‘You can’t just be so late when you’ve got a child with you,’ she said.
‘He’s not a child.’
‘He’s thirteen. Don’t you think they wanted to be with him on his birthday?’
‘Sorry.’
‘You don’t sound sorry.’
He flopped over onto his side, away from her. ‘Jesus, I said sorry.’
‘You don’t sound it. You don’t mean it. You make it worse with your fake sorry, how defensive you get.’
‘What am I meant to say?’
‘You’re meant to mean it.’
‘OK, I’m sorry I worried you.’
Evelyn stuck her face into the pillow and growled.
Daniel laughed. ‘I’m not sorry we had the last run.’
She got out of bed. ‘It’s not funny.’ The air through her T-shirt was sharply cold; her feet froze; she climbed back into bed and under the blankets again.
He cupped a handful of her hair and rubbed a thumb over her hip bone. ‘Do you want to have angry sex?’
‘No.’ It was too long since they’d done it, and always weird when there were people staying. She curled up, facing away, and smoodged her body back into him, his arm slung over her ribcage.
Eve woke in the night to see him sitting on the end of the bed, something in his hand – no, flicking through a pile of something – money. He was counting money. She sat up, pulling the blankets up and her long hair down over her neck to keep warm. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just seeing how much I’ve got left. It’s payday tomorrow from the ski school.’
‘Looks like you’ve got loads.’ She was pretty sure that wasn’t all of it.
‘I want to . . .’ He folded the bills back into an envelope and put it in his knapsack, the zip loud as he closed it. ‘I really want to go to New York. Next. I want to stay there. Get some work, bar work or whatever, go and see your folks upstate, spend some time. I mean, Canada’s fine, but.’ His gaze went through the knotted pine wall and out into the lightless snow. ‘Enough mountains, I want to go and live in a city. I just, I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, that’s all.’
‘What about –’ Later, she wasn’t sure where she had got the courage to say it. Daylight would dissolve her: after any more than a moment’s thought, Dorothy would have entered her mind, clapped a hand over her mouth, said no. Daniel’s face was barely visible. ‘I’ve got citizenship,’ Eve said. ‘A green card. We could get married.’ She felt the silence burn.
‘Eve, shh.’ He put a hand on her knee. Over the blanket. ‘Shh, it’s the middle of the night. Let’s not make things complicated. You don’t mean it.’
She did. ‘Goodnight,’ she said, and curled up again and was amazed and grateful to succumb quickly to the iron pull of sleep.
In the morning neither of them spoke of it. She got the family ready for their day and Daniel left in his ski gear straight after breakfast. He called up from the snow if she had seen his frog and she stood on the deck and said she couldn’t hear him. He turned and skied away, knees bent, legs in close, expert parallel. The family raised their arms in a faceless goodbye salute as they skied down towards the car park with packs on their backs, shouting and laughing amongst themselves, and Evelyn closed the ranch slider against the white sky. The vacuum cleaner was in the cupboard in the utility room and she dragged its dwarfish body around on the end of the snaky hose, sucking at the channels of crumbs and dust all over the cabin until the floor was clear.
In the children’s room a tubular bundle of duvet on a top bunk made her heart stop. It looked like a sleeping body. But she had seen the family ski off, all six of them. ‘Hello?’ she said, and took a quick breath and yanked the duvet aside to make sure. Nothing but a rippled sheet.
She adjusted the bunk mattresses and pulled up the bedding and shook out the pillows, which smelled of scalps. There was a dog-eared paperback on the floor, in German, its pages oxidised yellow, the cover dotted with brown like a liver-spotted hand. In the top drawer were neatly piled thermals and socks sausaged into pairs. Some cash tucked down the side, a small torch. Evelyn turned the head of the torch so it glowed, and waved the dot of white over the ceiling,