They fell tangled to the ground, their hunger matching each other’s, their wet bodies sticking to the sand nested soft beneath them. Silva rolled and straddled his waist, pinning him by the wrists, bearing down all her weight upon him—a woman leaned into a man, her body flowing from root to branch tip, shaping the whole, his body forming the bulk of the trunk, a mass anchoring them against hard winds. A shared grace with no ending and no beginning. She was surprised at her own body, surprised by what she felt—a sense of security, of self-willed power. Taking what had been given.
She let the air and the river inform her movements—two bodies interwoven, succumbing to their own remaking. A slow, warm melting into sweetness, the breath of water everywhere, the air full of the river’s gurgling, headlong rush.
A coyote’s wavering howl lifted up in the hills above them, a call of commemoration. This place, this moment. A small piece of belonging—as new and fraught as that belonging might be. Something opening up in her soul that had been sealed off for so long that the hinges had rusted shut and she’d forgotten what possibilities there were left inside her.
Nick trailed his hand along the sharp bone of her hips, the soft curves of her breasts, tracing the lines of her body, the knowledge of his hand on her like knowledge of herself. Water and salt, sand and algae—the taste of him, the smell of him, something she’d always known. He kissed her stomach, stroked her back, and she pressed her body close, hungry for the radiant heat of his skin, the feel of the beat of his heart against her own. She was still there, whittled down and battered as she might be.
She stroked a finger over his forehead and cheek, let it hover just over his lips where she could feel his breath against her skin, tracing the contours of his face, taking each detail in, memorizing this moment so she might hold it again—his mussed hair, his stubbly growth of beard, the line of his scar. She turned his hand palm up and marked his calluses, all the scars of his body like a map she could learn to follow.
A breeze gusted up the canyon, bringing with it the sounds of the night: crickets chirring, the wash of the creek, tree branches touching the house. She imagined the bees tucked in their hives, tasting new air full of the secret wash of pollen dust, the wafting drift of hidden blooms full of nectar, divining the movement of current and wind, learning their new home with each inhalation, with each surge of breath.
“It would seem we’ve finally begun,” she said, her fingers trailing over the delineations of Nick’s body.
He rolled onto her. “So we have,” he said, his muffled voice resonant against her. So we have.…
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Date: January 1, 2000
Title: Wedding of the Maidens
Subject: The Twelve Maidens & Len Dietz
Setting: Almost Paradise Sanctuary
Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press
Size: 14×24
Dearest Eamon,
It is the day: Y2K. The new millennium. The End of the World. The Wedding of the Maidens. The Apocalypse.
The sun rose. The birds sang. The sky was blue. The wind blew down the canyon. The trees rustled their dead leaves. The elk chewed their cud and nuzzled one another, calling out for fresh hay. There was no great sweeping darkness, no heavenly trumpets blowing, no horsemen of the apocalypse riding in on clouds of doom.
They have a boy, Isaac, posted in the ham radio room as monitor of the airwaves. Headphones on, he scans and scans, skipping through counties, regions, countries. They wait and they listen, prepared for full failure. Their generators are filled with fuel, their compound is wired for a shift in the power grid, their food coffers are stacked full, their well is primed, their cash is stocked and stored, their guns oiled and their ammo boxes overflowing. They stand at the ready, for the financial world’s collapse, for all computers to fail, for all of humanity to crash, for everything to burn in wreck and ruin, for murderous hordes of the desperate and the damned to charge their compound borders.
But so far, life goes on, just as before. The radio deejays chat, the worldly songs of ruin play through, the computers compute, Wall Street trades, the banks and malls open, the gas stations pump fuel, the power stays on, babies are born in warm hospital rooms, and people the world over tip back champagne and celebrate this new year, this new century, this new millennium.
We instead lift our hands in praise of Len Dietz and his successful takeover of the virgin brides—these girls who should be in middle school, passing notes and studying evolution.
The wedding was held in the candlelit dark, a rustling hush of dresses and veils, a quiet hum of women’s voices lifting in the night, Faith and the others singing their holy songs. The maidens came in a line, walking down the aisle one by one, their fathers clutching their arms to lead them to Len Dietz, leading them to slaughter. The maidens lined up on either side of Len, centered in the sanctuary beneath the cross, his eyes closed, his arms raised. He is the pastor, the groom, the executioner. When they had assembled, each dressed and veiled in white, he dropped his arms and began the proceedings, speaking words of his own making—this fable of destiny, of holiness, of divine will cloaking the baldness of his raw and insatiable desire. They are his now, each one of them eradicated, burned, and buried to themselves. Disassociated. Fragmented. Lost. Doomed to forever seek what was taken from them, their own selves cast aside and trodden upon until there is nothing more to recognize.
I painted each of them individually in their wedding attire, adding to the private collection I have kept secreted away. A body of work that has kept me from falling completely away into the dark chasm and losing what tiny bit I have left of myself to this voracious black hole.
The main “Wedding of the Maidens” painting is the largest one yet—all the maidens in white gathered around Len beneath the cross, the candles burning around them the only light. The gowns took the wives a year to create, hand-sewn, hand-embroidered, pearl studded. Twelve identical gowns on twelve individual girls, each of them standing stair-stepped up to Len’s tall-man height. The veils a full covering, blurring any separate features, blending them into repeating versions of themselves—like cutout dolls accordioned out, hollow stamps for their hearts.
The feast is larger than that of the Dowry Ceremony, all the Almost Paradise people gathered—a hundred or more—to eat and drink to the end of the world and the beginning of their new reign. Except there has been no end other than for the maidens, all these people complicit in their collective violation, their loss of self, their overtaking.
I have hidden myself away, my door barred, the sound of their celebrating a trespass creeping through the cracks. I’m afraid I have gotten myself in too deep. I’m afraid I won’t ever be able to make my way back out. I’m afraid I, too, might be lost. I am consumed with what might have been. I replay each island day, each day with you. I remember them so well, it would seem that no time has passed—the way the oars creaked on your dinghy, the water like unending glass; orcas blowing and breaching down the Straight; spotted harbor seals slipping by, their liquid-eyed sea-dog faces wet and slick; shore-bound gulls and bald eagles fighting over a feast of crabs and fish; the steep, sloughing slopes blooming with wild rose and thimbleberry.
I remember our “wedding” day, standing outside the courthouse, a gust of wind blowing against the earrings you carved me. An interweaving of our lives I never wanted to end, even if I was the one who made sure it did, unraveling each thread until I—until we—became a loose, shapeless fray. It feels too late now to rewind, respool, restitch. Are you still there? Will I ever find you again? My Eamon. My heart. Oh, how I love you. How I have always loved you. Stay a little while longer, will you? Stay until I can again come find you.
All my love,
Isabelle
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
JULY 2001
Nick’s rhythmic sleep-breathing was a steady presence beside her, as it’d been for the last weeks. Silva woke early, light breaking against the western hills out Nick’s bedroo
m window, her eyes taking in the world before her brain could transmit. Nick rolled over in his sleep and slung his arm across her middle, as if to make sure she wouldn’t leave, as if he were trying to pull her back into his own slumbering reaches.
She lifted his arm in increments, timing her movements to his breathing as she crawled out of bed, trying to avoid the creakiest floorboards, but her weight set off a series of pops and snaps across the whole house as if she were awakening it, too. She held still, trying to let everything settle back into place, but Juniper got up and shook from where he’d slept beneath them on the floor and put his ears back and wagged his tail in morning greeting.
She leaned over to pet him and looked out at the river. A jet boat surged over rapids and then disappeared, the water left empty and rippling in its wake. The canyon felt as it had when Silva had first come: full of quiet promise, buzzing with possibility, with change. She realized it had delivered—change pretty much all she’d had since she’d first set foot on the Larkins Ranch.
Over the months she’d been there, Hells Canyon had fully transitioned into its national-recreation-area self. Another of its strange juxtapositions—the empty, rugged isolation coupled with casual outdoorsmen: jet boaters fishing from early morning until night; groups of weekend rafters lazily drifting by, armed with water guns and coolers laden with beer; sweating Boy Scouts hiking in from Pittsburg Landing, along with groups of backpackers—the last, three tall, lanky brothers from Moscow, where Isabelle’s honeysuckle bonsai painting had hung. Silva wondered if any of them had seen it—this one final thing connecting her to Isabelle. Two women who’d never known anything of the other except through Eamon and his trees.
The three brothers had pitched their orange tents on the bouldered flat across the creek near the river. They fly-fished at the convergence, hooting and hollering at their catch of jacks and steelhead grown spring-greedy and too incautious for their own good. Jet-boaters with setups that cost tens of thousands of dollars couldn’t compete, one of the brothers landing a thirty-pounder from shore with his undersize backpacking rod, blind to his own good luck.
Nick was a gracious Larkins Ranch host—far better than Silva was, even though it was the job she’d been hired to do. Each day he went out and chatted for hours with jet boaters and Boy Scouts alike. The night before, he’d taken the three brothers lemon and fresh garlic for their catch. She had seen him from the window, casting their rods, talking flies and line weights and reels. When he’d come back in, he’d smelled of fish and smoke and skunkweed, and Silva had asked him why he hadn’t just applied for the caretaking job himself—gotten paid to be the host of his own property? In answer, he’d kissed her neck, her collarbone, nuzzled her ears, told her what a good pair they were as he’d ticked each item off his fingers: he took care of the bees and the barn, she took care of the trees and garden; he studied bee books, and she studied bonsai journals; he slept uncovered, she slept with the blanket over her head; he was brown and white and she was gold and copper. He teased her until she relented, letting him reach under her shirt and unbutton her pants, slide his hand against her smooth skin, his movements stirring the ripe sweet of her own body.
“Tell me again,” he’d said, his voice like heat against her skin, insistent on rousing her. “Tell me again about all those peaches we’re going to eat.…”
She’d told him about the dream she’d had—a good one, for once, the two of them surrounded by rows of fresh-churned dirt that they walked along, throwing seeds like confetti, seeds that immediately sprouted and grew into vines and bushes and trees, a jungle full of fruit so ripe and tender the juice ran off their fingers like syrup.
Movin’ to the country, gonna eat me a lot of peaches. Her mother’s back-to-the-earth dream. After Eamon, Silva had promised herself she wouldn’t let herself get attached again, but now she remembered what it felt like to have someone to belong to, what it felt like to give so freely of yourself. Nick’s skin was like Trawler in July after the tide—beach sand, sunbaked grass, and salt-tinged rocks dried in the afternoon sun. Sometimes she couldn’t help licking him, just as, when she was a child, she’d licked tidal rocks in order to restore their shiny-flecked depth.
Each day they moved around each other like a synchronized team, as if they’d been doing so their whole lives, the work written into them—arms, necks, and faces baked dark, hands callused, hair bleached from the sun. Nick spent his days checking the bees, repairing fences, and beating back the yellow star thistle that sprouted in the cracked and hardened dirt like an army of invaders. He walked the ranch’s perimeters every morning and evening, checking for the pale wind of leaves, the small barbed heads, as if they were the trespassing embodiment of Len Dietz.
But there was satisfaction in it, rebuilding the Larkins Ranch until it could finally fulfill its own potential. The garden growing, the bonsai healthy, the bees established in their new colonies, working the land alongside Nick. Everything as it should be, becoming all they’d envisioned. She pushed away the canyon’s history, all those who’d come before, working toward the same goal, until, one by one, they had been decimated by their own failure and loss.
Above them in the canyon, the visitor center occupation had settled in as though they planned to stay forever—the land and everyone who cared about it as their hostage.
Behind her, still in bed, Nick’s breathing changed. He peered at her, his eyes slitted. “Where are you going?” he asked, his voice thick and sleep soft. He watched her carefully, appraising a creature about to run off. She had thought of running, but not away. There was something beckoning about hills, the stillness, the openness, that smelled of tawny grasses. Only in the canyon’s silence and isolation did all the trauma of the past dissipate into something better, something without the threat of more loss to come.
Often when she couldn’t sleep—when she woke from nightmares of dark rooms or bodies washing downriver—she would get up and walk the house, trailing her hand along the walls in the dark. The first few times Nick had awakened to her empty side of the bed he’d been alarmed, had come out wild-haired, calling her name. He’d grown more accustomed to her wanderings, but still, if she stayed gone long enough, he always came looking for her.
“It’s extraction day. The sun’s up,” she said. Like Eamon, she loved the soft-lighted early morning, everything still possible. “I listened to the birds. Listened to you,” she said, studying Nick’s sleep-rumpled face. “You said my name in your sleep.”
He smiled, a slow-blooming thing that moved up his cheeks and creased around his eyes, edging the scar on his cheek crooked. “That’s because I was dreaming about you,” he said, pulling back the blankets and beckoning for her to rejoin him in bed.
She shook her head, smiled at him. “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” she said. Another of Eamon’s sayings. The realization of how much he would have approved of Nick filled her with a sudden rush of sadness.
“There are other things that make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” Nick said, raising his eyebrows and tilting his head suggestively, his body sprawled across the space she’d left vacant.
She rolled her eyes at him, but couldn’t help smiling. “Go back to sleep. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Don’t know what you’re missing,” he replied, relaxing back into the covers as she stepped over the heap of clothing that had been mounding in the bedroom for a week. In the passion of their lovemaking, they’d left the bedroom unkempt, their clothes unwashed.
Hot morning air filled the curtains like sails. She closed the window and let the bamboo blinds down, filtering the sun into bars of light on the floor. Outside, even though it was early, the barn roof shimmered as if ready to ignite. It’d taken days just to get the extraction equipment set up in the barn’s back room—the extraction room—but everything was ready now, the bees settled in and working steadily, all the empty honey jars waiting.
She went outside, wishing she’d brought Eam
on’s Crew Working in Trees arborist signs—big orange traffic signs she could use to mark where she was for Nick—“working in trees” somehow a good metaphor for all life’s quiet, solitary moments. She and Nick the pioneer species, the trees that grew up first after an act of disaster or destruction. The shelterwood—the hardiest mature trees left to propagate, to establish a new generation of strong seedlings after several forest thinnings took the rest of the mature trees.
Garden dirt crumbled under her bare feet as she let herself in the deer fence they’d put up the weekend before—peeler core posts strung with tall wire, the plants finally growing unmolested behind it. When she’d first planted, Nick had warned her that a few deer might come, but she’d never expected the kind of havoc they could wreak, smelling the fresh dirt and unfurled seeds as keenly as she did. Before the fence, she’d staked out stick scarecrows with floppy plastic bags that snapped in the wind; sprayed the entire garden with deer repellant Mack brought up; tried playing tape recordings of predator calls all night—cougar screams and the resonant howling of wolf packs on the hunt. No matter what method she tried, the next morning she would find entire rows destroyed, tender tips of the delicate new sprouts eaten off. One day, in desperation, she’d gone to the bone pile over the hill and hung skulls on T-posts around the garden’s perimeter. She’d thought it would serve as a warning, all those empty sockets staring them down, but it seemed deer weren’t too worried about their ancestors’ demise.
She’d taken to patrolling the garden at night, sneaking out barefoot until she got close enough she could hear the deer eating, the little snaps and crunches of her demolished plants. She would turn on her flashlight and run at them, hollering and flapping her arms, the light catching the reflection of their eyes until they scattered into the darkness. She would huff around for a minute and then settle back on the porch with her blanket. Despite her efforts, it would often be less than an hour before she would hear them again—whole families pocketed back in the rows, munching away like a herd of lazy cattle.
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