had been known for its seafood, an eight-year-old Quinn had wanted a hamburger.
“You’re a good writer,” Annika said. “I felt like I was right there in the Cape Cod Room.”
“Thank you,” Quinn said. “I’m glad you liked my articles. I wonder sometimes if anyone reads them. I’m not writing one at the moment.” She went on, “Right now I’m writing about my senior year of high school. I’m trying to re-create it. Not everything, just the most important parts. I’ve been especially prolific today; I’ve already written four memories of that year.”
Annika looked surprised. “Why do you want to write about your senior year?” she asked.
“I guess I’m trying to understand it better. Writing is the best way I know how to do that. Maybe the only way,” Quinn said. “But I’m doing it for me. It’s not for publication.”
Annika was sitting very still in her chair, almost too still, Quinn thought. The lamplight shone on her blond hair.
“That must be really hard, writing about that year,” she said to Quinn. She stood up then and started moving in the direction of the door.
And Quinn, who’d been sitting on the bed, got up too. “It is hard. Sometimes I want to write about it. And sometimes I don’t. But I’m pushing myself to anyway. So far, I’ve only written about the good parts of that year. I haven’t gotten to the accident yet . . . That will be the hardest part . . . It was a terrible time.”
Annika, standing with her hand on the doorknob, nodded in agreement.
“Was it hard for you?” Quinn asked, realizing that all three boys had been from Annika’s hometown, and she must have known them, at least tangentially.
Annika put her head down, as though considering this question. “It was a hard year for everyone who lived in Winton,” she said. “But I was pregnant with Jesse. So I had to think about that.” Checking her watch, she opened the cabin door as she said, “I’d better be going. I told Jesse he could watch a program, but it’s almost over now. It was nice talking to you.”
Quinn smiled. “Thanks for the towels,” she said.
After Annika closed the door, Quinn went to the window and watched her walk away into the darkness. She’s an enigma, Quinn thought. A bundle of contradictions. She was friendly but guarded, polite but abrupt, interested but not forthcoming. In fact, even as she had settled into the armchair she’d had one foot out the door.
Quinn turned from the window and thought about picking up her writing where she’d left off. She’d lost the thread of it, though, and besides, she’d gotten most of it down, hadn’t she? Instead, she wandered around the cabin a little and ended up standing in front of the dresser, staring at her face in the mirror that hung above it. This wasn’t Quinn’s favorite thing to do, but she looked at her reflection now as if she were searching for something. Had Gabriel kept those photographs he’d taken of her? Were they stored somewhere in that solitary cabin of his? Or were they gone now, another casualty of life? And she wondered what he had seen in them, in her, when he’d taken them. What had he seen in them that she hadn’t been able to see in herself?