All along the road, trees raised their scrawny hands, white-knuckled against the brittle sky. Signs warned, caution deers mating. It was the day November dribbled into December. Henry and Tabitha were listening to a podcast about a plane crash in the Andes and the gruesome ways the survivors had clung to life in the feral winter hellscape. It gave them something to think about other than themselves. At least I’m not wearing a sock made of arm skin, thought Tabitha.
They almost missed the turnoff, and Henry swerved into the driveway of the newly renovated inn that was offering Tabitha a free stay in return for coverage in the newspaper. The alternative was to remain holed up in their Bushwick apartment, grieving. The inn, a Victorian manor painted a deep gray, was smaller than it had seemed in the pictures. The landscaping was sparse and immature. Aside from the bar and restaurant, the hotel wasn’t yet open to the public. They would be the inaugural guests.
Henry parked the van in the gravel lot and cut the engine. Then he climbed between the seats to the back of the Sprinter and gathered the bags they’d packed. He’d built the vehicle out over the years with a platform bed, shelves, and a kitchenette—crude but clever, pieced together with particleboard and scrap. Tabitha opened the door and received the backpack he held out to her. They’d traveled thousands of miles in the van together. She had been there the day he’d bought it and had helped him with some of the labor, prying off the wall panels and adding sheep’s wool for insulation.
There was no one at the front desk when they entered, so they did a lap through the spaces. The lobby floor was checkered marble. Through one door was a wood-paneled library with stained glass windows. What was left of the tinted light fell on a tufted velvet settee and a crowded bookshelf. Through another door there was a wooden bar with gleaming, well-stocked shelves, and this room fed into a lounge with a pool table and a woodstove at the far end. Every element had been carefully considered, Tabitha noted, the suave austerity of the Wassily chairs orbited by antique rugs and estate-sale paintings. Pendant lights illuminated the sober craftsmanship of bentwood dining sets.
“Tabitha?”
She turned to face a grinning man in a Canadian tuxedo. “Hi, yes, that’s me.” She gestured at Henry, suddenly not sure how to identify him. “And this is Henry.”
“Derek,” said the man, giving each of them a hale handshake. He looked like he belonged on the cover of a romance novel. His teeth were perfect white squares, and she imagined a cartoon glint off them—ping. “How was your drive up? You’re coming from Manhattan?”
“Yeah—well, from Brooklyn, but it was nice,” she said, though it didn’t seem like enough verbiage. She searched her memory of that afternoon, of their funereal progress to the car and the red, ruptured rat on the asphalt—a fresh kill—and the crush of traffic in Manhattan before, finally, a cruising speed and the spare woods of the Catskills. “Scenic.”
“Fantastic.” Derek clapped his hands together. “Well, let me show you to your room so you can take a load off.”
Tabitha and Henry followed him up the carpeted stairs. The king bed in their room had a woven cane headboard framed in dark wood, and the lamp on the nightstand wore a pleated shade. Before Derek left them to their unpacking, Tabitha asked if there were any places in town open for dinner; a cursory search on Google Maps hadn’t turned up anything.
“Oh, yeah, it’s stick season, so a bunch of places are closed,” said Derek. “But our kitchen’s open downstairs. Why don’t you join us at the bar after you’re settled in, we’ll get you buzzed and fed?”
“That sounds great, thank you,” said Henry.
“Catch you folks later,” said Derek, and left with a wink.
“I’ve never heard anyone call it that,” said Henry, uncoiling the gray scarf Tabitha’s mother had given him last Christmas. She watched him do it, memorizing his broad, ruddy cheeks, the spirals of gray in his beard. “Stick season.” His gaze was fixed out the window, where the whittled trees were just visible in the deepening blue.
Downstairs, they sat together at the bar. They each ordered a spicy chicken sandwich, which came with a tin of steak fries, and shared a little gem salad. Tabitha had a Negroni and Henry had a beer. There were a handful of other patrons—all locals, it seemed, talking about the water damage someone’s house had taken, and someone’s brother who had just had twins. The food was excellent. The drinks were good. Something sweet and hazy played on the vintage jukebox in the corner.
Every time Derek came by to drop off extra sauce or fill their glasses, he told them about the renovation: how they had pulled up the floral carpeting and discovered a layer of tar over the floorboards, how they’d had to spend days sanding it down.
“And get this,” said Derek as he wiped the counter, “under the floorboards, what they were using were these old newspapers. It was a literal time capsule. Reports about the naval ammunitions depot on the Hudson during World War I. Wedding announcements. Ads for stuff to make chickens lay.”
“That’s incredible,” said Tabitha, jotting down notes in her phone. She marveled at how normal she and Henry could seem, laughing at the right beats, reaching into each other’s fry tins and sopping up each other’s smears of ketchup. She would miss this feeling of presenting as a unit to a stranger: one bleary, pleasant, conjoined personality. She ordered another Negroni. Henry got another beer.
“Wanna bring these to the pool table?” he asked when the drinks arrived.
“Sure,” she said, and slid off the stool.
There were many things Tabitha loved about Henry, one of them being the intelligence of his body, the clarity of his movements. As he bent low over the table, searching for the right angle with the cue, she took a photo. It was a given that she would pore over it in the next few weeks, part of her relishing the singe of pain, like the refulgent disaster of staring straight into the sun, but she would also encounter it through the years in different ways, like when she was nostalgic or trying to free up storage on her phone. She would remember the sense of being exempt from time, hidden from the whirring city that comprised their actual lives, while also running out of it.
She hit a couple clean shots—the sharp crack, the slick transfer of energy—but it wasn’t enough to stave off a loss.
“Hey, Tab,” he said, lining up the final shot, his body stretched across the green felt. When she met his eyes, he sank the eight ball without looking away.
That night they watched most of Thelma & Louise in bed because Henry had brought up the final scene, blue Thunderbird frozen in the air, and been aghast to learn that Tabitha had never seen it. Before they got to that part, their bodies swam toward each other, all tenderness and trepidation. A ribbon of awareness that there would be no more of this threaded between them, and drew taut as their movements grew more urgent. His hand wrapped around her throat. She said his name just to hear it.
*
The problem wasn’t that they weren’t in love. The problem was ostensibly children, although they both agreed, warily, that they wanted them. The problem was ostensibly when: Tabitha, who was thirty-two, felt keen on becoming a mother in this decade of her life; Henry, who was thirty-seven, didn’t feel like he would be ready for an indeterminate but long time.
It had come up as a way to stop interrogating the other, more inscrutable ways they were falling out of sync: how one always felt bereft and the other accused. They had been fur-mouthed and crust-eyed, not yet out of bed, and Tabitha had said, “Look. We can work our way through anything, but having kids is something we can’t compromise on. It either happens or it doesn’t.”
“I want kids,” Henry had insisted. “I know it would be easier if I said I didn’t, but that wouldn’t be the truth. I’ve pictured it. Holding your hand at the hospital. Teaching them to ski. I’m just not ready.”
She showed him her empty palms. “I’m not ready now, either. But what about in five years? Ten, even?” She said this last part in a desperate bid to find overlap.
“I don’t know. I can’t promise anything.” The light in the room was flat and gray. The cat, hungry, stomped around on the comforter. Henry worked up his courage: “Sometimes it doesn’t feel like you want to have kids with me. Like it could be anyone.”
Tabitha had been flabbergasted. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want it to be you. It wouldn’t even be a question.”
They had tried convincing each other for a while—that he wanted children, that she wanted him—but he had a work meeting and she a yoga class, and by the time they reconvened, they had both come to understand that it was over, somehow, with the person who had made everything seem possible just yesterday.
*
The next morning, Tabitha and Henry went on a hike to see the falls. Brown leaves, thick between the trees but mashed into the mud on the trail, blanketed the earth. They walked with their hands in their pockets, noses leaking. They ranked, in order of goodness, the dogs that had been at Thanksgiving, which they’d spent at Henry’s aunt’s house. At the table, as they’d gone around, she had talked about being grateful to be there, to be part of his family. Tabitha didn’t have much family of her own. She’d sat with Henry’s ninety-three-year-old grandmother, holding her chilly, wrinkled hands. The Saint Pyrenees—which Tabitha and Henry agreed now was number one, the best dog—had inched his gigantic head imperceptibly closer and closer until he’d snuck a morsel of ham from her plate. His jowls had dragged ropes of drool.
They came to the observation deck above the falling water, a nimbus of mist rising to wet their faces. The rocks closest to the spray were white with rime, and a faint rainbow hung in the air, a diaphanous net catching color.
“It’s bigger than I expected,” said Tabitha.
“Yeah,” said Henry. “It’s probably huge in the spring.”
This wrung fresh tears from her eyes: the suggestion of spring, one without him. She turned into his chest, and he held her against his wool coat. They stood for a while, listening to the rushing falls. She thought about her friend whose husband had fallen from a ladder and died. She thought about another friend whose girlfriend had been hit by a car while jogging. Her grief was meager in comparison—what was the big deal, anyway, other than the fact that they would be sleeping in different beds from now on? In a year or so, she might be able to call him and catch up, ask him if he’d bought that truck, how his niece and nephew were doing. It was just that they would be alone in their mourning. They—this version of them—were lost to no one but each other.
They would put forth their best efforts to stay friends—to be like family, she would repeat to friends like a prayer. Instead, in a year, she would walk past his van while on a date with someone good, note the new mud spewed over the tires, and force herself to keep stride.
On the walk back to the inn, Henry veered off the trail to pick up a fallen branch, gray and forked with one crisp leaf clinging obstinately on.
He waved it in the air. “Want to take this home?”
She laughed. She had texted him a couple days ago, before either of them could even fathom the thought of separating, with a picture of a branch she wanted to buy for $100. It had been artfully arranged, staged in a marble vase. That was the sort of thing living in New York could make you do: pay $100 for a branch. He had texted back, no no no. I’ll find you a better one.
*
Only two restaurants in town were open for lunch. While Henry took a meeting from the hotel’s private dining room, Tabitha eased the van onto the road to go pick up sandwiches. She’d only driven it a handful of times, uncomfortable with its height and heft. It swayed, and things inside tinkled, as though she were driving a house with the silverware rattling in the kitchen drawers.
It was, sometimes, a little house. They had camped their way from California to Colorado not so long ago. It would remain one of the best summers of her life, though the memories flattened to pale snapshots over the years: A calf sprinting alongside as they drove down the Extraterrestrial Highway in the lavender evening. A brisk shower under the seven-gallon jug they’d placed on a pergola and opened to a trickle. Drinking wine as the sun dragged its hem of light over the orange turrets of Bryce Canyon, speaking low to preserve the hush. They hadn’t booked a single thing in advance, and everything had worked out perfectly.
Indulging the memory made her cry, which exasperated her. It was getting ridiculous, the crying. For the past week she had conducted this pain, its relentless unfolding, her eyes inexhaustible wells. She wiped her raw nostrils on her sleeve and said, “God, fuck it.”
The lone employee at the café had a milky complexion and a handkerchief tied around her hair. As she waited for the sandwiches, Tabitha browsed the store, which was stocked with local crafts. Fringed plaid scarves, thick as clouds. Bars of lavender-studded soap. A man in a red beanie walked in and started telling the shop owner about the inn opening down the street. He had sat at the bar last night—she should check it out.
“I’m staying there,” Tabitha interjected: proof that she could penetrate the aquarium, still touch the world. They waited for her to say more, and she wondered if she looked as bad as she felt. “They’ve done a nice job with it.”
*
At the bar that night, Derek asked them how the hike was. “Beautiful,” said Tabitha. “We didn’t go far, but we saw the falls.” “Isn’t it something?” Derek leaned against the back bar and
dried a glass. “I run those trails every chance I get. Gets the blood pumping.”
“Have you lived in the area long?” asked Tabitha.
“It’s been a year or so. It suits me,” said Derek. He lined up a couple glasses on the bar and filled them with ice. “I’ve been everywhere else. Paris, London, Milan, Shanghai—you name it. It’s quiet here, and I’m at the age where that’s appealing to me now.”
“Were you always in hospitality?”
Derek bared his white teeth in a smile. “No, I was a model.”
It was an unexpected answer, but one that explained the man’s posture, his slightly disconcerting friendliness, no doubt honed by years of learning to tightly focus his charisma, to perform confidence and vitality. They peppered him with questions, each one winding him up further until he was guffawing at a memory about people they didn’t know. At one point, Derek showed them a photo on his phone, taken on a Panama surf trip, standing on the beach next to his board planted in the sand. It was grainy, but Tabitha recognized the easy smile. Back then, his looks had been more cutting but less distinct.
“But I got out of all that,” said Derek after a while. “That kind of stuff can take over your life. I saved up as much as I could and got out, and I’m glad I did.”
“Do you think he’s lying?” asked Tabitha later, when they were in bed. “Do you think he misses his modeling heyday? He completely lit up talking about it.”
Henry was scrolling on his phone. “Maybe. He seems content.
He’s smart. I wouldn’t have been able to do it.” “Do what?”
“Walk away from it. The money, the parties, the travel.”
Later, Tabitha would put things together in a way that she could understand, regardless of the truth—how Henry could both want and fear a certain future. He dwelled in desire because fulfilling one would foreclose another. It was a large part of why she’d loved him: the sense that they could go anywhere at any time. In the end, she would find it an impoverished way to live.
When they woke up, it was snowing—Henry’s favorite weather. The flakes were slow and voluptuous, and already the wraithlike branches outside the window were fattening with white.
As they walked out to the car, their shoes left dark prints on the powdered ground.
It sobered them to say goodbye to Derek, who was stacking firewood; to Derek, they had no beginning or end. “Hope you enjoyed your stay,” he said, slipping his hand out of its suede work glove to give them each a parting shake.
“It was perfect,” said Tabitha. “So peaceful. I bet this place will be hard to book in the fall, once the leaves change. And soon you’ll be crushed by the après crowd.”
“That’s the idea. And once it gets warmer, that new pool will be a hit,” said Derek. “We’re thinking of doing pop-up menus, DJs. This whole scene gets jumpin’ in the summer.”
“We love getting out of the city,” said Henry. “We’ll definitely be back.”
Tabitha couldn’t figure out why he’d said this. He’d done it earlier to another staff member: “We’ll be back.” Maybe it was out of politeness, a sense of obligation. Maybe he liked it, too, the idea that Derek would be here, waiting for them to come back.
The closest Tabitha would come to returning would be eight years from now, on her way to meet her husband’s cousin for the first time. They would be driving with their daughter in the back seat, and Tabitha would look up from her phone just in time to see the hotel flash past like a specter. She would turn to look, but the road would already be carrying it away. It would remind her that she should reach out to Henry—social media told her he’d married a friend, a muralist he’d once introduced her to, and moved to Santa Cruz—but then her husband pointed out the clouds, and she would take in that field of sails and think of the thing she should have tried to explain better: yes, it might have been anyone she loved, but that didn’t make love any less a miracle.
The mood was somber, though leaving the hotel wasn’t the worst part. The worst part would come a few weeks later, after they’d finished extracting all his belongings from the apartment and loading them into the van, which was now taking them home. They would dismount the TV and spackle the walls. He would throw away the birthday cards stuck to the fridge and excise his books from the shelves.
“I’m sorry,” said Henry. The windshield wipers ticked like a metronome.
“I’m sorry too,” said Tabitha. She thought of the future, blustery and black. “I’m scared.”
“I’m terrified.”
Tabitha drew her legs up and crossed them in her seat. Flurries parted over the glass as they barreled forward. She looked out the window and had a vision, though she couldn’t tell if she was remembering the past or imagining a future. All she knew was that she could see him out there, bolting into the cold, making tracks between the trees. It was like those mornings that he seemed to know it was snowing even before he opened his eyes, and his smile, when he faced her, was streaked with impish joy. He would kiss her hard on the mouth and hurry out of bed so he could go outside and revel in it.
__________________________________
“Stick Season” first appeared in The Sewanee Review. Copyright © 2024 by Jenny Xie. Reprinted by permission of the author.
