25 Years

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “This is Marie Moran.”

  The chill silence that followed matched her mother’s unwarm tone. Lily felt a strange respect for her mother’s powerful grudge toward someone only tangentially involved in the death of her son. It’s the anger they should feel toward me and maybe do feel, but they won’t admit that even to themselves, so they treat him this way.

  What if her parents ever woke up to her part, her bigger part in Ryan’s death?

  Into the phone, her mother said, “Our daughter, Lily, is visiting, and she found an injured owl…. It’s here. She put a towel over it and picked it up…. Well, I’m sure she didn’t want to leave it for predators.”

  Odd, Lily thought, how her mother could find fault with everything she did—but let someone else criticize her daughter and the fur would fly.

  “Surely that’s moot?” her mother was saying. “The owl is here. Do you want to help, or should we find someone who does? It would probably be better off at the university Raptor Center, anyway.”

  Lily blushed, listening. But perhaps the person at the other end was being more no polite than Marie.

  “We’ll bring it over, then,” her mother said stiffly and hung up the phone, her lips tight.

  “Mom, is there a cardboard box around?”

  “Yes. And thank you, really, for taking it yourself. I really prefer it. I detest the man—and not just because of Ryan. I wouldn’t have cared for him in any case, and I just worry about that poor child with only an angry man for a role model.”

  They found a big box that had once held bottles of organic apple juice, and Lily put the owl inside, still wrapped in the towel, and carefully released its legs. Its talons moved before she closed the lid.

  “Will it jump out of the box while you’re driving?” her mother asked.

  “I hope not. Maybe we should put a piece of tape on the lid.” It was a strange moment, putting the owl in the box with her mother’s help, the two of them united in caring for the injured animal that Lily had found where she’d last seen Ryan alive.

  “Will you let me wash those cuts? And are you going to put on more clothes?”

  She had never told her parents that she and Colin had gone into the ice-fishing shack to make out. Her mother’s remark about clothes brought it to mind, where she knew it would linger. The guilt of that secret could not be lifted now, it was that heavy.

  “I can wash the cuts myself.”

  “Your leg looks as though it could use stitches.”

  Lily agreed but didn’t want to go. “Let’s see if some butterflies do the trick.”

  She cleaned the cuts made by the owl’s talons, and her mother poured hydrogen peroxide and Betadine over them. “Thank you again for taking the owl over to that place. Now, you know you just drive around the lake road? There’s a sign on the right that says North Woods Aerie.”

  “How long have you been neighbors?” Lily asked, knowing she should run upstairs for more clothes, to get out of her torn swimsuit.

  “Four years,” her mother said tersely. “The Aerie should’ve been a good thing. We need something like that up here. But your father and I have never liked him. No personal skills. You know that.”

  Yes, Lily knew. Her parents had liked Colin Gardner fine before Ryan’s death, before he had become their scapegoat, substitute target for the hatred they should have sent toward their own daughter and for some reason could not.

  “You should hear what he said to Helen. Well, really it was to Bert.”

  Lily gave her a look of interest.

  “I can’t remember the circumstances, but it was quite bad.”

  On the money, then.

  “He won’t be friendly to you, either,” Marie said. “He’s quite nasty. You’ll see.”

  Lovely, Lily thought.

  Her wounds bandaged, she ran upstairs, snatched up a black cotton, above-the-knee, wraparound skirt and tied it over her swimsuit.

  “Don’t handle that bird again,” her mother said as she came down the stairs, car keys and cell phone in hand. “You’re taking your cell. Good. In case you have trouble. You should have coverage on the road, at least.” There was none at Camp Boreal. “I’m sure you’ll be back soon.”

  Lily had expected her mother to scorn the expense of a cell phone. Clearly, Marie’s dislike of Colin Gardner was overriding all other rules of life.

  Lily carried the box out to the BMW and put it in the passenger seat. She had rescued the owl, and now she would turn it over to a person who could care for it.

  But it didn’t seem that simple to her.

  She noticed, for instance, that this was the first time she was driving away from Camp Boreal, and she wasn’t doing it because she was sick of her parents and couldn’t bear to be in their presence for another moment. Also, she’d found the owl—and the owl was a symbol of death in so many traditions—at the place where she and Colin Gardner had acted in a way that had resulted in Ryan’s death.

  And she was taking the owl to Colin Gardner to be healed.

  She’d seen the wing, though.

  Would it ever fly again?

  There’s the metaphor. Nothing would bring Ryan back. Nothing would allow her parents to get over his death, because one didn’t get over such a thing. It was normal not to get over it.

  Maybe, Lily thought with a flash of insight, it was even normal to hang on to his ashes for twenty-five years, to refuse to release that last part of him to the earth or the water or any of the elements, to let go.

  Yes, maybe her parents’ reaction had been the most normal one of all.

  She had driven only three miles on the road around the lake when she saw the sign that read NORTH WOODS AERIE. It was stenciled in bright red on a white background and the name wasn’t all the sign proclaimed. Beneath the name in black: VISITORS BY INVITATION ONLY. A phone number and NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  Good grief. Well, she’d been invited, she supposed. In a manner of speaking.

  There was no gate, just a muddy drive. More signs. SLOW.

  Funny how somebody who, at sixteen, had been sexy as hell, appealing to every girl he met, could be, at forty-one, a person who hung signs that made him sound like a man who’d appear on his porch with a sawed-off shotgun if anyone came too close. Somehow, she doubted it was the death of her brother that had affected him this way.

  He’d shown horror, too, when they’d seen the canoe, when they’d been unable to find Ryan. Unlike her, he had not believed her brother was playing a trick on them, and he had dived into the lake at once, around and under the dock, searching the murky water.

  They had searched together for two hours.

  Colin had told her that if they found Ryan in the lake even after all that time, there might be a chance of reviving him, because of something called the mammalian diving reflex. Later, she’d read about this. She didn’t know whether Ryan had been young enough for that to help him survive.

  Ryan’s death had been a life-changing event for Colin Gardner, she was sure of that—and just as sure that he’d gone on to kiss other girls, to love and find love, and to enjoy being alive.

  SLOW, another sign cautioned.

  A huge building appeared, sided in a combination of weathered wood and the kind of corrugated tin that’s made to look old. It was as big as an events center, she thought, like one of those places at fairgrounds where people showed livestock and dogs.

  There was a very old fifth-wheeler, used for she couldn’t guess what, another building, smaller than the big one but of similar construction, and a very small cabin, undoubtedly an old summer place built in the fifties and remodeled to withstand four seasons.

  She shivered in her car’s air-conditioning, in the security of her rolled-up windows, safe from mosquitoes and this strange world of Colin Gardner. She decided that living in northern Minnesota made people strange but reflected again that it had become a refuge for her parents, who had lost a child, and for a man who, as a teenager, had been instrumenta
l in that loss.

  Yes, it was her blame.

  But it wasn’t as though he owned none of the blame. Even he had shown anguish at the time—and remorse.

  The cabin door opened, and she saw a figure behind the screen, masculine and indistinct, in fatigues and a T-shirt, with a plaid, maybe flannel, shirt over that.

  She parked outside the cabin, opened her own door and made sure her skirt was straight before she got out. “Hi,” she called and immediately walked around the car to open the passenger door, to give a clear message that she wasn’t remotely interested in trespassing on his privacy or feeding the bears or whatever it was that made him so prickly.

  She heard the screen door creak but didn’t look over her shoulder, just lifted the box holding the owl from the front seat.

  A small dog darted from the house, barking. “Thank you, Winky. Quiet.” His voice and footsteps behind her. “It’s alive?”

  She turned. “I think so. It was definitely alive an hour ago. I think it’s been hurt for a while.” The Jack Russell terrier sniffed her, then sprang away. The last thing she would have expected Colin Gardner to have was a small dog.

  He took the box from her hands, and she glanced up at him for the first time.

  Different. The same person, but different. Gold threaded his tousled, rather curly hair the color of a walnut shell. Thick eyebrows, a straight nose, green eyes, and a handsome, laughing face. He wasn’t as tall as six feet, nor particularly heavy. Strong, though. Lily remembered all about that. At sixteen, he’d looked great with no shirt, and she suspected nothing had changed.

  He wasn’t especially clean, and she decided his close beard must require less effort than shaving. She wondered if he drank but didn’t think so. He seemed feral and unlike the teenager she had known. Where was his son?

  Lily was unafraid of questions, afraid neither of asking or of answering. She had been told that she was fear-less but that wasn’t true. She feared repeating the mistake she had made twenty-five years earlier, feared making another like it. “What brought you back here?” she asked. “I thought you left. Or lived somewhere else—during, you know, the off-season.”

  He carried the box away from her, toward the huge barn. It was corrugated metal on the outside, utilitarian-looking, almost like an airplane hangar.

  “Neighbors,” he said. “I came back for the neighbors.”

  “My parents say that’s why they like it here, too.”

  His lips twitched, which she remembered was how he’d sometimes smiled. It had seemed sophisticated when he was young, as though he had seen things, learned things. It still seemed that way.

  But his real smile—she recalled that as something with much greater impact.

  Although once she would’ve made an apology for her parents’ attitude, to do so now seemed pointless. She didn’t care about currying favor with this man—or any other. Why should she apologize for the rudeness or prejudice of others? After all, it wasn’t her fault, and what good could it do?

  She followed his fluid strides, not willing to let her owl out of sight that easily.

  The owl was wild of course—not really hers. Presumably, Colin had some training and probably state permits for handling it.

  “How did you catch it?” he asked.

  “I threw a towel over it and kind of hugged it, and then I reached through to find its legs.”

  He nodded at the gash on Lily’s thigh. “Looks as though you got footed.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “You’re lucky. If it’d grabbed hold, it could have taken a couple of people to pry the talons off.”

  That had to be exaggeration. Lily looked up and remembered those eyes behind eyelashes so long and thick you could lose your way in them. But now there were laugh lines, too, the kind that only came with age—and life.

  “That’s the possible danger to you,” he said. “I’ve had a talon through my palm. But the bird’s at risk, too. If you grab a leg above the hock you can bruise it. Hold a raptor the wrong way, you can break feathers.”

  Her teeth clamped tightly together. “I did what I thought best. I found it where—I found it by the ice-fishing shack. It seemed—” She decided not to try to explain. What did it matter?

  “The owl is considered an omen of death in some cultures, a messenger from the dead in others. Is that how it seemed?”

  She shrugged. “Something like that.”

  “I hear you do philosophy and math.”

  She crouched down to pet the Jack Russell terrier, which had returned. “I teach philosophy and math. But philosophy is not my religion, if that’s what you’re implying.” You little preppy snot, she wanted to add, abruptly recalling where he’d spent each school year. At some prep school, rowing sculls, playing lacrosse, sailing and alpine skiing. Or at least she supposed that was how it had been, not really remembering the details. He hadn’t gotten on with his father, which explained why he’d chosen this back-to-nature existence that he might or might not eventually outgrow.

  Her thoughts reminded her of her mother, and she fought a blush.

  “What sort of philosophy?”

  In all the years Lily had been teaching, her parents had never asked this. “I teach one class on Nietzsche and one called ‘Death and Philosophy.’”

  He shot another glance at her from under the brim of his very frayed and faded baseball cap. The cap, she saw now, had a patch of the yin-yang symbol sewn on the front. The patch looked as worn as the hat.

  Colin led her toward the corrugated building, and she saw that the side that hadn’t been visible from the road was covered, in many places, by grating. He opened a door at the corner of the building. “The rehabilitation mews and clinic are on this edge. The rest is our flight barn,” he said. “Put together with funds raised by the local elementary school. We have another mews for long-term residents. Education birds. A mews,” he explained, “is a room where we keep the raptors.”

  She’d known this already. “Why no visitors?” She gazed down a long hallway of unfinished wood. The wall on her right had many windows and doors and was topped with more grating. There was a door for each mews.

  Colin shut the door behind her. “Sometimes visitors disturb the birds or surprise us in the middle of a difficult task. There are juveniles here that we try very hard not to let see humans at all so they don’t imprint on us.” He opened another door into a stall-like area surrounded by bars that reached to a ceiling lower than the roof of the barn. Probably above the stall—or mews, for that was what it appeared to be—there was a storage area.

  As Colin led the way down the hall, a figure emerged from a doorway on the left, and Lily’s heart stopped and restarted.

  He was very small—almost delicate-looking, like an elf—but wild and healthy-looking too. But it wasn’t the mop of pale hair, or the baggy cutoffs and T-shirt that could almost have fit his father, that fit more like a dress, or the bare and very dirty feet. It was that he wore a heavy glove like a gauntlet, like a welder’s glove, on his left forearm, and on that very small arm perched a bird that must have been a foot and a half tall. On his right hand, he also wore a glove, but to Lily the elfin child seemed incredibly exposed.

  Lily had felt the force of just the tip of the talon that had torn into her leg—and now the wound had begun to ache. In light of Colin’s graphic warning to her, how could he let his son handle a bird like that? What could that huge bird do to that boy?

  Colin said, “Hello, Sharpe. Sharpe’s a red-shouldered hawk and one of our permanent residents. And this is my son, Luke. Ah. And Mosi, our veterinarian.”

  A young black man with dreadlocks gathered low and loose behind his neck had come through the door behind Colin’s son. He wore scrubs. His bearing was regal, his smile comfortable.

  So much for my mother’s information, thought Lily. “It’s nice to meet you all,” she said. Then, “Do many people work here?”

  Colin and Mosi and Luke all seemed to consider the question.
/>   Colin said, “Several. We have four volunteers and two paid employees besides Luke and me.”

  Her eyes strayed again to the raptor on Luke’s arm.

  “Would all of you like to come to Music Night tonight at my parents’ house?” The impulsive invitation was unlike her. Why she’d offered it, she couldn’t have said, except that she was curious about this man who had been as much a part of Ryan’s death as she had. She was interested for more misanthropic reasons, as well. In speaking with a man she’d liked when he was a sixteen-year-old, she could congratulate herself on not getting what she’d once wanted—because, in the long run, it would surely have made her miserable. There would be satisfaction in that.

  Strange, this summer was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ryan’s death. Lily supposed it was also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first time a male she liked had returned her affection. More than that, too. First real kiss…

  Which shouldn’t be a chilling memory but always was, because of Ryan.

  “Music night.” Colin seemed thoughtful. Was he remembering nights of their childhood when he’d made musical instruments from empty coffee cans? He walked into the clinic, trailed by the others, and set the box on a ledge just below waist height. “Do you have a hot date tonight, Mosi?” he asked, almost under his breath.

  “As a matter of fact I do.” The veterinarian grinned.

  “Lily, we’re going to ask you to step back into the hall,” Colin told her. “You can watch through the glass until we’ve restrained the owl. Then we’ll come and get you.”

  “I’ll put Sharpe away,” said Luke helpfully and walked down the hall to one of the mews.

  Lily wondered if she was allowed to follow him. She opted instead to watch Colin and the veterinarian through the bank of windows, which were marked at intervals with pieces of tape, perhaps to keep the raptors from trying to escape through the panes.

  Colin donned a welder’s glove like the one Luke had worn. Mosi reached into a cupboard, taking out a thing that reminded Lily of a stocking mask. He rolled it carefully while Colin opened the box.

  Lily saw him groping for the legs before lifting the owl.