Something that feels like a great balloon in the center of her is growing, pushing against her ribs, against her throat. If it gets any bigger, she thinks she will explode, shattering into so many pieces she will never be able to put herself together again. She tries to swallow around a pain like blackberry thorns, and a sound begins. She hears it before she understands that it is coming from inside herself. A low moan, it grows louder, rises higher, until it becomes a kind of scream, and she is crying, tears flooding her eyes, pouring down her cheeks. She cannot make them stop. There is no way to wake up from this pain, no way to get away. The black spot from her nightmares has swallowed her. Sobbing, Charley throws herself down on the moss.
Memories come flooding in. The day her father turned from the telephone, his face gone gray and old, to say the words that made no sense: “Your mother’s plane went down, Charley. Your mother is gone.” Neighbors with casseroles. People crowding the house. The funeral at the church that she and her father have never gone back to again. Taking down her mother’s photographs, trying not to see them as she did it. Mrs. Jensen coming at her, touching, patting, hugging—the very things Charley did not want, could not stand. Amy—acting so weird, afraid to mention her own mother until the day Charley yelled at her to stop worrying about her, the day she told everybody at school that she was all right. That it was all over, and she didn’t hurt anymore. Wouldn’t cry anymore.
Other memories come, then, a flood that won’t stop. The hospital. Amy and Travis, scraped and bruised but on their feet—“treated and released”—walking so easily into the room, one foot then the other. Travis apologizing. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. The room full of balloons that she had to lie there and watch shrink and droop, flowers she had to watch die. Cards from the kids at school. “Get well.” As if she had the flu, as if when she gets out of the hospital, she can come back to school and everything will be okay. Wheelchair, crutches, Tony. Pain.
Amy’s mother on the phone talking about tennis. Becky Sue Lindner and Lake George. Amy gone for the summer with never a word.
And Coyote! A “good thing” she was doing, Dr. Frazier said. She understands now that it hasn’t been only her saving Coyote. It has been, since that very first day, Coyote saving her. Coyote gone now, like everything else.
Charley doesn’t know how long the sobbing lasts, but when it dwindles, stops, she lies still for a long time, unable to move. She is exhausted, limp, as if the life has been wrung out of her and there is nothing left. Never in her life has she felt so completely alone.
When at last she pushes herself up to a sitting position, her nose is running and there are pine needles stuck to her cheeks. She wipes her face with the bottom of her T-shirt, pulls her legs up and wraps her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees.
Little by little she becomes aware of the sounds around her. Thunder growls in the distance, and she sees that it is darker now than it was. It will rain soon, she thinks. She should go home. But she doesn’t move. She is breathing and counting now, long, slow breaths that don’t fill the emptiness inside.
She closes her eyes, listens. And becomes aware of her heart, quiet and steady, a slow beat that blends into the zithering of cicadas and crickets, the shriek of a hawk high above the pines. She is not alone. Time seems to stop or stretch. She feels as if she has slipped out of the world of humans, into a realm entirely separate, of other beings—trees and birds, mushrooms and insects and stones.
Something moves nearby, and Charley opens her eyes. Into the dim corridor between trees to her left steps a fox. She holds her breath. It has not seen her. It stands for a moment, utterly still, and then sits, black ears up, cinnamon coat fairly glowing in the shadows, and wraps its brush of a tail around delicate white feet. She thinks it may be the most beautiful thing she has ever seen, bright and astonishingly clean, as if it is a plush toy, newly made. Its tail is stunning, each hair shading from cinnamon to gold, to brown, to black. There is a rustle in the pine needles behind Charley, and she turns her head toward the sound. When she turns back, the fox is gone.
Like a ghost, she thinks. Like Coyote.
Coyote. Come back. Come home! She sends these thoughts into the air around her, beaming the message out to wherever Coyote might be. Come home!
And then, quite clearly, she knows that he is not a body among the weeds somewhere. This is no imagining. She is sure of it. She feels the steady pulse of his heart as surely as she feels her own.
25
Home
By the time Charley gets home, it is raining hard, lightning flashing, thunder rolling closer, the trees leaning in the wind. Her hair is plastered to her scalp, sodden clothes cling to her skin, and her teeth are chattering.
She is halfway up the ramp when the sliding door opens, and Sarita tosses her a beach towel. “It’s about time you got back, girl! Look at you, soaked to the skin. Get those muddy boots off before you come in,” she says. But there is something in her voice that doesn’t match the gruffness of her words.
When Charley has loosened her boots, pulled them off, stepped into the dining room, she sees that Sarita is beaming. This tall, thin woman Charley has thought immovable as a wood carving seems lit from within.
“What?”
“Mr. Heyward called,” Sarita says. “He has a friend who lives over by the high school who has a young female malamute he wants to breed someday. She came into heat for the first time last week, and for days there have been dogs hanging around his yard. One of them is gold—with a green collar.”
Charley remembers her first imagining—Coyote weaving through trees toward the sound of barking dogs.
“They’ve been barking and howling all night, so the man’s wife finally made him take the malamute to a kennel this morning.”
Charley puts her hand against her chest, where her heart is thudding almost painfully. “The high school’s so far!” Roads and cars. He could not have gotten there without roads and cars. “We have to go get him.”
“No telling where he is by now.”
Even if they found him, Charley realizes, she can’t be sure he would come to her, can’t be sure she could get him in the car.
“You have to let him come home on his own,” Sarita says.
He’s a survivor, Charley reminds herself. If he got there, he can get back. “Will he? Will he come home?”
“What do you think?”
Charley considers for a moment and then nods. The connection between them is real. She knows this. She makes an image of him in her mind, far from roads and cars, heading home. Be careful! she thinks.
“Now go get into some dry clothes and then call Mr. Heyward and thank him.”
It is dusk when Charley, going to the window for what feels like the millionth time, sees Coyote coming down the road from the direction of Mr. Garrison’s. He is wet and muddy, tail down, ears tipped sideways against the rain that has kept up steadily all day. “Dad! Sarita!” she shrieks. “He’s here. He’s back!” She opens the sliding door and calls to him. “Coyote, dinner! Come get your dinner!”
He is limping slightly as he trots down the driveway, but otherwise, she thinks, he is himself. There is something jaunty in the way he moves, something cheerful and casual and ordinary. As if he has only been off on a ramble and is, of course, coming home for his dinner.
Charley hurries to the kitchen, puts all the pieces of liver she has into the bowl she has kept ready since she filled it with dry food the day he disappeared. When she carries it into the dining room, Coyote is standing on the ramp under the roof overhang. He shakes himself, splashing muddy water on the bricks, on the glass of the door. “You’re gonna like this!” she tells him as she puts the bowl down.
He wags his sodden tail and looks up at her expectantly. He has been without food for four days, she thinks, and this food smells of liver. But he does not move toward it. I can’t eat, you know, until you back away from the bowl.
“Don’t you ever, ever do that again!” she says, and steps
back into the house. Sarita is watching from the doorway to the kitchen.
Paul Morgan has come into the dining room. He puts a hand on Charley’s shoulder and they stand, watching Coyote eat. “No way to hold him to that, you know.”
When Coyote has finished his meal, has settled himself behind the boxwoods to sleep, Charley goes downstairs. She opens the door to the studio and turns on the light. Her mother took her favorite cameras with her to the rainforest, of course. They were lost in the crash. But somewhere here, with her old equipment, there will be the digital camera she got and hardly used before she went away.
Colleen Morgan hadn’t wanted to work with a digital camera. Hadn’t wanted to let computers take over her world. But she didn’t intend to be left behind, either. “The world has changed,” Charley remembers her saying as she pulled the new camera from its box, took out the manual, the batteries, the memory card. “I’ll keep doing things my way, too, but I have to know what this new way has to offer.”
That is the camera Charley intends to find. She will take pictures of Coyote tomorrow. She will make a disk of the pictures for school on Monday. When the other kids ask about the accident, about how she is now, how it feels to come back to school after so long away, she will have something else to talk about and something to show them. If a teacher asks her to write about her summer, she will create an illustrated report. She will call it “Coyote Summer,” and she will get an A.
Charley finds the camera in the second carton she opens. It has been packed away in its original box. Beneath this box, wrapped in bubble wrap, is one of her mother’s old cameras. Maybe, she thinks, I will learn to use that one someday. She looks at the door to her mother’s darkroom, the sign hanging crooked from its nail. Maybe I’ll learn about darkrooms and the way you did the work you did. But for now I’m going to make pictures this way.
She notices the stack of books on the desk. All this time she has been sleeping in the studio, she has not noticed or thought about those books. Something should be done with them, she thinks. Whatever her mother wanted her photographs to accomplish, these books are wasted sitting down here in the dark. She takes two copies, tucks them under her arm. One she will put on the coffee table in the living room where it belongs. Maybe her father has forgotten it. Maybe he will want to remember. The other she will give to Sarita.
At the door, before she switches off the light, Charley looks back at the studio, at the framed photographs that are leaning against the leg of the table. She isn’t ready to put them up in her room, she thinks. But someday she’ll wake up in the morning in her own room, with Coyote asleep on the floor next to her bed, and see the fairy castle across the room. Someday she’ll imagine again the little figure with iridescent wings.
26
Sixty-nine Days
It is the afternoon of Day Sixty-nine. Sunday. The last day of the summer vacation. School starts tomorrow, and Amy is home.
She called yesterday and Charley talked to her, survived hearing her voice. She found herself laughing at Amy’s stories about Becky Sue’s crush on Adam. But she couldn’t bring herself to invite Amy over, invite her to meet Coyote. “He’ll just run into the woods and hide, the way he always does with strangers,” she explained. It is odd to think that Amy is a stranger to Coyote and probably will be for a long time. Odd and somehow satisfying, too. Charley has taken picture after picture of Coyote, a few of them pretty good. Amy will see him for the first time on a computer screen tomorrow, just like all the other kids.
Charley has planned how to handle school and Coyote’s taming. She will get up early every day and take Coyote for his walk before school, then come home and take him for a boat walk. She is not so sure how she will handle school herself. She hopes it will all work as easily as talking to Amy on the phone, hopes old patterns will just fall into place all by themselves.
Sarita is at the card table, working on the newest puzzle, a painting of a canal in Venice. Charley watches her leaning over the table, one knee on a chair, the other foot on the floor, one-legged, like a heron. What, she wonders, is so wonderful about jigsaw puzzles? It occurs to her that she has never thought of asking, as she never thought of asking her mother why she took pictures. “How come you’re always doing puzzles?”
Sarita shrugs but doesn’t look up. “It passes the time.”
“There are lots of ways to pass the time,” Charley says, going to the table. “Why puzzles?”
Sarita picks up a cookie sheet full of water pieces, sorts through them, and chooses a piece before she answers. “There was always a puzzle going at the home.”
“The home?”
Sarita nods. In the puzzle a headless gondolier poles his gondola over a patchwork of tabletop and water. Charley moves pieces at the edge of the table, looking for the piece with the gondolier’s head and hat, waits for her to go on. It is so long before Sarita speaks again that Charley is actually surprised when she does. “I had a son liked motorcycles. Riding in the rain one night he skidded. Went under a truck.”
Charley wishes she hadn’t asked. She doesn’t want to know more.
“He spent four years in a nursing home—in a coma. I worked puzzles, waiting for him to wake up. Got to be a habit.”
“Did he wake up?”
“He died. Long time ago now. Guess I’ll go on working puzzles till I see him again.”
Sarita fits a water piece into place and begins to hum. It is, Charley understands, the end of the conversation. She realizes she is glad, now, that she asked. It changes something to know this about Sarita. Maybe, she thinks, she will ask her other questions from time to time. Now she will find the gondolier’s hat.
An hour later Charley is making the CD of the Coyote photos when Coyote begins barking outside. She sets the laptop on the coffee table and goes to the dining room. Her father’s car is pulling into the driveway, Coyote circling it, barking and wagging his tail at the same time, as if he isn’t sure whether he’s greeting or defending. It seems too soon for her father to be back from the office, too soon for a contract problem big enough to require working on Sunday to have been solved.
She goes outside. Her father is opening his trunk, pulling out a large, obviously heavy carton. Coyote, spooked by the carton, barks a few times and retreats into the trees across the road.
“What’s this?” she asks, as her father sets one end of the carton on the driveway.
“A doghouse,” he says. “Some assembly required. It’ll probably take me a week or two to get it together. Let’s hope it doesn’t storm again in the meantime.”
Charley can’t believe her ears. “Doghouse? You bought Coyote a doghouse?”
He nods. “I never saw a more bedraggled-looking mutt than the one who came home from that unrequited love affair. I figured it was about time he had a place of his own to stay when the weather gets bad. Something better than that hole he’s dug himself behind the boxwoods. It’ll be winter eventually. We can’t have him outside all day in a Charlotte ice storm.” He digs into his pocket, pulls out a round gold disk with a ring through it, and hands it to her. Coyote, it says, with their phone number underneath.
Charley grins. “Thank you. I don’t think anybody could get near enough to him to read it, though.”
“Not yet.” Her father drags the carton to the side of the driveway under the dogwood. “This is his place, isn’t it? I thought we could put it here.”
Coyote has come out of the woods, is standing at the end of the driveway watching them. “It’s for you!” she calls to him. “Shelter!”
“You think he’ll use it?”
“He’s no dummy,” Charley says. “He’ll figure it out.”
Her father chuckles as he leans the carton against the fence. “Let’s hope I can. This do-it-yourself stuff isn’t my strong suit.”
“You can do it. I can help, and if we get into trouble we’ll call for Sarita. So,” she says, as he strains to open the box, “there wasn’t really a contract problem?”
&
nbsp; He grins, a grin Charley hasn’t seen in a very long time. “There’s always a contract problem. Just not one I had to deal with today.”
“Are you planning to start this project right now?”
“In a while. I need to change clothes and find some tools. And have a little something cold to drink.”
“Then I’m going to take Coyote for a boat walk.”
“Suit yourself. Just don’t leave me alone with this thing for too long.”
Coyote has come down from the trail and is standing chest deep in the water, drinking, a few feet from where Charley has pulled the canoe in beside Tree. She is holding the boat in place with the paddle, her other hand resting on Tree’s rough bark. She is glad to be away from the sun beating down on the open water. Glad for the shade of Tree’s heavy canopy. “I go to school tomorrow,” she says. She is used to speaking to Tree now, the way her mother did, used to the feeling of comfort she gets when she is in his presence. “It’ll be weird being back with all the kids.” A dragonfly circles her head and flies off, its wings a silvery blur. “There isn’t going to be much time to work on The Taming before Coyote has to have his heartworm treatment. You think he’ll be okay?”
She doesn’t get an answer. But it occurs to her that there is no point thinking about what will happen next. The future is anybody’s guess. She never expected to lose her mother, to have an accident, to find a dog. What is important is that Coyote is here with her now. Stick with this one day. She can’t tell whether it is Tree or herself she is listening to.
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