Ascension of Larks

by Rachel Linden

  “What are we going to do?” Ellen asked quietly.

  Maggie shook her head. “I don’t know.” She needed coffee, at least a double espresso. Maybe that would clear her head.

  Ellen looked down at the piecrust, thinking hard. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Did George say anything that might help us?” Ellen asked, hopeful.

  Maggie shook her head. George’s advice had been to file bankruptcy, a move Maggie was fairly certain Lena wanted to avoid. It wouldn’t solve their problems even if they did.

  “Hope for the best and plan for the worst,” George had told Maggie at the end of their call. It was not helpful advice. It was too little too late. The worst had already happened, and Maggie had no idea how to make things right.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “WHY ARE YOU HERE?” MAGGIE MUTTERED TO herself, rounding the corner of Daniel’s shabby cabin later that evening. She had no real excuse to see him, but that hadn’t stopped her from coming. Her shock over the disastrous news from George had faded to a low-grade agitation. She was buzzing with it. The truth was that she was completely and totally stuck. At whatever angle she looked at the problem, she could find no clear way to make any of it come out right.

  Turn around and go home and come up with a plan, she told herself sternly as she came in sight of the front door. She kept walking. She’d brought her camera with her, although she wasn’t exactly sure why. But as always, it made her feel better to have it in her hand. It gave her a small sense of control, even as the world seemed to be spinning completely into chaos.

  The door to the cabin was open, so she knocked on the door-frame and poked her head in. The single room was empty. See, he’s not even here. She felt a little nudge of disappointment at Daniel’s absence. She turned to go but spotted him a hundred yards away, perched on a shelf of rock jutting out over the Strait. His back was to her. She hesitated. He hadn’t seen her yet. She could just go. Instead, she walked out on the point to join him.

  He didn’t turn as she approached. She gave no greeting, just dropped down beside him on the ridged black rock. He glanced up, seemingly unsurprised by her abrupt appearance. “I heard you drive up,” he said. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt and jeans but no shoes. He was whittling, the pitted rock around him covered with little golden whorls and spirals of wood. It was a deer this time, eyes wide, one foot raised as though ready to dart away.

  Maggie lifted her camera to her eye, watching the sunset over the water through the viewfinder as the last touches of light gilded the clouds a pearly pink and gold. There was nothing like a sunset over the Pacific Ocean. She’d seen a lot of sunsets in her life, in the Himalayas, over the Danube River, in the desert where darkness blotted out the light almost in an instant. But nothing compared to these Pacific sunsets, the fiery orange coal of the sun sinking into an endless blue sea.

  She snapped a photo, knowing it would never do justice to the actual beauty of the event. Although she knew all hope of entering the Regent was gone now, she was determined to keep taking photos. She had to keep believing she would one day return to doing what she loved. She needed something to hope for. There was no guarantee that it would be soon, but she wanted to keep fresh, to continue to practice her craft, to keep moving forward even though the future seemed impossibly muddled and uncertain.

  “Everything in my life is conflicting, and I can’t see how to make it come out right,” she said, lowering her camera, a little surprised that she’d voiced the quandary out loud. She was usually so guarded with her thoughts, but it was different with Daniel. They had skipped all the small talk from the beginning, diving into deep water from the start.

  Daniel concentrated on his carving for a moment before answering. Carefully, he made several small divots in the deer’s hindquarters. Now it was a fawn, speckled on the haunches. “What’s the most important thing to you?” he asked at last. He cleaved the tiny raised hoof with a careful slice of the knife.

  She sighed. “All of it.” It was the truth. She could not make a hierarchy out of the things she held dearest in life. “It feels impossible.”

  “Is it?” he asked mildly.

  “I don’t know. It feels like it is.” In a few sentences Maggie outlined the problem, stating the conundrum baldly. The situation looked even uglier when she spoke it out, a convoluted maze.

  Daniel didn’t say anything. He began sanding the fawn with a small square of sandpaper, rasping it over the hindquarters in a rhythmic motion. Maggie watched him for a moment, intrigued by the motion of his hands. She raised her camera, focusing on the deer. “Do you mind?” she asked. He shrugged his assent, and she took two shots, one of the deer and one of him, head bent over his work in concentration.

  A light breeze was blowing in over the water, tossing Maggie’s curls about her face, bringing with it the salty sweet odor of rotting kelp. She lowered her camera and inhaled deeply, taking in the scent of the sunbaked rock, the dust and dry pine needles mixed with the brine of the ocean, trying to inhale strength and wisdom and a peace that was proving increasingly elusive. They sat in silence for a few moments, the rasp of the sandpaper the only sound between them.

  “Have you ever had to make a choice like this?” she asked at last, thinking of the beautiful red-haired woman who had been his wife, of the list of awards and accolades beside his name when she’d googled him, wondering if he had somehow already faced a similar dilemma.

  “I didn’t get to make that choice,” he said, his voice sober. “It was made for me.”

  He didn’t offer any further information, just began rubbing the fawn’s head with a small ball of beeswax. Maggie watched him for a moment, then turned back to the water. They sat in silence for a while, Daniel methodically rubbing the carving with wax while Maggie mulled over the problem at hand.

  “What did you give up?” she asked finally. “Your marriage? Your career?” She knew she was prying, but she was curious to know more about him, about what had happened in New York to bring him to the island.

  Daniel snorted. “My career wasn’t hard to give up.”

  Maggie was surprised, taken aback by the casual dismissal of his work. The very real probability that she was going to have to sacrifice her own career felt catastrophic to her. Why did it not seem to matter to Daniel?

  Daniel said nothing more for several minutes, concentrating on his carving and the ball of beeswax. She thought he might not answer, but then he surprised her.

  “His name is Eli,” he said finally. “He’s four, and he’s my son.”

  Maggie’s eyes widened. A son? This was news to her. None of the articles had mentioned a child. Daniel set down the ball of beeswax and turned the carved deer over in his hands. The deer wore a look of startlement, as though caught unawares.

  “We knew something was different by the time he was two. He didn’t like to be touched anymore. He’d play in a corner all day and scream if anyone came near him. When he was three the doctors told us he was autistic. We immediately started therapy and put him in a special preschool. We did everything we could to help him. But he couldn’t bond with us. He didn’t want us to be close to him. Especially me. He’d let Kate hold him sometimes. When he cried, he wanted her. But never me.”

  Daniel swallowed hard, bending his head over the carving. A long hank of hair fell over his cheek, almost hiding his expression. “We handled it so differently. Kate threw herself into helping Eli like he was one of her court cases. Books and articles and support groups and case studies. And me . . .” He shook his head. “I just grieved for my son. I loved him so much, and he felt so far from me.” His mouth twisted with sorrow. “I loved him, and I felt such loss at the same time. But Kate didn’t understand that. She thought I couldn’t accept him. There wasn’t room in her mind for regret, only for action. My grieving seemed pointless to her. She accused me of rejecting him. My own son.”

  He looked down at his hands, the pain etched on his face.
“And I couldn’t just pretend I didn’t feel the loss of things that would never be. I stopped writing, and I started drinking some, not all the time, but too much and too often. One night I got a DUI. It was so stupid. And finally Kate had had enough.

  “On Eli’s fourth birthday she served me with divorce papers. She said—” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat before continuing. “She said our son didn’t need me in his life if I couldn’t accept him the way he was. She said I couldn’t support either of them anymore, and so I didn’t deserve to have them. She wanted full custody.” He ran his finger over the smooth head of the fawn, between the tiny pricked ears, over the slope of the nose.

  “Did you fight her for him?” Maggie asked, leaning forward intently.

  He laughed, a short, bitter sound, and shook his head. “Kate’s an attorney with one of the top firms in the state of New York. They could make Mother Teresa look like a hard-time felon if they wanted to. There was no way I was going to win, not with the DUI, not against her.”

  “So what did you do?” Maggie already had an idea of his answer.

  He shrugged. “I left. Packed a bag and just left. I didn’t tell anybody where I was going. And I came here. My grandmother used to bring me here when I was a kid to watch the whales in the summer. I knew the island. I knew I could hide out here until I figured out what to do next.”

  “And what did you figure out?” Maggie asked.

  Daniel gave her a look of chagrin. “How to screw up even more people’s lives.”

  They said nothing for a few minutes. Far out on the sea a group of kayakers rounded the shoreline, heading south, their paddles dipping into water that looked like molten gold in the sunset.

  “And yet here you are,” Maggie observed finally.

  “Here I am,” Daniel agreed, sounding resigned. He set down the fawn beside the knife and ball of beeswax and stared out to sea. The air was chilly now, the light seeping from the clouds, leaving only shades of gray. They watched a sleek, black cormorant dive into the water with a spray of white, reemerging a few seconds later with a fish in its beak.

  “Do you think we ever get what we really want in life?” Maggie asked.

  “Do you know what you really want?” Daniel responded.

  “What I can’t have now. What I never could have,” Maggie answered cryptically.

  Daniel nodded. “I had everything once. And then I lost it all.”

  They said nothing more. There was nothing more to say. After a few moments Maggie rose, brushing bits of lichen and moss off her pants. “I should go.”

  Daniel stood, slipping his knife and the carving into the pocket of his jeans. “I’ll walk with you.”

  As they headed for the cabin, two small birds with wings fringed in white swooped low, passing just a few feet from their faces, then wheeled upward sharply into the graying pink of the sky. Maggie stopped, glancing up after them. “What are those?”

  Daniel followed her line of sight. “Skylarks. They have a nest over here. Come on, I’ll show you.” He headed toward a patch of knee-high grass away from the water, and she followed.

  “They’re rare on the island now,” Daniel said. “There used to be a lot more of them. Here it is.” He squatted down and moved aside a tuft of grass, motioning her over. She knelt next to him, peering down at the nest, suddenly aware of his proximity to her. She could smell him, a warm scent of roasted coffee and cedar shavings mixed with the sweet dry grass where they knelt. She shifted, putting a few inches between them, concentrating on what he was showing her, flustered and feeling like a teenage girl at her reaction to him. Concealed in the tuft was a little nest made of the same strands of pale-gold grass. Inside were four creamy-brown speckled eggs.

  “I found them this morning.” He leaned back, letting her inspect them.

  “Where’s the mother?” asked Maggie, careful to keep her distance from the nest, fearful that if she got too close she’d damage the eggs somehow. She took her camera and focused on them, taking one shot and then another.

  “Up there somewhere.” Daniel pointed above them, where the birds soared in spirals higher and higher in the sky. “Hear that?” He cocked his head. Maggie looked up, straining to listen. From high above them came a liquid trilling cascade of notes. It reminded her of a stream burbling over rocks.

  “Skylarks are famous for their song,” Daniel told her. “They’re not native to the island. German settlers brought them when they emigrated from Europe. The birds reminded them of home, of working in the fields and heading in at suppertime with the song of larks at their backs.” He watched the birds for a moment, then added, “My grandmother told me skylarks are a friend of travelers. She said they help people find their way home.”

  Maggie craned her neck, watching the graceful spiral of a lark as it swooped and dove in the evening air. “Do you think that’s true?”

  Daniel rose, brushing bits of grass from his pants. He offered her his hand, and she took it. His palm was dry and warm as he hoisted her to her feet. He released her hand and tipped his head back, watching the larks in their flight. “I hope so,” he said quietly.

  “Me too.” Maggie watched the birds’ flight path, wishing they would point the way, give her some clue about which way to go. Daniel turned and Maggie fell into step with him. They walked in silence to her car, the trill of the larks following them in the evening stillness, singing of things lost and found. Singing of a future that felt more uncertain than ever.

  “Aunt Maggie, Jonah says we need to do something at the altar,” Luca told her at breakfast the next day. Gabby nodded in agreement. Maggie looked at their earnest faces and set down her forkful of scrambled eggs.

  “What kind of something?” she asked. The younger two looked at Jonah expectantly. He shrugged, avoiding her eyes. “Like a ceremony,” he said. “Like those old people did at the museum. To bring back something we lost so we can find it again.”

  “And what are we finding?” she asked carefully, taking a sip of orange juice.

  “We’re finding Mommy,” Gabby piped up. “Her brain is sleeping, and we need to wake it up.”

  “And we’re helping Dad so he can find us again,” Luca interjected.

  “And how do you think we do that?” Maggie asked. The kids looked at one another. Jonah shrugged again. “We don’t know,” he said. “We thought you’d know what to do.”

  “Do you, Aunt Maggie?” Gabby asked.

  Maggie thought for a moment. “I don’t,” she said, then seeing their crestfallen expressions, she added quickly, “but I think I know someone who will.”

  “I can’t.” Daniel turned away from Maggie in the dim confines of the cabin, clearly agitated by her request.

  “Why not?” She faced him across the narrow table.

  “I’m not . . . I’m not good with kids,” he muttered, avoiding looking at her.

  “Look, I’m not asking you to babysit,” Maggie reasoned with him. “I just need your help. They want to have a ceremony to try to help their mom and dad. I know you know something about this. I read one of your poems about losing something and finding it again. You talked about a ceremony in that.”

  He looked surprised at the mention of her reading his poems but then shook his head. He wouldn’t look at her, just kept picking up objects and putting them down—a bowl, his carving tools, the enamel coffeepot. “I can’t,” he said again.

  “Daniel.” Maggie considered her next words carefully. “Lena’s in a coma because of a car crash. She hit a concrete retaining wall going fifty miles an hour. The officer at the scene said she didn’t even hit the brakes.” She let her words sink in for a moment. Daniel glanced sharply at her. He said nothing.

  She continued, “You know the situation. I told you everything that’s at stake. I don’t believe any ceremony is going to bring Lena back or make everything turn out okay, but right now three very scared, very sad children have lost both parents in the last few weeks. Marco’s gone and there’s nothing we c
an do about that, but Lena might still come back to us. At the very least we can help the kids feel like they’re doing something to help. Please,” she asked gently. “They’ve lost so much. Give them something to hope for.”

  He considered her words for a moment, then nodded unhappily, looking trapped. “Okay, I’ll figure something out.”

  They gathered just after sunset around the altar. Jonah, Luca, and Gabby were solemn and silent. Daniel paced, nervous and on edge, and Ellen stood with her arms crossed, frowning in staunch Lutheran disapproval. Gabby was wearing her fairy princess outfit, pink tulle skirt and sparkly wings and a tiara tilted on her curls. The boys shot furtive glances at Daniel, who was wearing a white T-shirt and dark-navy cargo pants. His hair was combed but loose, hanging down around his face, and he wore a tooled leather belt with a hunting knife fastened to it. Jonah eyed the knife enviously.

  Maggie had brought her camera along to document the ritual. When Lena awoke, she would want to see what they had been doing to help her in her absence. Maggie raised her camera and focused, taking a couple of shots of the altar and the children gathered around it. She captured an image of Ellen in profile, arms still crossed, watching Daniel suspiciously. She took one or two of Daniel, crouched down and hovering over the objects they’d collected for the ceremony.

  Even when she wasn’t looking at Daniel, she was aware of his presence. As she snapped photos of Ellen and the children, she could feel him crouched to her left. Her heightened awareness flustered her. She didn’t know what to do with it. When Daniel looked at her, she felt as though he really saw her—not as the globe-trotting photographer or the bereaved best friend, but as herself, simply Maggie. It had been a long time since someone had looked at her that way. Maggie turned her attention away from Daniel by force of will, making herself concentrate on the task at hand.

  Using small white pebbles, Daniel outlined a large circle around the altar. In the center of the circle he placed a few new objects—a black crow feather, a bottle of gardenia perfume Lena wore for special occasions, a few pinecones gathered by Gabby, and half a dozen more candles Ellen retrieved from the mudroom for the ceremony.