After he left, Silva fixed herself a quick salad and took the newspaper to her room. Juniper sniffed at Nick’s open doorway without crossing in, seemingly aware that the space wasn’t theirs alone anymore. Bags sagged in the middle of the guest bed, shirts and jeans in tidy folds, a pair of boots heeled against the wall. Books and a bathroom kit sat on the side table, along with a quart jar of what looked like honey. Nick had packed in more than she’d thought—as if he were settling in for the long haul, as if he planned on staying. She tipped her head and read the book titles sideways: Apiary Science, The Bee Reader, Colony Health and Wellness.
She closed her door, sat on her bed, and speared forkfuls of salad, trying not to think about Nick sleeping right there, a dozen feet away. What that might mean, her whole body responding to him against her will each time they were together. She kept telling herself that she already had too many life complexities and complications going on without adding romance into the mix.
She distracted herself with newspaper photos of the Lenite men patrolling the visitor center, armed with AKs and covered in face paint as if they were at a desert outpost in a war-torn land. Len’s quote was front and center: “Mark my words: We will never return this land to the government, but if they want to take the situation to violence, we’re ready for it. And if they want a war, we’ll give them a conflagration so great it’ll be unstoppable.”
Silva laid down the newspaper. She could see now why Mack hadn’t been more specific in his warning, why Nick had come down early to check on her. Who would want to come stay for months in an isolated place that was home to a man like Len Dietz—a man who lurked with his followers up in the hills, planning for the end times, who kept women held captive, who spoke of things he couldn’t possibly know? Only someone gone mad. Only someone desperate themselves.
It was late when Nick finally came in, light edging under his door. She wondered what it felt like, staying in his old childhood home after all these years. She tried not to think about what he was doing. Undressing, reading bee books in bed?
She tossed and turned, sitting up to listen throughout the night, thinking she’d heard him moving around, but the house was quiet, a pair of owls somewhere far off crying distant mating calls to one another. She wanted to get up, but she felt trapped to her room like a curfewed dorm.
She was still awake when the first early-morning birds started singing. Barely light out, she heard Nick’s door open, then the creak of floorboards as he walked to the kitchen. Late to bed and an early riser. Like Eamon.
Juniper got up and stared at the bedroom door, everyone up early, ready to go, but Silva waited until she heard the screen door squeak and shut, the house go silent, before she finally got out of bed.
Nick’s door was open, his bed tautly made, looking as though nobody had slept in it. In the kitchen, a washed cup and bowl were tipped upside down next to the sink. Taking care of himself like he said he would.
The morning brought heat like a punishment, the canyon already moving to summer. Silva thought she was prepared, acclimated, but the days’ stilled swelter worried her. This heat was something more—an intensity of air and sun that felt more like a presence than temperature.
She walked out to the barn and paused in the entryway, Nick’s back to her as he cleaned out the room she hadn’t been able to see into before, its corners and floor heaped with sloughing stacks of old magazines: Ferrier’s Digest, Sheep Guide, Farm and Ranch. His T-shirt stuck to the corded muscles next to his spine, his shoulder blades shifting in tempo to his movements: fork, lift, plop, fork, lift, plop, a rusted wheelbarrow heaped full, things already looking orderly.
Noticing her, he stopped and leaned against his pitchfork, his face dripping sweat. “It’s hot. Should’ve worn my long johns.”
“What?” she asked, laughing in confusion, distracted by his physicality.
“When I was a kid, there were these old-timers called the Bull-Gang. Wore their wool long underwear year-round under jeans and flannels. Swore it kept them cooler in the heat. Can you image the sweat? The smell? It’s no wonder they were all bachelors.”
He leaned over and picked up a rotting seed bag and threw it in the wheelbarrow. There was a sudden scurry of movement, mice scampering from a nest of thimble-size, pink, writhing babies.
Silva shuddered as Nick scooped them into the wheelbarrow along with the rest of the room’s offal. Seven weeks. A countdown that seemed detonated—a fuse already lit.
“Sorry about that. Never know what you’ll uncover. Found a watch in a packrat’s nest once. Still works.” He held out an old, ornately scrolled silver pocket watch on a chain, its ticking audible from feet away. Silva could picture him dressed like James Dean: jeans and motorcycle boots, T-shirt sleeves cuffed over a pack of smokes. Muscle cars and curvy dates sliding across a slick bench seat as he cornered fast, double-clutching, smoking the tires.
“It’s nice to get something done. I hope it’s not too much of an imposition,” he said, employing his good manners again. He didn’t know he’d already offered her a solution to her access problem—for the second time. “Let me make it up to you. Mind if I use the kitchen, cook us dinner tonight? My mom was a good cook, taught me a few things in the kitchen.”
Silva tried not to show her surprise. She hadn’t pictured Nick cooking with his mother, but he hadn’t yet fit in any of the prepackaged categories she’d tried to sort him into.
“I’m thinking of going downriver to gather pitch for fire starters,” he said. “You’re welcome to come, if you’d like—you could ride Sage. She’s about as surefooted as they come. I’ve been trying to get her out more, make her forget. Bred her last fall, but it didn’t go so well. Little stillborn filly, perfect replica of her mama.” He looked at Sage and lowered his voice as if she might overhear. “She wouldn’t eat, just kept whinnying, trying to bring back her baby.”
Silva looked away, hiding her sharp stab of emotion. What she’d been trying so hard to keep at bay, even from herself. She resisted reaching down and touching her own stomach, reminding herself of the reality of her condition. What decisions she’d come here to make.
Out in the pasture, Sage flopped down and rolled in a dustbowl, coating herself gray until it looked as if she’d been dipped in ashes. A horse in mourning. Nick was offering the opening Silva had been waiting and hoping for. She refrained from looking up at the hills behind the house. There were plenty enough reasons for being duplicitous, for having a self-serving agenda.
“Tiko reminds me of the horse I used to ride on the island, a headstrong Arabian named Sunchero. I miss him. I’d love to ride Tiko, get my sea legs back,” she said.
“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Nick said, joking, but nobody could claim Silva hadn’t been warned, everything a flashing red light since she’d arrived in Two Rivers.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
* * *
Your face a veil, your body a wash of white, your finger ringed in gold, his seeing eye upon you in blessing, his hand covering your hand in godship. Say these vows, speak these words, remember not your own will, your own life. You look in his eyes, and you see specks of dark and light, planetary orbs of the all-seeing-eye, liquid and night. They sing your praises, sing you both into your right: man and wife, man and life, man and woman, ceremony of light, a new-crowned glory of wifeliness, of womanliness, of life. You are clean and fresh and bright. You are God’s holiest maiden of paradise, your womb a fertile harbinger of life. You will never waver, you will never doubt, you will give of this over and over again, your will always and never made of flight.
Leaves like a covering, a hidden garden of Eve, find your way through to the other side, the tree of life and death among this garden of delight, fruits like globes, fruits like honey, fruits like your womb, growing and swelling with the seeds of life. Bees sipping sweet nectar at this tree of life, growing and growing into something new, a body like a soul made fresh, this world made of holiness, full of your song reaching
heavenward, singing that what you will have is this, is you.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
APRIL 2001
Silva got herself ready as Nick bridled and saddled the horses. A western-riding setup instead of the English setup she’d used as a child. She swung herself into the saddle and directed Tiko forward, the horse responding to each shift of her body. She rode a few yard loops and then pulled up next to Nick. Tiko stood still, his ears flicking back toward her.
“Huh,” Nick said, regarding the horse with bemusement.
“What?” Silva said, concerned she’d done something wrong.
“He wants to do your bidding. It’s a new one, that’s all.”
She patted the horse’s neck, surprised how comfortable she was. “We understand each other,” she said, hoping it were true, everything possible from a new angle.
The horses rode easily, the sandy trail muffling the sound of their hooves as they brushed through hackberry thickets and rock tumbles studded with prickly pear and coyote scat, crickets chirring in dry grass, poison ivy growing riotous in dry creek beds, drought-starved trees like skeletal sentinels. Along the flats, the remnants of ranches: a tumble of rocks alongside rusted farm implements and windrows of piled boulders, everything declarative of collective failure.
Juniper ran ahead as they followed the trail past an old mine, winding down into a still-damp slurry. Suddenly he stopped, staring warily into the brush, his hackles up. Tiko snorted and tossed his head, and Silva worried he would rear up, throw her off. Nick pointed to a coyote carcass lying tufted in the shadows, the stink swelling into the warm air.
“Was it shot?” Silva asked, thinking of the dead sheep.
“People kill them anyway they can. Ranchers have M44s planted all over the place.…”
“M44s?” Silva asked, picturing landmines set to blow up anything that touched them, the human-made war zone of this place at odds with the land’s deep quietude.
“Torture devices. Look like a sprinkler stake, but with a spring-powered ejector loaded with sodium cyanide capsules and bait. My dog died from one when I was young—breathed out blood-froth and writhed in pain all the way to the end. Nothing the locals like about top predators—especially the wolves coming back after nearly a century of peaceful eradication. ‘Blood-thirsty sport-killers, don’t eat what they kill.’ Putting human morals on a wild animal. Better start condemning all of nature, if that’s the case. I say better wolves kill elk and deer like nature intended than some overfed hicks taking potshots at a thousand yards, but being a coyote or wolf supporter around here is about as sacrilegious as being a Democrat, even though wolves and coyotes will probably be the ones to survive the end of the world if it does come. Get the last laugh when they have this place back to themselves, just as it was in the beginning.” Nick looked back at Juniper. “He’s not safe around here. People shoot first and ask questions later.”
It didn’t seem to Silva anything in the canyon was safe to just be. Just having a presence was enough of a threat to warrant violence.
The trail dropped to a ponderosa-studded flat carved in half by a dry-wash gully full of debris washed down in spring flash floods. The ground beneath the trees was carpeted with long needles, the air imbued with their warm-pine scent and the dry mineral smell of heated scree.
Nick pulled Sage up, dismounted, and went to help Silva. He held her arm as she jumped down. “Bones like a bird,” he said.
“Don’t worry. I won’t break,” she said, but she had already been broken—shattered into pieces and then hastily put back together, edges all out of alignment.
They led the horses to a patch of shade under the trees and tied them off. The wind blew placid and warm—the touch of lips against bare skin. The taste of sweet water, the taste of fruit warmed in the sun. Silva sat on a beached log, throwing sticks for Juniper into the river. He swam hard into the current, his shoulders lifting out of the water, unafraid, having already forgotten his journey downriver, his near demise. She wished it were as easy as that—forgetting your destiny. A body not your own. A life that cast you loose and left you to sink.
Nick sat down next to her. “Beautiful out.” He glanced over at her.
“It is,” she said, watching the river, keeping her tone neutral, as though she’d missed his meaning. She pushed back her real response—wanting to meet his eyes, communicate what she really felt. “I saw a sturgeon for the first time a few days ago. Strangest thing I’ve seen—even if I was born under the Sturgeon Moon.”
“I caught my first when I was just a kid. Bigger than I was, jaws full of teeth. This place is full of strangeness,” Nick said, his voice suddenly changed. Winsome, she realized.
She almost touched her stomach again before catching herself. Instead, she planted her hands on the log’s hieroglyphics, her fingers worrying the riddled scorings of beetles as though working to decipher some strange cuneiform, the past’s collision course with the present.
The river’s murmuring at their feet, she leaned over and picked up a flat stone, winging her wrist and releasing it in one quick, smooth motion. It skipped cross-current in fast, evenly spaced dips.
Nick whistled. “Winner take all?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows and smiling at her.
Silva laughed, then stood without waiting and winged another stone. It kissed the river’s surface over and over again with increasing speed until it finally clattered against the boulders on the other side.
Nick let out another appreciative whistle. “Ah, I see how it’s gonna be,” he said, pursing his lips and frowning in concentration as he bent over and carefully selected a flat rock from the beach. At the water’s edge, he made a big show of setting up his skip, standing sideways and whipping his arm back and forth through the air, making Silva laugh. Then he finally muscled a hard throw, his stone gracelessly plunking six ringed pools before disappearing mid-current. He shook his head in defeat. “Should’ve known better than to challenge an island girl.”
He hadn’t missed a thing.
Silva brushed off her hands and glanced over at the horses. “So, what do I win?”
* * *
The ponderosas had what they’d come for: crystalized amber globs of pitch that smelled like fungus and tree sap. They used a small hatchet to chunk off pieces into a paper bag, their fingers sticky and covered with bits of bark and lichen when they were done, the bag full. Silva didn’t wait for Nick’s help to remount, launching herself into Tiko’s saddle with ease. She needed to show Nick she could handle herself, that she knew enough of what she was doing to be trusted, even if she was making things up as she went along.
When they started off, she leaned over Tiko’s neck and said, “You’ll do just fine, won’t you?” His ears swiveled back toward the sound of her voice, each thing leading to the next, leading to the next.
When they got back to the barn, she stayed to brush Tiko, slicking metal tines over croup, withers, and stifle, smoothing away saddle-sweat lines, everything like some muscle memory—the earthy muskiness of horse and hay and leather, the texture of horsehair under her hands. She brushed her hands over Tiko’s coat. Even without an ulterior motive, she would have loved him.
Back at the house, she carried the bonsai into her room. The only way she’d ever been able to work through problems, puzzles of geometry or planting or grafting, was to work with her hands—touching the bark of a tree, tracing the tender veining of a leaf, delicately dividing a tangle of hair-roots, the world suddenly opening up like a seed casing sprouting open underneath the warm embrace of spring soil.
When she was young, Eamon had had a ginkgo bonsai he called the Child-Giver—a representation of the ginkgo tree that grew in Tokyo’s Zoshigaya Kishimojin Temple that was thought to bring fertility to worshippers. The goddess Kishimojin was the guardian deity of children, even though Kishimojin had first fed her own thousands of offspring by devouring the children of others, until Buddha hid one of her own children in an alms bowl to teach her a lesson, admonishing h
er for the suffering she had caused. Distraught and chastised, she finally repented, vowing to protect all children from thereon. Eamon had left the tree in Silva’s room each night as a banishment of her nightmares, and it’d worked. Instead of drowning, she’d started dreaming of floating—her body riding the top of the water as the current swept her gently underneath a reaching canopy of trees, leaves extended toward her in embrace.
She got out Isabelle’s paintings and propped them up on her desk. “What are you trying to tell me?” she asked, her hands resting on the driftwood cedar’s enameled turquoise tray, looking at the girls’ enigmatic gazes staring inscrutably out to the unknown.
She didn’t hear Nick come to her doorway. He knocked quietly, standing just outside, hands braced on either side of her door, face scrubbed, hair wet, clothes changed. The same vague scent of evergreen she’d smelled earlier.
Silva grabbed the paintings and laid them facedown on the desk next to the bonsai.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to disturb your work. Just wanted to tell you dinner is on its way,” Nick said, careful in his assessment.
She tucked her hair behind her ear, realizing how she must look, hunched over her table, surrounded by twisted and stunted trees as strange and exotic as hothouse flowers, relevant to some foreign setting. The hackberry next to her, stripped and wired. Eamon’s journals open, Isabelle’s paintings next to them. Silva was dressed in the same shorts and T-shirt she’d worn since coming to the canyon, her body caught in the folds. Despite her body’s steady march of growth, the canyon had honed her, too, wearing away any excess until only essential structure was left—bones and muscle and sinew not unlike the river canyon’s spines and ridges.
Nick fingered a sliver on the doorjamb. “Are they very old?” He nodded to the Sitka spruce with its ankle-thick trunk. A cluster of wizened foreigners, unaware of their otherness.
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