She glanced at her cell phone mounted on the dash. No signal. That made her nervous, too. The car wouldn’t break down, but if it did, how long would it be before anyone drove past? How long would she sit on the shoulder of the road among the trees? Would she be forced to walk? She hadn’t seen another vehicle in she didn’t know how long. And P.S.—what was she doing here? Her errand, which seemed so right and true, so hopeful a few hours ago, now just felt a little crazy.
As if in answer to her anxious thoughts, a car rounded the bend behind her. She breathed through a welcome pulse of relief. But before long, the sleek black BMW with dark tinted windows flashed its blinker, then passed her and sped out of sight. She glanced at the speedometer. She was driving too slowly, not even forty miles an hour in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. The truth was, she wasn’t the best driver. A New Yorker born and raised—a Manhattanite—she’d rather never be behind the wheel of a car. She had her license but hadn’t driven regularly in years when her husband Wolf insisted that they needed to start getting out of the city more with the kids. Why they needed an eighty-three-thousand-dollar Range Rover was another matter. Because we live in an urban jungle, baby, he’d joked. More seriously: And you need a lot of metal around you.
She picked up speed, feeling more alone and vulnerable by the second. The trees were soldiers, surrounding her, menacing and grave. Give her the bustle and chaotic energy of an urban landscape any day. There was life in a city, the unmistakable throb of people doing, thinking, wanting, rushing.
Merri hadn’t even wanted to rent the cabin last summer. If Wolf hadn’t gone ahead and booked it without even asking her (It’s called a surprise, honey. Remember those?), she’d have said no.
The idea of being unplugged, of long walks through the woods, of canoeing and picnics, of days where they could just be together as a family, cooking, reading, whatever it was that people did before they were slaves to schoolwork, and activities, and play dates, and endless birthday parties at Extreme Bounce? Before Netflix and iPads and smart phones and laptops? Well, when it came right down to it, it didn’t exactly thrill her.
Because mainly what would wind up happening was that Wolf would go off and try to connect with his inner adventurer. It’s the only place where we’re truly free, Wolf would exclaim. To Merri, the kind of “freedom” Wolf was talking about just meant “without structure.” And without structure, there was no control. No mother liked being out of control when her kids were part of the equation. But Wolf didn’t get that, because he never factored in his kids when he was making plans.
And the kids wouldn’t want to go with him on the excursions he planned because Wolf’s idea of fun was not fun for anyone else. (And when the kids got tired, started complaining as they would invariably do, or Merri dared to utter even the slightest note that maybe they’d had enough, Wolf would get peevish and he and Merri would start fighting. And what was supposed to be fun would just wind up sucking hard, as Jackson might put it.)
So to avoid that inevitable scenario, Merri would just let Wolf go off and do whatever he wanted to do, while she, Abbey, and Jackson would stay behind and play Monopoly (or Sorry! or Old Maid)—until someone had a tantrum. Or maybe she’d read aloud from The Giver, which she wanted the kids to read (but neither of them really wanted to). Or they’d go for a short walk until Abbey fell and scraped her knee, or Jackson started complaining about bugs. Like Merri, neither Abbey nor Jackson shared Wolf’s exact degree of enthusiasm for the out of doors.
So, Merri had been envisioning a weekend where she would end up entertaining Abbey (eight going on thirteen) and Jackson (thirteen going on eight) while her husband (forty-six going on eighteen) would disappear on hikes or whatever and take a bunch of selfies. He would then create a narrative of the trip, and in the telling of it later to friends, it would sound like the perfect family vacation. Because that’s how it went with Wolf, no matter where they were. Though, of course, he would completely deny that. What do you mean “create a narrative”? That’s what happened! You were there!
But those were the thoughts belonging to another version of Merri. The woman she was today as she drove up the winding rural road was so far away from that woman who worried about things like vacations, and not having time to work out, and whose turn was it to do the laundry. Those were luxury problems, the kind of problems people had when they had no real problems.