Three Dances

Things

We named the spider Fred.

She lived in the driver’s side mirror of the old, beat-up station wagon that was the first thing we ever bought together. It didn’t occur to us until we’d had the car for at least a month that, big as she was, she was probably a female, and by then we’d already gotten used to her rather unladylike name.

We discovered her in the way we discovered most things at that time in our lives: trial and error. When we bought the car, there were cobwebs all over the mirror. “No worries,” we thought, “probably just hasn’t been looked after in a while.” (We applied this same, brilliant logic to the lack of water in the radiator as well, with rather more exciting and expensive results). So we wiped off the mirror and thought nothing of it until a few days later, when we noticed the webs were back. I think it was probably a week or so until we actually saw Fred herself.

I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, except that it sort of explains how we work, and it might help you understand the fire and how it was a little inevitable in the end, I think.

Maybe.

Anyway, we’d bought the car in order to take the trip of a lifetime—four months up and down the coast and through the mountains as we pleased, hopping from campsite to campsite or sleeping in the back of the station wagon as it suited us. The car ran like a charm, and the fact that it was about as old as we were somehow just made the trip seem like fate. By the end of our four months, we’d fallen in love with each other, with the car, and with traveling together.

For a while, we hung on to all three. The car kept running, even though it lost a piece of rusty metal off its frame when we bottomed out on a drainage culvert, and we used it long after the trip was through. It took us to the grocery store, to work, to the gym, to family get-togethers, and even across the country a couple of times. We got older. Transitioned from jobs you can leave at the drop of a hat to jobs that make you feel comfortable, proud, happy, at home in yourself and your lot in life.

Six years after buying the car, we bought the house.

It was a tiny, ramshackle old thing up in the mountains. It had one level, which contained a bedroom, a bathroom, and a combination kitchen/dining/living room that boasted a cast-iron, wood-burning stove. Nearly an acre and a half of land came with it, mostly forest, except for a field some previous owner had cleared in the back. We spent a summer turning that field into a garden that didn’t grow a damn thing. Then we planted it with cover crops, huddled together inside the house, and waited for spring to come. Our nearest neighbors lived on a plot twenty minutes’ drive down a dirt road, except when the spring and autumn rainstorms came through. Then twenty minutes became more like forty-five, as we crawled our way over the landscape mother nature had preferred to give us.

You see, the house is important too. Not just the isolation of it, but what it did to us. Grounded us. Our relationship was based on flying together, and when we bought the house, that’s what we thought we were doing.

We were pretty wrong.

That first spring was alright, except that during one of the heavier snowstorms, a tree came down in the middle of the night and missed the bedroom by a few feet. Terrifying, that was. Absolutely terrifying. I was already having a creepy dream, involving a dentist with red teeth, a clown, and a giant crow that could speak, and when I heard that thing crash down, I sat bolt upright in bed, clutching my chest like I was having a heart attack. I remember thinking, lucidly and simultaneously, That was just a tree, and if you heard it, it didn’t hit you, and you’re probably alright, and, somewhat more urgently, You’re going to fucking die.

I am led to believe that I screamed like a little girl.

At any rate, the next morning we went out to survey the damage. The tree that had fallen was an enormous spruce, about half as big around as I was tall.