The Last Woman in the Forest

by Diane Les Becquets

  Ally had a boyfriend then, a pole vaulter and a point guard, but on those late afternoons on the hood of her car, she didn’t talk about Shaun, who’d been captain of the boys’ basketball team for the past two years. After we finished the bread we’d light a cigarette, not because either of us smoked—we didn’t except on those days—but perhaps because we could pretend to be someone other than ourselves. Eventually we’d lie back on the hood, which would sometimes buckle beneath us. We’d talk about life as if anything were possible. I wasn’t college bound like Ally but said maybe I’d go to art school one day and show my paintings in a gallery. The truth was, I wanted to work for a while first, and had applied for a job doing trail work through the U.S. Park Services. As we talked I’d think of kissing Ally. I’d think of running my hand up and down her spine, even though I’d never kissed a girl or a boy before. But Ally wasn’t like me, and I wondered if that difference had created the heat between us on the basketball court.

  Then one day sometime in May, I told Ally I’d been offered a position on the trail crew at Glacier National Park. I would start as soon as school was out. I would be living with the other seasonal employees and would be working three weeks on, one week off. “You’ll be ripped,” Ally told me. She said she was happy for me. Then she said she and Polebridge would miss me, and I told her I would miss her, too. At some point in the conversation while I was still talking, Ally rolled toward me onto her side and pushed herself up on one elbow. I’d finished my cigarette and stopped talking and looked at her. Both of us were smiling as if we were nervous all of a sudden. Ally leaned over and kissed me on the lips. But then she didn’t pull away, and as her lips hovered over mine for that second, I lifted my mouth toward hers and kissed her again, this time tasting the sharpness from her cigarette. She leaned back against the hood of the car. The two of us started laughing, but despite our laughter, Ally reached for my hand and she didn’t let go when we talked of places we’d like to travel to one day, like Paris or Italy or Montreal. We kept holding hands until sometime later when we decided to leave and we climbed off the car.

  * * *

  —

  Years later in my apartment, on the large wall beside my bed, I painted a mural with the Polebridge Mercantile, and a light gray Honda Civic, and two high school girls lying with their backs against the hood and their knees drawn up. The two girls are holding hands and staring up at the sky. There are stars in the sky, as they appeared the last time Ally and I drove to Polebridge, two nights before I started my job at the park.

  I didn’t paint the mural because of any feelings I still had for Ally. She and I had long since moved on. I painted it because I wanted to remember the first time I felt like it was okay to be different, that it was okay to want to work on a trail instead of going to college, to want to live in a small town and not feel like I had to go far away to be somebody, to want to kiss a beautiful woman instead of a beautiful man. I asked J once if the mural bothered her. “Why would it bother me?” she said. “It’s a part of who you are,” and I loved her more.

  There are other murals on my walls. Beside my kitchen is a mural of my mother in her red pickup truck with her window down. She is waving from the truck window, and in the back of the truck are my brother and my sister and me. Though I did not draw my father in that mural, he’s the one she is waving to, and her smile, with her lips pressed together and the corners of her mouth turned up just a little like there is something mischievous behind her thoughts, reminds me of the way my parents still look at each other even to this day.

  My father is a tall man. I learned how to shoot a basketball from his shoulders when I was just three years old. And it is he who taught me about birds—about hawks and eagles and egrets and blue herons. He works as the butcher at Safeway in Whitefish. My mother works at the same grocery store as a pharmacy tech. On their days off we would load up my mother’s pickup truck with tents and sleeping bags and bearproof containers full of food and go hiking and camping in the park. From an early age, I swore I never wanted to live away from my family or from the park with its glaciers and alpine forests and deer that would walk right up to us, and grizzlies and elk and bighorn sheep and mountain goats.

  On the wall space above my headboard is a painting of my father. He is lumbering through the snow, pulling a freshly cut Douglas fir tree behind him that we will decorate for Christmas, with me and my little sister, Emily, trudging through the snow behind him.

  There are two other murals on my walls. In my living room there is a large painting of Avalanche Lake from the park, and the image of me at twenty years old with a young woman named Katie. In the mural, we are working to clear a fallen cedar from the trail. Katie is holding a bow saw and I am holding an axe. The sun is hot on our skin, and Katie is wiping the sweat from her brow with a red bandana that she kept in her pocket. This was my third year working in the park as part of the trail crew. Katie was my senior. She’d worked trail crew at Yellowstone and Yosemite, and three years at Glacier. She taught me how to wield an axe more effectively, throwing the strength of my whole body into it.

  Katie and I didn’t date right away, but eventually we became a couple, and I grew confident in my body as both a lover and a trail crewmember. Though I am not a large woman, only five foot five with a lean frame, Ally was right. I had grown strong and felt proud of what my body could accomplish in a day’s work.

  * * *

  —

  There is another mural in the living area, which I painted a couple of months after J and I met. She is standing tall, with her arms outstretched to her sides. She is wearing a purple knit cap and the autumn leaves are blowing around her feet, and a peregrine falcon is perched on her left arm. This mural might be my favorite. I will never forget that day, when I took J to Dawn of the Wild, a wildlife rehabilitation center for birds, where I volunteer. Dawn of the Wild, staffed with two full-time biologists and the rest volunteers, rehabilitates birds and releases them back into the wild, but sometimes the center provides birds a permanent home should a bird’s injuries be too severe for the bird to be fully restored.

  That was the case with Astor, the peregrine falcon. He was found by an engineer at the Hungry Horse Dam on the South Fork Flathead River and brought to the center with a broken right wing. Treatment of the bird’s injury required amputation. The day I brought J to see the birds, I entered Astor’s netted cage and, wearing a thick leather glove, held my hand up to his chest and told him to step up, which he did. I then brought the bird over to J and told her to hold out her arm. She held both arms out to her sides, as if instinctively for balance. At first her face winced in fear, with the falcon being so close, but eventually she relaxed and I was sure I’d never seen J smile so big. There is a sadness in J’s eyes that seems to always be with her, but that day when I kissed her with the falcon perched on her arm, for that moment her sadness seemed to disappear. J visits the birds regularly with me now. She says they teach her things, like how to maintain one’s wildness while living in captivity.

  * * *

  —

  Last night I put the last piece of lasagna in a container to bring with me to work, and this morning I made a thermos of chai tea. I’ll see J today and that will be good. She doesn’t work tonight, so maybe she’ll come over and we’ll think up something to cook for dinner. Maybe I’ll invite Emily to join us. She is just recently home from college. The other night she stayed over. We stayed up and talked till sometime after two. She said I look really happy, and I told her I am happier than I have ever been.

  PART THREE

  In America, murder is a more honest expression of feeling than making love.

  —JOHN PHILPIN

  28

  PRESENT

  August 2017

  MARIAN

  The Den, Montana

  When the deputy finally arrived, he said he’d been delayed by another call and thanked Marian for waiting. She felt catatonic, give
n everything Nick had told her and the ring she was still wearing and the things she now believed.

  “Are you all right?” the deputy asked her. And she told him she was fine. She led him to where the deer had been ensnared, but by the time they got there, the deer had already broken free, and Marian hoped the doe’s injuries hadn’t been too severe.

  “I’m sure you’re ready to get back on the road,” the deputy said, and he told her she’d done the right thing in reporting the incident.

  Wind crept up through the mountains as she drove back to The Den. She slammed her fists, one and then the other, against the steering wheel. She sped along the curves of the dark highway, around the base of Fritz Mountain and McGregor Peak, through the Kootenai National Forest and the Salish Mountains, as the spin of one memory to another, one lie to the next, all the static over these past months pressed in on her.

  She parked behind the barn—parked this vehicle that for all she knew might contain traces of DNA going back the past six years, from Melissa Marsh, or Lynn-Marie Pontante, or Erin Parker, women whose lives now felt irrevocably intertwined with Marian’s own.

  The lights were out in the house. The lights in Trainer’s hut were out as well. She grabbed her pack and slung it over one shoulder. As she approached the entrance to the barn, the motion light came on. Once inside, she used the flashlight from her phone, not wanting to get the dogs any more excited than they already were. Yeti and Arkansas greeted Marian at their kennel gate. After she let them out, she stopped by the storage room and looked in the cabinets for the dogs’ prescriptions: heartworm preventive, ear wash, antibiotics, and the tranquilizers administered to the dogs when they traveled. Marian opened the bottle of acepromazine. She tapped two tablets into her palm, collected enough spit in her mouth, and washed them down.

  She consoled the other dogs that had stirred, and led Arkansas and Yeti out of the barn with her. Gusts of wind tensed up around them as Marian brought the dogs back to her hut. She got them settled on her bed; she cried into their fur; she let them lick her face. Marian then rose. She told the dogs to stay. She grabbed an extra bar of soap, a towel, and a bottle of shampoo and put them in her shower bag. She stripped out of her fleece jacket, hiking boots, and socks and slipped on her pair of flip-flops. And as she stood in front of her closet, she saw her white silk shirt, her designer blue jeans, and the turquoise-threaded cowboy boots she’d bought in Texas. She thought about the night Tate had taken her to dinner for her birthday, remembered the moment he’d given her the ring and how he’d admired it on her finger—the same ring that had no doubt belonged to Erin Parker. Marian and Tate’s lovemaking had been particularly passionate that night. He’d wanted the lights on; he’d wanted to watch her undress. And then Marian remembered the flyer she’d seen at the convenience store earlier that night, with Lynn-Marie’s picture: She was last seen wearing jeans, a white blouse, and cowboy boots.

  Marian gathered her jeans and silk shirt in one angry sweep and shoved them into the stove. She grabbed kindling and aspen bark and layered them over the clothes. She picked up her butane lighter from her desk and lit the kindling and bark and closed the stove door, all the while convinced that Tate’s arousal the night of her birthday had to do with his memory of Erin Parker and Lynn-Marie. It was their deaths that had incited his passion. The horror of that thought crawled over every part of her like a disease. She tried again to remove the ring, but it wouldn’t budge beyond her knuckle. She imagined Tate’s thrill each time he’d seen the ring on her finger, as if he were reliving Erin Parker’s death all over again. And Marian remembered Nick saying that if Tate were the perpetrator, he would have thought of killing Marian a thousand times over. Marian picked up the cowboy boots and heaved them across the room. “Damn you, Tate!”

  The dogs’ ears went back and Yeti tucked her head into a fold on the bed, and Marian felt terrible and said she was sorry. She turned on her flashlight and walked back down the hill toward the showers, the wind rattling the branches, debris collecting between the soles of her feet and her shoes, shadows dancing across the path in front of her.

  The light blinked out when Marian stepped into the shower, and she thought it was because of the wind. She cursed the wind and the bulb and the electricity and Trainer, who was supposed to have checked on the light while she was away.

  Marian lathered her hands until she could work the ring off her finger. She threw the ring against the shower wall, listened to it hit the concrete and clink against the drain cover, metal against metal as the ring wobbled until it was still and the only thing left was Marian’s rapid breathing and the water running over her. She lathered her hands again, lathered her arms and legs and breasts, scrubbed herself so hard that her skin burned raw. “No,” she cried. “Please God, no.” She let the soapy water run between her legs, let the shower rinse the soap from her skin.

  The door to the shower house opened and closed.

  “Trainer? Is that you?” Her voice was hoarse. “Who’s there?” Marian yelled. She turned off the shower, wrapped her towel around her. She picked up the ring. Her change of clothes—a pair of sweats and a long-sleeve T-shirt—were hanging outside the shower stall. She dried herself off quickly and dressed. She slid the ring into the front pocket of the T-shirt. Maybe she hadn’t closed the door tight behind her. The wind could have swung it open and closed. That was all it was, Marian told herself. Using her flashlight, she stepped over to the sink to brush her teeth and rinse her mouth. And as she brushed her teeth and stared into the mirror, she swore she could see the shower curtain from the stall adjacent to the one she had used moving, as if someone were standing behind it, and all the while Marian told herself she was going crazy. She stared wildly back at her reflection in the mirror. She’d been exhausted, sleeping very little, and the tranquilizers were kicking in, and her mind wasn’t working right.

  Carrying her shower bag, she walked back to her hut. She shut off the light and burrowed into bed between the wall and the two dogs. She wrapped her arm around Yeti, whose back was pressed against her, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out the thrush nest Tate had found for her, on the shelf above her bureau. She scooted out from beneath the covers and crawled over the dogs. She picked up the nest and carried it to the stove, opened the door, and set it inside with the ashes from her clothes. She sank onto the floor and watched the nest catch and go up in flames. She thought of the day she’d spent in the Cabinets with Tate, remembered their conversation in the woods after he’d brought her the nest. When Tate had told her about the artist girl, whom Marian now was convinced was Melissa Marsh, Marian had thought he’d been referring to a girlfriend because of the way he had spoken about her. She could draw hawks, ravens, falcons, any kind of bird, and the detail was extraordinary, Tate had said. Marian remembered the feather tattooed on Jenness’s wrist and the peregrine falcon tattooed on her left thigh. She felt certain Jenness had gotten the tattoos after knowing Melissa Marsh, that the designs were replicas of Melissa’s work. And in that moment Marian knew Tate’s guilt all over again.

  Marian closed the door to the stove and crawled back in bed. She concentrated on the dogs’ breathing, their intake of air and exhalations that were remarkably in sync. Her phone was on her nightstand. The screen lit up. She had an email from Nick. He wasn’t sleeping either, she realized. She read the email message. Jeffrey had already gotten back to Nick. He’d identified the ring. Marian felt a flare of anger in her chest, but she was so exhausted, and she knew sleep was coming fast.

  29

  PRESENT

  August 2017

  NICK SHEPARD

  Bonners Ferry, Idaho

  Cate answered the phone call from the North Carolina area code. “Hello,” and “Yes,” and, “Yes, he is.” And, “That’s good news.” And then, “Yes, we can.” She picked up a pen. She jotted down information on a pad of paper while she continued her dialogue exchange.

  It w
as seven o’clock in the morning. For the past few weeks, knowing the time would come when Nick’s cancer would begin to spread, Cate had been researching clinical trials and operating on three different time zones. At first it looked as if Nick could have his pick, like choosing a second honeymoon destination: Santa Barbara, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; New York City; Denver, Colorado. And then there were the studies themselves: TPI 287 and Ativastin; CC-486 and Vidaza; and a feasibility study of the Nativis Voyager system, which sounded to Nick like the name of a car. “Let’s choose that one,” he’d said. “Maybe we’ll get more mileage.”

  But they quickly learned that qualifying for a clinical trial wasn’t that easy, and there were a limited number of openings in each of the studies. Then Cate found a Phase I expansion study for recurring glioblastoma out of Duke University Hospital. The purpose of the study was to determine the most effective dose of a genetically engineered poliovirus that would be directed into the tumor via a catheter. The virus would attack that portion of the brain, causing inflammation. The patient’s immune system would then respond by attacking the inflammation, hence the tumor.