“I will,” Lily said, trying to sound happy about the suggestion. “I might like to go for a swim or go out in the canoe before then. If that’s all right.”
“It’s fine,” her father said very quickly, as though to show that he trusted her now, now that she’d reached the age of forty, now that his only son had been drowned through her carelessness, now after everything. No worrying now.
“Oh, and Helen called,” her mother said. “She and Bert should be getting in tomorrow night. They’ll take the other two upstairs rooms, of course.”
It was all Lily could do not to cross her eyes. Her forty-three-year-old cousin was not a virgin, but she and Bert, whom she’d been dating for years, could not bring themselves to share a bed. Lily sometimes found herself speculating on what Bert saw in the situation. Had he no interest in sex? Or an aversion to sex with Helen in particular? Had they taken vows of celibacy? She said, “Still not sleeping together?”
“At least she doesn’t practice serial monogamy,” replied her mother.
That was for those of us who’ve slept with more than one man. Lily carried her bags upstairs and changed into the swimsuit she’d brought with her, a white mail-lot, then coated herself with sunscreen, SPF 45. She braided her long hair, grabbed a beach towel and went downstairs. “Where are the life vests?” she asked her mother, not because she couldn’t have found them but because she wanted to reassure her parents, who must still worry about some things they needn’t have worried over.
“There’s a light blue one that’ll fit you out on the porch railing.”
“Thanks, Mom.” And Lily went over to her mother and hugged her.
Her mother said, “Pretty suit,” in a way that meant she was thinking something critical as well—but restraining herself from voicing the thought.
Lily left before Marie could overcome that self-control.
The life vest did fit her. She fastened it as she walked down to the water.
An aluminum canoe—not the green wooden one she and Ryan and Colin had taken that July day twenty-five years before, the canoe Ryan had then taken out alone, to his death—was upside down on the beach beside the dock. Hastily, Lily rolled it over, dropped her towel inside and shoved it into the water.
She picked up the paddle that had lain beneath the boat, waded into the lake and climbed into the canoe, as steadily as if she’d been out on a canoe every day for the last quarter century, instead of never setting foot inside one since Ryan’s death.
The mosquitoes whined in her ears as she dipped her paddle over the gunwale. She’d been told that taking lots of vitamin B complex would discourage mosquitoes—and make her stink. Both seemed to be true. Nonetheless, she’d brought some light cotton pants and a blouse and hat to put on if they started biting too greedily. The mosquitoes at Swan Lake had, in some years, been measured in numbers per square inch.
Ryan? she thought, reaching out in her heart, remembering a strangely tall and skinny boy who’d been such a pest that long-ago day. He had known of her crush on Colin, and he’d made the most of his power—of any power to tease her, to bother her. Where was he now?
Her take on death was informed by the subject she taught so well—because, she supposed, she’d experienced the death of someone close to her when she was so young. But what she felt about death, what she supposed she believed, had more to do with spirituality than philosophy.
Philosophically, Ryan’s death had taught her that she was mortal, that her parents were, that every living thing and person would eventually die. This was a mortality she really wouldn’t completely accept until she herself died. But spiritually, she wondered if Ryan’s soul was immortal, as Plato would have argued. And she studied the elaborate rites of people since the Cro-Magnon, rites designed to appease the spirits of the dead.
Her brother’s spirit had never come to her, to communicate either forgiveness or condemnation.
Even to talk like Yoda and tell her she was ugly.
Lily paddled across the lake alone, wondering again why she felt guilt toward her brother. Socrates had envisioned a soul that could both endure and think. Didn’t sound too bad, except here in this familiar humid heat, with the canoe weightless on the water and even the mosquitoes so profoundly alive.
Yes, to cheat someone of life was a great crime, and she must answer for it, certainly until she died and maybe afterward.
The old dock drew near. She didn’t mind recalling because she would never forget. Following Colin Gardner into the ice-fishing house, a shell its owner would carry onto the ice in winter. Colin had kissed her and felt her breasts, such as they were, through her bikini top. They had kissed with tongues. French kissing, she’d called it.
She’d done one thing right, though not right enough, and that was to say, Wait, and to peer outside, primarily to see that Ryan wasn’t creeping up to spy on them.
And he hadn’t been.
It had happened so fast. The canoe wasn’t far from the dock, drifting but still on the water, not rocking at all. They’d heard nothing. Ryan must have tried to get into the canoe and slipped into the water. At first, she’d been certain he was hiding, playing a diabolical trick on her—then on her parents, too; it was the kind of thing he’d do, just to see what everyone did. When his body was found, there was no indication that he’d struck his head. He had drowned.
The dock drew closer, and she steered the canoe alongside it and leaned forward for the chalky cotton bowline. She made it fast to a cleat that looked new.
Had someone bought this property?
Incredibly, the ice-fishing house was there. It had been repaired, then allowed to decay. Yet it still looked as though someone used it regularly. And not far away, hanging from a magnificent red maple, was a tree swing. In an adjacent ash was a primitive tree house. Nonetheless, the shore looked very wild—and quite deserted. Lily stepped onto the dock in her bare feet, liking the warm feel of the wood, the water in the air.
She knew she’d like the ground, too, damp and warm, spongy, humus-like, beneath the paper birch lining the shore.
The place of her guilt.
This shack.
Feathers erupted from the undergrowth beside her feet, and she jumped, heart pounding, and sprang back.
Yellow eyes, yellow beak, and gray feathers, great wings lifting. Or one lifted. The other dragged limp.
The face was a lunar circle.
It was an owl, and Lily knew immediately, as she’d known with certainty few things in her life, that it was here in her life for her, that this bird was part of her destiny, part of her past, part of her future.
It was an owl, the bird of death, and it could not fly.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BIRD WAS HURT and frightened. It was also huge, more than two feet tall. A Great Gray Owl. Lily suspected it had been surviving in its injured state for some time, days rather than hours. She didn’t know why she thought this. She’d seldom seen animals in the wild, never come across even a small bird that had been injured or was sick. Dead animals on the road—yes.
But this owl. A Great Gray Owl.
She wished she’d brought her cell phone across the lake. She could call someone. Her parents would know where to take a wounded raptor.
But if she left the owl, she might not be able to find it again. Were they endangered? Was it even legal to pick up an injured owl and take it to help? It seemed to her there were laws against helping eagles and peregrine falcons.
If I don’t help….
She decided. She would get her beach towel from the canoe and throw it over the owl and pick the owl up. If she could do this easily, she would. If it seemed as though she was hurting the owl, possibly making the injury worse, she would not.
She figured she would get one try.
The yellow eyes, a light lemony-yellow, gazed at her.
“I’ll be right back,” she said and crept away through the undergrowth, her toes and the pads of her feet imprinting themselves on the moist, deep earth.<
br />
She glanced over her shoulder at the owl. The creaking of the old dock seemed too loud. Don’t go away, owl.
How far could it go?
Irrelevant. She had no doubt that if any owl, even an injured one, did not want to be caught by her, it could manage not to be caught.
She had to surprise it. If it had no idea what she intended, if she was fast, she could capture it. Years of ballet had made her an athlete. She would never stop dancing, because dancing was her meditation.
Her steps now were dance upon mulch, dance into forest earth turned forgiving in the place where she would be forgiven at her own death.
God, she was sure, forgave her.
But she had made a deliberate choice not to forgive herself the one mistake of leaving her ten-year-old brother unattended by the canoe; part and parcel of that choice was that she’d never make such an error again. She did not live with recklessness, nor with unpredictability. She did not continue relationships with people who were wild cards—and too many were.
Colin Gardner had been.
Not especially wild. He hadn’t, she understood, gotten on well with his father, with whom he’d lived during the school year. His father, she’d been told, had been glad to send him to live with an aunt and uncle, and Colin had been glad to go.
None of that made what had happened with Ryan his fault. The fault was hers, and she accepted it. But she’d never again make the mistake of being around someone like Colin, someone with that charged, creative energy, a way of being that ducked out of and denied basic human responsibility.
She approached the ice-fishing house again. The owl had not moved from its place.
Yes, she’d throw the towel over the bird and herself upon it.
But what if she squished it? Were they delicate, owls? Lily realized she had no idea.
Pale yellow eyes gazed at her.
One chance was all she had, because after that chance the owl would be frightened and much harder to catch.
No hesitation. She held the towel at her waist, spread out like a net she could fall upon. She dove down the instant she dropped the towel, using her falling body to make the towel’s shape more netlike. She needed to make sure the feet didn’t get her; they could probably rip open her hands, her arms.
She had it.
The shape trapped within the towel, trapped against her middle and her thighs, was both smaller and lighter than she’d expected. She tried to feel for the feet and grabbed the owl’s leg instead and decided that was better. But the free foot tore the towel and her skin. She grabbed at it awkwardly and couldn’t catch it. Then she managed with the hand holding the other leg.
The hand not holding the legs was sticky and she saw blood oozing down her thigh, too, from a gash there.
Would she need antibiotics? Lily didn’t care. She had the owl, and she held it against her, not releasing its legs, as she stood. How could she paddle and hold the owl? Her hand was already beginning to cramp.
What had it been doing here, anyway? Here, where she’d failed. Ryan had died in the lake. It was where she, Lily, had lapsed and changed so many lives forever.
She carried the owl—the incarnation of feather-light—over the creaking dock. I caught a wild raptor. I did it.
She would take it back to her parents’ house—to Camp Death—and they would tell her who to call, where to take the bird.
Without using her hands, busy with the owl, Lily stepped into the canoe. She sat on one of the seats and arranged the owl so that one arm held it, the same cramped hand clutching its legs.
Swan Lake was half a mile across and one mile long. The trip to her parents’ beach was just over a half mile.
The owl must really be mostly feathers to weigh so little, Lily reasoned as she paddled. It moved not at all now, or not so that she could feel any movement.
They made good time.
She stumbled getting out of the canoe, her bare feet slipping in the shallow water, in the mud, over smooth rocks. The bird stirred and she said, “It’s all right, owl friend.”
For the first time, she knew comfort in being back at Swan Lake, back in the North Woods. She was used to the world of beach tar, to swimming in the Santa Barbara Channel every day. She never told anyone where she was going, and she swam alone. In doing so, she was endangering no one but herself. However, she felt divinely protected. Because Ryan had drowned, she would not. She was certain of this.
This was another world, this place of wet air and mosquitoes and heat, heat that Santa Barbara did not know. But nature soothed, a balm.
Rather than remove the towel from the bird, she decided to take it as it was to someone who could help. Someone else might have to drive her.
Her hand, holding the owl’s legs, shook, numb.
Her father stood just below the porch, facing the lake, with a couple of women in motorcycle leathers—part of the prayer group?
Lily supposed she could put the owl in a cardboard box to transport it wherever it needed to go.
“Lily!” Her father called her over, and she trudged toward him, keenly aware that she was scratched and bloody from the owl’s talons. But her parents, too, would understand the need to get the owl to a wildlife hospital.
“Dad, I found an injured owl. I think its wing is broken.”
Her father and the bikers gazed at her with interest.
“You should have those cuts seen to,” her father said. “I’m sure they can get infected. It looks like you might need stitches. Is the owl under there?”
“Yes. I found it over by the old dock. I’m fine.”
“An owl,” said one of the women.
“Ask your mother to find the number of the Aerie for you.”
“The Aerie?”
“The North Woods Aerie. They rehabilitate sick raptors and provide a refuge for those that can’t be released. Colin Gardner runs it.”
Colin Gardner? Not— But it had to be, or her father would have explained that it was a different Colin Gardner. And hadn’t Colin always been fascinated by every hawk and eagle and owl he saw, and when they were children hadn’t he said that he was a Scottish chieftain galloping across the highlands with a falcon on his arm?
“I thought he left. I thought he lived somewhere else.” She mustn’t let go of the owl’s legs, or she was sure its talons would get her again—and it could get free and injure itself further.
Were her parents on speaking terms with Colin Gardner? They had so thoroughly blamed him for Ryan’s death—had blamed him and held Lily blameless—or forgiven her, at any rate.
Her father must have noted her expression. He assigned it his own explanation. With an unenthusiastic look, he told her, “Well, he lives here now. He owns some of the property across the lake, actually. His place—and the Aerie is part of it—extends north quite a ways, I think almost to Canada.”
Her father’s tone lacked acerbity. What did that mean? And what was Colin Gardner like now? He’d been part of the biggest disaster of her life—may no greater catastrophe ever touch her. No mistakes was Lily’s rule in life. So—had she made a mistake by picking up the owl instead of leaving it to its own devices or calling a professional to pick it up?
No. This time she’d gone on instinct, and she’d done well. Could she switch her right hand, holding the owl’s legs, with her left?
She took the owl inside and very carefully changed the way she was holding it. Relief. Her numb hand trembled against the towel.
Marie came down the stairs and said, “Lily, what have you done to yourself?”
After learning about the owl, her mother said, “Well, we’ll have to take it down to the Raptor Center at the university.”
Lily perched on the edge of one of the mismatched—but beautiful—chairs near the maple table that had been part of her childhood. “Dad said there’s a raptor center nearby.”
“If you can call it that. It’s just him and one very messed-up child and an elderly woman who comes and helps, I believe. Maybe a
few other people. They’re not professionals.”
“Is there a veterinarian?” Clearly, Marie would prefer to drive all the way to Minneapolis rather than deal with a person whose name she couldn’t bring herself to utter.
“Well—he has some training of that kind. It’s up to you if you want to take it there. It makes me absolutely sick to see how he’s raising his son. I think homeschooling’s all right if a child has siblings, but they are so isolated.”
So Colin Gardner had a child. And a wife hadn’t been mentioned. Immediately, a scenario sprang into Lily’s mind. Colin was divorced and had bullied his wife so that he received custody of his son. Of course, that didn’t have to be the picture, but she thought it often was with custodial fathers.
Her mother’s view was no kinder. “It’s no surprise how the man’s turned out. Not that he hasn’t changed. But he’s grown into exactly the kind of person I thought he would. All friendly on the surface but very angry underneath. Of course, he was a very angry young man.”
Lily did not remember this.
“If you’re going to take the owl there,” her mother continued, “I think I should make the call. And I should drive the bird.”
“Why?”
“Well, you can do as you like—you always do. I just assumed you wouldn’t want to have to speak with him or see him.”
“The owl is important, Mom.” She’d told her how the Great Gray had erupted from the ground, demanding her. “I want to take the owl myself, wherever it goes. We could take it together.”
“If you want to take it, you may as well go yourself. I get no pleasure from seeing Colin Gardner. To come back here and buy that property. Taunting us. It was very cruel.”
Lily considered this in silence.
“I’ll call him,” Marie repeated, reaching for the princess wall phone. Lily noted that it had buttons and wondered if her parents still had any rotary phones. They did have an answering machine—with a message about Camp Boreal.
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