by Paula McLain
He nods, his features muddy. “Lots of kids come by the park on their way to the beach, smoking sometimes. Every once in a while one of them asks us to buy beer or a fifth of Four Roses. But not that girl. I’m not sure I ever saw her come through. If I did, she didn’t stand out.”
“Do you think this is a safe town? You guys camp out, right?”
He shrugs. “Sometimes outside feels safer than inside. You know exactly what you’re up against.”
It’s the sort of thing Hap might have said. “How long have you lived here?”
“Couple years. My girl always wanted to live by the ocean. I said sure, let’s try it. We were in Denver before. The sun shines every damned day there, right through the snow sometimes. But Lenore said the altitude turned her upside down.”
“Lenore? That the woman I met the other day?”
He nods. “She doesn’t like people all that much. I’m surprised she talked to you.”
“My family had a pet raven named Lenore once.”
“What, in the house?” He shakes his head, frowning. “You can’t tame an animal like that. Bad luck.”
“She was a rescue animal. One of her wings didn’t work.” I don’t even know why I’m telling him the story, or why I can still see her scuttling around the house after Eden, begging for raisins and blueberries and pellets of dog food. She could talk, too, but only had one phrase, something she’d pulled from her life before, Don’t you, don’t you. “She scared me to death,” I find myself saying to Clay. “I thought she could read my mind.”
“Of course she could,” he says without faltering. “All birds are telepathic.”
As odd as Clay is, I can’t help but like him a little, this sort of transient hippie outcast, living under a tarp in Rotary Park but thinking of the mountains, or Waterloo, not totally in this world or any other. “Where’s your Lenore tonight?”
“Back at the tent. I should probably go let her know you’re okay. She’s a worrier.”
“The surf isn’t really what’s most dangerous right now, Clay. Whoever took this missing girl might be walking around among us.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me if he was. Small town like this one. Anything can be happening right next door and you’d never know.”
It’s the second time in minutes he’s reminded me of Hap. “Who would you look closely at, then? As a suspect?”
A look moves over his face that’s hard to read in the darkness. But then I place it. I’m taking him seriously and he’s flattered. “Everyone, I guess. I don’t think it’s like the movies. Some Friday the Thirteenth thing. I’ll bet he looks like us on the outside. All the really scary stuff’s on the inside, where probably no one’s ever seen it.”
It’s a good insight. “You should have been a detective,” I say.
“Maybe I’m undercover,” he replies, grinning. Then he looks over his shoulder, past the circle of light thrown by the streetlamp overhead, into the length of the dark street. “Here she comes now.”
“Lenore?”
“No, your dog.”
(thirty-three)
I was sixteen when Eden got sick, at the beginning of my sixth year with them. Her symptoms were confusing at first, nausea and dizziness and night sweats. Her doctor told her it was menopause and would pass.
“Menopause my ass!” Hap burst out at dinner one night, while Eden picked at her plate. “You’ve lost forty pounds!”
He rarely raised his voice, because he never had to. Eden became visibly upset, and so did Lenore. “Don’t you, don’t you!” she warned from her chair.
I knew ravens could be as smart as parrots, but Lenore was more than smart. She seemed to read our moods easily, and to smell fear. I looked back and forth between Hap and Eden, wishing I could sense what was happening in Eden’s body, or that she could. That for once she could appear in her own dreams.
“I’ll go back in,” Eden promised Hap. “I’ll make him give me something.”
“I’ll go with you,” he said, not remotely mollified. “We’ll see if that doctor has the nerve to ladle out that same vague horseshit when I’m in the room.”
But he had.
* * *
—
It was a full year later before we knew Eden had endometrial cancer. On her last good day, we went to Point Cabrillo, and looked for whales. We brought lawn chairs, hot coffee, and blankets for our laps. It was fiercely windy that afternoon, with wind hammering a million divots in the surface of the bay.
“If I were any kind of water,” Eden said, staring out and out, “I’d want to be this ocean.”
You already are, I wanted to tell her. You’re everything I can see.
Those hours together seemed to last for ages. We counted six humpbacks.
“Six is the number for spirit,” Eden said.
We saw wind flap over the kelp beds, flags of green and gold. And then the sunset, and the first evening star flickering awake. And then the moon rose like a pearled shard of beach glass, fractured and whole all at once.
Three weeks later, Eden died in her sleep under a pink afghan, small as a child by then, and incoherent from morphine. When Hap came to tell me she was gone, his face buckled. I’d never seen him cry, and he didn’t then, just hovered on the edge of what he couldn’t bear, but had to somehow. One day I would know this exact state with horrifying intimacy. In that moment, I could only stand by numbly while he went back to the bedroom they shared and closed himself in to be alone with her. No one was going to rush him to call the coroner. Not for this woman, his life for more than thirty years. Not until he was good and ready.
* * *
—
My own goodbye seemed impossible. I wasn’t ready to lose Eden. I couldn’t. In a kind of trance I made for the woods, barely feeling the hike. Miles from town, trekking straight down Little Lake Road, I reached the Mendocino National Forest and left the trail almost immediately, plunging up the side of a steep ravine and down again, forcing my way through wet ferns and spongy undergrowth. There were signs of fire damage, the hearts of trees burned black and gutted.
By the time I broke into a stand of old-growth redwoods, my muscles were spent and my clothes were damp with sweat. The trees were hundreds of feet tall, toweringly still. Hap had told me once how trees as old and big as these only took one breath a day. How if I really wanted to understand them or even a single tree, I had to be there in the moment it breathed.
“Really?”
“Sure. Oceans breathe, too,” he said. “Mountains. Everything.”
I dropped in the center of the ring of trees, down into the litter of needles and dust and lichen. It wasn’t prayer, exactly, but something Eden had emphasized over the years. When things got hard and you felt shaky, she liked to say, you could hit your knees wherever you were, and the world would be there to catch you.
I’d had too many mothers, and not enough mothering. Eden was the closest I’d ever gotten to feeling like a real daughter. And now she was gone. I stilled myself and waited for faith to come, for some sign of how to go on without her, but nothing arrived. Nothing except waves of chills from my own cooling sweat, and a sadness that seemed to settle into the spaces between the trees, between the trunks and branches, between the needles and leaves, between the molecules. It climbed inside my body and curled up tightly under my ribs, like a fist made of silver thread.
Finally I stood on weak legs and began the long walk home. It was well past dark when I got there, no porch light on, and all the rooms dark. When I went into the kitchen and turned on the lights, Lenore flinched. She’d somehow clawed her way up onto Eden’s chair at the table, and as I stepped closer she flared, her feathers plumping around her neck in an angry collar, as if she was protecting the space.
“You hungry?” I asked.
Glaring silence.
I found the bag of dog
food and put a few pellets out for her on the lip of the chair anyway, but the minute my hand drew close, she flapped out with her good wing, neck feathers bulging, just missing me.
I hit her without thinking. Her body was far more solid than I expected, thick and unbending as something carved of wood.
She struck back instantly, stabbing the flesh near my thumb with her beak, both wings up now, even the broken one.
“Stop it!” I raised my hand again, knowing I’d crossed a line. No one was supposed to hurt animals, ever. Eden would have hated to see us like this, but I found I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t back down.
“Don’t you,” Lenore warned, the same phrase as ever, but it made sense, finally. She was talking to me about now, about us. The look in her eyes was so cold my heart turned over.
I lunged for her, grabbing up her thick body and catching her off guard. She churned against my chest horribly, thrashing and fighting, trying to get free while I pressed her tighter. Opening the front door, I threw her into the yard and then slammed the door behind me fast, locking it. Then I hurried to my room and slammed that door, too, lying facedown on my bed, roiling with hatred and guilt and shame and who knew what else.
Oh, honey, Eden would have said. Who are you really mad at?
You. But that wasn’t right, either. Nothing was right. My eyes burned. My heart was on fire with emptiness.
After half an hour or so—I had no idea, really—I got up and moved quietly through the house to the front door. I opened it, expecting her to be on the mat or the front walk, but Lenore had gone. I panicked, rushing to find her. But she wasn’t under the hedge or around to the side of the house. She wasn’t cowering near the garage or between the trash cans. I grabbed the boxy flashlight, big as a thermos, which Hap kept in the front hall closet for stormy nights when the power would cut out, and pointed it into the inky night, whispering Lenore’s name over and over instead of shouting the way I wanted to. I was afraid to wake Hap, or Eden, maybe, wherever she was now, up near the stars, or down the ragged coastline, searching and patient, an unhoused beam of light.
Eventually I gave up and came back into the kitchen, collapsing into the chair where the whole nightmare had started, next to the abandoned pile of dog-food pellets. I’d done something terrible and on purpose and I couldn’t take it back just because I felt sorry. Sorry wouldn’t find her. Sorry was maybe the loneliest feeling of all, I understood, because it only brought you back to yourself.
(thirty-four)
As the dog trots up to us, Clay LaForge’s smile is wide, as if the universe has just cracked a joke. Maybe it has. “People always say elephants have great memories, but I’d put a dog up against an elephant any day.”
“I can’t take care of a dog.”
He keeps smiling that mysterious smile. “You know we don’t actually keep them, right? They choose to stay or they don’t. That’s any animal, mind you.”
I’m still thinking of Eden’s Lenore, so the words tumble out of me, unfiltered.
“I’ve made mistakes.”
He only stands there, nodding as if to say Of course you have. Then he snaps his fingers, and the dog’s attention shoots to him instantly. “I get the feeling you can’t screw up here. See the markings in her face and her reddish color? She’s got Belgian Malinois in her. Not many breeds smarter or more intuitive. That’s why they make good police dogs. They partner with humans to make a team.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I was a trainer once, in another life. I’d put her age at four or five. She’s lost muscle from living on the streets, but seems healthy otherwise. You’ll want to get some raw protein in her and not just kibble. Salmon oil is good for her coat and vision.”
“Clay…” I’m backpedaling, fumbling for another argument, but his attention is back on the dog. Kneeling at her side, he runs a steady, knowledgeable hand from the top of her skull to her tail and back while the dog submits to his touch.
“Yep,” he says quietly, still bent over. “Some breeds are hardwired to know what we need before we do. She’s good and sound. Strong, too. Can’t imagine asking for a better partner.”
I don’t need a partner, something in me wants to insist, but even I know how thin the excuse is. How blatantly untrue. “I can’t believe this is happening,” I say instead.
“Yeah.” Clay chuckles. “Life’s funny that way.”
He walks with us as far as Rotary Park, where his girl, Lenore, waits at the picnic bench in the same outfit as before, Seahawks sweatshirt long as a skirt, her hair like a dense blond scribble above her lined forehead.
“Oh, good,” she says in a low voice. “You’re okay.”
“Thanks for sending Clay to look for me.”
“I thought maybe you ran into trouble.”
“No. I’m fine.” I look back and forth between them feeling inexplicably grateful for their presence. We don’t even know each other, and yet we’re here.
“What’s your dog’s name?” Clay asks me.
“Good question. Too bad she can’t tell me.”
“Oh, she can. Just not in English.”
* * *
—
I reach Mendosa’s Market only minutes before it closes, leaving the dog in a down-stay just outside the door while I look quickly and in vain for salmon oil. They have only tinned sardines and anchovies. I buy both, plus a fillet of salmon, almost luridly pink against the white butcher paper as the clerk wraps it, and dog food—wet and dry.
My items are rolling down the conveyor belt when I notice Caleb, his arms full of groceries.
“Hey.” His eyes flick over my purchases. “You have a dog?”
I feel flustered for some reason, almost embarrassed. “I’ve rescued her. I must be crazy, right?”
“I always wanted one, but my dad was allergic,” he says offhandedly, but not quite. Just beneath the remark is a shadow of emotional accounting. A tick mark in the column where life has shorted him—or not life per se but Jack Ford.
As we move outside, there’s a dance of sorts as Caleb and the dog say hello.
“She’s really pretty,” he says. “Looks smart, too.”
“So I’ve been told.”
We drift toward my Bronco, where I load the groceries, and then the dog jumps into the back seat as if she already knows her place. My back is still turned when Caleb says, “I ran into Will yesterday. He told me you’re helping him with that missing girl.”
I spin to face him, more than a little surprised. Will and I agreed to my being incognito. “My role isn’t official or anything.”
“I see. I thought you were just passing through is all.”
“Me too.” I close the tailgate with a thump. “Are you really doing okay, Caleb? You can tell me.”
His eyes flit toward mine without landing. Then he says, “I don’t really talk about those days, Anna. It’s just way easier not to.”
“No, of course. I get it. Listen, do you want to grab a drink or something? My treat.”
“Nah, I have to get home.” He hefts up the groceries in his arms like a prop, an excuse. “Rain check?”
“Sure, yeah. I’ll see you soon.”
* * *
—
On my way out of town, I roll down the window and turn up the radio, Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” filling the car, which feels more solid somehow with the dog stretched out across the back seat as if she owns it. I assumed there’d be a big adjustment period for both of us, but the dog at least seems totally relaxed and unconcerned.
Back at the cabin, she finds a place by the woodstove and waits patiently for her dinner. I cook half the salmon for myself, searing it for a few minutes on each side in a hot skillet as the oil pops. We eat together and then she stretches out near my feet, while I sit up with Cameron’s copy of Jane Eyre, lookin
g for clues in the passages she’s underlined and dog-eared. I have little left in myself—I must have you; The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter…in the eye; He made me love him without looking at me; Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?
The book seems to be a puzzle like everything else about Cameron, but can I solve it? Is the key to her dilemma and her pain here in the pages of her ravaged Penguin Classics paperback, or am I looking in the wrong place, for the wrong thing, grasping at straws?
I put down the book feeling my eyes burn, and watch the dog instead. The tip of her dark nose lightly touches the wall as her belly rises and falls rhythmically, as if whatever life she’s had before now doesn’t take up space or trouble her in the least. She sleeps so peacefully it makes the whole room feel lighter, and warmer.
(thirty-five)
“We’ve got this,” Will tells me the next morning before the polygraph technician arrives from Sacramento to interview Lydia and Drew Hague. “You said you were going to talk to Gray and Steve Gonzales about drumming up support for the search center, right?”
“They’ll be in school all day. I can help you here.”
“We’ve got enough hands on deck. Get some rest and we’ll connect later?”
“Rest?” I ask incredulously. “When we’ve got two missing girls, and maybe three?”
His look tells me to drop it. “It’s just a few hours. I’ll check in with you later.” Then he turns on his heel and leaves me wondering if he’s punishing me for Petaluma and Rod Fraser. Maybe he’s still fuming over missing resources and manpower or maybe it’s some deeper thing, our disagreement over Emily’s polygraph results, or what he said at Patterson’s about my getting too emotionally involved with this case for my own good. Whatever his reasons, he seems to be drawing a clear line, with me on the other side.