Aspen in Moonlight

by Kelly Wacker

  “Yeah, like I said, I don’t know what she was doing, but she was behaving weirdly and…inappropriately. And then Sula showed up, scaring us. Kerry shot her in the arm. And I sprayed Kerry with bear spray.”

  “Sula scared you?”

  “Yes, at first,” Melissa said hesitantly. “I didn’t recognize her at first.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Betty looked her in the eye. “And Kerry says she shot a bear?”

  Melissa nodded.

  “Did Kerry shoot a bear?” Betty’s expression was strangely calm, given what she was asking.

  Melissa bit her lower lip, hesitant to answer the question truthfully. She hadn’t lied to the officer; she just hadn’t been so specific. But he wasn’t asking questions with Betty’s precision. It was if she already knew the answer. Melissa took a deep breath and exhaled. “Yes.”

  Betty seemed unfazed. “Did you tell Lee Martinez that?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Betty narrowed her eyes.

  “Because I thought he’d think I was crazy, just like he thinks Kerry’s crazy.”

  “Because the big bear you saw turned into Sula?” Betty’s voice was nearly a whisper.

  Melissa jerked upright, staring at Betty. “What? How do you—” Melissa sputtered, unable to form a question.

  “What you saw was real, Melissa.”

  “I’m not crazy?”

  “No, you’re not crazy,” Betty said reassuringly, a subtle smile forming on her lips. “But you did experience something very special and rare.”

  “You’ve seen it before?”

  “I have. And we’ll talk more about it later, but right now I need to know that you’re not going to talk about this with anyone else but me so I can go find a nurse and see what’s going on with Sula.”

  “Yes, the nurse…” Melissa felt like her brain was in a fog. “The nurse was supposed to come back to talk to me, but she didn’t.” A wave of anxiety hit her. “Do you think that’s a bad sign?”

  “Not necessarily.” Betty patted her back and squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll go see what I can find out, and I’ll be back.” Betty stood and was intercepted by Nurse Stone.

  “Is this Sula’s mother?”

  “No,” Melissa answered.

  “I’m her aunt,” Betty said quickly. “How is she?”

  “She’s stable,” the nurse said to Betty, but glanced at Melissa with a reassuring smile. “She’s being prepped for surgery right now. The bullet nicked the bone, and the surgeon want to remove a few fragments and clean up the wound so it’ll heal properly. If you’d like to see her before we move her, now would be the time.”

  “I would, thank you.” Betty looked at Melissa. “Are you good here?”

  Melissa nodded.

  “I’ll be back.”

  “Hey, Sula.”

  Hearing a familiar voice, Sula opened her eyes, blinking against the harsh light. Betty stood in the doorway smiling at her. “Hey…”

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “I’m okay…well, I mean I guess I’m not okay if I’m here…” She started to point to her bandaged shoulder, but the movement caused a spasm of pain. Wincing, she held her breath until it ebbed. “I’m going to have surgery. Did they tell you?”

  “The nurse told me. And I talked to Melissa. She’s in the waiting room. You had an exciting morning, didn’t you?”

  “Is she okay? I tried to explain, but she kept telling me to be quiet.”

  “You scared her. In more ways than one. She’s got a good head on her shoulders, though, that’s for sure. She’s understandably confused right now. I’ll talk with her, so don’t you worry about that.”

  “Thanks, Betty.” Sula closed her eyes. She felt a little woozy and was having a hard time keeping Betty in focus. She opened them again. “Hey, Betty?”

  “Yes?”

  “Kerry was setting traps.” Sula frowned. “On conservancy land and other places. She set out bait and was going to shoot Notch.”

  “That explains the dead deer. And why you got angry enough to show your true colors.”

  “And Melissa…she was scared of Kerry. I heard the fear in her voice, and I felt very protective.” Sula panicked. “I might’ve messed up, Betty. I was…Kerry saw—”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about her.” Betty chuckled, although Sula didn’t think it was a laughing matter. “The police picked her up. She seems to have the crazy idea that she shot a bear. She’s getting a psych evaluation.”

  “But Melissa saw—”

  “Melissa says Kerry shot you, not a bear.”

  Understanding, Sula closed her eyes and laughed softly. She felt better with her eyes closed. “Hey, Betty?”

  “Right here.”

  “Could I see Melissa?”

  “If that’s what you want, sure. I’ll go get her.”

  Melissa put her head in her hands and closed her eyes. Snippets of the day flashed through her mind. A big, big angry bear. Kerry in a cloud of pepper spray. Sula on the ground bleeding after several excruciating minutes of a mind-boggling metamorphosis. And Betty sitting next to her, patting her and all but telling her that everything was okay. Okay? What the hell? Truth be told, she was glad Betty was here. It seemed like she was taking command of the situation.

  Her head felt like it was spinning. Was she experiencing shock? Perhaps the doctor had released her too soon. She opened her eyes and stared out the window overlooking the parking lot while she tried to process her thoughts. Sula was…what? A shape-shifter? A were-bear? This was the stuff of horror movies, fairy tales, and ancient art—the products of imaginative, creative minds. This did not exist in the real world. At least that’s what she’d thought until this morning. What she knew to be fact and fiction had shifted beneath her. A shift of seismic proportion. It was an awful lot to take in. She felt destabilized, adrift in an ocean of uncertainty. Just hours ago, she had been certain about a lot of things, of feeling wonderfully, deeply in love with Sula, for one. And now…God, she didn’t know what to think.

  “Melissa?”

  Startled, Melissa flinched and sat up to see Betty in front of her. She was so lost in thought she hadn’t seen or heard her walk up. “How’s Sula?”

  “She’s all right, considering. She’ll be going into surgery soon.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It is.” Betty scrutinized her. “She’d like to see you before she goes.”

  Melissa bit her lower lip, feeling unsure.

  “Listen,” Betty sat next to her and looked her directly in the eye. “That is Sula in there. The same Sula you’ve always known. Today you learned something new about her. But it doesn’t change who she is.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “I’ve never not known,” Betty said, a gentle smile forming on her lips. “Our families have been good friends for a long time, going back to the old country. It runs in her family, you know. She’s not an anomaly.”

  There were more people who could turn into bears? Melissa’s head started to spin again. She hadn’t gotten past the shock of knowing there was one. “Are you…?”

  “Ha! No. I’m just a plain ol’ regular Norwegian-American. Nothing fancy in my genes,” Betty said with a half-smile. She tucked her chin and raised her eyebrows. “So? Do you want to see her?”

  “I do,” Melissa said, but still felt uneasy about facing Sula.

  Before she could change her mind, Betty led her down the hall to the pre-op area, where the beds were arranged in bays with a privacy curtain at each end. Betty gestured to a closed curtain on the far side of the room. “She’s in the bed at the end.”

  Melissa heard voices, people talking, and one of them was Sula’s. She took a step forward and a nurse stopped them. “She’s on her way to surgery now.”

  “Sula asked to see Melissa before she went,” Betty said.

  “Okay, but…” The nurse glanced over her shoulder as the curtain was drawn back. “It’ll have to be quick.”<
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  Melissa moved forward slowly and peered around the curtain. Sula lay in the bed, eyes closed, dressed in a hospital gown with a blanket neatly draped across her. Her shoulder and upper arm were wrapped in thick layers of gauze, and an IV was attached to the hand of her other arm. An orderly stood behind the bed, ready to wheel her out.

  Sula opened her eyes and raised her head. Her lips curved upward gently, an expression as disarming as it was charming. Melissa returned the smile without thinking, but the dizzying happiness she felt seeing her was edged with a gnawing anxiety that churned inside her, a strange emotional cocktail. Sula lifted her arm, extending her hand, the gesture striking her like a jolt of electricity. Melissa froze. All she could see was the shape of a bear paw. Suppressing the memory, Melissa stared at the long fingers…not claws, she reminded herself…it was the strong hand that hoisted her up boulders and brought her pleasure during their lovemaking. She moved to the side of the bed, cautiously taking her hand.

  Sula squeezed her hand gently. She sighed and put her head back on the pillow, closing her eyes. When she spoke, her words were slow and thick. “Glad you’re here.”

  The orderly cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I need to take her to surgery.”

  Melissa nodded to the young man. Sula released her hand, and as she watched her roll past, she held on to the feel of her skin, soft and warm…and human.

  Betty walked her back to the waiting area. “The nurse said the surgery should take about an hour and a half.”

  “Okay.” Licking her lips, Melissa realized her mouth felt sticky and dry. She remembered that her car was packed for a picnic, including bottles of strawberry lemonade in ice. “I’m going to get something to drink from my car. Can I bring you something?”

  “No. I’m fine. Thanks.” Betty touched her arm. “Hey, you don’t have to stay here, you know. It would do you some good to go back to the cabin, get a shower, maybe take a nap. I’ll keep you posted, and you’ve got my number.”

  Melissa walked through the doors, out into the heat of the day. She retrieved the bottle from the cooler in the back of her car, but her hands were shaking so badly she could barely twist off the cap. Sitting in the car, she held the bottle with both hands to steady herself, took a deep drink, and noticed the hospital band still on her wrist. She thought to cut it off with the Swiss Army knife in her backpack, but with her hands trembling the way they were, she feared she’d only cut herself. Maybe when the sugar kicked in, her nerves would settle. She stared at the hospital through the windshield, the white walls reflecting the sun so brightly it hurt her eyes. Looking down, away from the glare, she realized she had blood on her hands, in the creases of her palms, under her fingernails. Startled, she wondered how she had been unaware of it. The world was apparently starting to come back into focus bit by bit.

  She took another swallow of lemonade and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. She looked awful…although her hair looked kind of nice. She hadn’t realized how spending so much time outdoors had turned it really…golden…just like Goldilocks. Sula had been calling her Goldie all summer. It had seemed a cute, sort of flirty term of endearment. But now she realized the joke was on her. She really was Goldilocks sleeping in the bear’s bed. A bear’s bed, for crying out loud. A fucking bear! And she’d been fucking the bear, too. Melissa stared at herself in the mirror, curled a golden lock of hair around her finger, and began to cry.

  Betty was right. She needed to wash up, go back to the cabin for a shower and a clean change of clothes, then try to calm herself and hopefully get some sleep before beginning her three-day drive home to Georgia. The mundane reality she’d been dreading returning to was now a lifesaver, something tangible to hang on to. Her thoughts raced away from the present, forward to Georgia, to her university, to her teaching position. She had meetings to attend and classes to prepare for. She couldn’t miss a day of work, couldn’t miss a thing this semester. It was her tenure-application year, and not showing up for her first day back would jeopardize her good standing and reputation. The new provost paid attention to who attended and, more importantly, who did not attend the formal faculty convocation before the start of the term. Barring a death in the family or any other extreme emergency, Melissa had to be there. If she didn’t get tenure, she wouldn’t have a job.

  It was time to leave. Time to go home.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Hey, Boss, here’s your coffee…” Anna put a cup of fresh coffee on her desk and pulled a plate out from behind her back, “and a cinnamon roll.”

  “Ah…you’re the best administrative assistant ever, Anna.” Sula lifted her nose to inhale the sweet, aromatic scent wafting toward her.

  Anna beamed. “Did you hear the news? The weather forecast changed. We’re supposed to get several inches of snow this afternoon.”

  “Really? Then I guess we’ll be closing the office early today.” It was an office tradition to close early the day of the first snowfall and let the administrative staff go play in the snow. The visitor-center employees would get two extra hours of personal time.

  “Awesome.” Anna grinned. “Snow day! Shall I share the good news?”

  “By all means, let everyone know. I’ll send an official email.”

  Anna practically skipped out of her office. Sula sipped her coffee and looked to her calendar. The twentieth of September. Snowfall this early wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual. Looking at the calendar reminded her that over a month had passed since Kerry had ruined everything between her and Melissa, and she was still causing her trouble.

  After the shooting, Sula’s immediate concern for the conservancy was news coverage. Kerry’s initial assertion of having seen a bear-woman had been reported by the Denver stations and spread quickly through the internet, with spinoff speculative stories about fabled grizzlies and even the possibility that freaking Bigfoot was tramping around Buckhorn. Worried that it would cause a public-relations problem, she discovered that the opposite was true. Her media director explained that it was being perceived as just another all-too-frequent example of a troubled individual acting out violently. If managed correctly it would benefit the conservancy by providing more opportunities to share the organization’s noble work and to preach the good word about living with bears.

  Sula didn’t want the conservancy to press trespassing charges. The district attorney’s office was already pursuing reckless-endangerment charges. The local newspaper quoted Kerry as saying that, blinded by pepper spray, she thought she was shooting at a large bear in self-defense. Trying to portray herself as the victim, she also said she had lost her job. Strangely, her story contained elements of truth. Sula in fur had huffed and popped her jaw in anger and begun to charge when Kerry fired the pistol. Sula couldn’t help it. A deep protective instinct had kicked in, and her mind had emptied of everything except getting Kerry away from Melissa. At least Kerry seemed to have stopped talking about the bear turning into a woman with reporters. But Sula knew not to trust her. The woman was wily, and who knew what she was saying privately?

  Sula’s hands trembled with mounting anger, and she put the pencil down before she snapped it in half and threw the pieces across the room. Kerry had given up a respectable job to work as nothing more than an unconscionable contract serial killer. If she had any moral compass whatsoever, she had abandoned it when she took that job with Wildlife Services. As far as Sula was concerned, when she started trapping for them, she became complicit in the agency’s slaughter of millions of animals—bears, mountain lions, wolves, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, the list went on and on—butchery that was unjustified, horrific, and tragic.

  She wanted Kerry to pay for her crimes against nature, an intentional misuse of the term, she knew, but it described her heinous actions well. Sula also needed to protect the conservancy and, the more she considered it, herself, too. The last thing she needed was some Bigfoot hunter, inspired by Kerry’s fantastic story, nosing around, hiding in the woods with recording device
s. Finding Kerry’s trail camera had warned her that even forests weren’t as safe as they used to be.

  She was the source of every damn thing wrong in her life right now. If it weren’t for Kerry, she and Melissa would still be speaking. Sula would have had the time she needed to find a way to explain to Melissa carefully and gently what she was. It would have been difficult, but Melissa would have understood, and they would still be together. Instead, the love of her life, the only woman she had ever loved, had driven away as quickly as she could without even saying good-bye.

  Sula had still been groggy the day after surgery when Betty let it slip that Melissa was on her way back to Georgia. She only vaguely remembered having seen her as she was being wheeled to the operating room. Recalling her last clear memories of Melissa broke her heart—seeing a look of terror on her face as she witnessed Sula in fur and the metamorphosis of the hamask, the rampant fear as she drove her to the hospital. Sula had texted Melissa from her hospital bed, asking her to let her know when she arrived safely. Her heart was heavy when she received a terse text several days later that just said, “Home.” Sula replied immediately, saying she wanted to talk, to explain things, to make things right between them, but received no reply. Nothing…not another word from Melissa.

  Sula’s chest constricted; pain and heartbreak twisted and spun into white-hot anger. She wanted to lash out, but at what? The feeling of helplessness made her even more frustrated and angry.

  She went to the window and gazed out at the trees and the lake beyond, hoping the peaceful view of the landscape would soothe her agitated nerves. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass and closed her eyes.

  She fantasized about taking Kerry down. If she hadn’t been shot, she very well might have sunk her teeth into an arm or a leg and given her a swift bone-breaking, tendon-snapping shake, before dragging her into the woods where nobody would have ever found her. Sula ran her hands through her hair and sighed deeply. As much as they gave her guilty pleasure, she recoiled from her thoughts. She had never hurt anyone while in fur, not even with her cousins when they were kids playing rough-and-tumble with fangs and claws. But she’d never been pushed to the edge like this either. Clearly Kerry was a predator. She shuddered to think about what might have happened to Melissa had she not arrived.