Steven McBrearty: CABIN IN THE WOODS

Steven McBrearty is a shortlist winner nominee of the 2024 Adelaide Literary Award Contest in the category of Short Stories, with his work titled Cabin in the Woods.

Steven grew up in San Antonio, TX., in one of those large, rollicking Catholic families so prevalent in the era. On any given day, there could be games of pitch and catch in the hallway or tackle football in the back bedroom. Steven moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas and remains living in Austin now. He has published three collections of short stories and numerous individual stories and essays. Most recently, his stories were published in Literary Stories, 34th Parallel, Sybil, and Adelaide literary journals.

CABIN IN THE WOODS

We left Austin at sunrise December 26, heading for a romantic getaway in a rustic, one-room cabin in a pine forest near Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the Sangre de Christo mountain range. December 26 was a drab, dreary, grind-it-out sort of day, representing winter as the absence of light and warmth. Our 12-hour drive had few highlights, just the bleak memory of bucking headwinds for 700 miles through desolate West Texas and rushed, edgy meals at interstate fast food stops. By the time we arrived we were sullen and out-of-sorts, our conversations delivered in short, staccato snaps. My allergies were making me sneeze and my eyes water. Claire freaked out when we skidded on ice driving the last leg to the cabin. Our cabin was reserved for a week, and I already wanted to go home.

But the cabin was a beautiful place, it turned out, ridiculously beautiful, isolated, pristine, fresh, cold, clean. It sat in a clearing in the woods, no other habitations around. The inside was bare, like a fresh start, with a pull-out bed and built-in cabinets and a gleaming small kitchen, and smelling of its pinewood walls and the pine forest all around. A cold, clear stream ran swiftly just beyond a window over the kitchen sink. A deer pranced primly by outside the window, turning its head as if to ascertain what was happening within. Unloading our belongings, we could hardly contain our excitement.

“We” was myself, Kevin Donnelly, age 22, and my girlfriend Claire Cunningham back in Austin, where we both lived. In separate apartments in a university neighborhood near campus, though we slept together as often as not. It seemed important that we maintain separate addresses. It seemed important in my mind, anyway. We were both seniors at the University of Texas, graduating in the spring, unfinished, idealistic, hopeful of achieving impressive things still. Claire wanted to be a kindergarten teacher in a Montessori school. I wanted to be . . . a writer, though I told nobody of my plans, not Claire, not my family, nobody. I wanted to surprise the world when my first novel turned up on the best seller list. “You?” everybody would say. “You wrote a book?” “Yup,” I would say, with a modest shrug. “That was me.” Ostensibly, my life’s goal was to be an accountant, like my father.

I was as romantic as the next guy, but the getaway was all Claire’s idea—I would really rather have stayed home and watch college football bowl games. It was our anniversary of something—half-year anniversary, anniversary of the first time we went to a fancy restaurant, something, Claire kept track of stuff like that. Maybe I wasn’t as romantic as the next guy.

Claire and I had met in an English class in the fall of our sophomore year. She was from my hometown, San Antonio, and she had gone to a Catholic high school, like I did. She was a pale, delicate young woman, slim-limbed, delicate, petite. She wore her brunette hair in two long braids on either side of her downy-cheeked face. In her blue knit wood hat and navy-blue ski jacket, she looked sort of French, though her ancestry was Scottish/German, mostly. She looked like somebody who loved all things small and fragile, the kinds of things you’d expect a kindergarten teacher to love. She was small and fragile herself. Sadly, I was undecided regarding my future with her. She seemed good enough for now, but I couldn’t envision staying with her forever. I kept seeing girls that I might like better, girls who would make me deliriously happy, eternally joyful. I tried sometimes to break up with her, but could never quite work up the gumption to follow through. I thought it might send her to a mental breakdown. She seemed very delicate, mentally. Anyway, she was my first steady sexual experience, and it wasn’t easy to break away from that. Sex when you are a young man will make you do a lot of things you don’t really want to do.

Around the cabin, Clarie was like a kindergarten kid herself, preternaturally alive, aware, wanting to gambol in the woods, explore this uncharted territory. Her enthusiasm was contagious. Walking around, we discovered a small café in a clearing in the woods, with a broad bay window and lights turned on in the early gloom of late December. The lights inside were like a beacon in the wilderness. As we approached, Claire took my hand and we ran together, diving headlong into a snowbank. We rose to our feet laughing and kissed madly. I felt my manhood bursting forth like the sap in a young maple tree.

Wind chimes tinkled merrily as we pulled open the heavy glass door and stepped inside, greeted there by an aging hippie couple, greeted effusively, overwhelmingly, like we were foreigners fresh off the boat. Jim and Ginny were their names, white people in Native American garb, moccasins on their feet. East Coast transplants, they explained, they had settled here in the New Mexico highlands decades ago in their free-wheeling youth, seeking peace and harmony with the universe. At least this corner of the universe located here. Jim was tall and ungainly and stoop-shouldered, clean-shaven with a ponytail and a silver stud in one ear. Ginny was stocky, with graying hair cut short in a pixie style. She wore long, dangly hoop earrings that I swear seemed to tinkle, themselves. They fussed over us as they ushered us in, regaling us with sordid tales of their free-living, free-loving youth. Jim winked knowingly, as though he would be divulging the secret of life itself. I almost thought he might pull out a reefer and pass it around. Ginny seemed to present herself as a kind of prototype Earth Mother, mother of us all. Though she had no children of her own. The glass counter at the front desk was stocked with Apache dolls and other local novelties and trinkets. Claire bought a doll on the way out, one wearing a hoop dress and fringed shawl. She clutched it tightly to her chest as we walked back to the cabin.

“Isn’t this amazing?” Claire said, feet crunching through the snow in twilight darkness.

“It is amazing,” I said. “It’s beautiful here.”

“Can we just stay here forever?” she said.

“Maybe so,” I said. “Maybe we can.” In the moment, I almost believed that we could stay there forever, cordoned off from our past lives and far from the madding crowd, removed from any cares or troubles, making love multiple times a day. Could it get any better than that? We didn’t wait long after we got back to the cabin that night. We made love under the warm blankets of the cold bed and slept in libido-drenched tranquility through the night. Sex will make a young man believe he is in love. Sex will make a young man not care if he is in love or not.

The restaurant became a kind of base of operations for us there. We tromped all around the area, sighting deer and foxes and a coyote and an Elk, and what we conjectured were the tracks of a black bear. We went sledding and cross-country skiing and rented a snowmobile one sunny afternoon, trekking through an open plain area where the snow was piled knee high. We drove into town for supplies and to look around. But we always returned to the restaurant for a meal or a cup of coffee or hot cider before bedtime. Jim and Ginny were always there to provide counsel, comedy, local lore, all fodder for discussion when we were back alone. We would walk back to the cabin evaluating their observations. And then fell into bed in a torpor of passion.

We meandered along like this for two or three days, lather, rinse, repeat. I was content, more or less. I was satiated, for sure. I didn’t need anything else. It even seemed possible to believe that Claire really could be the person to spend the rest of my life with. But then I awakened one morning staring at the ceiling with a sharp sense of dread. Being with Claire wasn’t enough. I was antsy. I was bored. I missed TV. I wanted to know the football scores. I wanted to know what was happening in the world. The world here seemed too small, too confined, too static. The cabin walls surrounded me. The trees outside surrounded me, too. My old doubts about Claire came flooding back. I found myself again ambivalent about her, uncertain of our future together. I saw a girl in the store in town who turned me on. My old self had returned. My bad old self. My mind wandered far away, back to my college friends and classes. I missed the routine of school, chit-chatting with classmates on the way out the door, drinking coffee in the student union, sitting beside the biology pond in peaceful contemplation.

We ate breakfast in the cabin with me pretending that everything was hunky-dory, planning our day. Later that morning, Claire drove off by herself to the store in town and I found myself luxuriating in her absence, in the quiet, the aloneness, the separation. I reveled in being by myself. I didn’t have to find the energy to talk. I didn’t have to formulate my thoughts to please her. I was untethered, unchained. I could just be me, by myself.

Claire was oblivious to all this, of course. She still believed I was having the time of my life. When she returned, she bounded through the door with two bags of groceries and plopped them triumphantly on the kitchen table. She smiled—she beamed—like the winner of a sporting match.

“Look what I got!” she said.

“Hey, great,” I said.

But my voice was flat and stilted. I couldn’t hide my disaffection any longer. Claire eyed me questioningly, as though wondering what in the world had transpired while she was gone. We put the groceries up silently, laboring individually, looking stridently away from one another. It was like we were in two different locations. Now she had clammed up, too. It felt like a duty for us to go out walking again, walking in a muted, mid-day winter sun, a sun that seemed to bleach everything into a stark whiteness. It was a narrow trail, tall evergreens on both sides boxing us in, confined and claustrophobic. The entire known world seemed engorged in whiteness, enervating whiteness, an infinity of whiteness stretching into outer space. Wind whistled through the treetops above, a soughing sound. A fine dusting of snow shook off from the limbs above, stinging our faces. There were no other sounds, the world a womb, or a tomb. I felt increasingly isolated as we crunched alone, one foot in front of another. I knew I was ruining things for her. I was ruining things for myself. Each step forward it seemed as though we were marching into an uncertain fate, like infantrymen marching off to battle. There was no end to the trees, no end to the blanket of snow, yet another blanket of snow around the corner. My communications were curt, sometimes only a grunt or a wave of the hand or a wag of the head. I was being as ass, I understood that. I fought against it, but sometimes you just can’t help being an ass. It’s like a sinner who pledges to reform, but ultimately is unable to do so. Perhaps I was just a congenital ass.

Desperate, despondent, I suggested that we stop by the restaurant as a kind of last-gasp effort to restart. Maybe Jim and Ginny could provide therapy with their usual bantering, self-validating bonhomie. They seemed like our last best hope. But there seemed like a pall of foreboding even there today, a malaise of apprehension that infected every inch of the space. Jim was grouchy and out-of-sorts, his surgically-repaired hip and a bunion on his big toe flaring up, he said. Moreover, he was morose and unsettled due to Ginny admonishing him for some trivial housekeeping infractions—sweeping the floor in slipshod fashion and overcooking the eggs that morning. He plopped our coffees on the table unceremoniously and skulked away without further comment. There was no knowing wink. There was no inside joke. It turned out that Jim was just an ineffectual old fart and Ginny a control freak Earth Mother who wanted everything done her way. We could see them squabbling behind the counter, Ginny speaking in an annoying stage whisper. Jim let loose an exasperated breath. Jim and Ginny didn’t seem much like role models for Claire and me anymore. Nothing to aspire for us there.

Back outside, we walked a few uncertain steps before Claire stopped suddenly in her tracks. She turned and looked at me, searching my face.

“Why are you being so quiet now?” she said, eyes hard, as though making a calculation. The hard data would show that I was not the man of her dreams. Not the person she had hoped I would be.

“I’m not being quiet,” I said—absurdly.

“Oh, yeah, right!” she said. “You’re Mr. Chatty.” And for the first time since we had met, almost, her voice took on a tone of exasperation—anger, even. She had always been so even-tempered, so easy-come-easy-go, treating me as if I were one of her kindergarten kids requiring patience and kindness and compassion. Her fervor took me aback. I felt exposed—she had the goods on me—I was a jerk. “What’s the matter?” she said. “You don’t like being here? You don’t like being here with me?”

“Sure I do,” I lied. “I love being here with you.” I reached out to show her I cared for her deeply. But I had no energy. I felt like somebody moving in a dream. I extended my arms. She pushed me away. She ran twenty steps, put her hands over her face. She began to cry. I started toward her, stopped. I didn’t know why. My gaze focused on a cluster of pine fronds scattered around the snow-packed ground. Clad in white athletic shoes, her small feet seemed obsequiously clean and tidy, as if to mock me by their orderliness. My own life seemed to have fallen into rampant disorder.

“Let’s go back to the cabin and make love,” I tried.

“I don’t want to have sex with you,” she said. Her word choice here was telling. We had always said we were making love. We had never said we were having sex. “I don’t feel like touching you. I don’t even feel like talking to you.”

I could only shrug.

“I can’t believe I’ve wasted all this time with you,” she said. “I thought you might really be the one. I thought you could be that special person I could spend the rest of my life with. Turned out I thought wrong.”

Hands at sides, I stood immobile and impotent. I had spent much of the past two years wanting to break up with her, but now that she was breaking up with me, I was a pathetic nutcase. My life seemed over. I would never find anybody like her again.

“I thought you thought I was funny?” I said.

“I do think that,” she said.

“I thought you thought I was sensitive and caring?” I said. She shrugged.

“Sometimes,” she said.

“I’m writing a novel,” I said. I wasn’t sure how this fit into the new narrative, but it seemed important that she should know. I supposed I thought it would sway her over somehow. From her reaction, it seemed almost as if I had revealed I was gay or had spent ten years in prison.

“A novel?” she said. She tilted her head sideways in a narrow-eyed squint. “Is that what you’re always clacking away with on your computer? I always thought it was some kind of accounting project.”

“It’s my novel,” I said. “I want to be a writer.”

“Well, Mr. Writer,” she said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was stupid. I didn’t know if you’d care. I guess I thought I’d surprise you.”

“Surprise me when?” she said. “When I’m eighty years old and in a nursing home? Nice surprise.”

I stared obtusely at the ground, fearful of looking at her. Fearful to see what she might be thinking. Fearful of what was going to happen for the rest of my life.”

“You want to know why I brought you here?” she said. “I was going to see if you wanted to get married. I was going to ask you to marry me.”

“You were” I said. I stood flat-footed, my brain flat-footed, too. “You want to get married.”

“Not anymore,” she said. “I don’t want to be miserable for the rest of my life.”

“We had such a good thing going,” I said, pitifully. She shook her head, as if to say, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

“Just take me home,” she said. “I want to get home. I can’t stay another minute here.”

Back in Austin, the world was brown and drab. When we parted, it was hushed and somber, anticlimactic, like the last leaves falling off a deadened tree. Claire packed up her belongings that had gravitated to my apartment in a sports bag and drove away. I watched her turn the corner and disappear, disappear from my life.

Steven McBrearty