She was in the closet of her childhood bedroom, looking for some extra tent stakes, and turned to stare at him, shaking her head in disbelief. Dix filled the frame of the doorway to the hallway. The creases on the sides of his mouth looked raked in.
“I’m serious, Colden.”
“I’ll bring my fishing pole. I can hook someone if they mess with me.”
“You said yourself that there’s weird stuff going on out there.”
“Nothing that requires a damn gun.”
“Not yet.”
“C’mon. I have a black belt, remember? All the tournaments you schlepped me to?”
“That was a long time ago. And no use against someone who might be armed. Which every hunter and trapper out there will be.”
“A gun in a pack is dangerous,” Colden pointed out.
“True,” Dix confirmed.
Sally showed up alongside Dix. He moved to let her through.
“So, here. Carry this instead,” Sally said, handing Colden a can of pepper spray.
“I have bear spray, Sally.”
“Great. This is douchebag spray.”
If only I could use it on a certain professor down in Albany, Colden thought.
She took the canister from Sally. It was a small item with little weight that would be easy to carry and would make her parents happy.
“OK, OK, I’ll carry the douchebag spray.”
Dix and Sally dispersed and left her to her preparations.
Colden found the snows almost fully retreated and the woods filled with multitudes of greens so fresh, they seemed to glow. The ground squished under her boots. The air was scented with moist earth and damp decay. Birds twittered in the air, and chipmunks rustled in the undergrowth. She had left the ATV at home and was happy to be carrying all her needs for the next few days on her back. By late afternoon on her first day out, she made it to the reed-filled shores of a small lake she wanted to survey. She set up her tent in the soft duff under a cluster of trees, then sat and listened as the loons sent their laments over the dark, flat water.
Colden was alone. She was sure of it. Like any animal comfortable in the wilderness, she had an acute sense of when her kind was near. There had been many times she’d paused on a trail, felt a breeze of caution cross her skin, and then let her eyes drift until they found a camouflaged hunter sitting in a deer stand, completely unaware of her. Other times, she’d paused on a rock outcropping for a rest or a snack and inexplicably felt compelled to move away to a more private spot, just before a group of hikers appeared and settled themselves, chattering like crows, right where she’d been. She had been out assessing lakes like these and found herself stepping into deeper cover just as a canoe with two fishermen silently paddled into view. At this moment, at this lake, she was confident and serene in the conviction that, for a very comfortable distance, it was just her and whatever other wild creatures were making this area their home.
Colden spent two days surveying beaver ponds and documenting new construction and chewed saplings, along with moose prints, scat, and browse. She found a fresh shed of butterfly-shaped antlers, noting the tiny marks where mice and chipmunks had been gnawing at the nutrient-rich rack. One evening, as she stood outside her tent sipping tea, a large beaver appeared in the lake, swam closer to her, then slapped her spatula tail on the water, the sound loud enough to report and echo off a rock outcropping nearby.
“No worries, my friend,” Colden whispered into the quiet after the beaver had retreated. “I’m here to protect you.”
Colden found a small flat rock at her feet, cocked her arm backward, and skipped the stone across the lake. Twelve bounces. Her Dad had reached eighteen or more. Her record was fourteen. Too bad no one was there to see, she thought. Only, not really. Colden didn’t require or even desire a witness to her life. She was alone, yet not lonely. When she’d had a regular boyfriend, or even just a guy interested in her, even if she really liked him, she had also felt constrained, like she was wearing shoes half a size too small. Invariably, the guys became vaguely dissatisfied with her. They complained that she was always busy. Too self-contained.
One had said she didn’t need him enough. She’d responded that she didn’t need him at all. It was clearly not the response he’d been hoping for.
Colden knew she was fortunate to “do the work you love,” as has been so often advised. Yet, standing on the edge of the lake, skipping rocks and watching the distant beaver, she felt content and also remote from the passion she’d once felt for this sort of work. The ebb and flow of enthusiasm for a project was normal and expected. Helicopter rides were exciting; crunching numbers, not so much. This was a different sensation. She was starting to feel like she was just doing an assignment. She chafed at the restrictions, the reporting requirements, the consensus building.
She was aware this was a fault in her, not the project. People called her ambitious, and in their mouths, the word always sounded like an insult. But the accusation was true. She wanted to make a difference somehow, and she wanted her life to have meaning. She wanted to accomplish all this in her own way, and that was ambition, pure and simple.
For two days, she’d forced herself to focus on beaver and moose. She’d done the work she needed to do. Now, she could go hunt down the camera traps on her personal project. The thought and effort were thrilling. She broke her first camp and hiked deeper into the mountains to the places where she’d set the camera traps. One camera had become dislodged somehow and was dangling from its perch. The others were where she’d left them. If hunters or trappers were in here, they hadn’t found or had chosen to ignore her equipment. It took her two more days to find each spot, pull the data cards, clean the lenses, re-secure the equipment. Another full day to hike all the way back out to her truck. She grabbed a premade sandwich on her way home, got back after dark, bypassed the house, went straight to the cottage, and without even removing her boots, opened her laptop and began clicking through grainy black-and-white images.
The cameras were triggered to take pictures by motion. She saw crows. A fox. Deer. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. A waving branch over and over and over. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. There was one data card left. She sighed, rubbed her face, closed her eyes, and said, “please, please, please” out loud to whatever science gods might be listening, then began clicking. The first few images were strange, still pictures of the small clearing and stump where she’d directed the camera. She’d hoped the stump would be a likely scent-marking spot. She stared at the screen. Odd. She saw no creatures or movement. A bird or a branch just out of view must have set off the motion detector. Then she saw the tail of another fox. Then something else. Tail and hindquarters, mottled gray fur, bushy tail. Her heart raced with hope and excitement far ahead of her thoughts. She reined them in. The animal was lean. Maybe sixteen inches tall. Nope. Not big enough, tail not brushy enough, hindquarters not beefy enough. Maybe a young animal? No, too early in the season. She clicked to the next photo. A shoulder. It was just a coyote. A normal coyote.
Damn. Oh well. What did she expect? People had studied wolves in the wild for years before getting a glimpse of one, relying on scat and kills to gather information. Besides, the animal she was after might not exist at all. There was nothing to do but to keep trying until she got something or gave up. She wasn’t much of one for giving up, though, and this thought made her both determined and exhausted.
There were a few more pictures to go through. A couple of blanks set off by who knows what. Then, an image with a dark, indistinct shape filling half of the frame. A bear? Maybe. They’d be coming out of their winter torpor and be very hungry. Her bait would certainly be attractive. Odd, though. It would have to be a bear standing on its back legs. Whatever this was was tall. Maybe a bear reaching up to scratch or something. There was another shot of the coyote. This time, she could see its muzzle. Yep, a coyote for sure. She was disappointed but not discouraged. She’d get some more cameras. She’d try another area. There was no hurry
. She had no deadlines and no one to report to.
She stretched her arms over her head. Scanned the news. Some celebrity scandal. Some political scandal. It all seemed so far away and irrelevant. She checked her e-mail and deleted a few dozen solicitations, announcements, LinkedIn notifications, and science-nerd LISTSERVs. The only personal correspondence was a note from Drew. The subject line said, “Sugar.” She couldn’t figure out why. Then she remembered he’d said at dinner that someone had poured sugar into the tank of a skidder. He’d commented that it didn’t do the damage that people generally and erroneously thought it would, but this person had also cut the machine’s gas lines and punctured the tires, as if for good measure. His note was brief.
Hey girl, any news?
The e-mail made her feel annoyed at him for some reason, for no reason. Maybe just annoyed in general. She didn’t want to be pressed.
My dad and I are asking around, she typed, knowing that she was doing no such thing and unsure if her dad was or not.
Gotta be circumspect, you know? she added.
She hit “Send.” She should have been nicer, she immediately thought. This was a familiar self-reprimand. She was more prone to irritability than she liked to admit.
There was one more e-mail in her in-box, this one from an unfamiliar address. The message also began with the words, Hey Girl. At first, she thought it was another note from Drew. There were only a few sentences. The writer asked how she was. If she was around, in the area, on certain dates. Liam. She reflexively checked her calendar. The dates he suggested were next week. She had a flash of insult. Way to give me warning, she thought. Then she reminded herself that she hadn’t checked her e-mail in more than a week. And that the note contained a specific apology for the late notice. Said an unexpected trip her way had come up. She felt her face flush and her heart speed up like a revved engine as she stared at the name at the end of the note.
Not sure, she tapped into a reply. Nice to hear from you. She deleted this sentence. Then wrote instead, Is your wife coming along on this trip??? She quickly hit “Send” before she could change her mind and was immediately bowled over with a crashing wave of regret.
It’s not like they were dating. It was just a one-night stand. She didn’t know if he was married. The source of her information was unreliable. But still. She should have been more subtle. Or more polite. Just told him she heard from someone that he had a wife, and she wasn’t interested in participating in infidelity. Why had Larry even told her? What a jerk. She wondered if he treated everyone the way he treated her. She’d have to ask around. But whom would she ask? She’d be seen as a complainer, someone looking for trouble. Or labeled “too sensitive.” The standard way to keep ambitious women just a rung or two below where their skills would otherwise take them. Just brush it off; just ignore it—that’s what they’d say. Or not say, but imply. She needed a beer or a cup of tea. She needed a bath and some sleep. The sandwich she’d picked up sat next to her computer, still wrapped. Her head ached, and her stomach rumbled. She wrote another quick reply to Liam that just said, Sorry. Heard a rumor. None of my business, really.
Her e-mail pinged. She hoped and feared it was Liam with either an explanation or insulted outrage at her rudeness. She wanted something, anything, that could close this chapter with a definitive door slam. Or opening. The e-mail was from Drew, asking if she would be in Albany anytime soon. Could they have coffee or dinner?
She hadn’t planned on going to Albany anytime soon. But it might be good to check in at her office. She was caught up, for the moment, on fieldwork. She had to get the data cards back into her camera, but there was no deadline on that. Albany was just a couple of hours’ drive.
She tapped a reply saying that, yes, she was going to be there next week. There. Now she had a real reason to say no to Liam, no matter what he replied. If he replied.
13.
The next morning, when Colden wandered up to the main house from the cottage, Sally was sitting on the back deck, her feet propped on the rail, her fingers wrapped around a cup in her lap. Dix and his truck were gone.
“Not going into the office today?” Colden asked.
“Nope. Decided to take a mental health day. Too beautiful to be inside.”
Colden looked around her. The lawn was a rich, iridescent haze, and the trees glowed with an amber light made by rosy buds just starting to unfurl into green leaves. Robins were busy hopping around, cocking their heads, and then tunneling their beaks into the grass. A dog barked protectively in the far distance. The sunlight was warm against her face. A slight chill in the fitful breeze and a large patch of dirty snow plowed up at the end of the drive were the only reminders that summer could be a slow-to-arrive and reluctant guest in these tangled mountains.
Sally lifted her mug. Colden took it, went indoors, and came back with two full cups. She pulled up a chair and paralleled Sally’s slouched-down, feet-up posture. They interrupted the morning silence with intermittent conversation about quotidian things.
“Guess your cameras didn’t pick up anything interesting yet?” Sally eventually asked.
“How’d you know?”
“Figured you would have told me by now if they had.”
“Science is an uneven process.”
“Like the rest of life.”
Something in Sally’s remark sparked something within Colden, creating a fast and electric connection between the cameras, their funding source, and her internal yearn to strive, to search, and that apparently similar drive within her mother. Her real mother. Well, her biological mother. A question she didn’t realize had been latent within her was suddenly set free; it fluttered tentatively within her, a butterfly released from a cocoon. She sipped her coffee. She waited. The back of her throat tickled, the question itself trying to take flight.
“Sally?”
“Yeeeesssss?” She drew out the word, playing off Colden’s obvious reluctance.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Am I much like her?”
Colden didn’t feel any need to further define the “her” she was referring to. Sally stared fixedly into the distance.
“Wow. That’s a tough question,” she replied, her voice noticeably quiet, a bit weary.
“I realize that,” Colden said. “I mean, I think I do. What do I really know about her, anyway?”
“Not much, I guess,” Sally conceded. “Maybe that’s our fault. Maybe that’s a mistake.”
Colden considered.
“I don’t think so. You’ve shared stuff in a natural way. I’ve just never been that curious. Not that interested.”
“And you are now?”
“Not much. Just a little. From time to time, she seems to pop into my awareness in a way she never has before.”
“I want you to know that you can ask me anything about her, anytime,” Sally said.
Colden realized that perhaps she had been incurious, but perhaps she had also been afraid to bring up her own mother, not wanting to burden Sally or Dix with painful memories. Not wanting to put the specter of Miranda between herself and Sally. Or Dix.
Sally rolled her neck.
“Well, to your question. You are so very much like your father in so many ways,” she said. “I usually only see the mirror of him when I look at you. Your jawline. The expression you have when you’re concentrating. Something in your gait. Your quiet stubbornness. But you have some qualities he does not. He wants to improve the world around him, for sure, as do you. It’s your energies about the effort that are different. You are more restless. More ambitious, I guess.”
There was that word again: ambitious. But Colden felt, instinctively, the hardwired truth of Sally’s observations.
“Did you know her well?” she asked.
“Yes and no,” Sally said. “Not as well as your dad did, obviously. But maybe there were some ways I knew her better.”
“How do you mean?”
“Because I
am a woman. I understood her from that pretty primal perspective. Also, I wasn’t in a romantic relationship with her, so I had more clarity about who she was. I loved her but wasn’t in love with her. And, well, she didn’t hurt me the way she hurt your father.”
Colden flinched. It was hard to imagine her father loving anyone other than Sally. They had such tenderness between them. She had seen its manifestations countless times. A hand on the lower back. A kiss to the top of the head. A shared and knowing grin. A cup of tea delivered without being asked for. Colden wondered, for the first time, if Dix’s big, messy, earlier love for Miranda was a sore spot for Sally. If she ever felt like she was some sort of consolation prize plucked from the ashes of Dix and Miranda’s burned-out relationship. They seemed two such different women: Miranda, beautiful, airy, idealistic, spoiled, and self-absorbed; Sally, handsome, pragmatic, fierce, and loyal.
“It’s hard for me to picture them together,” Colden said. “They seem, well, not that I really know anything about it, but just not well suited.”
“Sure, but since when has being ill-suited kept a couple from falling in love?” Sally replied, without rancor.
Colden took in the scene around her: the aged stone wall and walks bordered with beds she knew harbored bulbs and perennials just starting to stir within the dark soil; the line of deciduous and evergreen trees that fringed the lawns, creating a soft wall of security against the encroachments of the outside world. She allowed herself to feel how grounding and comforting this place was. She realized it wasn’t so much that she hated, for instance, going to Albany; she just hated to leave here.
“What do you think she was looking for?” Colden asked. “By going to that commune?”
“You mean, why would she cut out on such an awesome place and wonderful man?” Sally asked.
“Well, yeah, I guess,” Colden said. “I mean, sure, how could she leave this? But also, why there?”
“Do you want the groovy answer or the clinical answer?”
“Can I have both?”
“I’ll need more coffee for that.”
Beneath the Trees Page 12