Aspen in Moonlight

by Kelly Wacker

  “Me, too.” The possibility made her so angry, if she were in fur she’d have roared and torn something up just because she could. That wasn’t an option, and if it were, she certainly would have scared poor Eva, so she thanked her politely instead and excused herself by saying she had a ride waiting for her.

  The shiny black Audi pulled up to the curb near the entrance, and Sula got in. The driver, still professionally detached, asked her if she was heading back to the hotel. Sula said yes, and the drive back was like the ride out, quiet with no conversation required. By the time she reached the hotel room on the ninth floor, she felt better, the anger coursing through her replaced with anticipation at seeing Melissa again. The realization that she’d get to spend another day with her traveling back to Buckhorn made her feel surprisingly light.

  Entering the hotel room, she called out but didn’t hear a reply. Music was playing, and Sula thought perhaps Melissa didn’t hear her. She closed the door, and when she turned around, she noticed a yellow wrapper, one of her honey candies, on the floor. It must have fallen out of her bag when she rushed out earlier that morning. She bent down to pick it up and noticed another candy a few feet in front of her, and another one in front of that. In fact, a trail of them led into the sitting room and then veered to the left. She followed the trail, picking up each candy as they drew her to the bedroom door. Sula laughed softly at Melissa’s playful ploy to entice her into the room, which was dark and the door ajar.

  “Goldie, you in there?” No response. Puzzled, Sula pushed the door open and stepped into the dark room. White flashed in her peripheral vision, and something soft hit her. Sula caught the scent of Melissa’s perfume and heard her muffled laughter through the bath towel that, apparently, had been tossed over her head. She responded instinctively, pawing at the towel, but then dropped her hands to her sides. “Have I just been trapped?”

  “Yep.” Melissa bunched up the towel and slid it down behind her head and neck. She stretched up and kissed her on the end of her nose.

  As her eyes adjusted to the low light of the room, Sula discovered that Melissa was wearing nothing but a wicked grin. “I suppose it would be futile to resist, wouldn’t it?”

  “Mm-hmm. I got you, Bear.” Melissa tugged the towel, and Sula knew only a fool would resist following her into the bed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sitting on Sula’s porch, Melissa ate a slice of pizza left over from their dinner the night before and soaked up the view. It was a picture-perfect day, though some dark-gray clouds were beginning to creep over the peaks. It was sunny and warm now, during her lunch break, but another afternoon storm seemed possible in a few hours. She wasn’t sure which she liked better, the energy of a thunderstorm when it blew in or the cool air, refreshed and sweetened, after it had passed.

  She assumed the characteristic scent that infused the air after the rain must come from a certain mountain plant, but when she said something about it to Sula as they sat together on the porch swing after the thunderstorm the night before, Sula explained that it was a complex mix. She directed Melissa to close her eyes and take slow deep breaths through her nostrils, to focus on separating out the scents. Melissa tried, but unable to identify anything beyond pine and sage, she gave up. Opening her eyes, she watched as Sula lifted her chin, sniffed the air, and called out a litany of trees, plants, flowers…and wet dirt. Melissa laughed, but Sula had assured her that the force of the rain hitting the ground caused certain bacterial spores to erupt into the air and that they smelled very good.

  Melissa was learning so many interesting things from Sula, just as she was learning so much from Sula’s collection of paintings. Sula had given her free run of the house to study the paintings while she was at work, and Melissa was taking full advantage of the opportunity. With Sula’s permission, and cotton gloves purchased from the local hardware store, she was methodically removing the paintings from the walls one by one and placing them on the oak table in the dining room that she covered with a cotton blanket to protect both it and the works of art. The dining room had become her study for examining and documenting them.

  She took photos with her camera for reference later, when she wouldn’t be able to look directly at the paintings. In her notebook, she wrote down observations about the subject matter and the physical condition of each one, knowing she’d later create a spreadsheet on her laptop and enter the notes and add photographs. At this stage, she preferred to write by hand. Translating thoughts to words slowed her down, giving her time to digest what she was seeing.

  On the table now lay the painting from the billiard room, an autumn landscape that exploded with green, yellow, orange, and rusty red. She was done with it but had decided to take a lunch break before putting it back on the wall. Enjoying the porch with its magnificent view, she took a sip of the unusual and refreshing iced tea Sula had made from mint and pine needles and stretched her bare legs out into a beam of sunlight cutting across the porch. She admired the tan she’d acquired since her arrival. It was such a luxury to be outdoors without the oppressive Southern humidity, swarms of mosquitoes, and always having to be on the lookout for fire ants, whose painful, venomous stings itched for days.

  She took another bite of pizza and continued watching the clouds, marveling at their mysterious beauty. They were such impossible things, seeming to exist in two states simultaneously, expanding and contracting at the same time. Suddenly something silky rubbed up against her leg. She looked down to find Tawny staring at her, the cat’s green eyes focused and piercing.

  “Cats don’t eat pizza,” Melissa admonished the cat in a gentle voice. The sweet orange-and-gray tabby looked at her as if to say, “But we do eat cheese.” Spotty, her sibling, was curled up, sleeping soundly on the cushion of a chair across the porch. Melissa pinched a piece of cheese from what remained of her slice and held it out. “Shh. Don’t tell your sister.”

  Tawny delicately took the morsel from her fingers and gave it a little shake before eating it. Even when their food wasn’t alive, cats still “killed” it; some wild instincts ran deep. Melissa ate the remaining bit of pizza, brushed the crumbs off her lap, and rubbed the cat between her ears. Tawny purred and bumped her head against her hand. Missing her own cat, Melissa was glad for the company of Sula’s, but she suspected that Alex might not be missing her that much in return. Every few days she received a new photo of him from Beth, usually sleeping in a cute position on the bed, the sofa, in a patch of sunlight, or Emma’s lap.

  Melissa stood and stretched to relieve the knot of tension that had formed in her neck and shoulders during the morning. Going back into the house, she was greeted by the subtle resinous scent that the wood of the house emanated. Like the air after a rainstorm, the scent was deeply satisfying. With a glance at the cuckoo clock as she walked through the great room, she estimated that she had just enough time to return the autumn scene to the billiard room and then take down, assess, and photograph one more before Sula returned from work.

  After hanging the painting back on the wall above the dancing bear, she paused to regard the sculpture and put her hand on it with guilty pleasure. She could never touch it like this in a museum. Its black surface was cool and smooth as glass. She ran her fingers along the curve of the bear’s upstretched arm, over its head, down the length of its back, and along the underside of its leg. She mused on how touching was another way of knowing. While keen observation revealed so much, touch allowed for a different kind of comprehension. Melissa cocked her head, a habit when she was deep in thought, and wondered how she might describe this type of knowing in words. Embodied observation, perhaps? She liked the sound of those words together and reminded herself to write the phrase in her journal when she returned to the dining room. Her thoughts drifted from academic to erotic as she considered how, in the past few nights, she was certainly getting to know Sula’s body by touch…as well as her senses of sight, smell, and taste.

  Reluctantly, Melissa pulled herself from her reverie and
considered which painting she would examine next. Delicious memories of Sula unclothed and undulating with pleasure in the bed upstairs reminded her of the moonlit winter scene of aspen trees and snow hanging above the headboard. Winter came after autumn, didn’t it? It seemed a logical choice.

  The bedroom, located in a corner of the second floor, was cozy rather than spacious. The modest size was probably easier to keep warm. A cast-iron stove in the rock-lined corner of the room suggested that extra heat was needed on a cold winter’s night. The ceiling and exterior walls in the room were exposed, and the logs, like those in the rest of the house, had darkened with age, though the room was brightened by the pale, warm yellow of the plastered and painted interior walls.

  A tall dresser and low chest of drawers evidenced Sula’s preference for Arts and Crafts style furniture, but the bedstead, made from aspen logs, was rustic. Beautifully crafted, it wasn’t heavy looking like ones she’d seen before. The headboard and footboard of the large bed were comprised of narrow branches set into a frame at irregular angles so that they resembled a tangle of tree branches. In fact, she had joked with Sula that morning that she felt like she was sleeping in a tree house. Sula had replied sleepily, saying that, if they were actually in a tree house, she would have pulled up the ladder to keep her in bed a while longer.

  Melissa crawled across the bed in order to get to the painting, which seemed to stir up their commingled scents. She smiled to herself, enjoying the intoxicating fragrance, as she reached up and lifted the painting from the wall. Once it was in her hands, she noticed that it was backed with paper. That was unusual, as all the other paintings in the house so far had exposed backs. She grasped it carefully, the way she had been taught many years ago in a museum-methods class in grad school. With a firm grip on opposite corners of the frame, she held the painting out in front of her and made her way slowly down the stairs, one cautious step at a time. She was almost to the bottom when the heel of her sandal caught on the edge of the last stair and she pitched forward, nearly falling. Catching herself, she jerked back sharply to regain her balance, and when she did, she heard a pop. Afraid she might have cracked a joint in the frame or dislodged a key—one of the small wedges of wood tapped into the corners of the stretcher frame used to tighten the canvas—she stood motionless, scrutinizing the frame and the painting’s surface for any obvious sign of damage before taking it to the dining room.

  She placed it gently on the padded table and took her time with it, allowing her eyes to roam over the view of a stand of aspen trees in heavy snow. The paint was thick, and the wide brushstrokes were so masterfully fluid and confident, Melissa easily visualized the movements of the artist’s hand. The perspective, like many of her paintings, Melissa realized, was from a low point of view, and it gave her a sense of being in the grove rather than gazing at it from a distance. The painting of white trees in the snow was stark, but mesmerizing. The narrow tree trunks, with their characteristic dark eye-like patterns in the cool white bark, created strong vertical elements. The moon, though not visible in the sky, must have been full and either rising or setting as the trees cast bluish diagonal shadows that pulled the eye to the left. Melissa considered the way Ursula used linear perspective: the tree’s shadows were orthogonals—implied lines that met up at a single vanishing point on the horizon line—which in this case was the dark area in the distance where the aspen grove seemed to end and the coniferous forest began.

  Unlike the other paintings in the house, this one contained figures. Much like her painting at home, it featured a woman and a bear, but the positions were reversed. A woman in a white dress stood among the aspens in the middle ground, and looming large in the foreground was a big brown bear watching her.

  These figures were articulated. They looked effortlessly painted, but that wasn’t an easy thing to do. Such a skill came from experience. Melissa began to wonder how many of Ursula’s paintings included figures and if they would all be women and bears. Ursula, like Sula and her parents, also seemed to have had an affinity for bears; perhaps it was a familial tradition passed down the generations.

  Melissa photographed the painting, and when turning it over to inspect the back, she heard what sounded like something sliding from one side to the other. Mindful to document the painting’s condition as found, she resisted the impulse to immediately remove the dust cover on the back. The paper backing along the upper edge and right corner seemed to have been re-glued because the paper wasn’t quite as tight there as on the other edges. A second layer of glue seemed to have caused the paper to buckle; either too much or a different kind had been used. Perhaps a repair had been made and the damaged area weakened as a result. Melissa documented the painting’s condition with more photos, and then, with her Swiss Army knife, she carefully removed the backing.

  What was inside came as a surprise. Instead of a loose wooden wedge, she found a thin bundle of envelopes tied with black silk ribbon. One corner of the frame was missing one of the keys, and normally two wedges were tapped in at right angles to each other. The envelopes must have been tucked into the narrow space between the remaining key and the back of the canvas and had come loose when she tripped and jerked the painting.

  She lifted them out with a gloved hand and turned them over. She inhaled sharply, nearly dropping them when she saw a name and address on the front of the top envelope. Written in a beautifully elegant and fluid script was her great-grandmother’s name.

  Sula checked the time. It was nearing two o’clock. Her parents would be calling her soon for their video chat. Although they had internet access and email on the research vessel, they scheduled real-time conversations around their working schedules and when broadband was available. Sometimes, when the boat was moving in a direction that put the boom of the large crane in between the satellite dish and the signal, they had to wait until the ship changed its heading to get a better connection. Rather than sit in her office staring at the computer screen, Sula went to the break room for a cup of coffee and then to the front office looking for Anna.

  “Hey, Anna?”

  “Yeah, Boss?” Anna, grinning, spun around in her chair.

  “I’m going to talk with my parents in a bit. I’ll be unavailable for the next half hour or so.”

  “Okay.” The smile on Anna’s face remained unchanged.

  Sula started to walk away but then stopped and turned. “Am I missing something? Why are you smiling like that?”

  “I’m a happy employee?”

  Sula narrowed her eyes at Anna suspiciously. “I’m glad to hear that, but you usually don’t smile like a Cheshire cat.”

  “I’m so happy for you!”

  “Why?” Sula was puzzled.

  “You’ve been kind of funny ever since you got back from Denver, real quiet and smiling at nothing. Like, a lot.” Anna paused. “I went to lunch at the diner today and ran into Betty and Lars. Betty asked how you were doing, and I told her about how you were acting. She said it probably had something to do with you and Melissa, and that explained why you hadn’t called her.” Anne’s smile got bigger. “I put two and two together. You’re seeing her, aren’t you?”

  Sula rolled her eyes and made an exasperated sound.

  “I knew it!” Anna’s smile shifted to a look of concern. “Are you mad at me, Boss? For discussing this with Betty?”

  “No, not at all. Betty’s sneaky. I’m sure she knew you’d talk to me about your conversation.” In truth, Sula really had been in a daze while working in the office recently, and then, spending her time with Melissa in the evenings, she’d honestly forgotten to return Betty’s call. She was distracted and running a little short on sleep, not that she was complaining.

  “She seems really nice,” Anna said softly. “She’s pretty, too.”

  “Yeah, she is.” Sula wasn’t sure what else to say. She glanced at her watch. “Look, I’ve got to catch that call from my parents.”

  “Okay.” Anna spun back around in her chair to face her comp
uter, waving her hand behind her head. “Tell your folks I said hi.”

  “I will.” Sula laughed softly to herself, thinking about Betty’s sly ways, as she walked down the hall. She closed her office door, something she rarely did, and the staff knew it meant she was not to be disturbed. She took her laptop to the couch and logged into her Skype account. Sipping her coffee, she stared out the window. Clouds were building in the distance, foreshadowing another afternoon thunderstorm.

  The burbling ringtone alerted her to the incoming call, and when it connected, her smiling parents abruptly appeared on-screen. As usual, they were in their small wood-paneled cabin, with cool arctic light streaming through the rounded windows behind them. They looked a little weather-beaten, but happy. Her mother’s gray hair was tousled, by the sea wind, no doubt. Sula had inherited her dark hair color from her mother, and she imagined that, in a few decades, hers would be similarly streaked with white. The texture of her hair came from her father, who had recently trimmed his short and grown a beard. It suited him, made him look more handsome somehow. They greeted each other with enthusiasm, Sula commenting on how it was still light there, even though it was ten o’clock at night, and asked how things were going.

  “It’s been great.” Sula’s father, Charles, spoke first. “Your mom’s gotten to observe quite a few bears, and we’ve spent the past few days helping the marine scientists on board gather data. Interesting stuff. We’re heading back to Longyearbyen now.”

  Longyearbyen, the northernmost town in the world, was the largest in Svalbard, with a population of about two thousand people. Situated in a treeless basin between rugged mountains and the edge of a fjord, it had begun as a mining community around the turn of the twentieth century. Now it was associated more with research scientists, nature tourism, and the global seed vault. Sula had never been there, but her parents said the views of the northern lights were spectacular and polar-bear sightings were frequent.