Listen! (9780062213358)

by Tolan, Stephanie S.

  On Day Thirty-eight of The Taming, with Coyote as her guide, she finds the way from the sewer line access, across the creek behind the new housing development, and up the power lines all the way around the lake to the Dumpster on the road that leads in through the gates—where she saw him as a wild thing that very first time before the accident. The power company keeps the trees cut beneath the lines, so the way is mostly tall grass and wildflowers, blackberry brambles and pine saplings—like an overgrown Christmas tree farm, Charley thinks. The ATVs have been here, too, leaving deep red clay ruts through the weeds. That day Charley doesn’t get home till nearly noon, and Sarita meets her at the door, furious. “You let me know before you leave if you’re planning to walk to China and back!”

  Charley, hungry, soaked with sweat, and limping more than usual, holds out a plastic grocery bag, heavy with blackberries. The berries cool Sarita’s temper, but Charley can’t decide what made her so mad—whether she was worried about Charley or only about what Paul Morgan would say if something happened to his daughter when she was being paid to watch her.

  Later, when they are eating the blackberry muffins Sarita has made, she tells Charley she was so worried that she gave up working on her puzzle. “I was picturing you at the bottom of a cliff someplace, smashed to pieces. Or drowned.”

  “Don’t worry about me drowning,” Charley says. “I don’t go in the lake.”

  Sarita slathers butter on a muffin. “I’ve been meaning to mention what a waste that is, girl. Here you are living on a lake with three swim docks and the cleanest water in the county. Swimming’s good exercise.”

  “I don’t see you swimming Eagle Lake every day,” Charley says.

  “You won’t, either—all those snakes and snapping turtles.”

  Charley nods. After two years of Amy’s pool, the clear blue water with nothing in it you can’t see, it gives her the creeps, too, to think what would be swimming with her in the lake. But that wasn’t always true.

  Charley learned to swim in Eagle Lake. She knows perfectly well that the turtles and the shy brown water snakes that sometimes zigzag across the surface want no more to do with a swimmer than the swimmer wants to do with them. She and her mother and her father used to swim—all three of them together—every evening when her father got home from work. He didn’t used to go back to the office after dinner, which in good weather they mostly ate outside on the terrace. The dock box is still full of swim noodles and fins and goggles and inflatable toys. She and her father don’t use them anymore. Maybe, Charley thinks. Maybe someday.

  16

  The Pine Grove

  Sarita comes in from her drive up to the mailboxes and hands Charley a letter from Amy. Charley can feel Sarita’s eyes on her back as she starts for the kitchen to throw it away. She can imagine the look on Sarita’s face—the same look she gets when Charley refuses an invitation to hang out with the kids from school. Sarita probably thinks, like Charley’s father does, that she shouldn’t be alone so much, that she should be going out with friends, having them over to the house.

  But Charley doesn’t want to leave Coyote—not yet—and she certainly doesn’t want a bunch of kids coming around and scaring him into the woods. Besides, there’s something else, something almost magical happening this summer that she can’t explain, even to herself. It isn’t something she wants to share.

  Still aware of Sarita watching, Charley doesn’t drop Amy’s letter in the trash this time. She goes to her room instead, sticks the letter, unopened, in the frame of her mirror, and flops onto her bed. It is July 18. The red number on the calendar today is 39. The summer is more than half gone. One month from today, school starts again. Amy will come home from up north, and Charley will have to go back to school. What will happen then?

  She doesn’t want to think about it. Doesn’t want to think about Amy. Amy’s probably only writing because she feels guilty. She ought to feel guilty, going away and—

  Charley stops in the middle of the thought. It is just a habit, she realizes, grumping about Amy and Becky Sue, Lake George and tennis. She is surprised to find that she isn’t angry anymore. Whatever Amy is doing this summer, there is no wild dog in it. Whatever Amy is doing, Charley is having a better summer. She grins and gets up. She will take some biscuits outside for the dogs.

  The next morning Coyote leads Charley back up the sewer line access trail. Maybe, she thinks, he’s hoping she will be willing to do the whole power line hike again and stay out all morning. It’s Saturday, Sarita’s day off, so she could. Today her father won’t wait till she gets back to go to the office. He’s decided she can take care of herself for a few hours. But it’s only eight in the morning and already the sun is beating down on the trail so hard that she really wants to get off it and into the shade. Under the power lines there is no shade at all.

  She looks to see where Coyote has gone. He’s disappeared. Her choice is to turn back and take the lake trail, hoping he’ll figure out where she’s gone and come find her, or cut into the woods where there isn’t a trail. Her leg isn’t hurting too badly, and she feels up for adventure, so she decides to cut into the woods. On her left the ground slopes down toward Heron Pond and gets marshy. Once she pushes her way through the screen of honeysuckle and poison ivy and blackberries to get in under the trees, the walking will be bad. On her right the ground slopes up. The sun has encouraged pretty much the same tangle of undergrowth among the pine and sweet gum saplings on both sides, so whichever she chooses, the going won’t be easy at first. But at least to the right there won’t be mud.

  She keeps walking, looking for a break in the undergrowth, until she sees, through a stand of tall pine saplings, what looks like a clearing of reddish sand. There seems to be nothing growing there, and she wonders if it could really be sand, here where all the soil is heavy Carolina clay. She remembers, then, a winter photo her mother took of a place where sand and water have frozen into a forest of tiny stalagmites. This must be that place. The blackberry brambles have petered out along the edges of the trail, leaving only honeysuckle and a wild rose, its wickedly barbed branches spraying out like a fountain. Amazing, Charley thinks, how many things in nature have thorns. Skirting the rosebush, she heads in toward the clearing, pushing pine boughs out of the way, ducking under or stepping over vines.

  Whatever made this clearing, it is floored with coarse, sandy soil, lighter than the color of the clay. It slopes up to a wooded hill, covered with moss and pine needles. In the middle of the clearing there is a small pile of black dung, studded with seeds. Scat, her mother called these leavings of the woods animals. It is one way to track the animals. Charley has no idea what left it—raccoon or possum or maybe a fox.

  She crosses the clearing and climbs the hill, holding onto the trunks of young pines and cedars to pull herself up. When she gets to the top, she recognizes it immediately. She has found the Pine Grove.

  Pines and cedars grow so tall and so dense here that the shade is too deep for undergrowth. The lower branches of the trees have died and mostly broken away, leaving clear space for standing. She can look in any direction and see what seem to be corridors of tree trunks—some straight, some curving down the slopes. The place where she is standing now, a rounded knoll, is an almost perfect circle, like a green-roofed room with a mossy floor where the fairy rings grow. There is no sign of mushrooms now. It is dim and still here, almost cool. Unlike the ground everywhere else in the woods, there are no leaves. A scattering of sharp-edged white stones peek out from the carpet of pine needles, moss, and lichens that covers the ground.

  It feels as if she has stepped from the bright, hot summer of Eagle Lake into a different season, a different world. She finds herself breathing more deeply, taking in the sharp scent of pine sap and cedar. If she could feel her heartbeat, she thinks, it would be slowing down. This is a place she does not want to leave.

  She lowers herself to the ground and leans against the trunk of a pine, her left leg tucked up under her, her right str
etched out in front. The stillness settles around her. Gradually she becomes aware of insects buzzing. The twittering of birds. And there is something else, something that isn’t quite a sound. It is more like a vibration, as if the pine grove and the woods beyond are breathing in time with her breath.

  What you hear depends on how you listen. The thought appears in her mind and hovers there, like a hummingbird at the feeders her mother used to put out. What you hear depends on how you listen. She sits as still as she can, aware of the birds, the insects, the breathing of the woods. Her eyes focus on the feathery branches of a cedar on the other side of the knoll, then on the thick-plated bark of a pine. There is a quick glimmer of silver light. She shifts her focus and sees a fine line of gossamer trailing across the clearing. One of the lines of web a spider stick catches, she thinks. The kind she can’t see. Maybe she has not been looking the right way.

  She doesn’t know how long she stays, drifting in the stillness, before the shrill voice of a blue jay in the top of a nearby tree jolts her back to herself.

  Where is Coyote? She whistles once, then again. Will he find her here, in this place they’ve never come to before, or will he expect her to be on the trail somewhere, heading home? She doesn’t want to move yet, doesn’t want to leave this place. She will wait for a while and see if he will come.

  Where is he? she wonders again. What is he doing? She closes her eyes, and an image forms of him sniffing around the base of a tree stump, scenting something burrowed underneath. He digs with his front paws, throwing clots of red clay out behind him. When he can’t get to the animal he is after, he sets off, trotting through the woods, ducking under bushes and jumping over fallen trees. Then she imagines him stopping, ears and nose twitching. He has caught the scent of a deer. There are plenty of deer in the woods, Charley knows, though they aren’t very often seen in the daytime. Sometimes at dusk they come out under the power lines or into the field near Eagle Lake’s stone gates. From time to time she has noticed hoofprints in the mud by the ponds.

  Now she sees a pair of deer, a doe and a young buck, leaping up from where they have been sheltering in a hollow beneath a fallen tree. They leap away, and Coyote takes off after them, becoming a golden blur, running and jumping and swerving among the trees. They splash through a creek and up the bank on the other side, Coyote behind them. Then they angle to the left, and Coyote cuts across a small clearing, closing the distance between them. He leaps at the one that is lagging slightly behind, and it kicks, its hoof catching Coyote across the bridge of his nose. Coyote yelps and stops as the deer goes on, bounding over a fallen pine tree and disappearing into the brush. Panting hard, Coyote watches it go. There is a sharp, curved line of blood across his nose where the deer’s hoof connected.

  Charley shakes her head and opens her eyes. Wherever Coyote is, it is time to start back. Her legs are stiff, and she can feel where the bark of the pine tree she’s been leaning against has left a pattern on her back. She pushes herself to her feet, stretches her arms over her head, circles her shoulders a couple of times, and heads down the hill into the sandy clearing, holding to the trees to slow her progress. She will be coming back to the Pine Grove, she thinks. It is a perfect place to rest while Coyote does whatever he does in the woods.

  The sun is hotter than ever out on the trail, and she is eager to get home and change out of her jeans. From time to time as she walks, she whistles for Coyote. The blackberries are almost gone now, but she snatches a late one and pops it into her mouth. It is dry and hot and not good. She has just passed the cutoff to the lake trail when Coyote comes down out of the woods on the other side.

  “Well, it’s about time,” she says. “You’re a mess!” His legs are muddy, his fur is studded with clumps of red clay. Charley catches her breath. There is something else—a sharp, curved line of blood across his nose.

  17

  Touch

  Hot as it is, the rest of the way home Charley is aware of a chill up her back and along her shoulders. The cut on Coyote’s nose is exactly the way she saw it. Did he really chase a pair of deer? Did he splash through a creek and leap at a deer who kicked him and got away?

  There is no doubt about the cut, about the blood on his nose.

  All this time she’s been imagining things about Coyote, she’s had no way to be sure whether what she sees in her mind is real or not. She only knows how real it has felt. This is different. She saw that cut, saw it happen in her mind, before she saw it with her eyes.

  She wants to tell someone about this. But who can she tell? Her father won’t believe her. He used to complain about how long her mother encouraged her fantasies of fairies in the woods. “The sooner she knows the difference between what’s real and what’s not, the better!” This is real, though. It is.

  She could tell Sarita, but she has no idea what Sarita would think about it. Besides, Sarita might tell Charley’s father.

  At home she feeds Coyote, wishing that she could put some sort of medicine on his nose. The cut is crusting over, but it looks deep. It’s possible that the fur won’t grow back and he’ll have a scar the rest of his life. It doesn’t seem to bother him, though. He doesn’t paw at it, doesn’t shake his head as if it hurts. Or maybe he’s had enough pain that he’s used to it. Like Charley and her leg.

  Charley goes to her room to change her clothes, her mind still reeling. She strips off her jeans and T-shirt, checks for ticks, drapes the clothes over a chair to dry out, and sits on her bed in her underwear. She closes her eyes. Can she make an image of Coyote now? Of course. She can see him perfectly clearly in her mind, lying under the dogwood. But he always goes there after breakfast if Sadie isn’t around. This isn’t what she did in the Pine Grove.

  Charley shifts to Sadie, lets a picture form in her mind of Sadie swimming across the lake, making splashes with her front paws. Clearly as she can see it, it isn’t the same as the deer chasing, either. She has seen Sadie do this so often that the image she is seeing in her mind now is ordinary memory. Even if she were to go outside right this minute and find Sadie coming up out of the water and shaking herself, it wouldn’t prove anything. Sadie swims over at this time of day a lot.

  In the Pine Grove she was just playing with the images, drifting. She wasn’t making a real effort to see what Coyote was doing. Does that make a difference? Now it’s like a test, to see if she can do it again. Now there is something to prove.

  If Amy were here, Charley thinks, and still her best friend, she could tell her. Amy would think it was cool. Weird—a little scary—but really, really cool. Charley grins. Whether Amy would think that or not, she does. Definitely. Weird—a little scary—but really, really cool!

  The corner of her mother’s book is sticking out from under the extra pillow. Her mother—that’s who Charley wants to tell about this. Colleen Morgan wouldn’t refuse to believe her or tell her she’s crazy. But Colleen Morgan isn’t here. And she never will be.

  Charley pulls the book out and finds the page with the fairy ring. There, scattered in the moss and pine needles in the middle of the circle of mushrooms, are the same white stones she saw today. Except for the mushrooms, the Pine Grove looks today the way it did when her mother was kneeling in it, taking the picture. Looking at it makes Charley’s throat hurt. She turns the page.

  The next photo is of Eagle Lake, taken from the dam on a soft, gray morning, tendrils of silvery mist like whirlpools rising from the surface of the water. “‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’—Marcel Proust.”

  New eyes. Like when she looked across the Pine Grove and saw the strand of spiderweb. It occurs to Charley that her mother saw the lake and the woods around it differently than anyone else who lives here. What she saw she captured, and then she sent the images out into the world for other people to share.

  The next page is a single white wildflower, incredibly close-up, with five petals arranged around a spray of golden dots. There is nothing else in the
picture—just the flower against a dark background, green but unfocused. “‘Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.’—Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  And then there is the beaver again. “To understand any living thing you must creep within and feel the beating of its heart.” Is that what her mother could do? Did she connect with the animals spirit to spirit? Is that why she never needed to make a blind to get her photographs?

  Charley’s throat is hurting again. She closes the book and puts it back. Then she gets dressed and goes outside. Sadie and Coyote are chasing each other around the azaleas. Sadie is wet from swimming the lake. Of course she is. It doesn’t mean a thing.

  A few hours later, when Charley has finished a cheese sandwich that she shared with the dogs—Coyote coming close enough to take his share from her hand—the dogs are playing again. They roll on their backs next to each other, biting at each other’s ears and paws whenever they get close enough. Charley goes over and sits down next to Sadie, expecting Coyote to leap up and move away. He doesn’t. The two dogs keep snapping at each other, gently, not really trying to connect, and Charley rubs Sadie’s stomach.

  After a minute she reaches over Sadie and gingerly lays her hand on Coyote’s chest. He looks up at her, and their eyes lock. He has registered this touch, knows it is her hand on his chest. Good dog, she thinks. Holding her breath, she begins to rub. Coyote wriggles in the grass just the way Sadie was doing a moment ago. After a while he rolls onto his side, away from her. She rubs behind his ears and then runs her hand through the honey-gold fur down his back to the base of his tail. His fur is wavy and a little wiry, not as soft as Sadie’s. If she had ointment to put on the cut on his nose, she could do it now, he is so relaxed. His tail thumps on the ground once, twice—and then Sadie jumps up and knocks Charley sideways. The moment is gone. The two dogs take off again, Coyote ducking in among the azaleas to leap out at Sadie as she runs past.