Waiting for the Night Song

by Julie Carrick Dalton

  She tugged the chain attached to the naked light bulb over the kitchen’s butcher-block island. The wrought-iron trivet that read “Kissin’ Don’t Last, But Cookin’ Do” hung, as it had forever, above the sink. She slumped into an oak chair at the table. The seat’s caning had cracked with age. Sharp edges pushed through her jeans, enough to notice, but not enough to make her get up.

  Tires crunched on the gravel driveway. A string cinched around her heart with a pinch.

  Daniela knocked, but didn’t wait for a response before walking in. She wore light blue hospital scrubs, her hair swept back in a ponytail. She carried a six-pack of beer and a half gallon of mint chip ice cream.

  This woman had Daniela’s jawline and dark eyes, but she felt like a stranger. Cadie gripped the countertop, unsure if she wanted to hug Daniela, shake her hand, or run away.

  “It’s like time stopped in here.” Daniela dropped her provisions on the counter and looked around the cottage. She picked up a Mason jar full of pennies from the counter and put it back down.

  Cadie brushed a crumble of leaves from the curled-up edge of the shirt she had been wearing for four straight days.

  Daniela leaned close to Cadie’s face, pulled a dried pine needle from Cadie’s hair, and grinned, her head cocked to one side. “Have you seen any bears?”

  And there she was. Daniela.

  The naked light bulb cast a cozy glow instead of a glare. Daniela softened the sharp edges, as she always had.

  “No bears.” Cadie picked up a beer and handed one to Daniela.

  “Thanks for coming.” Daniela’s aches had always seemed deeper than Cadie’s. She had this way of smiling with her mouth but not her eyes when she wanted people to think she was having fun or interested in a conversation. Seeing the disconnect on Daniela’s face caused a lump to rise in Cadie’s throat.

  “They haven’t identified the remains.” Daniela twisted the top off a beer bottle. “But there’s plenty of speculation.”

  “And your dad?” The words tasted bitter in Cadie’s mouth.

  “Right now, they’re just talking to him. But he’s scared, I can tell. It’s the same thing all over again. But it’s not going away this time.” Daniela put her beer down and leaned on the counter. “He didn’t do anything. He knows they can’t convict him of anything, but if they start a serious investigation my family’s status could be exposed. And I have a kid now.”

  Cadie choked on a swallow of beer. “You’re a mom? I didn’t know.”

  “Sal. She’s thirteen.”

  Cadie coughed harder, laughing, choking.

  “Sal? Like Blueberries?”

  “Exactly.”

  So much had passed between them in such a short period of time. That one summer took up more space in Cadie’s memory than all her other years combined. Each moment lived large and vivid, easily accessible if Cadie allowed herself to remember them.

  “You smell terrible.” Daniela leaned closer and sniffed.

  “Yeah, I can even smell myself.” She fanned her hand in front of her face. “I’ve been out in the woods for four days. I work for the forestry department through UNH, studying insects. How’d you get my number, anyway?”

  “I looked up your parents, told them I wanted to reconnect. They gave me your cell.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We go to the police first thing in the morning.” Daniela’s words filled the cottage, pressing out against the windows and up against the roof as if the pressure might burst through the walls. “We need to get ahead of this. If they keep looking at my dad for this, they’ll start digging. They’ll take a second look at our papers,” Daniela said. “But you and I can stop the speculation before it gets that far.”

  “Everyone will know what we did.” Consequences. Cadie had set the universe off-kilter by avoiding the natural consequences of her actions. The dark, inevitable shadow chased her in her dreams and woke her in a sweat. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What was equal to and opposite of covering up a murder?

  Cadie laced her fingers behind her head and squeezed her elbows together in front of her face. She wanted to run, to sweat, to open her mouth and roar from deep in her gut until she had no breath left to push the sound out, until she lay empty, flat, like a tube of her father’s used-up oil paint.

  “Let’s go get the gun.” Cadie surprised herself with the suggestion. The past had grown bigger and twitchier since she read Daniela’s text. She could no longer swallow it down and put it back in its hiding place.

  “Now?”

  “Now.” Cadie put her empty beer bottle on the table.

  “I’ve worked two doubles this week. I’m too tired to go traipsing through the woods this late at night.” Dark circles framed Daniela’s eyes, but more than tired, she looked scared.

  “You’re the one who called me to rush home, remember?”

  “It’s been out there for twenty-seven years. It’ll wait one more night.”

  “You’re afraid we’ll find it,” Cadie said.

  “I need one more night before explaining to my daughter what we did.” Daniela dragged her finger through the dust on the counter. “Besides, it’s too dark.”

  “We’ll take flashlights.” Urgency simmered up from Cadie’s gut like steam looking for release. It hissed and burned. It had to be now. “There’s no way I can sleep now. I’m going, with or without you.”

  A gentle buzz settled over her, stirring a memory she couldn’t pull into focus. Not fear or regret, but a reminder of herself, of who she used to be. The Cadie who commandeered lost boats. The girl who rode her bike down hills with her arms over her head. That other Cadie prodded at her from some deep hiding place she had tried to forget.

  “Come on.” Cadie grabbed two more beers.

  Her toes curled in her hiking boots as she remembered the texture of the sun-warped boards beneath her bare feet the day she saw the boat drifting by her pier. Something made her uncurl her toes that day and leap into the unknown. Ever since, she had been walking through life bearing the tension between guilt and consequences unfulfilled. Unbalanced equations.

  Using their phones as flashlights, they worked their way through the woods. The path that once squished under her feet now crumbled and crunched. Cadie paused at a tall pine tree and moved her flashlight up and down the trunk, looking for signs of damage. The tree stood strong, healthy, a bubble of sap assuring her the beetles had not found a home in her woods. At least not in this tree.

  “How is it, moving back in with your parents?” Cadie said.

  “Okay, I guess. It’s temporary. I’ll let Sal settle into school one more semester before we get our own place. She misses her friends, school, you know. She had a hard time spring semester.”

  “How about you?” Cadie asked.

  Daniela did not answer.

  Humidity hung low in the still woods. Stray wisps of hair clung to Cadie’s sweaty neck, although her body shivered uncontrollably. The muscles in her shoulders cinched so tight she imagined plucking them like guitar strings.

  Cadie didn’t need to think about where to put her feet as they wound through the woods. Momentum guided her. The atomic weight of guilt, the incalculable mass accumulated from the compression of energy she left behind, drew her closer. Cadie imagined dirt, stone, and crumbled leaves swirling like a cyclone around the fear she’d left behind in these woods. Faster and tighter, it spun until it forged a pulsing mass with a heartbeat.

  She had always been trapped in this forest’s gravitational pull.

  Not fighting gravity, for once, liberated her. She sprang ahead of Daniela and leapt from rock to rock by the narrow beam of light. Daniela ran behind her. Branches grazed Cadie’s head, twigs snapped under her hiking boots. She ran faster, moved more deftly like a child, running to something, from something. Always running.

  Moths pollinating night blossoms ruffled among the low-hanging branches near the boulder rising up next to the beech tree. Moonlight
sifted down through the sparse clouds casting marbled, shifting shadows on the ground. The dusky silhouette of the beech tree startled Cadie, squashing the hope that her memory had invented the whole story.

  Cadie climbed up the boulder beside the old beech and positioned herself next to the deep hollow where a branch had come down decades earlier. She plunged her arm into the hole. Beech nuts, twigs, and crumbled leaves lined the bottom of the otherwise empty cavity. It had to be there. She scratched and clawed at the corners and crevices, driving a splinter under the nail of her index finger with a blinding stab.

  “It’s not here.” She bit her lower lip to distract herself from the pain shooting through her finger. Cadie swatted at gnats swarming around her neck. In the thin light she saw the shadow of a wide spike embedded under her nail.

  “Let me see.” Daniela grabbed Cadie’s hand when she saw the blood.

  Cadie pressed her lips together as Daniela probed with her fingernails, finally coaxing the splinter out. Every millimeter Daniela prodded magnified the splinter a thousand times in Cadie’s mind. Her brain magnified painful things with exquisite detail.

  “Are you sure this is the right tree?” Daniela said.

  “I’m positive.” Cadie remembered the slope of the rock she had to stand on to reach the hole. She stood inches taller now, and decades had widened the diameter of the trunk, but the dark hollow, the sideways eye, glared back at Cadie with mutual recognition.

  “There are thousands of trees out here. We can come back in the daylight and look.”

  “I’m telling you, this is our tree.” Cadie ran her fingers over the smooth bark.

  “And you’re sure you never moved it?” Daniela said.

  “Never. Did you?”

  “No. This is bad.” Daniela wrapped the edge of her shirt around Cadie’s throbbing finger and squeezed. They sat cross-legged at the base of the beech tree, listening to the whispers of the forest. Moonlight melted down Daniela’s face. Her round cheeks had grown thinner and a few gray hairs speckled her temples.

  The mossy smell of the forest at night—of this particular forest—teased at a memory. A sense of refuge, or of dread. Or maybe both at the same time. She closed her eyes and searched for that slip of time that hovered out of reach, like a color she no longer remembered.

  “It’s my fault they found him,” Cadie said.

  Daniela turned her head and waited for Cadie to continue.

  “I created models indicating where beetles were most likely to kill off pines so we could dig firebreaks in areas with deadwood. Creeks and riverbeds make natural firebreaks, but sometimes they aren’t wide enough. We clear combustible brush so the fire can’t jump the waterways. I sent my projections to local fire stations. Most towns ignored me, but not Maple Crest. They cleared the brush.”

  “On Silas Creek,” Daniela said.

  “Yeah. On Silas Creek.”

  “Do you still believe in trees more than people?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cadie said.

  “When we were kids, I always suspected you talked to trees when I wasn’t around. And now you spend all your time alone in the woods. That’s the last place I’d want to be.”

  Cadie pressed her cheek against the beech tree. If she disappeared, maybe only the forest would care. Sweat trickled down her neck. Even with so many years and wounds between them, Daniela still saw Cadie in a way no one else ever had. Daniela squeezed Cadie’s throbbing finger, the spike of pain anchoring her in the place she had so long avoided.

  “What happens if you prove you’re right about the beetles and the fire risk?” Daniela said.

  “We can monitor the infestation, predict patterns, and thin the pines to prevent fires before they get out of control.” Cadie repeated the line she had recited so many times before.

  Daniela took Cadie’s hand to examine the finger where the splinter had been. Satisfied the bleeding had stopped, she turned Cadie’s hand to inspect the self-inflicted scar on the pad of her thumb.

  “Do you still have your scar?” Cadie said.

  Daniela opened her hand to show Cadie the faint pink line on her thumb.

  “Blood sisters. We were ridiculous, weren’t we?” Cadie said.

  “More than ridiculous.” Daniela’s eyes darted around the woods.

  “Why’d you move back here?”

  “I needed work. The hospital here needed a radiology tech, my parents wanted us to move in. Can’t argue with free rent.” Daniela picked up a small stone and tossed it back and forth between her hands. “All the important decisions I’ve made in my life were made out of convenience, not because I ever had a real plan.” Daniela finished the last of her beer. “I took the first job offer I got after school. I married the first willing guy, then let my parents rescue me when he died. I’m always playing defense.”

  “I’m sorry. What happened to him? I mean, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s okay. A drunk driver hit him five years ago.” Daniela stared into the darkness. “He was a decent guy and a great dad.”

  Cadie wanted to say something supportive, but she had no right to offer life advice to anyone.

  “Think you’ll stay here until Sal graduates?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Daniela sat up straighter and faked a smile. “How about you? Are you seeing anyone? Running away from anyone?”

  Cadie preferred talking about insects over her love life, but her work problems seemed suddenly insignificant compared to Daniela’s situation. And Daniela seemed like she wanted to keep things light.

  “I dated this park ranger from Vermont for a while. We talked about moving in together. But, I don’t know, it fizzled out a couple years ago. It’s been me and the beetles ever since.”

  “Maybe if you worked on your wardrobe and personal hygiene you’d have better luck.”

  Humid air wrapped around Cadie like a familiar blanket as she and Daniela slipped into old patterns. When they were kids, Cadie clung to Daniela’s tender jabs as evidence of their friendship. Daniela’s trust expanded Cadie’s capacity to dream out loud. She allowed Cadie to take risks and never judged her. With Daniela, Cadie had felt powerful and explosive and special. Just as she had when she was eleven, Cadie longed to be worthy of that confidence.

  Even in the clumsy, surface-level conversation, Cadie felt at ease in a way she did with few people. She imagined friendships still came easily to Daniela, who invited people to like her with her unapologetic posture. She could ask questions that Cadie would never dare, but when they came from Daniela, the inquiries felt endearing and considerate. If Cadie did the same, she suspected she would come off as intrusive or nosy. Daniela attracted closeness, tenderness. She would have no need for a friend like Cadie, and Cadie felt childish and small for wishing otherwise.

  Bats circled above their heads, weaving in and out of the trees. Daniela ducked when one dipped low.

  “They won’t bother us,” Cadie said.

  Even alone on her research expeditions, Cadie felt at home among the clicks and chirps of the night forest. The gentle crush of pine needles under her tent as she shifted in her sleeping bag soothed her in a way sheets couldn’t. The mossy tang when she unzipped her tent in the chilled morning air mollified Cadie like a drug. But she missed having occasional company in her tent. The park ranger, who used to wake her with pancakes over the campfire on weekends. Fresh coffee by a fire on a fall morning with him had been the one thing that soothed Cadie all the way to her core.

  But her reluctance to move into his apartment and give up her cairn pushed him away, and he met someone more willing to play house. She missed him in the mornings. Or maybe she missed the body heat and the pancakes.

  Another bat swooped lower than the first. Cadie flinched, and for the first time in a long time, she wanted to go inside.

  Cadie stood up and snapped her fingers as they walked back toward her cottage, a habit she had formed over years spent working in the forest
. “Remember the tambourine you gave me? I still carry it with me on all my hikes to warn bears off.”

  “You do not.”

  “I’m serious. I clip it on my pack every trip. I haven’t been eaten by a bear yet.”

  Daniela stopped walking and looked Cadie straight in the eyes for the first time since she had walked in the door with beer and ice cream.

  “You never told anyone?” Her stare pulled Cadie back in time, reminding her of that trust Daniela had placed in her so long ago. The trust Cadie had betrayed. Her chest ached as if a fist squeezed her heart, wringing the blood out of it.

  “No one,” Cadie whispered.

  A loon wail, hollow and wild, echoed in the cove.

  “Then who took the gun?”

  4

  THAT SUMMER

  Daniela lay on her back with her eyes closed, playing a wooden flute, when Cadie found her on the rock the morning after they met in the woods. She played the same song she had been whistling the day before. Although her eyes remained closed, her face morphed with each note, her eyes squeezing tight at the high notes and her eyebrows rising as she sustained a long tone. Cadie lingered at the edge of the hemlocks to listen.

  Friar nuzzled Daniela’s neck. She scrunched her face at the dog’s wet nose, but continued playing without missing a note. The breathy melody expanded like an organic part of the forest, fused to the air, the leaves, and the stone.

  “Did you see any bears?” Daniela moved the flute from her lips without opening her eyes and put an arm around Friar.

  “No. Did you?”

  “Nope.” Daniela sat up and tucked the flute into her backpack.

  Cadie had braided her hair into neat plaits and chosen a pair of frayed cutoff shorts and a red T-shirt, hoping Daniela would forget about her outfit the day before. In school Daniela hung out with the popular, athletic girls, the ones who traveled in clumps. Daniela walked with long, purposeful strides and never looked over her shoulder to see if her friends followed. But they always followed. Cadie suspected Daniela disdained the pack of girls, but tolerated them rather than waste energy evading them.