Transfixed, Mallory found even breathing an effort.
It was in that span of seconds that seemed to last an hour that Mallory grasped a single, paralyzing thought: She alone had seen Eden shape-shift—the emotional response to the threat and the full moon a combination that Eden was helpless to resist.
James’s back was turned.
It was Mallory who would have to die or break the ancient chain.
Then the cougar fell on the black bear and a snarling, roiling tangle of black pelt and white limb collided—the puma striking low, the sow on her back legs slicing the air. Bleating, the bear closed its jaws first on the puma’s head and then, as the cat wheeled to strike at the bear’s exposed belly, raked a claw across the puma’s thigh, opening a bright red rivulet of blood on the snowy coat. Back and forth the animals wrestled, one losing ground only to lunge back with renewed ferocity. Finally, the puma’s greater size prevailed. The lion placed herself between the bear and James, driving the bear back, up the ridge, leaping and lashing as the bear bent low to protect her throat.
Mallory scarcely noticed Cooper leaping through the snow from the trees, racing along on snowshoes, his rifle cradled in his arms. Seeing Cooper, the bear turned and scuttled up the ridge trail.
In the silence, the lion’s ragged breath was the only sound.
The puma turned, its great chest heaving, dark with snow and sweat, smeared with blood.
She faced Mally.
Cooper’s rifle hung, useless, at his side. James started forward, raising the log he still clutched.
Mally shrieked, “No! Don’t touch her. No one! Just wait!” She held her hands out, palms up. The puma’s golden eyes seemed to droop, almost drowsy, as she approached Mallory. She yawned, spent. “Eden,” Mallory breathed, a whisper no one could have heard at a distance greater than a foot, but which Meredith, a dozen miles away, did.
Hearing it, Merry covered her eyes with her hands. She too said, “Eden.”
The golden eyes were for a moment those of Mally’s friend.
If there is a way that whatever I have been given lets me look over you, I’ll do that from afar, Little Sister of the Dark. If there is a way. From afar . . .
“Don’t leave me,” Mallory pleaded. “Edie, don’t leave me all alone.”
As she watched, the mountain lion turned its eyes toward Cooper, who dropped to his knees in the snow and stretched out his hands to caress the cat’s back. The lion dropped her head, a long silver string dripping from her mouth, groggy with weariness. Her paws crossing delicately, she then approached James, who stood, his legs visibly trembling. The lion slid the length of its long form along James’s hip, and stopping, walked back along his side, like a great house cat in the dusk. James squeezed his eyes closed. The lion watched him, its head tilted curiously, the blood on its flanks black in the fading light.
“James!” Mallory finally cried. “Don’t you know her? Won’t you touch her? She would have died for you!”
Bewildered, James began to back away.
“Look at her!” Mallory commanded him. “Look at her. It’s Eden.”
James forced himself to relax and look down at the creature. Then, slowly, he bent and lowered his head, placing a hand on each knee. The great white lion laid her own head against James’s shoulder. He reached up and encircled the huge neck with his arms. A sound escaped James’s throat—a word or a cry. It was too much to bear, too private to observe.
A moment later, Mally felt the bump against her hip as the lion passed her. When Mallory opened her eyes, the puma was jogging silently away, disappearing into the darkness under the cliff, toward the ridge path.
Mally gathered her senses.
“No!” she called. She could only now grasp what Eden had chosen. “No, no, wait! Cooper, make her come back. Cooper, listen!”
Cooper was beside her by then, holding her wet face against his rough jacket. “Mallory, there was only one way. It was her choice. Don’t make it worse for her.”
“You’re so calm!”
“I’m not calm!” Cooper cried. “I’m . . . I’m numb. I think that when I go back to the house, Eden will be there, teasing me about you, asking me to go ice skating, telling Raina’s fortune with pebbles in a cup. When she wrote me, I got on the bus. I grabbed my gun. I brought the rifle for the bear, not for my sister!”
“I thought you would shoot her, to wound her.”
“No, never!” Cooper’s hair straggled, wet, over his collar. “You know that the bear . . . I wasn’t sure . . . until it left when it saw me.”
“Sure of what?”
“It wasn’t a real bear.”
“It gouged her! It sliced her with its teeth!” Mallory told him.
“It was Bear Clan, Mallory. They were fighting for their medicine woman. Eden fought for her freedom. The bear . . . won.”
“Oh, Cooper, it’s my fault. I got here too late! I could have talked to her. The last time I saw her, there, inside the cat, she heard me.”
“She would have heard you, but it wouldn’t have made a difference this time.”
“She can never . . . come back?” Mallory asked. “Please don’t say that.”
“No, never,” Cooper said. “Not unless another medicine woman takes her place. In the oldest stories, some of the shape-shifters married human beings, and they were human for only a few days, at the full moon. But that . . . I know that’s really a legend.”
“But it wasn’t a fair choice!” Mallory said, grabbing Cooper’s shirt.
“It wasn’t fair. And it wasn’t a choice,” Cooper said, his voice clogged with emotion. “She could never have hurt you or James.”
James still knelt in the snow, his hands and arms a shield over his face.
Mallory still clung to Cooper’s shirt. She pleaded, “Will she live? Will she be all alone? Will I see her? Will she have . . . someone like her?”
“I know she’ll live. It’s the same medicine. I don’t know if we’ll ever see her again.”
“I can’t bear to think of her all alone. And some fool could shoot her.”
“I can’t bear it either! Now that she knows it’s forever, she’ll hide. You’re angry at me, but you just need someone to blame! I didn’t make this medicine! I didn’t make this world.”
“I do blame you! Not you personally, but your mother and your father and all your aunts and uncles and your grandmother! You knew this was going to happen. You sacrificed her! I wouldn’t have let this happen to Meredith. You should have stopped her.” Cooper flinched away from her, and Mallory wheeled and bent to rouse James.
“Do I have to go now? Should I wait for her to come back?” he asked.
“She won’t come back, James.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If I had a dime for everything in my life I don’t understand, I’d be so rich I could fly away. And I would. I’d never see this dumb little town again.”
“She saved my life. Eden saved me.”
“And she saved my life. And my sister’s. At least once that we know of. Maybe more times. How do I let her go? It’s terrible for you. But she’s part of my life every single day.”
“I don’t get it, Mallory. But I’m so sorry.”
“I just want you to know. I’m not blaming you. But this is for you. You have to know that she left here because she loves you more than she loves herself. Do you know that? If she followed the legend, the lion would have . . . hurt you. And Eden would be standing here, her regular self. It’s just a few weeks until soccer season. It’s just a month until her prom.” Mallory covered her chapped face with her hands. “Oh, Eden. How can I make this be okay? It can’t ever be okay.”
Mally could do no more than sit on the stump while Cooper helped James break down his camp. Mally tenderly folded the big red sleeping bag that still smelled of Eden’s jasmine perfume and hugged it one last time. “Please, James. Take me home. Is your car out that way? Can you drive me into town?”
“Of cour
se,” he said.
“Come back with me, Mallory,” Cooper said.
“I can’t,” Mally said. “Not now.”
Mallory could see the tears standing in Cooper’s eyes. She touched his arm before he turned back toward home. Just before she left, Mallory spotted the limp shapes of Eden’s white moccasin boots. Stumbling through the wet snow, she picked them up, holding their dear weight close to her. May you live to wear out a thousand pairs of moccasins. The duffel, with its dainty sundresses and peep-toe shoes, she left where it sat. She watched Cooper disappear. Inside her, where love for him once stirred like a warm spring, everything had gone silent and cold. She heard only the crunch of the snow and James’s labored breaths, felt only the slap of the wind as they passed the Cardinals’ ring of warm windows to the ghostly white of the crushed stone road. Without speaking, James drove Mallory into town and parked across from her house.
“Was it real?” James asked her. Mallory sighed.
“Yes, James.”
“Will her parents know?”
“For them, it will be as though Eden has died.”
“That’s how it is for me,” James said.
He helped Mallory get out of his car, handing her Eden’s boots and her own skis. At the last instant, she turned back, giving Eden’s soft white boots to James. “She made these with her own hands, James, when she was just fourteen years old. I want them. But I think she would ask me to give them to you.” James received the boots as he would have held a little child.
“Thank you, Mallory,” he said.
“Good-bye James. Good luck.”
“Good-bye, Mallory. She . . . she told me so much. But the most important thing of all, she kept from me.”
“She did tell you the most important thing.”
“No. I didn’t know any of this.”
“She told you she loved you. That was even more important.”
Her house was dark and warm. Mally closed the door behind her, and peeled off her wet clothes. Only then did she see the answering machine light blinking.
There were six messages.
The last three told her that she had a little brother.
EVER AFTER
Well, I felt that,” Campbell said, when Mally finally arrived at the hospital. “I’m certainly no spring chicken.”
Grandma Gwenny and Aunt Karin, Dad’s sister, were there in the hospital room, along with Tim and Adam. Tim was “smoking” a big blue bubble-gum cigar. Adam ran to Mallory as soon as he heard her in the hall.
“I saw the whole thing! Almost! Well, from the corner of the room, not right up close! It was disgusting!” Adam said delightedly. “But he’s cool. He’s a neat baby.”
Mallory looked down on her scrunched, elfin little brother, his head no bigger than Tim’s open palm, his little fists held tightly together under his chin, as if he had a secret.
She hoped that he didn’t.
She hoped it would only be Merry and her. She knew Grandma had predicted that one day it would be she, Mallory, who had the twin daughters that came in every generation of their family. Aunt Karin had been a twin, but her twin was lost in a miscarriage before she was born. Being a mother herself was something Mallory could not even imagine. She had begun to see that love, all love—even that of a parent for a child—came at a price.
“Do you want to hold him, Merry?” Campbell asked. Her short hair was spiked with sweat but she looked excited, her cheeks pink and her eyes dancing with light. Mallory had forgotten. It was her twin that her parents believed had gone skiing—a few hours and a million years ago. She said, “Just let Mally show me where the soda machine is first. I’m sooo thirsty.”
In the hall, Mally and Merry formally exchanged identities—Mally’s flannel shirt for Merry’s sleek gray sweater, the left pierced earring for the right.
“Are you okay?” Meredith asked. “I heard some of it.”
“It was awful.”
“Is Eden okay?”
“I’ll explain later. Mom will wonder if I don’t hold the baby.” Back in Campbell’s room, Mallory’s mother placed the sweet small bundle in her arms.
The twins stood close together near the window and watched the sky darken. Merry stroked the baby’s dark blond fuzz and said, “I’m so sorry. Do you think we were meant to change this?”
“If we were, we couldn’t. I don’t know which is worse, to live with what you changed or what you didn’t.”
“I hope that someday we get to see why. I can get the rest. But if we couldn’t help Eden, why did we have to know?” Merry asked.
Mally kissed the baby. “Maybe because she helped us. Maybe we owed her to know.”
Their mother said then, “Girls, I’d like both of you to stand in as godmother to him. Adam and my brother will be the godfathers. So if you have ideas for names, now’s the time. I’m thinking Ian.”
“How about Owen?” Merry asked.
“Owen Campbell,” added Mally.
Campbell’s eager smile broadened. “Why, I love that! What do you think?” she asked everyone. “I love that name. Owen Campbell Brynn.”
“It’s perfect,” said Grandma Gwenny, her eyes telegraphing a secret mirth to the girls. “It’s just the right name.”
“And he’s right as rain,” Campbell boasted. “Only five pounds and two ounces but strong as a little pony.”
The door opened, and first Bonnie came into the room, with Kim following her.
“Oh, Cam, congratulations,” Bonnie said. The two women held each other for a long time. “He’s beautiful.”
Campbell said, “I thought I would feel completely terrified at the idea. Maybe it’s hormones, but I think I’m going to do just great.”
“I used to want to adopt a baby. Even before David died. But I’m so old,” Bonnie said. “And so tired. And Dave would never allow it.”
Kim said, “Mom, you’re still young. You look years younger than most moms.” She lied bravely about Bonnie’s looks—as a good daughter should, both twins thought.
“You wouldn’t be embarrassed? At school?” Bonnie asked. “If we had a baby like Mally and Merry?”
“Come on! I’d be crazy about a new baby,” Kim said. “I don’t mean we could replace David. But . . . we have to live, Mom.”
Campbell spoke up, “I sure wouldn’t mind not being the oldest mom at the preschool. You’re three years younger than I am. And if I’d adopted him, I wouldn’t have all this baggy, saggy . . .”
“That’s enough information, Mom,” Merry told Campbell. “It may just be biology but don’t go into it.”
“Hmmmm,” Bonnie said. “I could just eat him up.”
“His name’s Owen,” Tim put in. “His godmothers here named him.”
“I think he named himself,” Mallory said. They all shared a grin. And then Mallory asked, “Mom, do you care if I ride home with Kim and Bonnie? I think I’m coming down with something. I’ll come back after school tomorrow.”
“I’m going to raise him to play three sports,” Adam said. “You don’t have to help.”
“And you’ll love the nice green diapers,” Merry put in. To Mallory she said softly their word that meant love and understanding, “Giggy. Text me if you need me. Grandma’s going to stay with us—like we were two years old.”
“Everyday I wish we were two years old,” Mallory said. She smiled at Kim, who looked a little more like the gentle girl they’d known long ago.
Before.
There were so many times Mally now had to think of a “before.”
She wondered about after . . . and all the afters to come.
“Well, I was the only one here when he came,” Adam was telling Aunt Karin. “Dad was in Deptford taking a delivery. He didn’t even get here until he was out! I guess I’ll be special to him.” Aunt Karin agreed. Mallory knuckled Adam’s head. Her own head weighed a hundred pounds. All she could think of was sleep. She kissed her parents and Grandma and told Merry they’d talk later.
When Bonnie and Kim dropped her off, she saw the envelope between the door and the screen.
She knew it would be there.
She’d had enough of sad messages.
Dear Mally,
I can’t stay. I don’t have the courage to watch my parents go through this. I don’t have the courage to say good-bye. I acted like a man but it’s an act. I have a lot of growing up to do. I may come home next year. I know that I’m needed. But I’m going to have to wait to decide that until this sinks in. You’re going to be a beautiful woman. Maybe I’ll be here to see that. Please stay my friend. Please listen for Eden with your spirit. Please forgive me.
Love,
Cooper
PS. This was meant to be a Christmas present that I never gave you. I’ll wear the gloves every day and pretend you’re holding my hand, okay? That’s pretty sentimental for me. I know you probably made one of these at camp when you were a kid, but this is a real one my uncle made of white gold with your birthstone. It’s not fragile. You can wear it all the time. Of course, it’s a dream catcher. It’s a dream catcher made by an authentic Indian and guaranteed to keep nightmares away. I don’t know how effective it is with other dreams, however. But we can hope for the best.
Still in her long johns, Mallory fell asleep with the card under her cheek and the necklace in her hand. Down she went into the well of sleep, and when the alarm rang, she couldn’t get up. Every part of her ached—her arms, her head, her legs. When she thought of the buzz at school, everyone asking about Eden Cardinal dropping out so close to the end of the year, she wanted to sleep forever. For only the second time in two years, she wanted to be called in and asked Grandma Gwenny to do it. She slept for nine more hours.
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