I MISS YOU.
Diana read the words and shrieked, scaring her mother who then also shrieked.
Alan Peterson looked up from the kitchen table where he had just sat down with a Coke and The Atlantic magazine. He wore cheap reading glasses and his gray-brown hair in a ponytail. Alan was 58 and a retired lawyer.
"Jared texted me!" Diana felt a little juvenile, but that was part of being back here in the womb.
Jake had heard Diana's phone ring when they'd all walked into the house together, and then Diana had cried out, and then laughed, and now she sank down next to him on the kitchen floor and leaned back against the wall. He sniffed the hospital scrubs bag where she'd dropped it, and then buried his nose in her faux-fur jacket and thumped his tail on the kitchen floor. Loudly.
"For God's Sake, Diana!" Janie O'Neil stood at the sink holding a bunch of rosemary that she'd just rescued from the garden before it froze. She was 56 and a retired social worker. She'd gained weight since retiring but was still very attractive and had thick shoulder-length, snow white hair. She and Alan spent their time gardening and raising chickens and a few goats, living like the hippies they were at heart.
The cedar branches outside the kitchen window of the O'Neil's house waved in the wind. The forecast was increasing odds for lowland snow, with tons of rain crashing into freezing wind from the arctic. The changing weather and Jared's text invigorated Diana. She thought a quick walk with Jake before dark would do her good, bear or no.
"You scared me to death," Janie said and smiled.
Since Diana had moved back home, she and her mother had made a deal. Diana could talk about boys for just five minutes at a time, and her mother could do the same with her favorite subject, death. It wasn’t as macabre as it sounds. Janie almost always laughed at her metaphysical obsession along with everyone else.
"Do you love him?" Janie asked.
"I might." Diana unzipped her knee-high leather boots.
"What's wrong with him?"
"Nothing," Diana said and shrugged. "Really. Nothing. He's great."
"He hasn't got a prayer," Alan piped up, looking over his glasses.
Diana pouted.
"Don't listen to him," Janie said. "Alan thinks true love has to be a trial full of angst."
Alan looked at his wife and grinned. "So do you."
Diana felt the focus slipping away from her and Jared, which was fine. "Who was that boy with the gargantuan skateboard?" she asked and finished pulling off her boots. Jake sniffed them aggressively.
"Jonah."
"The guy you hired to dig post holes?" Diana hadn't been here this past summer so she'd never met him, but she knew he had just graduated from a two-year welding school, was a couple years younger than she was, and was a very good worker.
"He's worried about his part-time job at the shipyard. So when he got home and saw the smooth road, the old skateboard whispered to him."
"Skateboarding on a gravel road?" Diana couldn't picture it.
"He's mostly walking with it to paved hilly roads like Valley," Janie said. "He broke his elbow on that ridiculous board, did you know that? He could have died."
"I bet he was for paving this road," Diana said.
"If he was, he sure didn't mention it around his mom," Alan said. "Jonah's mother was the leader of the opposition to the Pavers. But, I agree, in his heart, Jonah is a Paver."
Diana stood up and stretched. Jake stood up and shook. He was ready to go.
"Jake and I are going for a quick walk," Diana said. "Probably just up to Valley and back. So we can admire the beautifully graded road." The heavy equipment had finished its work.
"It looks good," Alan said, "but check out those grooves in front of our place and down at Lou's. That hydraulic plow on the back of the road grader completely wasted the pothole base we've built up."
"I'll make a point of noticing," Diana said.
"Keep Jake nearby," Alan said and looked Diana in the eye.
"Will do." Diana stepped toward the front porch and her running shoes. And a raincoat.
"Make noise," Janie said.
It was four o'clock now, the same time as she was walking last night. A rooster crowed from down at Jonah's house, which was across the road from Diana's and further back in the woods. They had a little chicken and turkey farm.
Diana stood in the cold wind in the middle of Berry with Jake at her side, looked both ways, and didn't see a soul. This was Lower Berry, the oldest, most used part of the road where the potholes were worst. Diana noticed the grooves Alan had mentioned. He hadn't invented Potholeology, but he could certainly teach a class in it now.
Jake held his nose high in the air, taking in seven times more scentsations than Diana. His olfactory nerve and brain chemicals sucked in the smells stirred up by the road grader and the wind as if they were brightly colored gases wafting here and there. Diana felt color blind. The sky was white as milk and the trees so dark they had lost their green.
She decided not to walk the road after all, but to visit Ruby's grave, which was on the other side of the property from the house, up the hill from the gardens and out behind the barn. "Come on, Jake," she said.
Jake pranced beside her back up the driveway wondering what was going on.
The O'Neil's place had many trails. Diana followed what her parents called the tractor trail. It started at the driveway and tool shed, turned at the garbage and recycling area, straightened out again at the actual garden tractor (which was under a brown tarp and pole roof shelter), and then ran parallel to Berry until it went up the hill and wound away from the road and around to the cedar barn. Alan had built the barn from two milled 150-year-old, Civil War era cedars he had cut down for the gardens and more sunshine.
Janie O'Neil's cat Garfield, a tabby, ran across the path in front of Diana and Jake bristled. He hadn't grown up with a cat. Janie had rescued her first one when Jake and Ruby were six-years-old and all three kids were out of the nest. Diana’s two siblings were both in Colorado now and didn't visit as much as Diana did.
"Let's go this way," Diana said, which was a command. Jake shook off the cat intrusion, saw now where Diana was going, and led the way up the separate nature trail Diana had turned on, up through the woods.
Ruby was Jake's sister and had died last November of a genetic epilepsy. She'd had several spells, and then Janie found her dead one morning when she went downstairs. Janie called Diana within an hour of Ruby's death, and the two of them had cried together. Diana was relieved it wasn't Jakie who died, but she was deeply sad for his loss. Her mother, however, had grieved hard and nurtured Jake all year as if he were Alan making his way without her. Jake got to sleep on the couch now. Unheard of.
Diana pushed a fallen huckleberry bush off the trail and then she and Jake climbed over a downed cedar from last year that Alan planned to cut up one day. The trail was a loop that circled behind the barn, the upper goat pasture, and the chicken coup. South of the trail, and further uphill, was ten acres of dense, undeveloped forest owned by someone in Seattle. A couple of eight-foot diameter old growth stumps, rotted around most of the edges, marked the property line. The trail straddled one of them, and just downhill from that stump was Ruby's grave.
Jake knew the spot well. He sniffed her red collar which hung from an alder branch. He did this every time.
"Hi, Ruby," Diana said and knelt down to the row of rocks marking the grave. Her parents had described the entire hippy ceremony to her in detail, but all she really cared about was Jake. She'd seen enough dying to understand the blessing of a ten-year-old dog's quick and painless death in her sleep. As long as it wasn’t Jake.
And so she did not cry, but walked back over to the stump and sat down on a mossy ledge, to have a moment with Ruby's memory. But instead she thought of Jared and how much she loved kis
sing and cuddling him.
The wind gusted through the tall Douglas fir trees. Diana looked up into the white and saw a gigantic black figure high in the bare branches of an alder, fifty yards away through a gap in the cedars.
She looked harder and gasped. It was the size of a gorilla, sitting slightly reclined in the crook of a limb. One round ear and a toe completed the silhouette, and Diana registered that she was seeing a bear. A real, live, though completely still, BEAR.
The northern wind was not only frigid, but it was in the wrong direction for Jakie to pick up the bear, so he sat placidly by Ruby's grave as Diana's heart and mind raced.
The bear had propped its feet on an opposite branch. It was absolutely still, leaning forward and facing downward so that Diana thought it might even be asleep. The bear and Diana were in roughly the same posture.
Should she run or make noise? Diana didn't feel threat so much as see it. There was a massive predator. Her instinct was to sit still and just watch the spectacle. How could this be? A bear in a tree. They were ubiquitous in the Pacific Northwest, and yet this was maybe a once in a lifetime experience all the same. It felt potent. God it was huge. Diana couldn't take her eyes off it.
Two or three minutes passed. The bear did not move. It dozed. It had come up here for some reason that escaped its mid-November bear consciousness now. Maybe it was scouting den sites.
When the first gun shot went off, Diana thought it was a branch cracking in the wind, but then there was a second and a third, pow, pow-pow. She had no idea where it was coming from.
Jake didn't flinch. He'd grown up on the Suquamish Indian reservation with firecrackers.
Diana recognized the gunshots after the third pow. She'd heard the sound once on a walk with her parents, coming from over at Jonah's when coyotes were into their chickens. Alan told her what it was, and she'd been shocked. That was legal? Probably not, Alan surmised, but perfectly understandable and acceptable behavior in Salal.
The bear's head jerked up.
Diana heard shots again, but closer. Three more. Sound echoes are untraceable in the woods, though. The gun could have been anywhere.
The bear scrambled down the tree as if it were a greased pole. Fear of the bear running toward her clutched at Diana, diminishing her for an instant. She froze and whimpered.
Jake looked up then and Diana told him to STAY. Which he did.
She flipped into nurse mode. The bear was gone. Long gone. She would be eaten by now if she was going to be. Then she wondered if the bear had been hit by one of the bullets. That bear wasn't hurting anything, and that idiot gun could have hit her, Diana!
She hunkered down in her stump and considered that she was hiding from the gun as much as the bear. When she felt safe and clear, she let loose her adrenaline and sprinted with Jake straight down the hill, cutting through the still-unfenced upper goat pasture and then past the root cellars and into the fenced backyard and the gardens.
All evening the wind blew and the temperature dropped. The bear never left Diana’s consciousness, but she didn’t mention it. Normally she would have raced in and announced her experience loud and long, but not this time. She went to bed early.
The wall just to the right as you walked into the small second bedroom upstairs was all bookshelves full of family photo albums. All three of the O’Neil kids’ high school graduation pictures hung on the opposite wall above a small table with a bedside lamp.
Jake jumped on the bed next to Diana, sniffed her face and let her burrow her nose into his cheeks. She tugged his houndish lips, nuzzled his ears and kissed his head repeatedly. “Oh, Jakie,” she crooned. “I love you.”
Janie and Alan had gotten Jake and Ruby as puppies when Diana was thirteen. She had looked forward to cuddling Jake every weekend at her mom’s house in Suquamish, a ferry ride away from her dad’s in Seattle. Jake always eased the transition.
More kisses, and Jake melted into the blankets next to Diana’s tattered Blankie and her cell phone.
Diana had texted Jared back, but wasn’t sure now if she wanted him to respond. Her mood had shifted. She’d seen a bear and heard gunshots and strongly desired a real, live boy.
Chapter 4
A Bear Tale Page 3