pausing to give Drew one final, baleful look: follow me and die.
Drew let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding (a hoary suspense novel cliché that turned out to be true) and started for the porch. The hand holding the keys was shaking slightly. He was already telling himself that he hadn’t been in any danger, not really; if you didn’t bother a moose—even a protective Moose Mom—it wouldn’t bother you.
Besides, it could have been worse. It could have been a bear.
8
He let himself in, expecting a mess, but the cabin was spick and span. Old Bill’s work, surely; it was even possible Bill had given it one last putting-to-rights on the day he killed himself. Aggie Larson’s old rag rug still lay in the center of the room, threadbare around the edges but otherwise whole. There was a Ranger woodstove up on bricks and waiting to be loaded, its isinglass window as clean as the floor. To the left was a rudimentary kitchen. To the right, overlooking the woods sloping down to the brook, was an oak dining table. At the far end of the room were a swaybacked sofa, a couple of chairs, and a fireplace Drew felt dubious about lighting. God knew how much creosote might have collected in the chimney, not to mention wildlife: mice, squirrels, bats.
The cookstove was a Hotpoint that had probably been new back in the days when the only satellite circling the earth was the moon. Next to it, standing open and somehow corpselike, was an unplugged refrigerator. It was empty except for a box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. The television in the living room area was a portable on a rolling cart. He remembered the four of them sitting in front of it, watching M*A*S*H reruns and eating TV dinners.
Plank stairs ran up the west wall of the cabin. There was a kind of gallery up there, lined with bookcases that mostly held paperbacks—what Lucy had called rainy-day camp reading. Two small bedrooms opened off the gallery. Drew and Lucy had slept in one, the kids in the other. Did they stop coming here when Stacey began to bitch about needing her privacy? Was that why? Or did they just get too busy for summer weeks at camp? Drew couldn’t remember. He was just glad to be here, and glad none of their renters had made off with his mom’s rag rug… although why would they? It had once been pretty damn gorgeous, but was now fit only to be walked over by people in woods-muddy shoes or bare feet wet from wading in the brook.
“I can work here,” Drew said. “Yeah.” He jumped at the sound of his own voice—still nerved up from his stare-down with Moose Mom, he supposed—and then laughed.
He didn’t need to check the electricity, because he could see the red lamp flashing on Pop’s old answering machine, but he flipped the switch for the overhead lights anyway, because the afternoon was starting to thin out. He went over to the answering machine and hit PLAY.
“It’s Lucy, Drew.” She sounded wavery, as if her voice were coming from twenty thousand leagues under the sea, and Drew remembered this old answering gadget was basically a cassette deck. It was sort of amazing that it worked at all. “It’s ten past three, and I’m a little worried. Are you there yet? Call me as soon as you can.”
Drew was amused but also annoyed. He had come up here to avoid distractions, and the last thing he needed was Lucy looking over his shoulder for the next three weeks. Still, he supposed she had valid reasons to be concerned. He could have had an accident on the way up, or broken down on the Shithouse Road. She certainly couldn’t be worried that he was going mental over a book he hadn’t even started to write.
Thinking that brought back a memory of a lecture the English Department had sponsored five or six years before, Jonathan Franzen speaking to a full house on the art and craft of the novel. He had said that the peak of the novel-writing experience actually came before the writer began, while everything was still in his or her imagination. “Even the clearest part of what was in your mind gets lost in translation,” Franzen had said. Drew remembered thinking that it was rather self-centered of the guy to assume that his experience was the general case.