Waiting for the Night Song

by Julie Carrick Dalton

  Fire in Hobson, JUST like you predicted!

  Are you watching Hobson?

  Holy shit. This fire underscores every point in your presentation.

  WHERE ARE YOU? Call asap.

  The fire was small, but the ramifications could be huge.

  Cadie paced in front of the door, watching Sal and scanning the room for Clyde as the clock over the exit ticked off each long, slow second.

  22

  THAT SUMMER

  “I’m still not sure why we’re doing this,” Cadie’s mother said as they drove over to Crittenden Farm to join in the search for Juan.

  “The kid’s been missing for days,” her father said.

  Cadie slumped down in the backseat.

  “He’s not a kid. It says he’s twenty-two,” her mom said.

  “But he’s still missing. I talked to Raúl about it yesterday and he’s pretty upset. Says Juan is really reliable, and apparently, he didn’t take anything with him. Not his money or family photos. He didn’t even cash his last paycheck from the farm or say good-bye to anyone.”

  “There’re thousands of acres of woods around here,” her mother said. “What do they think we can accomplish?”

  Cadie dug her fingernails into her thigh, trying to push out images of Juan’s misaligned buttons.

  “I doubt this will do much good, but Raúl went through a lot of effort to organize this. He’s even putting up a reward and Dolores is making lunch for everyone who shows up to help.”

  “Mrs. Garcia is helping?” Cadie bolted upright in her seat. Dolores knew as well as Cadie did that they weren’t going to find anything near Crittenden’s.

  “Turns out he works at the hardware store, and I guess they really like him.”

  “It feels like too much of a coincidence that he disappeared the same day as the convenience store robbery and shooting,” her mother said.

  “Juan didn’t shoot anyone,” Cadie said.

  Both of her parents whipped their heads around. The car veered onto the shoulder and her father jerked the steering wheel to right the car.

  “Oh, honey. I didn’t realize you knew him,” her mother said.

  “I don’t really. He was, he is Daniela’s friend. He wouldn’t shoot anyone.”

  Her parents exchanged a concerned-parent look.

  “If you don’t want to go, we can take you home,” her father said. “It never occurred to us you might know him. I’m sure Juan is fine. I think it would mean a lot to the Garcias if one of us showed up, but we don’t both need to be there.”

  “I’m fine. I’ll go with you,” Cadie said.

  Dozens of cars lined the driveway to the farm. Why had all these people showed up to look for someone most of them probably didn’t even know? Cadie sloshed through the muddy ruts in the driveway and made her way to one of the barns where people had gathered. Raúl distributed whistles and gave people instructions on where to go.

  “Blow your whistle if you find anything,” he told everyone as he handed out maps. The smell of pupusas wafted over to where Cadie stood. She let go of her mother’s hand and walked toward the smell.

  Dolores stood at a folding table to the side of the barn, handing out pupusas wrapped in paper towels. Cadie’s stomach churned, but not with hunger. Dolores’s shoulders were hunched and she moved in tight, jerking motions, slapping away hands that tried to grab second helpings.

  Her skin looked almost gray against the backdrop of the weathered barn. Cadie stood in the driveway watching Dolores flicker smiles and accept compliments on her cooking. She paced behind the table during the breaks between hungry people.

  Mud seeped through Cadie’s sneakers.

  Dolores stared up at the sky and twisted her necklace around her finger, released it, and twisted it again. When she lowered her eyes, she caught Cadie watching her. She scrunched her forehead up and seemed to be asking Cadie a thousand questions at one time. Are you okay? Are you going to keep our secret? Will you protect my family?

  Cadie shoved her shaking hands into her shorts pockets and nodded at Dolores.

  Two men walked by munching on Dolores’s cooking. “You know what they’re saying, don’t you,” one man said to the other. “Garcia arranged this whole fake search party to cover his own ass. Heard he and Hernández got into it the day he disappeared. Punches thrown, shouting. Then the guy disappears, and all of a sudden Garcia’s his best friend?”

  “I just came for the food,” the other man said.

  Cadie wanted to scream at them. Raúl had nothing to do with Juan’s disappearance. Cadie had witnessed the argument. Yelling, yes, but no one threw any punches. How dare they eat the Garcias’ food while accusing him of murder?

  Dolores, out of earshot of the men, picked up a pupusa and extended it toward Cadie. She gestured for Cadie to come get it. Cadie could not go near Dolores. Not now, maybe not ever. She could still feel the pressure of Dolores squeezing her hand as they prayed on the banks of Silas Creek. She had felt Dolores’s sorrow and fear in the sinewy muscles of her hand. Cadie had enough ache of her own now. She didn’t want any more of Dolores’s.

  Cadie felt trapped in Dolores’s stare, afraid to keep staring at her, but afraid to look away. She didn’t notice a man step up to Dolores’s table and help himself to lunch. The man followed Dolores’s stare and Cadie felt him watching her. She shifted her gaze and found herself staring at Clyde.

  A fierce pain gripped her chest and she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to run, but her feet seemed stuck in the mud. Clyde looked at Dolores, then back at Cadie, as if to remind her of his threat. You don’t want your friend to disappear, do you? He lifted his pupusa to his mouth and took a bite, chewing slowly with his mouth open. He wiped his mouth with his hand and tossed the paper towel on the ground. Clyde pointed a finger at Cadie, stabbing at the air as if he could hurt her from yards away.

  Cadie turned and ran. Dolores yelled after her, but she didn’t stop. She bumped into someone, but she didn’t see who, then someone else, but she kept running down the driveway. Mud slapped against her legs, and the farm blurred into a swath of trees and bodies. Voices called out to her and she heard his heavy footsteps thumping behind her.

  She leapt over a low stone wall at the edge of the woods and hurled herself into the forest. Thorns whipped across her legs, branches smacked her in the face. Feet thrashed through the underbrush, getting closer, closer. She could smell the stale tobacco on his breath. Her lungs burned as she plowed blindly between trees. Just when she felt she couldn’t keep going, two large hands grabbed her and pulled her to the ground.

  “No, no,” she yelled, and thrashed against the arms pinning her. “Let me go.”

  “Cadie.”

  “Don’t touch me.” Tears blurred her eyes as she pounded her fists against Clyde.

  “Cadie, it’s me. It’s Dad.”

  Cadie wriggled free to see her father sitting next to her in the mud. “What happened? Who did you think was chasing you?”

  “The person who killed Juan,” she blurted out without thinking.

  “No one said anything about Juan being killed. We don’t know where he is, that’s all.” Her father pulled her close and she sat on his lap, sobbing. “I had no idea this would scare you so much. I’m so sorry. I’m going to take you home. You’re okay. No one is going to hurt you.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes, her father rocking her back and forth until her breath calmed. Beyond the edge of the woods, cars rolled down the driveway as more people arrived to join the search efforts. Her chest ached with a hurt deeper than guilt, a pain greater than loss. An overwhelming premonition that nothing would ever feel normal again.

  A chorus of chirping crickets filled the forest. She picked up a small rock and squeezed it with all her might. She didn’t know how to pray to whatever Dolores believed in, so instead she called on the highest power she knew—the forest—to keep her and her secrets safe.

  23

  PRESENT DAY

 
; “The question is not whether the mountain pine beetle has migrated to New England forests. The question isn’t even what are we going to do now that we know it’s here.” Cadie practiced her opening remarks as she sped toward the ethics committee hearing. After driving Sal home from tutoring at the rec center, Cadie had zero margin of error if she was going to make it to the hearing. “The question is whether you are going to suppress research that you know is solid to appease Washington. Science or politics? Which one are you going to side with?

  “We have a responsibility to act, to head off a disaster on the scale of what we’ve seen in Colorado and California.” She mentally flipped to a dramatic slide of a forest fire. “It will be our fault when the fires get out of control, our fault when more homes burn or people die. If we don’t act, we will bear the guilt because we are the ones who saw it coming and did nothing because we caved to political pressure.”

  Maybe she should tone down the melodrama, like Thea said. No. She needed to scare them. She wanted to scare them. The thin haze of smoke thickened from a barely noticeable veil when she got on the highway to a denser fog sliding in from the west where a shroud blurred the mountains.

  A pickup truck going forty-five miles an hour held up the traffic in front of her. “Get out of the fast lane,” she muttered as she swerved past the line of vehicles and sped up.

  She put the window down and let her hair blow in the wind. A stagnant cloud of smoke hovered over the mountain separating the highway from Hobson. At least the wind had calmed, which would help contain the fire thirty miles from Maple Crest.

  “We’ve seen a four-degree change in the temps in New Hampshire in less than a century. That’s wildly disproportionate to the average increase in the rest of the world. We are the canary in the coal mine. Vegetation is migrating. Habitats are shifting. Warming temperatures have disrupted the equilibrium in our ecosystem. That is the permanent situation no one wants to talk about.”

  The committee would agree with her recommendations to thin trees ahead of the beetles. How could they ignore the facts? Even if they were obtained illegally.

  “When they closed off public lands for environmental research they sent a clear message: They don’t want to know the truth. But truth lasts longer than fear or ignorance. I refuse to play by false rules when I know the risk we face.”

  The air blasting through the car window tasted like the remnants of a barbeque. If not for the smear of smoke on the horizon, it would have been a perfect late-summer day.

  The black bear on the side of the road could have been a boulder or a stump, camouflaged against the woods.

  The thick mass of fur and limbs went from motionless to flying in half a second.

  The black blur lunged from the woods, interrupting Cadie’s speech rehearsal. She slammed on her brakes and fishtailed, narrowly missing a car next to her. She nicked the bear’s hindquarters, and the animal ricocheted into the pickup truck behind her. The truck hit the animal broadside with a hollow, wet thud. The forest spun past Cadie; around her, brakes screeched as she fought to right her car.

  She skidded sideways and saw the bear tumble and roll and get hit again. She felt herself scream, but did not hear her voice over the squealing of brakes and crunching of metal around her.

  She missed the guardrail by less than a foot, but the three cars behind her collided into a tangle that spanned the road. Everything fell silent around her. She peeled her fingers from the steering wheel and took inventory. No pain. No injury. Outside, car doors opened. Car doors slammed. She became aware of blurred bodies moving outside. A man knocked on her window to see if she was hurt and she waved him off.

  With the mess of vehicles blocking the road in front of her and traffic quickly piling up behind, Cadie’s car was blocked in.

  The ethics committee would be convening in twenty-five minutes. Cadie beat her fist on the steering wheel. She stepped out of her car to a silence that swelled from a murmur to a collective panic. A child wailed. People talked into cell phones, yelled at one another. No one appeared injured, as far as she could tell. She walked around her car to survey the damage. Her blood-smeared driver’s side fender had crumpled, but not enough to prevent her from driving—if she could get around the pileup.

  The bear, sprawled out and bloodied on the ground in front of an SUV, looked across the macadam at Cadie. Its wet eyes pleaded with her.

  A man circled the bear, inching closer, then jumping back when the animal groaned.

  The bear blinked twice at Cadie, drawing her close. Never look a bear in the eyes, she cautioned herself. But she couldn’t turn away. With slow steps, she crept toward the animal, keeping her body low, her arms at her sides to appear small and unthreatening. The bear did not react as she crouched twenty feet away.

  “Are you crazy? Move back,” a voice shouted at her.

  The bear’s right front leg twisted at an unnatural angle. Blood from a wide gash on its belly pooled on the road. She repositioned herself so she wouldn’t have to look at its intestines spilling onto the street. The smell of blood and offal overpowered the smoke in the air.

  The bear did not appear able to move, but its eyes followed Cadie. Blood and mucus trickled from one nostril.

  “It’s okay, friend,” Cadie whispered, still several feet away from the animal. The bear’s hind legs twitched and it let out a low, guttural groan. The lament reverberated inside Cadie until it blocked out the clatter swirling around her. The pool of blood expanded into a river on the sloped pavement, running toward the edge of the highway. Toward the woods.

  Cars on the opposite side of the highway median flew by, unaware that a bear was dying and that they had all collectively killed it. Timbering forests, cutting paths for power lines, polluting the air. Corporations burying science. All creating the conditions for a fire that would drive this bear into moving traffic.

  Stones dug into Cadie’s palms as she crawled over the hot pavement.

  Everyone should have to face the things they kill.

  The animal let out a low, wet moan, followed by several stuttered, shallow breaths, and closed its eyes. People milling around in Cadie’s peripheral vision blended into a smear of color and muted sounds. She crept closer on all fours, ready to spring back if the bear moved. The gamey air hung hot with grease and blood, mixed with spent fuel and desperation rising off the asphalt.

  The raspy breath sounds from the unconscious animal slowed, then stopped.

  Cadie inhaled deeply, holding the bear’s final breath in her lungs until it burned. She sank her fingers into the coarse fur on the animal’s neck.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered close to its ear, and stroked its fur.

  She increased the pressure on the bear’s neck, seeking out contact with its skin, sticky with blood. A weak pulse fluttered against her fingertips. Thick neck muscles stiffened and fell slack under her hand. A gentle warmth moved up Cadie’s arm and torso, uncoiling the knots in her own neck and back as the bear slipped away.

  Approaching sirens and stranded drivers yelling at cell phones spun into a background hum. A thick wood flanked the highway, arching down into a valley where countless deer, moose, bear, and foxes took refuge from the fires pushing them from their homes. Motionless cars lined up behind them as far as she could see.

  Cadie got back in her car, and inched her way back and forth until she found a narrow path around the pileup.

  “Hey, you can’t leave the scene.” A teenager banged his hand on the hood of her car as she maneuvered toward the shoulder. Cadie ignored him and drove off as the first emergency vehicle lights flashed in her rearview mirror. The rumble strips on the side of the road rattled her teeth. She clenched her jaw and accelerated toward the university.

  * * *

  Cadie sprinted up the stairs and burst through the stairwell doors into the third-floor hallway. Bodies lined the dark corridor, some standing, some seated with their backs up against the wall. She stopped, confused by the crowd. A young woman with faded
purple hair stood up and started a slow, rhythmic clap as Cadie walked down the hall. Students wearing shirts from colleges all over New England joined the steady beat, clapping, stomping, pounding on doors as if they were marching her off to battle.

  A lump rose up in Cadie’s throat as she tried to maintain her composure. Who were all these people who had shown up for her? She nodded awkwardly at the crowd as she made her way to the assigned room. The slow, steady beat continued as she opened the door, and persisted after she closed it behind her.

  Thea stood in front of the committee, pointing to one of Cadie’s slides projected on the wall.

  “Nice timing,” Thea said without looking at Cadie. “We started without you.”

  “Did you get my message? There was an accident. They closed the highway.” She brushed her hair out of her face and tried to compose herself. Her hands smelled of bear and death.

  “We’ve been reviewing your research,” said Dr. Larry Spencer, a professor Cadie had worked for years earlier.

  “Then you understand the beetles are responsible for much of the die-off.” Cadie tried to catch her breath and sound calm. “You saw the data. Forget my slides and look out the window.” Cadie gestured to the windows facing out toward the highway. “I’m sorry I’m late, but you need to understand why.”

  Thea gave Cadie a cautionary look.

  “I hit a bear on the way here. A black bear. It ran out of the woods onto the highway. The entire southbound lane of 93 is closed because I hit a bear. My right front fender is a crumpled mess and I think I broke a bunch of laws by leaving the scene of the accident to get here. But this is important.

  “I’m the one who hit the bear, but why did it run onto the highway? Because its home was on fire,” Cadie said. “It’s going to happen again and again, but it’s not just the animals that will be displaced or injured. It’s us. No one got hurt in Hobson. That might not be the case next time.”

  Thea nodded to Cadie to continue.

  “We can prevent some of these fires if we can predict where they will happen and head them off. I prepared this presentation for you, but you can read my slides on your own if you want. Look out the window. That cloud of smoke you see, that’s all the evidence you need.” Her voice no longer shook. She stared above the heads of the committee members at the smoke as it stretched out over the mountains. “Hobson is burning right now. People are evacuating. Tomorrow it will be another town. Then another. Washington can tell you to look away. But I’m begging you, look out that window.”