Northern Light

by Deb Davies

  “Her daughter, Simone, is geneticist who graduated from Oxford. I didn’t go to her graduation ceremony, though I’ve since seen her name in publications that call for reduced use of fossil fuels. Lane’s son, James, just graduated from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. He’s researching whether planted corals could clean flooded subways as sea levels rise. I think Lane wanted me to meet him to prove her kids will help the environment. Maybe as a way of saying I could have been the father of those kids.”

  “Was that depressing?” Claire asked. “Did it make you jealous?”

  “No. Their father is a brilliant mathematician. If she and I had had children, our kids might have been twits.”

  She thought of the photo on the bedside table. “I doubt it. Maybe I’m jealous. Lane has a flat stomach and has produced two children who are geniuses, whereas I have no children but do have a squishy gut.”

  “You don’t understand your own attraction,” Charles responded. “If you don’t believe me, ask Santana. Arnie has a crush on you. We meet you, and pow! We’re smitten.” Charles sighed. “Lane is beautiful, like a juvenile heron. All legs, all angles. Age doesn’t matter. If you’re a man or a woman, to this day, she takes your breath away. And she could belch in a way that somehow sounds like a bittern.

  “You’re more like a mourning dove, Claire. It’s a bird people think is ordinary. Most people don’t know a mourning dove can take off straight up at close to eighty miles an hour. They mate for life and are pretty much monogamous.”

  “A pigeon,” she said. “Lane’s a heron, and I’m a pigeon?”

  “Mourning doves’ feathers are buff-colored, but with an undertone of rose.”

  “Huh. What kind of bird are you like, Charles?”

  “Not sure. I could be a bittern,” he said. “Tall, streaky, long-necked marsh bird. Secretive. Points its bill skyward and blends in with the reeds. Perfect camouflage. Only, they’re a bit inflexible; if in an open field, they still stick their heads up.” He looked rueful.

  “There can’t have been only one woman all these years,” she challenged him.

  “There was a woman who I thought loved me. There was a girl who thought she loved me once.”

  The car bumped down a hill. The road looked more like a two-track now, and jack pines too crooked to cut scraped the car’s sides.

  “The first is a better story,” he said. “After Lane left Columbia, I was in my forties, and I lived with a writer. I’m not telling you her name. She does romance fiction. You’ve seen her face in beach reading suggestions in magazines.

  “She was different from Lane, who still doesn’t know she’s beautiful in her fifties. My inamorata had her eyebrows tattooed on, and eyeliner inked in as well. She looked like Elizabeth Taylor. And she loved me! Unbelievable. We met at a conference on Great Lakes dune erosion. She was setting a novel there. I moved into a house she was renting. Near Honor. Used to be a lighthouse in the area.”

  “I know the town. Back to Elizabeth Taylor,” Claire said. She rolled down her window, and the air that blew in smelled like broken balsam branches.

  The car scraped through a sand pit. Wheels spun and then caught. Rain was beginning to drip from the trees.

  “Her house looked like that catalog. Hump’s.”

  “Gump’s.”

  “She had this sculpture of a panther on her breakfast bar. Beautiful, long-backed, snarling thing. I was in awe of it.”

  “Oh, Charles. You didn’t break it?” Claire asked.

  “We lived together for two years. I wore a tie when she told me to. Got expensive haircuts. We went on book tours together. She’d be sure Feather Findings was on display.”

  The car lurched over a log. Good rental car, Claire thought.

  “What happened?” she asked him. “The two of you, both writers, you using aftershave lotion. That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “I was always careful of that panther,” Charles said. “It was glassy black. Wildcats are splotchy.”

  Claire knew that, but stayed quiet.

  “We’d just gotten back from a book tour. Her last book wasn’t selling as well as the one before it, though she’d sold twenty copies, mostly to women, including to one nice transgendered woman who had liked the sex scenes. I’d sold four copies, all at our last stop at a bookstore in Ann Arbor. Ecology was starting to be ‘in.’ We were back home, sitting down to Zingerman’s chile cheddar bread, toasted with cream cheese, and I’d fixed coffee. I was bringing food in on a tray. I’d done it before. No problem. This time, though, my eye caught on the sheen the hanging LED lights cast on the panther’s haunches, and I spilled the whole pot of coffee onto her computer.”

  The car jolted and bumped over a series of small logs.

  “And?” Claire asked.

  “She turned into a harpy! She said she had a new manuscript started and she hadn’t backed it up on her time machine, and I was ruining her career, was a boor at sex, and a lot of other unfounded things. She started throwing coffee cups at me. One hit my ear and bounced off and hit the panther, which fell on the marble counter and broke in half. Well, Maybe in thirds. She said she hoped I’d die from elephantiasis. I took the chile cheese bread—after all, I’d bought it—and my computer, and I left and never went back, not for my ties or my pointy-toed shoes. I drove here and didn’t leave Luzerne for a year.”

  Claire leaned against his shoulder, which was much more difficult to do now than it had been in the days of bench seats.

  “The woman who thought she loved you?”

  “Too young,” he said. “I met Nora at a conference. By then, I was in my late forties and had published some articles, and she was seventeen.”

  “Like Jen,” Claire said.

  “Not at all like Jen. Jen is a college graduate and a mature woman, with a brain. I never touched Nora, who had the brains of a soggy tea bag, but she just kept finding me. Her father threatened to shoot me. I have been careful, since then, to stay clear of women who are younger than I am.”

  “So,” Claire said after a pause. “We should get back to the cabin.”

  “The one time Nora drove here, I walked down the creek and stayed with Ed for a few days. That’s why he gave you the stink eye, but then he saw that you were older.”

  “Charles,” she said, “Let’s go back. I have to pee.”

  “Should I stop the car for you?” he asked. “This road used to be a logging road. We’ve been driving in a circle. We’re almost home.”

  Walking from the car to the cabin, they could hear the rush of the creek. She used the bathroom and doused her crotch with a handful of water, dried off, and used talcum powder—Gold Bond, not Johnson’s. Charles used the bathroom next.

  “I thought you’d pee outside,” she said.

  “I don’t mark my territory.”

  She picked up on his conversational tone as he checked on Oscar. The raven prrrted back.

  “Yes,” he said. “This time, I brought you real corned beef. And some peppers from my salad, and new papers.”

  Claire stripped off all her clothes but her lace-edged black underpants. Of course Ed had seen she was older. She was older.

  “I still may harbor sand,” she warned Charles when he returned and washed his hands fastidiously.

  “I can deal with that,” Charles said. “Anyone who loves this creek gets used to some sand in their teeth.”

  “Good God, shut up and come here,” she said.

  Afterward, she lay with her head cradled on his arm.

  “Charles? You awake?”

  “Languorous.”

  “You would have been a good father. Look how conscientious you are with Oscar.”

  “You and George didn’t? Or couldn’t have children?”

  They could hear the creek through open, screened windows. “No, we didn’t. There was a time when I wanted kids,” she said. “My sister, Jan, had heartbreakingly beautiful children: tousled curls, long eyelashes, eyes so dark brown they looked black
. Their hair smelled clean, like my mother’s sheets when she dried them in the sun. When one of her children relaxed in my arms, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, and was holding an angel. Her third child was autistic. Jan spent her life finding school systems that would work with autistic children, and every moment she spent has been worth it. But George had taken care of a younger sister, and since he was on the road a lot, and I’d be alone, he didn’t think I realized what I would be signing up for. He didn’t want for us to turn into burned out, cranky parents.

  “He wanted to be able to travel, which we did, and to just take care of me. I thought he might change his mind, but then we got caught up in the life we were living. And it was, you know, a very good life. I miss him.”

  “I miss Lane,” he said.

  “Did you two sleep together in San Diego?”

  “Of course not. I like her and her children. Even her husband is tolerable, though I can’t say I like him. There are moments you shouldn’t seize, though I am glad we seized this one.”

  “I was going to wait a year, before I slept with anyone.”

  “Mourning doves are monogamous, but if they lose a mate, most mate again.”

  “Are you offering?” she asked.

  “God no,” he answered. “We hardly know each other.”

  “I do like you, Charles.”

  “I should hope so. Actually, I’m honored.”

  “Part of what I like about you is knowing you don’t need me. Taking care of sick people is really hard. When you’re done, especially if you’ve lost someone, you feel guilty and depressed and like a zombie. Like you might clutch on to someone and be so needy, you’ll gut them.”

  “I don’t think you can gut me,” he said. “Though if we got more acrobatic, I might get leg cramps.”

  They fell asleep in a tangle of limbs. After half an hour, he woke. It had been years, decades, since he’d smoked, but a cigarette sounded good now.

  As he looked down at her, he pictured hunters shooting mourning doves.

  The stallion reared, towering above Elaine Santana, who fell back, hitting her hip on the two-foot-tall stump of a slender birch. The plate-sized hooves floundered over her head as the animal pivoted away, its rank, hot sweat stink filling the air. She looked up at it as it turned away. Its nostrils flared, flanks dripping, chest heaving with labored breath. Then it was gone, crashing through the underbrush.

  Elaine swore, cursing her own paralysis that had left her in its path. She’d heard the blue jay, then the brush breaking around the horse, yet she’d stood there, hand on her Glock, and damn near been run down.

  The stallion was heading downhill, to the river in front of Claire’s. She forced herself up, found her cell, and hit Arnie’s one-digit number. Then she fell back, her hip throbbing with sudden, sharp pain.

  Robideu made it out the patio doors at the same moment the big white horse broke through the clumps of alders and, like a trained Lipizzaner stallion, leapt over the deepest part of the river. It struggled part of the way up the opposite bank and suddenly stopped, legs spread wide, head down, gouts of saliva pouring from its mouth. With its coat darkened to gray by sweat, it looked like a Remington bronze, only no Cherokee straddled the collapsing horse. Murphy, the Vietnam vet, stood near his cabin looking down at it, wearing out-in-the-knees jeans and braces, a rifle braced against his bare shoulder.

  “Goddamn, don’t shoot,” Arnie said. “Murphy. That horse’s owner will sue the shit out of you. She’ll come over there and scalp you first. You’ve seen her—white-haired woman looks like God with a Mohawk. Goddamn, Murphy. Just don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.”

  Murphy spat a wad of tobacco and lowered the rifle, muzzle up, butt resting on the ground.

  “I could shoot your ear off,” he said, voice conversational. “I coulda shot an ear off that horse. Wanna see me bang a bullet off that chimney?”

  “Hell no. Jesus Christ. Why would you shoot at a standing still target, you goddamn fool? Somebody must’ve spooked it. Too old to race, but the last I knew, it still stands to stud.”

  “Good some of us can. You call the owner? Must be worried, if she saw her horse take off like that.”

  “She’s coming. Zoe Weathers. Dr. Weathers if you meet her.”

  “Dr. Weathers. Right. I gotta tell you, Robideu. I’m sick of disturbance. First, the old man dies. That was fair enough, but since then, I’m thinking someone’s stalking around my house at night. I won’t stand for it, you hear me? You think I’m not armed, now?” he said, dropping his rifle to his feet. “I got a knife. I got killer hands.”

  Zoe Weathers called Sanjay Kaufmann even before she drove to Claire’s. When she arrived, she left her car running in the driveway and the driver’s side door open, and half swam, half lunged across the roiling stream. She eased up to the horse, which snaked its head up, walleyed with panic. Its lips curled back over its teeth. She slowed her own breath and movements, muttering sweet nothings, until she could press the horse’s massive head against her chest, letting it catch the scent of her body. She stroked him, tears trickling down her face. Then she walked Whitsuntide Whirlwind—Whit—across the river, downstream where it was shallower. When they were back near the house in a shady area, she found a hose connection and began hosing him down with huge, splashing arcs of water, moving the hose back and forth.

  Laurel and Jen, who had been sitting at the kitchen table, looking at paint colors on Jen’s computer, had at first been frozen in place for fear they might spook Whit. Once he was under Zoe’s control, they both came out, wide-eyed and wobbly-legged, to help. Laurel followed Zoe’s instructions, scraping away the lather of rank sweat as Zoe sprayed on more water. Jen filled a pail of water from the kitchen tap and then got rubbing alcohol and extra pails, and dragged bags of ice from Zoe’s car. She filled the pails with a one-to-three mixture of rubbing alcohol and water, then added ice. She didn’t hear Murphy until he appeared at her shoulder, carrying the pail of drinking water to Whit. When he returned, he wordlessly started lugging pails with the alcohol, water, and ice mixture, and heaved them up and over the big horse.

  Whit lowered his head to the water.

  “He’s drinking,” Zoe yelled.

  “Why wouldn’t he drink?” Jen asked the sweaty, scrawny Murphy. “He’s so hot he’s steaming.”

  “Some horses—when they get run ragged—don’t drink,” Murphy said. “They don’t even know they’re thirsty, but they got systems punking out. They don’t drink, they die. They drink too much, they die.”

  Jen looked at him, horrified.

  “Fill buckets,” he said.

  By the time Sanjay arrived, the big horse was bobbing his head up and down while Zoe ran water down his back. She rubbed behind his ears. Whit pressed his nose against her, leaning forward, as though Zoe supported his weight, which she would have done, if she could have supported him by herself. He might’ve been a stallion standing to stud, but Whit was also her baby—her heart that beat outside her body.

  “Looks like you got a good start,” Kaufmann said. He was preternaturally calm. He had not gone to one of the top veterinary colleges, but since he was a kid, he’d been able to put animals at ease. He had absorbed his Jewish father and his Hindu mother’s respect for life, regardless of religion or external packaging. Now, he set both hands on the horse and probed gently, checking external temperature, heartbeat, and gut sounds. Whitsuntide Whirlwind not only belonged to his beloved, but was—because of the horse’s mild disposition—a favorite of his. He doctored Whit, boarded Whit when Zoe had to leave him, and his brother shoed Whit. Sanjay Kaufmann had known Whit since he was a colt.

  “What you been doing, you old fool? Got yourself in a sticky wicket?”

  “Idiot,” Zoe said affectionately. “You’re not British.”

  Whit half leaned against Sanjay, soaking him with water and sweaty lather. “Racist,” Sanjay accused Zoe. “I have colonial brethren.”

  “A cobra and mongoose are cousins.”<
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  They led Whit to Sanjay’s carrier and up the ramp. Zoe stopped to pull her car out of the way and turn off the ignition.

  “IV fluid?” Zoe asked.

  “Don’t teach me my business,” he told her. “If you keep bossing me, asking me questions, I’m going to charge you extra.”

  “You use a 0.9 percent normal saline with potassium and calcium?”

  “Yeah. Come off it, Zoe! We’ve looked at the same research. You’ll see the serum chemistry panels and the blood count results as soon as I get them. And yes, I’ll keep monitoring the gut.”

  “My good big boy,” she said to Whit, then hiked herself sideways, weight on one hip, into the horse box with him.

  “Where do you think you’re going to sleep when we get to the clinic?” Sanjay asked. He knew better than to suggest Whit would stomp her.

  “You’ll find me a place to sleep, and dry clothes,” Zoe said.

  Murphy watched them drive away. “That’s a strong woman,” he said.

  Jen was fatigued and hung her head. Murphy’s socks had sagged into his boots. The haft of a sheath knife protruded from one gray wool sock.

  “You didn’t see me here,” he said. Then he was gone.

  Jen went back to the house to take a shower. Laurel texted Arnie, and Arnie texted Dannie Christie, Elaine Santana’s lover. Once Dannie got to the emergency room, Arnie headed back. They’d do an X-ray, in spite of Elaine’s protests, and send her home with medication. No point in hanging around when he couldn’t help.

  He walked around Zoe’s property, narrowing his search down to the area where Whit had been tethered. There was a three-sided building in which Whit could take shelter when it rained. The inside walls had obviously been organized to hold tack and give her room to groom Whit inside the shelter if need be. The day had been so beautiful, she’d let him graze a section of grass that was ignoring the season, soaking up sunshine to bulk up roots.

  Arnie found what he suspected he’d find. Someone had used insect-like drones to panic the stallion. He looked at them with loathing, knowing these miniature machines would hurt more people and make his job more complex. He wanted to gather the drones up and, when they had their perpetrator, shove them up the creep’s ass. Gritting his teeth, he gloved up and followed proper protocol to collect plastic and metal bits; on the box, he noted the date, time, and place he found them. He shook his head hard, for a minute imagining he heard and felt the vibrations of the spider-legged dragonfly gadgets buzzing at his own ears. Elaine Santana was going to be livid. And Zoe Weathers would flay someone alive.