Frank opened another can of beer. Behind the glass door of the stove, a log fell, and the flames hissed. Patsy was gone, but this place was still a sanctuary—the one part of his life that hadn’t changed.
Like Mona, he thought. Mona didn’t seem to change. It wasn’t her slim figure or her intense blue eyes, though he liked those, too. It was that she seemed satisfied with her life. There was a wholeness, a settledness, about Mona. And her store. That simple country store that never got renovated. It seemed to embody the same quality—a certain timelessness.
The store. Oh, shit. He’d forgotten the coffee. He’d have to go back.
On the porch, a sheet of rain blew sideways toward him, drenching his head and jacket. It had warmed up just enough to turn the snow into rain, and this looked like a flash flood. Back in the cabin, he changed into his slicker, then ran to the car. Old Faithful started right up. Almost three hundred thousand miles on this little gem, and heading for the Guinness Book of World Records.
Now the torrents assaulted his windshield, and visibility was zilch. He started down the driveway, maneuvering the car up, down, and around the ruts and gullies of rushing water. Maybe if he hadn’t had that sixth beer, he’d have been a little more cautious—but hell, this was living. This actually called for Beethoven, which he didn’t have in the car, so he picked an old Taj Mahal tape, and sang along at the top of his voice: “Goin’ to the country, gonna paint my mailbox blue. . .”
The Wild Mountain Road was paved, and the mud gullies ended, but across the road, the Perry house was a wet blur. He headed toward the bridge, the river to his right barely visible. Were some of those ice floes moving? Could have been the beer. He proceeded more slowly.
Patsy had accused him of being too fragmented, and maybe she’d been right. Maybe he did run around too much, searching for answers. But now that he was older, he’d come to an understanding about himself. An acceptance. He was a person who liked to keep moving. And he liked variety. Life, after all, was constructed of all the people and all the places you’d ever known. So why not cast a wide net? His included San Francisco in ’88, New Zealand in the ’90s, New York, Vermont, and even Patsy, who had stayed out in Arizona after the divorce.
He’d been single now for almost twenty years. The other day, he’d been sitting in a café in the East Village, drinking an espresso and watching the people walk by, couples laughing in the unseasonable warmth and sun. Suddenly, he’d stopped, holding his tiny porcelain cup in midair. Light flickered across a building and reflected a beam straight at him, and with it came a realization, a kind of epiphany: he didn’t want to be alone when he got old. Now that he thought about it, it sounded so obvious, but he’d rarely felt it before—this longing to be settled, to have a home and a woman to come home to.
Through the rain and fog, he peered out at the river. Mona had a strange beauty, he thought, with those fierce blue eyes and that willowy grace; but it was her earthiness that appealed to him most. What would it be like to get into bed with Mona every night? Wait a minute. He shook his head, as though shaking off water after stepping out of a lake. Frank MacFarland, settle into a rural lifestyle? He’d never thought of himself that way. There was something about Vermont, about being here, that felt more comfortable than New York—or, in fact, any other place he’d been. Was he changing? Or just getting old?
He fiddled with the wiper lever. Something was moving on the river. An animal. A large animal. He pulled the car over and stopped. His head was throbbing.
Was it a moose? Yes. A moose calf perched on the edge of an ice floe that was drifting away from the bank. As he watched, it tried to jump, slipped back onto the ice, and scrambled to stand upright, floundering on its long, awkward legs. My God. The animal needed help.
If he could lasso the calf, maybe he could bring it in to safety. The last time he’d been in Arizona, he’d taken a class in rodeo and roundup. There was a rope in the trunk.
Frank stepped out into the deluge, tying the hood on his slicker. He took the rope out of the trunk and managed to tie a lasso in spite of the pelting water. Was there an opening in that glazed-over hedgerow? He could see only a few yards away. Stepping carefully, he broke through the icy crust, soaking his socks and pants in the soggy marsh grass. Maneuvering between the icy shards, he crashed and crunched down to the river’s edge, arriving just downstream of the calf. It panicked when it saw him, foundered, and fell again.
There was no way he could lasso the animal and drag it over the ice without hurting it. Too much jagged ice and too many broken tree trunks stood between them—but there, behind the calf, was an ice floe. He’d have to get onto that and herd the calf back to shore.
3
MONA HELD THE DOOR FOR THE DAIRY TRUCK DRIVER, who was wheeling in a dolly filled with milk and cream, then closed it against the rain. Leo, Heather, and Eli were huddled over the counter. Bodies at the hearth. People who belonged to you, your friends, your customers. At the center of the tableau, Heather’s pale hair lit up the scene, while her son Eli, with his adolescent sense of dignity, peered silently around from behind her at the laptop on the counter.
“It’s coming downriver,” said Heather.
Mona started. “What’s coming downriver?”
“Ice!” shouted Eli.
“But the whole river is ice.”
“They’re talking about an ice jam,” Heather said, her voice hushed. “Saying it could hit the bridge.”
“The bridge?” She choked. The old covered bridge was as much a part of her landscape, of her life, as the river. She reached across Heather and turned on the scanner.
Heather and Eli argued about driving home while the scanner crackled with static. Mona stood at the window, watching the river and twisting her finger around the end of her braid.
She had learned to drive a tractor when she was ten, and more times than not, she’d been out in the barn with her dad, milking and mucking the stalls when her brothers were still in bed. She’d much rather be outside than in. Let her brothers stay in with her mother. Mona couldn’t stand the kitchen. She could build fences and fix engines, and Dad had relied on her as he’d never done with the boys. It was tough—yes, it was—but it sure had come in handy when she’d bought the store. Not that she thought storekeeping would be all that easy, but sometimes it felt a lot tougher than all the farm work combined. It would have been nice to have had a break once in a while.
Nor would she ever go back to the high and mighty Johnny O. Duval. Maybe her dad had only been an uneducated farmer, and maybe he’d been what they now called abusive—but nothing like Johnny O. And for him to think afterward that he could just saunter into her life and upset the applecart whenever he had a whim… those phone calls…. Whoa, Mona, she thought, that was the past, and you don’t need to go there.
“I won’t subject you to violence,” Heather was declaring in her thin but authoritative voice, “and right now, the weather is violent. We’re staying here.” Eli skulked off to the back of the store as Heather pursed her lips.
Mona turned back to the window. Heather was so overprotective. If Eli were her kid, she’d have been home an hour ago.
A loud crackle and the voice of Mary Louise, the dispatcher, bleeped from the scanner. “Edson, come in.” Edson Perry was head of the FAST Squad, The First Aid Stabilization Team. As first responders, they had been a fixture in Vermont towns for years.
“Man on river, man on river,” Mary Louise called, in that official-sounding monotone, as if a man on the river were an everyday occurrence.
Heather’s mouth dropped open, and she looked at Mona. Mona turned up the volume. “Edson, do you hear me?” crackled Mary Louise, still in that monotone. Edson didn’t answer.
Mona picked up the receiver. “Mona here. Where’s the guy?” She was on the FAST Squad, too.
“Wild Mountain Road, quarter mile above the bridge, according to motorist with cell phone.”
“Okay, let’s go,” she said, pulling on her boots and
grabbing her parka from the hook. “Heather, can you cover for me?” she yelled as she banged out the door, leaving Heather nodding mutely at the counter.
She climbed into her vehicle, a silver four-by-four Ford, and Leo appeared with an armful of coiled rope. He threw it into the truck bed and scrambled into the passenger seat beside her.
When they reached the parked car, a gust of rain dumped out of the sky, and then, just as suddenly, stopped. Edson’s red Chevy pickup was on the other side of the road, and Edson was standing on the bank, facing the river.
“Fucking imbecile!” Edson shouted.
While Leo hefted the coiled rope out of the truck bed, Mona peered through the fog. “Who is it?”
“Fucking Admiral Perry.” Edson pointed. She saw a dark shape, almost on the other side of the river. He was surrounded by water, standing on what did look like an iceberg. The little blue BMW parked beside them looked familiar. Oh yes, she’d seen it earlier today at the store. Could it be Frank MacFarland out there?
A siren wailed through the fog, and the Wild Mountain firetruck, lights flashing, pulled around the bend and came to a stop.
Cappy Gold, the fire chief, a small, hefty man in his forties, stepped down from the cab. He looked out at the river and back at them with dark, quiet eyes, and in a soft voice, started to give orders. Cappy and Edson fussed and fumed, and finally agreed to extend the ladder out horizontally to where the man was stranded. They managed to release it and tilt it down, guiding its tip toward the river.
“I’ll go,” Mona volunteered. She was the lightest and nimblest person on the team. Cappy nodded. She strapped on a life vest, and then, taking one end of the rope, stepped onto the ice. She moved tentatively, then slipped and caught herself, sprays of water splashing onto her head and parka as the river crashed into a massive hunk of ice beside her.
Mona searched the river with her eyes, and now she could see him. “Oh, God,” she cried, “It is Frank. Frank MacFarland!” Not that anyone could hear her. She felt like screaming—and maybe like screaming at him. What an idiot. She didn’t know what she felt, but she was here, and now she had to go on. She stepped onto the ladder beside her and began to crawl toward Frank.
Frank, in a yellow slicker, marooned on his iceberg, waved his arms and pointed downriver. The water between them was roaring so loud, she couldn’t hear. Something about a moose?
“Okay, Frank, hold tight,” Mona shouted, and waved to Cappy to steer the ladder to the right. The tip of it came to rest on the ice floe where Frank was standing, and when he started to come toward the ladder, he was limping and struggling to walk.
“Crawl, Frank!” she yelled.
Frank sank to his hands and knees on the ladder, and started to inch toward her. “Good, Frank,” she shouted, “that’s it. You got it.” She tried to throw him one end of the rope, but it missed the mark and fell into the water. Well, maybe they didn’t need the rope. It was just an extra precaution.
By the time they made it back to the bank, Frank was red-faced and panting. He had a big goose egg of a bump on the side of his head. She gave him a hug, and his breath reeked of beer. He was saying something about a moose, but she wasn’t listening, because by this time, the ambulance had arrived, and two paramedics were placing a stretcher on the crusty snow and situating him on it. Frank mounted a half-hearted protest, but was obviously too beat to sustain much resistance. As the team fastened the straps on the stretcher, Mona called out, “Head injury, ankle injury.”
Frank sighed. “I hope he made it.”
The West Paris firetruck was parked behind the Wild Mountain truck, and now there were at least six other people standing around. As he disappeared into the ambulance, Frank gave her a sad-eyed smile. “Hey, Mona, I got you into an adventure, after all.”
“Yeah, Frank, I guess you did.” She patted his hand. Idiot.
The rain had stopped, and as she walked back to the truck, she shrugged off her parka hood and shook out her braid. With his hair sticking up in mats and a monster of a purple contusion, his pants soaked and torn, Frank looked like some feral maniac…or like Gus, her old friend who, a few years ago, had chucked his normal life and gone up on the mountain to live like a hermit. But Frank, she thought, struggling to be more compassionate, had been trying to rescue an animal, so he must have a good heart. And he had looked kind of cute in the store.
Whoa, Mona, she thought, straightening her shoulders and lifting her eyes heavenward. Let’s not go there, either. “Just my canoe and my fishing pole,” she declared, shouting into the rain.
The fog had rolled away now, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw something moving. On the other side of the river, scampering along the bank and leaping back into the trees—a baby moose.
4
MONA TRUDGED UP HER GRAVEL DRIVEWAY and stepped onto the stone path. Massive clouds hung heavy in the sky, and beneath them, the moon lit the store below like a ghost of itself. On the river, twisted piles and blocks of ice threw long shadows every which way, and the bridge creaked, its bones knocking together, a remnant of civilization in the night universe. The Wild Mountain Bridge, the bridge that had always been there, like a river or mountain, an element in the landscape, a part of the earth itself. If an ice jam hit it, what would happen? The river gulped and spluttered in its unfamiliar deflected course.
She’d been fourteen when she’d fallen in love with the bridge. It had come gradually, that realization—like when you suddenly notice that guy sitting beside you on the bus, the steady, gentle one who’s been there since grade school.
Mona would ride her bike over the hump at Hemlock Hill, coast down Wild Mountain Road, and see this gorgeous covered bridge shining in the light of a June evening, when the grass was new and the peepers sang their heedless chorus and the river lapped soft over the rocks. She absorbed the graceful curves of its entry arches, the earthiness of its weathered siding, the swallows nesting in its eaves and the delight of looking out at the swimming hole from its window. She noticed that whenever she went out on her bike, she’d end up at the bridge. At the library, she started studying its history, and that of other covered bridges in Vermont—and by the age of seventeen, Mona Duval had become the foremost expert on the covered bridge of Wild Mountain, Vermont.
From behind the house came a familiar snort, and Boris trotted around the corner, bounding up the stairs. Mona bent down and ruffled his furry back. Her little black terrier liked to hang out in the woods behind the house and sometimes came down to the store, where he got lots of attention. “I didn’t see you today,” she said, squatting and rubbing her face into his neck. Boris let out a soft yowl in reply. “Maybe you couldn’t take all the excitement. I know just how you feel.”
Inside, she switched on the lamp, threw her jacket on the couch, and headed into the kitchen. The red light was blinking on the answering machine. “No, thanks,” she said, and opened the refrigerator. Boris waited patiently beside his bowl while she took out a can of dog food and scooped in the remainder.
With all the excitement, she’d forgotten to have lunch, and now she was famished. In the fridge were some leftover spaghetti in a blue plastic container and a piece of chicken wrapped in aluminum foil. She put them on a plate and into the microwave.
When Mona sat down and started to eat, the answering machine was still blinking red. “Oh, shut up,” she said, and turned the other way. So what if the paper towel and toilet paper delivery would be late, or if the Putnam Creamery wanted to be paid for the organic ice cream she’d never ordered to begin with, or if her nephew Patrick had been suspended from another team for smoking pot? She dug into her pasta. Outside the window, the last ray of sun had faded, and the sky was black, with a rim of glowing blue above the mountains. She picked up the remote and switched on the little TV beside the phone.
And there, in front of the bridge, in his yellow slicker and dirty baseball cap, stood Cappy Gold with a reporter.
“Thanks for talking with us, Chief Gold,” sai
d Jake Perez, the handsome young reporter who covered most of the local news. “And congratulations on the dramatic rescue yesterday.”
Cappy bowed his head modestly, revealing the faded Yankees logo on his cap. As if he’d done it all himself. “Yeah, thanks, Cappy,” Mona mumbled through a mouthful of spaghetti.
“And now, we hear that the bridge itself is at risk,” exclaimed Jake Perez. “We understand that the temperature may rise tonight and dislodge the ice jam. And if the ice hits the bridge, it will go down. What’s your take on it?”
The camera panned to the jagged mountains of ice in the river, then to the bridge with its weathered wood, looking thin and fragile against the darkening sky. Mona gripped her fork, and noticed that she’d stopped eating.
“This bridge has been here for over a hundred years,” said Cappy in a crisp, authoritative tone. “We think it’s pretty tight.”
“Yes, Cappy!” Mona raised her fist, still gripping the fork. Cappy’s smug attitude was not always so attractive, but right now, it was reassuring. Well, maybe not smug, just self-confident, she thought, and a wisp of a scent, like the river in high summer, drifted into her mind, displacing the garlic-y tomato of her dinner. Cappy had taught her to fly-fish.
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