by Shannon Kirk
“You’re insatiable, lady girl. I’m just glad you’re here. Reservations are booked solid all summer, and I need you. Also, we need to talk serious over our steak frites tonight.”
That night, the start of her summer, Mag and Cord enjoyed dinner at the staff campfire pit, which overlooked the resort’s lake from a high bluff—as if they were king and queen on their thrones, presiding over their subjects: the water’s surface and a loon couple with their three hatched chicks. The night sky was bright blue with a full moon and no clouds. And the air was warm, a perfect match to her own body temperature.
Cord fried potato wedges in a seasoned cast-iron pot over their campfire. So perfectly crisp and salty, Mag devoured them fast.
“Cord, we need more fries, ’kay?” she said while cutting into her slab of fire-cooked steak, which took up most of the steel plate she rested on her sitting legs.
“Got a story for you on those loons,” Cord said, pointing at the loon family cutting Vs on the glassy surface of the water.
“Here we go.”
Cord laughed. “Yeah. Here we go is right. That bastard eagle tried to snatch one of them babies last week, yep.”
“I’m pretty sure she’s a mama eagle, Cord, and she probably just wants to feed her own. Nature,” Mag said, chewing her steak.
“Yeah, yeah, nature. Look, here’s the drama you missed. Eagle comes swooping, flying circles over those babies and the mama loon. And from right there, right by where the river washes into the lake, that dope father loon comes screaming, walking across the water, wings spread as wide as a pterodactyl. He was honking mad, so loud he interrupted a fancy hotel wedding up in the field. Seriously, the minister had to stop the ceremony.”
“Wow. Wish I hadn’t missed this,” Mag said, smiling at the way Cord spread his arms to mimic the dope loon father. “Why are you calling daddy loon a dope?”
“He’s a dope sometimes. Keeps dropping fish. Not efficient like the mama loon. Watch him this summer. But look, when he protected those babies from the eagle, he was no dope. Guess what he did after he came screaming in and after breaking up the wedding?”
Mag misses these dramatic nature stories from Cord all nine months of driving alone around the country. She settled her hands to brace the plate on her sitting knees and waited for him to tell her what happened next.
“So,” Cord said, “that crazy loon son of a bitch takes his loon wife and three babies and nests that night under the eagle. Tree right next to the eagle and the eagle’s baby chicks. You know what the loon’s message was, right?”
“What?”
“The message was ‘Look, bitch, you come around my baby loons again, I will take your baby eagles.’ Now that is your nature right there, lady girl.”
“You serious? What’s Audubon say about this?” Mag asked, showing skepticism.
“Girl, I saw the whole show with my own eyes! I might be a deaf motherfucker, but I’m not blind.”
“You are a deaf motherfucker.” With a grin, she took a swig of her red wine in the copper cup and set it back on the top of the white Yeti cooler she was using as a side table. “Where’s my fries, old man? You can’t stall cooking to tell me these stories.”
“All right, all right. First, we need to talk serious. I warned you this morning,” Cord said.
“You better not tell me you’re dying or some shit. I’ll track you down in hell if you try to leave me.”
“Oh, don’t I know. No, no, nothing like that.”
Several fireflies flashed reds and yellows in the space between their L.L.Bean camp chairs. Cord paused from fussing with his fry pot, and Mag stalled her knife and fork. They smiled.
“Seems the fireflies are happy you’re not dying on me, Cord.”
“Sure do. I’m going to miss those fireflies,” Cord said, pausing to create a serious and solemn mood.
“Miss?” Mag dropped her silverware to the plate. It felt to her like her heart had crawled straight into her throat. She couldn’t do the Triple C without Cord. She lived for her summers, teaching with Cord. There was something, she didn’t know quite what, but something about allowing herself a couple of summer months at the Triple C seemed permissible, forgivable, maybe even necessary. Important.
“So listen. Now hear me out and don’t say no right off. Okay?” Cord said.
Mag reached to her copper mug of wine on the cooler. She took a swig as her answer, a way to settle the loud beating heart in her throat.
“Okay?” Cord said.
“Go on with it already, old man.”
“Look. I get it. You know I get it. I know you need to drive around searching for your girl. I’ve always supported you. You know that. You’re like Mr. Loon, doing all the crazy shit to protect her baby. I know you think you need to drive around.”
“I do. And yes, I need to keep searching.” Mag shifted in her chair, balancing her plate of steak, straightened her back, and clutched her copper mug with both hands to her chest, preparing herself to weather another lecture from one of her loved ones on why she needed to stop this driving around already, searching for anything that would lead to her baby.
“Now, hear me out. You owe me that much, especially if you want more of my world-famous camp fries tonight. Look. It’s been thirteen whole years, Magpie, and your detective has your phone number. You check in with him all the time. It’s gotten to the point where it’s just plain senseless to keep living the way you are. And I’m sorry, this is Cord’s Tough Love 101, and you know I think of you as a daughter. Honey, this has gone on too long.”
Mag interrupted with a groan.
“Okay, okay. Here’s my point. Stop the groaning. I see you fidgeting and you’re about to jump in the lake and join the loons. I get it. Hear me out. Hear me out. Here’s the thing. I have a job offer to run the, what do the owners call it, yeah, their Games and Ground Division, year-round, on this real wealthy family’s estate. Drumroll. Outside Milan.”
“Italy!” She slammed her mug back to the surface of the Yeti-cooler table.
“Yes, Italy.”
“You’re nuts. You’re going to, what? You don’t even speak Italian.”
“Don’t need to. They’re fluent in English and, I’m told, so are all their many guests. I want you to be my lieutenant. They’re paying huge, Mag, and you’d have housing covered. A nice little villa in the Italian countryside. And look, nothing would change with respect to your contact with the detective.”
“Oh, Cord. Yeah, no way. No way I’m leaving the States. I could never live with myself.”
“But you always say that you listen to the universe on where to go next. And maybe this is what the universe is saying to you now: go to Milan.”
“No. Nope. Detective doesn’t think they took my Laura out of the States.”
“Detective Clue Bag doesn’t know his dick from his thumb, and you know I’m right.”
Mag breathed in deep, stared out over the movements of the floating loon family. Normally, she’d have laughed over the dick-versus-thumb comment. She shook her head.
“I do love you, old man. And I’m honored you’d ask me to be your lieutenant. Means a lot. A whole lot. But I can’t stop searching for her. Not until the day I croak, and frankly, I’m still going to haunt this earth searching for her for eternity after that.”
“Oh, girl,” Cord said, setting his hands on the arms of his chair. “All right, then. Okay. I understand. But fair warning, I’m going to try to wear you down by the end of the summer.”
Again, Mag looked out over the lake and considered the ripples around the movements of the loons. In rising from her seat, she patted Cord’s knee with one hand while holding her plate in the other. “Night, old man. See you in the morning on the range.”
“No more fries?”
“Nah. I’m full. Night.”
The next day, Cord and Mag readied the hay bales by tacking fresh paper-linen targets, organized the different-size arrows in different buckets, tightened bow strings, a
nd worked several resort groups through their archery lessons. Cord didn’t raise Italy again, not even when they were alone at the staff picnic table, eating from a fancy charcuterie board, left over from a day wedding on the resort’s upper field.
For the next week, Mag drove her designated golf cart to the end of the Activity Center’s dirt road to the clay shooting range, because the lead instructor, a big bear of a man who went by one letter, D, had had an appendectomy. Cord was off working other jobs around the resort.
In her second week, Cord raised Italy again, and she brushed him off with a sigh and said she was going to work that week in the staff fave: the treetop adventure/bird bingo course. But when Cord raised the topic, slightly, just the word Italy in the third week, she met his eyes and didn’t wince.
On August 9, Mag asked Cord if they could have a steak-frites dinner at their campfire pit, without the other instructors. Again, the night was bright blue with a full moon, and the lake was calm, except for Frank, the resident beaver, who was doing figure eights in a back float. The night was warmer than in June, and there were no biting bugs. A piney scent with a dash of cinnamon plumed in the air around their camp chairs, due to the spices Cord threw on the fire.
Mag once again rested her steel plate of steak on her lap and a copper mug of wine on the Yeti-cooler table, and Cord was again fussing with his pot of fries off to the side, so it was as if their June conversation had frozen in time and here they were again, resuming in August.
“So when would we have to leave for Italy, if I said yes? And if I’m miserable after a week, I can leave, right?”
“This isn’t slavery, Mag. You can leave whenever you want.”
“Well, not really. I’d be letting you down, and you’d have to start looking all over again if I go and then quit.”
“I haven’t spent a second considering anyone other than you, and so far, you’ve said no. So probably wouldn’t change my effort. This ain’t the kind of gig you post on some job board.”
“Oh, so you think I’m going to break down and say yes, then, don’t you?”
Cord nodded and winked. “Here’s what I know, lady girl. I know you’re smart, and I know you’re fearless. I know you follow what the universe tells you. So yeah, I do think you’ll say yes. And I also think that in that never-resting squirrel brain of yours, you’ve fixated on the fact that I said this wealthy Italian family speaks English and will have lots of English-speaking guests. I bet you think there could be a lead in Italy with as much potential as all your random driving around this country. And I happen to know—I know you, okay—I know you’re tired of the life you’ve been living and you’re lonely. And lastly, I know you have a thing for hairy, bearded men, and your quarry in Italy will be abundant. Plus, you’re an Italian Greek.”
“You think you know me, old man?”
“Did I say that?”
“Yeah, you fucking said that.”
“Oh yeah, I did say that.”
They both laughed.
“I’m chewing on all this, so don’t push me. I’m probably going to stick with a big fat no. Okay? But you can make me extra steak fries tonight, thank you very much.”
That night, Mag changed into her black bamboo-cotton pj’s, bent to enter her low-ceiling bedroom, crawled into her camper bed, and lay awake, staring at the faux-wood ceiling. She thought on Cord’s comments about how she always followed what the universe said. In other words, she always followed her instincts. And because she always followed the universe, her instincts, Mother Nature, whatever, one way to look at her life, she considered, was positive. The freeness of it. The constant new landscapes. Living out the wild idea that she could pick up and go wherever her beast camper would take her upon any whim she might have.
She still paid for her apartment—which she kept practically empty—with her share of the wrongful-death settlement for her parents’ deaths. She needed her home base to stay frozen to the time her daughter was taken. The settlement also provided enough spending cash, enough to get by. So . . . yeah, looked at one way, her life of following instinct and whim was ideal.
One time a whim told her to attend a Ray LaMontagne field concert and somehow, she’s unsure how exactly, she made friends with one of Ray’s groupies and found herself watching Ray from backstage. She thought she could marry Ray, for his solitude alone, and pile on his attractive, brooding aura, his obvious genius, his poetic lyrics, his medicinal voice. Sometimes she thinks she could settle down again, with a man with a beard like Ray’s, seriously sexy tattoos on his forearms like Ray’s, with a man who condones silence and nature and freedom and equality. Absolute equality. This mythical, perfect man would not mind the opera and would be as irresistible in a tux as he would in faded jeans and flip-flops. She could maybe picture settling down with a man like that. And wasn’t there such a guy once, or close enough? Some bearded man who stayed at the Triple C with his young son years ago. Hadn’t she talked with him late at night on an overnight camping trip along the river, Mag their paid guide? And wasn’t he one of the one hundred souls she’d trusted to tell what she was really doing with her life? Told him about her stolen daughter and how she would look just like her.
Wasn’t there such a man? And wasn’t he bearded with blue eyes? And didn’t she mean to give him her full name and phone number the next morning, but then a resort emergency called her away and another of the staff had to guide the man and his son back to the Activity Center? Right? And then he was gone? What was his name? Was he a doctor? From the East Coast?
Maybe another mother would have shouted constantly in the media, social media, to everyone she saw that she was in search of her stolen daughter. Maybe another mother would have plastered posters everywhere of her baby’s age progression. But Mag concluded that doing so would only drive the monster deeper, would lead to her baby’s appearance being altered, to her being hidden farther away from her. No. Being loud and stomping in the woods and emitting your scent was no way to hunt. She’d decided to let the monster grow complacent; she’d decided to trust her true identity and true motives to a select few who passed her trust test. The bearded man with the young son on the overnight Triple C camping trip, he was one of the ones who’d passed her trust test.
She rolled in her camper bed, this way and that, and couldn’t find any comfort, so she found herself straight on her back again, staring at her bedroom ceiling, which was only three feet from her nose. Her toes hit the base of the bed, and her head scraped the headboard.
She strained to stay on the idea that her nomadic life had been good, positive. How she’s alone, sure, but no hermit. She’s no nun, no saint, at least by puritanical American standards. She tries so many things. So many pursuits—intellectual, strange, physical, and otherwise. The surf lessons in Santa Barbara. The hip-hop classes in Boston with the real hip-hop teacher at a real dance academy. The winter she joined a jug band in Savannah as an unnecessary accessory to clink a triangle at the end of their songs. The spring she cut strips of squid as bait for a crew of fisherwomen off Martha’s Vineyard. This June’s visit to Colorado when the whim of the universe told her to take a key-clay impressioning and sculpting class. Random. In the fall she audited a college course about the political history surrounding the creation of the Bible and the simultaneous obliteration of pagan literature. Why had she taken that course? No idea. Something about the syllabus intrigued her, and the professor was captivating. Did she sleep with him? Yes.
Chess in Tennessee parks with retirees. The hula-hoop contest in Chicago. Author readings. Burning Man. Anything, everything, that had her out and about and searching for her daughter and the monster in every single face, but also experiencing everything.
Yes, looked at from one angle, she’s had an enviable life.
And to top it off, she thought as she ran a finger on her camper’s ceiling, she’s thirty-five and fit and skilled. And ready.
Really ready to destroy whatever cretin purchased her baby girl from Paul Trapmore, th
e devil himself. That’s what the cops said after they raided his place and scoured his computer. All after Paul had fled to the off-the-path part of Ecuador, which he did the very second the detective left his hospital bed on the day baby Laura was taken. Who had Paul sold Mag’s details and patterns to for a price? The cops were not sure. The transaction encrypted and too coded. Identities falsified. The wired money in some offshore account that had long been emptied, information scrubbed.
Lying in her camper bed thirteen years later, Mag didn’t want to think about the dark day when she discovered this truth, so she skipped the facts, but the familiar cycle of dark feelings came all on their own. The dreadful regret, the guilt, the lost chance, roiled in her as an unstoppable emotional tsunami. She rolled to her side and shifted her stare to the faux-wood paneling on the side of her bedroom. The white lace curtain on the screened window fluttered in the breeze. In the fetal position, she opened the floodgates to a different view of her life, the view that showed her life as utterly depressing.
Practiced in this emotion and knowing it was best to let it crest and not to suppress, she hit the menu on her iPhone on a side table and scrolled to Ray LaMontagne’s “Till the Sun Turns Black.” Ever since hearing him sing it live, this song has been a bloodletting, a mournful surgical tool that allows her to dredge and drain the blackest of melancholy that, if she tries to fight it, if she doesn’t control the course, can grab hold of her throat and choke her, even blind her. In her early years on the road, she didn’t know how to manage this mourning, and she’d go blind while driving, unable to breathe, only to have to pull fast to the breakdown lane, slam on the brakes, and crawl to the back bed to hold herself through a debilitating and scary panic attack.
But at age thirty-five, she’s better at managing herself. Listening to “Till the Sun Turns Black” in her camper, still in the fetal position, the song on the fifth repeat, the bloodletting began. When Ray hit the middle of the song with his aching refrain and sang a question asking who we are, Mag cried. God, how the song’s aching cadence and unanswerable question fit her dark heart. Indeed, who is she? Who am I? Who is she when the tires roll on the tar, town to town, alone? Where is she? Where is her baby girl? Where is she? Where is she? Is she in a shallow grave? A corpse? A skull and broken bones? A pile of bones? Has her baby girl forgotten her mother? Yes, she must not even know her mother exists. The sun is indeed black, the roads are black, her heart is black, her mind is black. The air is black. Her bones, her baby’s bones, her guilt, her failure, her fucking utter failure as a mother. All black. Who are we? Who are we? Who am I? Where is my girl?