Daisy was panting and wagging her tail as Colden spoke, glaring at her. Dix methodically stroked the dog’s sleek sides.
“I told you it wouldn’t work,” Colden pronounced.
She stood and left the room. No one followed her, not even the dog. She went to the bathroom, slammed the door, stripped down, and took the shower she’d been longing for. She let her warm tears mix with the cool water cascading over her face.
Wow, she’d been so bratty, she chastised herself.
Unreasonable. Unfair. She was just so frustrated. She was getting nowhere with the coywolf project—a dozen cameras checked several times and no signs of anything that could viably become a research project. The moose and beaver work had become totally rote and boring. She was supposed to go back to Albany for some departmental meetings and reports. She didn’t want to see Larry. She had never written back to Liam. She had nothing to tell Drew. She was lonely. Yet, all she wanted was solitude.
Stop. Stop, stop, stop, she told herself. You’re tired. It’s been a rough day. Focus on finding something unexpected out there. Find the thing that no one else is looking for. That’s what you need to do. Find the thing no one even knows is out there.
The following morning, Colden hunkered down at the cottage. She felt bruised by her own behavior the previous evening. She wasn’t ready for human company. But as she sat on her little porch sipping tea and watching the day brighten, she saw Sally walking down the path toward her.
Sally never came down to the cottage. Well, almost never. Colden expected, almost hoped, Sally would give her a stern dressing down. She certainly deserved it. She was also not ready to give up her foul mood, and a reprimand from Sally would help preserve her misery.
There were two rockers on the porch. As Sally got close, Colden shook the dry leaves from the cushion of the extra chair. Sally sat down with a mug of coffee. She sipped and stared out in front of her. She didn’t even say good morning.
“Why aren’t you at work?” Colden eventually asked.
“Thought I’d take the day off.”
Colden waited a few moments before replying.
“That worried about me?” she half joked.
Sally turned and looked at her full in the face. Her frank regard caused hot tears of frustration to spring to Colden’s eyes.
“Um, yeah. Little bit,” Sally said sincerely.
“Sorry if I was a jerk last night.” Colden had difficulty getting the words out of her thickened throat. “No—I mean, sorry I was a jerk last night.”
“You weren’t a jerk,” Sally said. “Well, maybe a little bit of a jerk. That’s not what concerns me. I just want to know why. What’s going on?”
“It’s just the research.”
Sally didn’t respond. Her silence told Colden she wasn’t buying the excuse.
“OK, it’s not just the research,” Colden finally conceded. “It’s a lot of things.”
“Spill,” Sally said.
Colden didn’t want to tell Sally everything. People were always coming to Sally with their problems. She was a professional listener and fixer. Colden didn’t want to be yet another person burdening her with their petty foibles. But Colden knew she’d worried several strands of her life into a knotted ball. Sally was the best person to help her untangle things. So, she gave in and started talking.
“It’s just . . . I don’t know. Things don’t seem to be progressing. I feel so frustrated. The PhD stuff is fine, but it’s honestly not as interesting as I’d hoped. So much drudgery, collecting tiny bits of information and trying to find patterns, which at the end of the day seem so obvious and anticlimactic. I’m not getting anything on the coywolf stuff. I’d had high hopes. Silly, I know. Unrealistic. But still. I wanted, I don’t know, I wanted to discover something. I wanted to make some sort of a difference somehow. To have an impact.”
“Impact?” Sally asked, skeptically.
“Yeah. OK, to make a splash. To get noticed. To get my career going. To do something. Something meaningful.”
“Wow.”
“Wow, what?”
“You sound so much like your mother.”
Colden flinched.
“Sometimes I worry I’ll somehow make the same mistakes she did.”
“Nope. You’ll make your own mistakes,” Sally said.
Colden drank some tea. She shifted in her seat.
“I feel like I’ve made a few recently.”
“Go ahead,” Sally urged her. “Tell me. There’s nothing I have not heard before.”
Colden slouched in her seat and told her about Liam. Everything up to and including his last e-mail, which was sitting, cowardly unanswered, in her in-box.
“Sounds like a pretty great guy to me,” Sally said when Colden was done.
Colden looked at her in genuine surprise.
“What? Seriously? Don’t you think that’s incredibly weird about his marriage?”
“Not in the least. On the contrary, seems incredibly mature and realistic.”
“You and Dad would never do anything like that,” Colden insisted.
“You don’t know the slightest thing about what your father and I might or might not do,” Sally countered.
Colden was shocked—not just by what Sally said, but by the definitive, corrective way she said it. She looked at Sally, blinking in the harsh light of her reply.
“When you’re young, you think relationships are all about being in love,” Sally said. “As if ‘in love’ can protect you from every obstacle, every other feeling, from anything going wrong. News flash, sorry, honey, love is not going to carry you over all the hurdles of a long relationship. Being in love helps, obviously. It’s important. But sometimes, maybe most of the time, making a marriage work is about sucking shit up, making tough choices, plowing ahead. Like your friend Liam did. Even if plowing ahead means ending the marriage to preserve the relationship.”
Colden felt confused and miserable. As if she were still an eight-year-old who had just been told that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
“But you and Dad seem so happy. Have always seemed so happy,” she said, pouting.
“Colden, how the heck would you know if we were happy or not?”
The rebuke pushed Colden deeper into her chair.
“Look, all you’ve seen of us is through the lens of a kid. Kids are all self-absorbed. And frankly, you’re still a kid. Sort of, anyway. You’ve had a very sheltered life. A wonderful, rich, engaging, beautiful, but sheltered life. You think we’re happy and have always been happy because we kept you happy. Believe me, we’ve had plenty of struggles. We didn’t get together in any conventional way. We came into our relationship with all kinds of baggage. We wondered if we were in it for the right reasons. I had fears and insecurities about not being your mother. Miranda seemed like the big love of his life, and we’re so very different. Not just in personality, but, petty as this sounds, she was beautiful, delicate, feminine, sweet—not things anyone would ever accuse me of.”
“But Sally, you’re . . .” Colden protested.
Sally stopped her with a severe look.
“Please. I am many things, but beautiful, girly, all that . . . not so much. Do not insult me with cheap compliments.”
“But you two always get along so well. I’ve never seen you argue,” Colden said, unwilling to give up.
Sally shook her head.
“Do you really think we’d argue in front of you?”
Colden opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out.
“Maybe we should have argued in front of you,” Sally continued. “Maybe that would have been more honest. Given you a better sense of what really happens in a relationship. Sometimes I worry that you don’t really get it. I mean, sometimes I worry that you don’t realize that struggles aren’t signs of a bad relationship, they are the relationship. They are the things that bind you. Assuming, of course, that you struggle together, fairly, and with love. Even when you really dislike each other. Even
if you’ve hurt each other.”
“Well, Dad never seems to struggle with anything.”
“You sound like your mother, again.”
Colden stared at Sally, surprised.
“That was a core problem for her with your dad,” Sally said. “She was always comparing herself to him. He always seemed to have it all together, to be good at everything, to not have any issues at all, to just cruise through life in his own bubble of competence. Not true, of course. He does have fewer doubts and worries than most. He simply doesn’t fret much about what he can’t change, being kind of naturally Buddhist, I guess. But to say he has no doubts, regrets, or concerns is terribly unfair to him. It limits and constrains him. He’s not an island.”
Colden groaned and put her face in her hands.
“Ugh. Sounds like what most of the guys I’ve dated have said about me. Too independent. Too self-contained.”
“You are nowhere near as Zen as your father, but I’m sure you seem pretty insulated to most people. There is no reason to change—likely, you can’t change—but be aware that these qualities can be hard for other people to bear. Your dad doesn’t really get that. It’s a blind spot. It keeps people at a distance in a way he doesn’t see. Sometimes it even pisses people off. Makes them poisonously jealous.”
Colden thought about Larry. He seemed irrationally angry at and competitive with her. She wasn’t dating him, yet it occurred to her that he was treating her like a spurned lover. She decided to tell Sally about him, too, about the way he treated her, the way he tried to elbow in on her work and seemed to want to take her down, as well.
“Well, there you have it,” Sally said when Colden was through. “Perfect case study of unreasonable and yet dangerous personal and professional envy.”
“But why?” Colden moaned. “We’re not even in the same field. Not really. Why doesn’t he just focus on his own work?”
“Ah, why focus on making yourself better when it’s so much more fun to try to bring someone else down?” Sally asked. “You’re just there, Colden, that’s why. Doing well. Respected. Get along with your colleagues. Doing interesting work. Making it look easy. Most people are not as well equipped as you are. The fact that you don’t seem to realize how competent and smart and playing-way-above-the-hoop you are makes it even worse for other people. And then you’re pretty, and you don’t even notice or care that you’re pretty. It can be a maddening combo for other people to have to witness.”
Colden was intensely uncomfortable with everything Sally was saying but had to admit that it was all wise and true. Colden had a cushy life and had taken it all for granted—not because she was spoiled or entitled, but because she’d never had any setbacks. Not yet, anyway.
She was not without empathy. After all, she was surrounded by people who never even got far enough ahead to have a setback. She had compassion for them. However, it had never occurred to her that she could ever be one of them. That her life could turn and take her in unimaginable downward directions.
Colden thought of Miranda, sitting on this same porch, wondering about her own life but from a very different vantage point. She must have been scared to death of the future. She’d been cut adrift from so many hopes and dreams that had seemed so inevitable. So much of Miranda’s life never got the chance to take place because her parents had failed her in a multitude of ways. Colden felt swamped by an overwhelming rush of gratitude for her own life and for Sally and Dix.
“So, what do I do, now, Sally?” she asked, her voice low and strained.
“Write back to Liam and apologize because he deserves that. Ask your lawyer friend for advice on Larry because he needs to be carefully managed. Keep doing the work you love and are really good at. And don’t be any less wonderful for anyone.”
“OK,” Colden said.
“And let your dad help you with the damn dog. Stop being so obstinate—admit you don’t know what you’re doing, and he does.”
17.
Colden didn’t tell Sally this, but she’d already asked Drew for help with Larry. She hadn’t meant to or wanted to, but over their last dinner, right after she’d gotten the Sasquatch erotica books, the story had come out. She had considered canceling dinner with him since the topic of conversation was supposed to be what she’d found out about his vandalism project and she didn’t have anything to tell him. She had never done what he’d asked, and she wasn’t sure why not. Some kind of embarrassment. Both toward him on behalf of her neighbors and on behalf of her neighbors for allying herself with an outsider. Complicated and conflicting loyalties. However, when he texted to confirm, instead of making an excuse, she asked if they could meet at the same Italian place they’d been to before. She wanted the familiarity and comfort, as limited as it was, of him and of that restaurant.
When she arrived a few minutes early, Drew was already seated. Again, she’d wanted to get there before him. Again, he’d beat her. Colden waved and weaved her way to his table, tucked into the far corner of the room. Drew surprised her by standing up, pulling out her chair—well, that wasn’t the surprising part—and then kissing her cheek.
She was unsure if she liked or resented his gallantry. Was there something vaguely misogynistic about it, or was she being ridiculously political about simple politeness? Maybe she was just unused to being treated this way. Maybe she didn’t want to admit that she kind of liked it.
The waiter came over and, with a dramatic flourish, shook out her white napkin and placed it in her lap. The action flustered her. She stammered when he asked what she would like to drink. Drew intervened and suggested a small pitcher of Chianti to share. Once again, there were many animated and distracting conversations going on at tables nearby. She realized she was avoiding meeting Drew’s eyes, which made her more uncomfortable. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something.
She took a deep breath, then a sip of water, forced a smile onto her face, and asked him about his house. He started telling her a convoluted and comical story about a plumbing mishap, leaning across the table to show her a large blood blister on the outside of his hand. She had a hard time following but nodded and smiled, even laughed at the appropriate moments. After the story wound down, they each drank some wine, and then he pulled back against his own seat and regarded her warily.
“What?” she asked.
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something is wrong. I can see it on your face.”
“Just some stuff at work,” she said, waving her hand in the air dismissively.
Drew leaned forward and touched her hand. His face was filled with concern.
“What’s going on?”
Colden noticed one of his front teeth overlapped the other slightly, like crossed ankles. Why hadn’t he had braces? Too expensive for working-class parents. She felt inexplicably sad. Her concerns were so petty. She twisted her wine glass in her fingertips. Drew crossed his arms over his chest.
“I’m not saying another word until you tell me what’s upsetting you,” he said.
Colden snorted, as if she was laughing at a joke. Drew was serious. His lips were closed. She wanted to see his teeth again.
“OK,” she said, sighing. “It’s just . . . Well, there’s this guy . . .”
Drew did not move. So, she told him all about Larry. Which meant she had to tell him about Liam, too, at least a little bit. Drew took it all in, nodding, staring at the tablecloth, pursing his lips from time to time, thinking, shaking his head here and there. In between her sentences, he somehow quietly placed their order. Food came. He showed her how to twirl her spaghetti onto a large spoon she hadn’t understood how to use. She found herself talking not only about Larry but also about her work. Her frustrations. The boredom. The mind-numbing acquisition of minute details about animals, on which publication and careers depended but on which she was not clear the animals’ lives depended. Also, the raw beauty of the landscape where she worked. What it was lik
e to see a moose lift its head, antlers dripping wet and strung with aquatic plants, from a marsh created by a beaver. She even told him about the coywolf project. She seemed unable to stop talking. Finally, the words sputtered out. Drew watched her for a bit, as if waiting to see if she’d start up again. He wiped his plate with a piece of bread, crossed his knife and fork over the edge, and settled back into his chair. She looked down at the few ivory-colored strands of spaghetti left on her plate, the remnants of red sauce. She’d monopolized the entire meal with her story. It was discomfiting.
“I’m going to help you,” Drew said.
“I thought I was the one who was supposed to be helping you. And I haven’t been doing a very good job at it. I haven’t been doing any job at it, honestly.”
Drew waved her concerns away.
“You’ll get to it. The vandalism has stopped recently, anyway. And you’ve obviously been a little preoccupied. In the meantime, get me whatever info you can on this Larry guy. I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Seriously?” Colden shifted in her seat. “I don’t know. Is that OK? I mean, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”
“Colden, if someone is harassing you, they should get into trouble,” Drew said.
“I guess I’m not sure if this is harassment. That’s such a strong word. Maybe it’s just, you know, being a jerk.”
“Tell you what,” Drew said. “We won’t get him in trouble. We’ll just see if he is in any trouble already.”
“Maybe I’m just being paranoid and making a big deal out of—”
Drew put up his hands.
“Stop it, Colden,” he said, not unkindly. “If it’s him sending you these weird things, then it’s unlikely this is the first time he’s done it. Or the last time. If people like you don’t come forward, someone else will suffer. It may get worse. A lot worse. Believe me.”
Beneath the Trees Page 16
