The Return Of Cord Navarro

by Vella Munn

  “Did you take this?”

  “Yes,” he said, and although she wasn’t ready, he closed his wallet and put it back in his pocket. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “But you did because I accused you of —” Of what? Of acting as if Summer never existed? Teeth clenched against emotions she didn’t understand, she stared up at her ex-husband. “Cord, I...”

  “It’s all right if you cry.”

  “Cry? I used to,” she whispered as his suggestion, his unbelievably gentle suggestion, rocked her. “So many things would set me off. But, Cord, I’ve learned that tears don’t change anything.”

  “No. They don’t. Don’t talk about her. Not here. Not this way.”

  “Don’t talk? That won’t stop me from thinking about her. Don’t you know that?”

  He said nothing.

  “When Summer died, I thought I’d died with her. I know the doctors told us before she was born that she wouldn’t live, but that didn’t stop—I couldn’t stop myself from loving her.”

  I fell in love with her. She’ll always be part of me. Those words had come not from her but from her ex-husband. “You never shed a tear. I needed you to cry with me, but you didn’t.”

  “Would that have changed anything?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “She’s in a better place now. With my grandfather.”

  She didn’t feel strong enough for Cord’s words. Self-control might last no longer than a single breath. Still, held there by the reality of Summer’s picture, she was incapable of moving. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard Cord say what he had about their daughter. The day Summer died, he’d placed his hand on the incubator and mouthed words about the spirit world and Gray Cloud being there to show her the way.

  When she and Cord had finished saying their goodbyes to Summer and walked out of the neonatal room, he’d put his arm around her and held her against his hard side. He’d said something, words that rumbled and jumbled, words she couldn’t hold on to. She remembered burying her face in his chest and crying until her head pounded and she thought she might die. Maybe he’d gone on talking. Maybe he’d fallen silent.

  It didn’t matter. She hadn’t wanted to hear that Gray Cloud was caring for Summer when her own empty arms ached.

  Cord should have known that.

  Her husband’s arms should have been strong enough to hold back the world.

  Instead, two days after the funeral, Cord had gotten a call from the state police in Nevada. He was needed to find an older man who’d wandered away from his fellow campers and was lost somewhere in the stark wilderness around Virginia City. If Cord didn’t get there as soon as possible, the man might not survive.

  Damn him and his all-consuming career! He’d had that to give his life direction. That and his faith that Gray Cloud would take care of Summer.

  What she had was the echo of his stiff goodbye and a nursery with no baby to fill it. How could she possibly study for tests that no longer mattered, be what Matt needed in the way of a mother, think of things to say to Cord when he called?

  She hadn’t asked him to stay and mourn with her. If he didn’t understand that she needed him more than they did the money to pay off Summer’s medical bills—

  Her bare foot hit a rock and she barely righted herself in time. Biting down on the inside of her mouth, she vowed to think of nothing except finding Matt. But Cord was only a few feet away, his back to her, giving her a view of the pocket where he kept his picture of Summer.

  Until this morning she hadn’t known he’d taken one.

  Maybe, if he’d told her about it and they’d stood together and studied their daughter’s features—maybe...

  Cord could hear Shannon breathing. It was a whisper sound, a message he understood but didn’t know what to do with. It was possible she was now thinking about Matt and had to fight down her fears, but maybe her mind was still on what they’d said, or almost said, to each other a few minutes ago.

  She’d said he should have cried with her when Summer died, making it sound like an accusation. Now he wished he’d been able to make her understand that, because of his grandfather’s wisdom and teachings, he’d found a peace that transcended grief.

  But her grief frightened him, took him back to his sixteenth year. His tears had come the day Gray Cloud wrapped an ancestral doe skin over his frail shoulders and stepped out of the cabin they lived in. It was in Gray Cloud’s eyes; he was going away. Going home.

  For a night and a day Cord had sat inside the cabin, tears staining his cheeks. Then, when he couldn’t cry anymore, he followed his grandfather’s tracks into the wilderness. The old man had died curled under the blanket that had been handed down through generations of Utes. He took the blanket because it was now his, buried his grandfather in that peaceful place, and cried again.

  Now, suddenly, he stopped, body wire-tight, listening. It took him a moment to sort out what had caught his attention. A deer was hidden maybe thirty feet away. He signaled to let Shannon know. After a few more seconds he sensed the deer moving away, and went about getting ready for the day.

  Summer lived here. He wondered if Shannon would ever know that, or why he’d given their daughter an Indian name. If the time had been right, if she’d ever indicated she wanted to hear this—if he’d known how to say the words—he’d have told her about where he’d gone the night after Summer died. He’d heard his daughter calling to him and left his sleeping wife, stepped into the night, and gone looking for her.

  Because they’d come back here to be near Shannon’s parents for the birth, he’d wound up at a small, clear pool of water fed by spring runoff. It was near this spot that he’d buried Gray Cloud and where he’d spent the night telling his daughter how much he loved her and that her great-grandfather would always been there to take care of her.

  When he’d taken Summer’s picture in the hard — smelling, too bright hospital, he’d wanted to explode from unspent tears.

  Beside the pool, watched by an owl, talking to two people he loved, he’d lost his grief and found serenity.

  But he hadn’t been able to guide Shannon to his peace and now they were trapped together in the wilderness with nothing in common except the boy who’d been over this ground yesterday but could be anywhere now.

  He needed to find Matt, for himself, and for Shannon.

  Because Matt had come across a deer trail and was following it, Cord and Shannon were able to make easy progress. Still, about an hour after they left camp, Cord called a halt because he wanted to see how well her pack fit. She turned her back to him and stood passively while he adjusted the shoulder straps. He would have believed she felt nothing, cared nothing for his touch, except that her fingers were tightly clenched.

  Lightly clamping his hands over her shoulders, he turned her toward him. “It’s going to be a long time before we overtake him,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

  “I do know. And it doesn’t matter.”

  Although he should get started again, he continued to face her. She stood slightly below him on the hill with the sky draped around her, looking smaller than she usually did. She’d run a brush through her hair before rebraiding it and washed up as best she could, her simple chores reminding him of the femininity that simmered—waited—beneath her practical clothes.

  “What’s going on inside you?” she asked abruptly. “What do you feel? What do you think about when you’re trying to find a sign, any sign, that Matt came this way?”

  “I don’t feel, Shannon.” It was a lie, but a necessary one. If he opened so much as a crack to his emotions this morning, she might step boldly inside—might expose herself to too much.

  “I feel sorry for you. Sorry and...I don’t know. Damn it, I don’t know!”

  “I don’t know what more you want me to say.”

  “I’m sure you don’t. I think, finally, I understand that. It’s just—maybe I still want different what can’t be different. I wish to God I didn’t
. It would be easier for me, maybe easier for both of us.”

  “What do you want changed?”

  She stared at him as if she had never expected to hear that question from him. Answering her gaze, he looked as deeply into her as he could, but he couldn’t reach far enough. If he’d ever once touched her heart, it had been a lifetime ago.

  “For us to be able to go back again, to be wiser, honest,” she whispered. “Oh, Cord. It should all be behind us, shouldn’t it? Okay, I guess I’ll always regret that you and I...when we should have clung to each other, shared as we’d never shared before — it didn’t happen.”

  No. It hadn’t. Summer’s death had changed something inside Shannon and he’d never truly understood what that was. She’d pulled away from him, buried herself. He’d had no idea how to reach her. “You never gave us a chance.”

  She blinked, looked off balance. Wounded. “/ never—You had no idea I might not be there when you came home that last time? That I couldn’t stand mourning our daughter alone, that I needed you...”

  He couldn’t let the conversation continue. Matt was waiting for them to find him. And if Shannon went on, she’d only open wounds she’d spent years healing. He didn’t want her hurt any more than she already was. “You know why I had to be gone.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. We were drowning under medical bills and that had both of us scared. But, Cord, there’s another kind of drowning—of the soul. Of love.” She dragged her hands along her temple and grabbed twin handfuls of hair. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just so raw right now that-”

  Although he simply nodded and returned to tracking, he was left with the realization that nothing about their conversation felt complete. The few times she’d spoken to him after that horrible day when he’d walked into an empty apartment stripped of her essence, she’d said only that his silence had been more than she could stand.

  Nearly seven years ago they’d gone their separate ways. Neither of them needed any more pain.

  But it hadn’t all been pain. She’d once been more important to him than life itself. Around her he’d felt whole. Vulnerable and incapable of telling her how much she meant to him, but whole. All she’d had to do was stand in front of him and hold out her arms to him and he would have died for her.

  She’d once owned him heart and soul. Didn’t she know that?

  He closed his eyes and breathed deeply through mouth and nostrils to clear his head of the cobwebs she’d always been able to spin inside him. Matt. Today was about Matt.

  Still, because he was tracking with his eyes and not his ears, he didn’t need the silence she said she hated. After a few minutes, he drew her attention to a tree trunk that deer used to rub their antlers against, pointed out some black bear sign, and even showed her the entrance to a fox den nestled under a moss-covered boulder.

  “How do you know where to look for a newborn fox or where a deer has bedded down?”

  “Time and experience. My grandfather. John Muir.”

  “The naturalist? What are you talking about?”

  “He and Gray Cloud spoke the same language. I learned from both of them.”

  Shannon didn’t speak, but he easily absorbed the questioning in her eyes. Looking out across an endless carpet of green, he sought inside himself for an answer. “Muir believed that everything in nature fits into us, becomes part of us.”

  “You—”

  “Not me. There’s more to Muir’s philosophy than that—about rivers flowing, not past, but through us, vibrating every fiber and cell of our bodies, making them glide and sing. Those aren’t the exact words, but it expresses the way I feel when I’m here. Part of nature.”

  “Part of nature.” She breathed the words. “I never knew you had that kind of poetry in you.”

  Made a little uneasy by what he’d revealed about himself, he gave her a casual—too casual—smile, “I try to hold on to what Gray Cloud told me because I believe there’s a timelessness to his wisdom.”

  “Yes, there is. I’ve never thought about that before.”

  “Not just him. I’ve found other sources, Indian prayers-Rachel Carson, William Wordsworth, George Washington Carver. Carver said that if you love something enough, it will talk with you. I love being out there where I can hear nature talking. I can’t imagine that ever changing.”

  “That’s—” Her eyes glistened. “Beautiful.”

  Without knowing he was going to do it, he touched a tear caught in her right lashes. She smiled, a slight, shy gesture. “Anyone can become tuned in with nature,” he went on, the words tumbling out of him simply because she’d smiled at him through tears he was responsible for. “All they have to do is listen and observe and love that world. You live out of doors. You must know what I’m talking about.” “I...think so. I don’t have the words you do to draw on, but they touch me.” She blinked away her tears and tried another smile. “Obviously they do.”

  Although he turned to gaze at his green and brown and blue world, he sensed her eyes still on him.

  “I don’t think you would have done that at eighteen,” she whispered. “Told anyone, not even me, about the poetry that has meaning for you.”

  “No,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have.”

  “Maybe it’s because you were still finding out who you are. I say that because I felt the same way. Growing up takes longer than we think it’s going to, doesn’t it? Eighteen isn’t nearly as mature as we’d like it to be.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  After a few minutes of silence, she began talking about caring for orphan rabbits and a fawn whose mother had been hit by a car. Then, when he thought she might have run out of anything to say, she told him she’d seen so many deer this year that she barely paid any attention to them. But she could never dismiss the sight of an elk. Matt, too, had a fixation about them and when one occasionally came into the pasture with the horses, he considered his day complete.

  Then, when the trail they were. on briefly became as clear as a highway, she admitted she wanted to buy a mountain bike so she could find and explore paths like this. She said she enjoyed most of her customers. A few had unrealistic expectations of what horseback riding on a well-worn trail was like and she’d had to learn how to deal with her customers’ reactions.

  His attention spread between her and Matt’s erratic progress, he told her about competition between different law enforcement agencies and how that sometimes complicated his work.

  He described the untouched view of natural forest land from his deck. She smiled, a little wistfully, he thought, then asked if he’d ever gotten the wide-angle lens for his camera he’d been talking about. He had, he said, surprised that she’d remembered.

  As the day dragged on, he learned more about Shannon’s interests than he’d ever known and felt gifted because she wanted him to understand those things about her. Listening to her talk about her admiration of a local wildlife photographer, he was again struck by her enthusiasm for life.

  That was what he’d fallen in love with—that and the way she’d freely given him her body and, he’d thought, her heart. What had scared him back when he was too young to truly understand the complexity of love had been the totality of his response to her body. Even with her walking behind him, out of sight much of the time, his body remembered.

  Getting his work off the ground had put a great deal of strain on their marriage, but it had been nothing compared to the aftereffects of Summer’s death. Was it possible to mend what they’d once had? Maybe he—they—shouldn’t try. After all, they’d each built new lives for themselves. However, life had brought them back together, at least briefly.

  He was halfway through telling her about his reaction to spotting a massive grizzly while being flown into Denali Park in Alaska by a ground-scraping bush pilot when he spotted a series of unexpected prints. Because he’d stopped to study his surroundings innumerable times, he didn’t think she would be alarmed when he did it again. Still, he was glad she couldn’
t see inside his head.

  Three or four people—men, probably, by the size of the prints—had been here in the past couple of days. The rain had washed away some of their tracks but not enough that he couldn’t draw out the information he needed but didn’t want. Their boots were new; they carried considerable weight on their backs, which altered their stance; they walked not like people out for a leisurely stroll, but cautiously and with purpose in mind.

  Hunters?

  The men followed the deer trail for another fifty yards before veering away from it. Although he continued to look for them, the prints didn’t reappear. Hadn’t they known what they’d come upon? he wondered. He wanted to go back to where he’d last seen the tracks, but if he did, Shannon would ask why he’d left the trail, and he’d have to tell her he was being forced to ask himself whether it was more important to find Matt or men with rifles.

  Matt, his heart decided for him. Besides, the men had been here before his son. They might be miles away by now and no longer representing a danger to Matt.

  Maybe.

  And if they were, all the police in the world couldn’t do any more than he was. But was it enough?

  “There.”

  Shannon had waited hours to hear Cord say that. Now it was nearly dark; there was precious little strength left in her legs, and the thin air at this altitude had given her a headache. She stood near Cord and watched him spread his fingers over what looked to her like nothing except a thousand years of forest litter. “What? What is it?”

  “Where he spent last night.”

  Last night seemed so incredibly long ago. Hadn’t they gotten any closer than that? “That’s all you know? That he slept here?”

  “He slept well. He barely moved.”

  “Oh. Thank heavens.” She sank to her knees beside Cord and, as she’d done before, touched the ground he indicated. No matter that she was deluding herself. For a few seconds at least, she could pretend Matt had left some of his heat behind for her. What had Cord said earlier? That if someone loved something enough, it would speak to that person without words. He’d been referring to nature; she thought of Matt. And of Cord. “He seems so far away.”