The Bobcat

by Katherine Forbes Riley

  The bus was crowded despite the hour, having originated in New York City. Laurelie sat next to a woman with a waist-length gun-metal braid who spent the ride glued to a paperback romance, her feet rubbing each other under her seat. The first hour, Laurelie passed staring out at what might have been a single evergreen, looping endlessly. Eventually her nerves settled into a high-pitched hum and she took out her sketchbook and began to draw. Bus People, some cocooned in wires and screens, some with eyes that swiveled on stalks, some whose seats had fused to their backs like carapaces. Near Portland, the highway threaded close to the coast, yielding dramatic glimpses of rocky bays. But after Freeport they headed north and west again, back into the trees. At Bangor they turned once more south and east, and then the miles seemed to fly. The land gradually flattened and filled with rivulets, each seeking its own path to the sea. The bus chose one and followed it until it emptied into a wide-mouthed bay, at which point it left the mainland behind entirely, rumbling over a series of high bridges beneath which, in odd reversal, the sea looked like an azure land on which the land lay in emerald lakes.

  Stepping off the bus five hours later was a sudden shifting of scenes. The heat wave that was smothering Vermont was gone. Here a salt breeze touched her with clammy fingers that still carried a hint of winter’s bone clutch. She shivered, gripping her backpack’s straps, wishing, for a moment, that she was home in her cottage. But then the hiker was there, pushing toward her through a crowd of tourists with his dog at his side, its head and tail raised high. The hiker’s own jaw was clenched and his eyes were watering and his nostrils were whipping like sheets in the wind, and yet despite this he looked to her to be the most solid thing there, as if the people he passed were only sound and air, while he was rock, country, planet.

  He told her he lived south of town on Strawberry Hill, but it rose more like a mountain as they climbed, twisting and turning through miles of forest in which the only evidence of humanity were occasional mailboxes, beyond which driveways led deeper into the trees. At the top of the hill was a gabled house of rough-hewn timber on a small patch of cleared land. When he turned into it she found herself holding her breath, for the scene was so much like what she’d been imagining that she now waited for it to shatter, like the fair had, becoming something she could not anticipate.

  She did not have to wait long. As she was climbing down from the truck, the curtains in the front window swayed. A moment later the front door opened and a woman came out. A stranger approaching was a blank canvas, but this woman was already a painting. She walked with the hiker’s own panther-like grace. Her hair was the same fathomless black, though it was threaded with gray, and fell heavy and straight to her shoulders with no hint of his rebellious twists and waves. Her face carried his wide gaze as well, but hers was a liquid black, not changing as his did through the forest’s hues, and her skin was a darker brown with cool jewel undertones.

  Now from the doorway behind the woman emerged the hiker’s curls, except blond and on a skin so fair as to appear almost translucent. This man was even taller and sparer of flesh than the hiker, but he bore the same wide frame and long limbs corded with ropy muscle.

  All this Laurelie absorbed as the woman came down the front walk. “Welcome,” she said upon reaching her, and even her speech was arresting, richly modulated and fluid of tone. She laid light hands on Laurelie’s arms and leaned in so that their cheeks barely brushed before pulling away again. “You must be Laurelie,” she said.

  Afternoon gave way to evening in the hiker’s family’s kitchen. Modeled after a Spanish hacienda, the floor plan was open and spacious, with cool clay tile floors and stucco walls and a high exposed-beam ceiling. The room overlooked the backyard, and with the large windows open and the patio doors flung wide, letting in the cool salt air, it felt as if they were outside.

  Laurelie, to her intense relief, had been stationed at the sink, washing the vegetables for their evening meal. Periodically the mother would call her to the center island, where Laurelie watched her select the next items to be cleaned from two big clay pots on the counter, all freshly picked, she said, from her greenhouse that morning. Standing so close their hips and shoulders brushed, the mother turned each piece in knowing brown fingers, pointing out defects that should be scrubbed or cut away.

  In between these conferences, the mother stirred and tasted, all the while discoursing on every manner of thing in a voice that often sounded as if she were singing. The father stood near her chopping things, interacting with her as if his hands were an extension of her own. She told Laurelie he was making the filling for a tourtière, and then explained that this was a famous pastry from his birthplace, a region of Quebec called Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean. To which the father added, chuckling quietly, “Beh, zis is basically ze meat pie.”

  The hiker stood at a countertop across the room making corn chowder and lobster cakes. Each time Laurelie looked over he was busy at some task, but the lines of his body stayed relaxed. He worked so quietly that sometimes, amid all the stimulation of the mother, she forgot he was there. Other times, hearing his mother’s voice shift into some minor key, she’d glance up and catch the woman watching him.

  Now the father carried his pan to the stove, and the air filled with sizzling sounds and the heady fragrance of browning meat. “Duck, rabbit, and venison,” the mother sang and, scooping a little of the melting fat from his pot, dribbled it into her flour. Motioning with a powdery gesture toward the front door, she added proudly, “My son, he takes them all right here from our own woods.”

  Takes them, Laurelie thought, hunts them, and the very air seemed to charge, grow harsher in some way as the meaning of those words sank in.

  The hiker hissed out a breath then. As one they all turned and saw him holding up a hand, and blood tracing down his palm.

  Maybe it had taken a while, but she hadn’t lost any yolks to the whites, not irretrievably at least. The hiker’s mother had tasked her with separating eggs while she’d taken care of the hiker’s wound. It hadn’t looked deep but still she’d swathed the entire hand in bandages. Then she’d come back and dumped sugar and cream into Laurelie’s pot without even measuring. Now Laurelie stirred the mixture at the stove, and it was beginning to thicken and cling. Afraid it would burn, she looked around for help, but the mother and father had their heads together and were assembling the pie in low voices. The hiker was at the stove frying his lobster cakes. There was tension now in his shoulders and hips, in the way he moved his arms. Not wanting to make it worse, Laurelie kept silent and stirred like mad. Finally the mother returned. She’d grown quiet too, nearly brusque as she took the pan from Laurelie. “Rest,” she said, pointing to a little bistro table beside which the dog sat with his ears cocked back, staring out the open patio doors.

  Shortly thereafter Laurelie was sitting too, charged with nothing more than occasionally turning the handle of an ice cream maker. She could hear the dog breathing, and thought he must be smelling the sea, wondered if he could hear the distant crashing of waves. The air trickling through the patio doors had grown colder as evening set in, far colder than the kitchen now that the oven was on. The mother had it open and was covering the pie; already brown juices were squirting through the crust, and a smell like baking bread wafted past Laurelie as it was pulled out through the doors. The hiker, next to his mother, lifted steaming cakes from his skillet, and although they didn’t speak, still it seemed to Laurelie as if their bodies whispered.

  With their meal served the mother grew expansive again. She’d set out tall glasses filled to the brim with ice and a ruby liquid and explained to Laurelie while they ate how it was made from a Jamaican flower called sorrel that she grew in her greenhouse. The flowers had to be dried thoroughly upside down, she said, and then steeped overnight with sugar and ginger and cloves before adding dark Jamaican rum.

  The food and drink reenergized Laurelie as well, and she took in the environment with newfound focus as the woman spoke. The father was eat
ing quietly with eyes on his plate, his forehead creasing with deep lines each time he took a bite. The hiker too gazed down at his food, his movements methodical, his nostrils half-flared. Beyond the table, the patio stretched a few more yards in an interlocking pattern of red brick and tiny white stones before giving way to a sloping lawn. The top of the lawn was still dotted with the flowering redbuds of spring, making her imagine that by traveling north she’d also slipped back in time. Halfway down the slope she could see the glass roof of a greenhouse. The edge of the cleared land was not visible from her seat, but beyond and all around it the woods stretched unbroken, steeply descending to a thin stripe of sea.

  “—relie?”

  In the silence the last few seconds of sound replayed, calling Laurelie back to her place at the table. She swiveled quickly, flushing to realize how far she’d turned her body away. The mother was smiling at her, but it felt hard and careful, and her eyes looked so much like marbles in the fading light that Laurelie had to suppress the urge to shudder.

  “Rafe asked what you were studying at Montague.”

  “Art,” said Laurelie, and now the heat of her cheeks was like a brand in the cool evening air.

  The father nodded encouragingly, but the mother’s eyebrows drew together into two soft puffs Laurelie recognized from the son’s own face.

  “My son was going to be a doctor”—the mother’s eyes tracked now to the hiker’s face, and for a moment her voice faltered as they took in its turbulence— “but he chose to become part of our family business instead. He is much like my grandmother, I think.” Her voice grew stronger as she continued. “She started our business, many years ago. She lived far north where there were no white doctors yet, and no white medicines either. She was known for her skill with plants, and so the white harvesters and lumbermen would come to her with their sicknesses, and she would give them the medicines of her people.” Now the mother’s dark gaze reached for the sea. “The whites called them the Penobscot, but I don’t know what they called themselves. If my mother knew, she never told me. They weren’t allowed to speak their language, and so my mother spoke only English. But she learned their medicines. My grandmother taught her how to find them in the woods and fields, and to cultivate them in her own garden. Once my grandmother died, my mother continued the business alone. Then she met my father. A Jamaican, he came to Maine as a blueberry harvester during the war. He’d never known such cold! My mother cured his chilblains.”

  She smiled then. So did the father. Even the hiker seemed to smile, his nose pulsing so slowly that it seemed almost still.

  “But he missed the sea, my father did, and so when I was born they moved to Bar Harbor. There were many white people here, but they didn’t know how to care for their gardens. So there was much work for us. Too much work, eventually.”

  The father chuckled then, and said, “Zis is why zey hired me.”

  Was this really the hiker’s room? It looked like a guest room, tucked away between the front door and the stairs. Small and square, its furnishing was spare, with only a desk, a futon and a wall of empty bookshelves. Two other walls were entirely bare, while the fourth consisted of windows facing the road and the forest beyond.

  Laurelie could hear the father moving around outside in the hall. She heard him lock the front door and then another quiet click and the stream of light coming from beneath the door disappeared. The stairs creaked as he climbed them, and his footsteps crossed the ceiling above her head. Briefly then she heard muffled voices, the snick of a closing door, and then silence.

  No, not silence at all. The hiker brought the forest with him. He came through the door and shut it behind him and opened the windows wide and turned off the lamp. The forest poured in. Crickets and cicadas and frogs, and even once a barred owl. Owls were known for their night vision, he told her, but they also had excellent hearing; those flat faces had feathers that focused sound waves, turning their heads into one great ear. That’s why they hooted, to startle prey, for even a shift of a leg or a change of breath could reveal a hiding place. From time to time there came a hoarse screaming, one low and then another higher pitched, which he said were mated foxes seeking each other after hunting alone in the night. They lay on his bed with her hand in his, wrapped together in darkness, listening. It was like sleeping outside, and the air was so crisp she had his down comforter pulled to her chin. But he seemed not to feel it, was lying on top of the covers wearing only his shorts and T-shirt.

  After a time she grew warm, and accustomed to the sounds outside, and then she began thinking about the inside again. Though she couldn’t see still she turned her head, imagining now that the walls were covered with movie posters and song lyrics scrawled in indelible ink, that there were armless action figures fallen behind the radiator and model cars stuffed inside rows of shoeboxes under the bed. But when she asked about these things he only shook his head. He said that for a long time his room had been upstairs. He’d only moved down here a few years before, because he’d been sick and this room had been easier. That’s all he said, and she didn’t ask for more, although a thousand questions bloomed in her head. Instead she thought about the panels she’d later make. Love is a Harmonic, she’d call it, capturing every detail of lying next to him in that room and on that bed, the gentle pulse of his heart in his hand, the sounds of the night mingling with their breaths.

  She felt the mattress stir then as he turned to her. She felt his hand gently moving up her arm. She felt the warmth of his body. Safe, she thought, and turned to him, pushing the coverlet to her waist.

  There was the hiker, sitting up on the bed, outlined in the flat gray light seeping through the windows. Her eyes drifted closed, and then she opened them again, capturing him in slow snapshots as he moved toward the door.

  The smell of cooking reached her next. Not wanting to be last, she skipped her stretches, but upon reaching the kitchen found she was second. Only the mother was there yet, looking both small and formidable standing at the stove in her long dressing gown, her dark skin high contrast against the white cloth, her spine as straight as a dancer’s.

  “Good morning, Laurelie. Did you sleep well?” she said.

  “Yes, thank you.” Laurelie was watching the woman’s arm move, turning slices of meat in a pan. She had an urge to ask if she had slept well too, even though she knew this wouldn’t be the right thing to do, knowing moreover that it was only a substitute for other questions she really wanted to ask. And in the silence she began to believe that the mother was having this problem too, that really she’d been asking how the night had passed not just for Laurelie, but between her son and Laurelie. And because neither was able to say what she really meant, both ended up saying nothing more, and as the silence between them grew so did the feeling that if either did speak, nothing they could say would have any meaning at all.

  After a while the hiker came in. His hair was damp, fresh from the shower. When he asked Laurelie what she wanted to drink, she saw the mother turn from the stove and take in the distance between them.

  He melted chocolate into milk for both of them, then carried their mugs into the dining room. The father soon joined them there with a platter of eggs and Canadian bacon. As they had the night before, the men ate in silence, focused on their food. The mother stayed in the kitchen this time, busy with tasks, passing through only once to snag a few slices of meat and toast before going out again.

  After breakfast the hiker’s father drove them all down to a harbor in a pickup truck far newer than his son’s, where they walked in silence along a dock past a line of boats that seemed to go on forever. There were sailboats, motorboats, houseboats, even luxury crafts. Laurelie read their names to herself as they went, making a note of the cleverest ones, like Wet Ev Oar and Piece of Ship.

  They stopped at a sleek white sailboat called Minnow. The others climbed aboard as nimbly as cats, but Laurelie waited until they were occupied before making the leap from swaying dock to rocking hull herself. Once in th
e boat she sat down on a wooden bench near the wheel. She felt her body sway with the slap of the water against the boat’s sides. She listened to the sounds of the mother belowdecks putting things away. She watched the hiker and his father perform myriad tasks with ropes and sails, unfurling some and packing others away and attaching the rest to the boat with knots and pulleys.

  Eventually the father came to the wheel and the mother climbed the stairs. They kept their gazes on the sea as the motor rumbled to life and the boat trundled slowly from the dock. The hiker remained on deck and raised the sails. Halfway out of the bay, the wind came up and snapped them tight. The boat cut hard through the water then, and Laurelie’s side began to rise. It rose and rose until she was almost standing and had to grip the rail tightly or else fall across the boat and be swept overboard. The danger was real and yet she found if she watched the hiker she felt no fear. His arm was wrapped around the boom and his face was turned into the wind, his mouth open, his eyes wet and fixed upon the waves, his nose pulsing hard.

  But as quickly as the wind had risen, so it died. The boat slowed, and then it stopped. The hiker came and sat down beside her. The father sat down beside the mother. Now they drifted directionless on a flat gray sea. The bay was gone, the land but a shadow behind them. Once again the silence grew loud.