“Did Sierra call you?” Michelle asked hoarsely. Her hand was still covering her mouth as she spoke.
“No,” said Tom.
“But you rang the front doorbell?”
“Yes.”
She came a few steps closer and gripped his arms, shaking him slightly. “Then how did you know?”
He shook his head helplessly. He couldn’t describe the silence at her end of the phone, the prickling intuition, the nightmare of the prowling animal. He could never explain these things. “Is she all right?”
“She turned off her insulin pump,” said Michelle in a choking voice. “It’s been off all night.” At a signal from one of the EMS workers, she dove inside the open door of the ambulance.
Joe pushed in next to her, grim eyed, hatless, not a hint of his usual calm good humor. Both twisted around to the back to face their child. The medics finished whatever they were doing and jumped back into the van. All the car doors slammed closed at once.
The emergency vehicle pulled out into the night, gravel spurting under its wheels. The siren sliced into the silence, as if cutting a path forward. Its crimson taillights appeared to wobble and sway as it set off down the street but that, thought Tom, was only a trick of the light.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A few days later, Tom stood pacing in the same long driveway on Lenox Street. This however was a calmer pacing, or as calm as an impatient man could get. He had lived a dozen more lifetimes in the space of those days—first the anxiety and then the girl’s medical reports that trickled down to him with infinite slowness, and finally the good news. They’d caught her early enough, earlier than most, the doctors told the family, and an unthinking intern had added that she wasn’t the first teenager who’d tried shutting down. Now they were going for a simple nature walk: mother, daughter, Tom.
Michelle had dressed for a climb to the top of Mount Everest, her daughter for a day at the beach, in too-short denim shorts with a ragged hem and cheap rubber flip-flops on her feet. Neither had thought to pack so much as a thermos of water.
Tom sent them back inside to change into something sensible, and filled the water bottles while he waited. He told Michelle to shed the hooded sweatshirt—it was coolish now, but would become increasingly hot as the sun rose higher, and to reconsider her heavy socks. He ordered Sierra to don long sleeves, long pants, and a sun hat.
“I don’t wear hats!” said Sierra with disgust. She acted as if he’d told her to put on a clown wig.
“Wear one of your da’s caps,” ordered Tom.
Tom had changed his plane tickets home for the third and, he hoped, final time. It was absurd. He could have crisscrossed the ocean several times for all the pounds they were charging him in change fees—but never mind all that, he thought. Let it be. His cottage back in Falmouth was bought and paid for. The medical bills would soon be sorted out. (Thank God he didn’t live in America. Barbarians.) He still worked and made a good wage. His mum was pensioned for life. All right, then, plane tickets. Where else would he spend his money now? He supposed he’d distribute it with donations to various worthy charities. Just the idea of making out all the checks and mailing out the envelopes made him feel knackered.
“Don’t you have a decent pair of hiking shoes?” Tom asked the girl. “Something waterproof, with treads?”
Sierra laughed right in his face. “That’s all I’d need,” she said. “Freak out.” She made some gesture with her fingers that looked like a victory sign.
Michelle appraised her daughter. “You still have your good sneakers, don’t you? The ones you use for gym?”
Sierra rolled her eyes. “I guess,” she said—but without the usual sneer. She’d been remarkably pleasant and cooperative ever since the night of the ambulance. Very deliberately so. She smiled more, Tom noticed, and said please and thank you, and when she thought no one was looking she had a hunched, guilty look—but at least not a furtive one. That would have been more troublesome, and greater reason for worry. Her parents had put her into counseling at once, of course, then jumped in after her with both feet. Tom wouldn’t be surprised if their dog now had a therapist, as well.
Sierra had stopped rimming her eyes in kohl black, and Tom thought he could detect a shining brownish-gold ring of color gilding the roots of her hair, her natural color coming in under the shoe-polish dye. Those simple things were enough to bring out the girl’s real resemblance to her mother. She’d be a pretty woman one day; probably a mother with three or four children of her own, to give her heart failure in the middle of a summer’s night. And serve her right, Tom thought matter-of-factly. What goes around comes around.
He made sure the water bottles were full enough. They were too heavy, of course, not made for hiking, but he would carry their containers in his own backpack. Sierra and Michelle showed up again downstairs after another slow twenty minutes. In the end he had spent the vast majority of his time in the States just waiting around. Hurry up and wait, it was called. How long did it take a pair of human beings to change a pair of bloody socks? They were rapidly losing the early morning light. He supposed most men spent at least half their lives waiting by the door for some woman or other.
Sierra lifted one thermos and sniffed at it suspiciously. “Tap water,” she said, turning to her mom for help.
Michelle laughed and poured the water out into the sink. “We only use the tap for watering plants and bathing,” she said. “Joe insists on our having filtered water.”
“Because the pharmaceuticals are, like, just pouring all these dangerous chemicals into the Massachusetts reservoirs,” said Sierra. “Plus the water tastes like crap.”
“Joe has handled a few cases,” said Michelle more cautiously.
“Did you know some of our county water pipes date back to the 1800s?” Sierra said. “Talk about old materials. Time to crack open the wallet, folks!”
“Sierra put together a project on water conservation last year,” said Michelle, fluttering one hand lightly down on her daughter’s shoulder. She touched her as if afraid the girl might break, or run away—or shake her off, more likely, thought Tom. “She won an award for it.”
Sierra grinned one of her rare grins, which made her round cheekbones rise. “Yeah, it didn’t completely suck,” she agreed.
Michelle poured water from a thin chrome spigot attached to the door of the refrigerator. “Filtered,” she explained. Tom watched in fascination. You had to hand it to the Americans when it came to ingenuity and gadgets.
The initial invitation to go for a ramble had been issued from Tom to Sierra alone—atonement for the stupid bloody mistake with the plates—but Michelle had immediately included herself, and Tom was fine with that. The walk into nature might be slower, but at least there’d be no awkward lapses in the conversation with the mother around. If she wanted to attach the girl to her hip, it would have been understandable. Not pleasant, of course, but a reasonable response—or as near as anything to do with being a parent could ever seem reasonable. Tom’s own mum was more than a little daft when it came down to him.
He had often wondered, with genuine amazement each and every time: Why did human beings indiscriminately worship their own sons and daughters, while remaining unmoved by the deaths of other people’s children? Not all species cared for their young; quite a few ate them. Tom had no offspring, he had been spared that much at least; to him it was all a mystery. If only there were some way to harness that particular and narrow wellspring of human loving-kindness, and spread it out across the board. A little more for everyone. Not quite so much focused in one very narrow, scalding beam.
Getting Michelle and Sierra out to the car and settled in was like herding cats. One or the other kept swerving away and heading back to the house for something forgotten: an umbrella (the sun was shining); antibug spray; an extra tube of sunscreen; some snacks for the car ride (ten more minutes) and so on. And then, they weren’t halfway down Lenox Street itself when Michelle suddenly signaled, pulled over to the
curb, and set the car into park.
“Can you drive on the wrong side of the road?” she asked Tom. “Like, here in America?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You sure?” she pressed him.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asked. Because now she had one hand on the door handle of the car.
“I’m fine,” she said, twisting her head around to regard Sierra, who was leaning forward from the back seat with a worried look. “You two go on ahead without me. Nature walk. Please. I hate nature.”
Sierra guffawed.
“I hate bugs,” Michelle went on, “and I don’t enjoy wearing sunscreen, and I’m not fond of long hot walks, either. You two go on ahead and have fun.” She opened the car door and slid out. Then she bent and peered back in at Sierra.
“You good without me?” she asked her daughter.
“Yeah, Mom,” said Sierra in a bored voice, trying not to look chuffed. “I don’t actually need a chaperone every time I leave the house.”
“I’m aware of that,” said Michelle in a slightly aggrieved voice.
No one, of course, had consulted Tom about any of this. He slid into the driver’s seat, feeling the strangeness of sitting on the wrong side of the car whilst holding a steering wheel. His hands immediately began to sweat. “Brilliant,” he said aloud, to be reassuring. Chiefly to reassure himself. “Brilliant,” he repeated.
Michelle closed the car door on his side. She had left the window partway open, and he had no idea how to close the thing. He adjusted the rearview mirror. He swallowed.
“You’ll be fine,” a voice whispered in his head. He thought it was Claudia’s, then realized Sierra had leaned forward to say it.
“Right,” he said, hitting the wheel for emphasis. The car horn let out a honking blast, startling all of them.
“Coming up front,” Sierra said, scrambling over the top of the back seat. She made a great show of fastening her seat belt while Michelle looked on, trying her best not to appear terrified. “Okay,” Michelle said. “We’re all okay.” She stepped back from the car.
Once settled in, Sierra said to Tom, “Right. Gun it.”
He pulled slowly away from the curb. He felt the car wobbling under his touch, like a bicycle.
“Don’t forget to check for ticks!” Michelle called after the car. “And use bug spray! Reapply it every sixty minutes.”
Tom kept on driving.
Sierra yanked down the sun visor, slid a panel sideways to peer into a small rectangular mirror, and smiled at herself. “Brilliant,” she said.
Sierra was a quick learner about moving around in the natural world. Tom was impressed. It wasn’t an easy talent, that one. Tom suspected it was inborn. Not that Sierra made a big show of it. She was as fastidious about noting the differences between bark and leaf patterns as she’d been about organizing her grandmother’s silverware. She even took notes on her small pink cell phone. He’d nearly told her to leave the cell phone to fry in the hot car, but she had muted it on her own and now he was glad he hadn’t imposed any rules on this hike. Mostly the gadget rode in her hip pocket, and she wasn’t always staring down at the screen, for a change.
He started her off with the most basic things, like walking softly instead of pounding around, finding her own center of balance, and paying attention to where she was going. She took to all of it like a duck to water. If you knew how and where to walk, and you paid close enough attention the rest would eventually follow. He showed the girl how to place her feet so as to barely stir the dust under her heels. He demonstrated how to balance her body’s weight on zero degrees of difference, not splay-footed the way urban walkers typically plodded along; holding herself upright so that both arms were free and loose, and she could look around and respond to things quickly.
Balance, he explained, was another sense, just like sight or taste or smell. If you held your center of gravity properly you could move at whatever pace you liked, and you wouldn’t grind your heels into the ground, leaving tracks wherever you went and blurring everything else.
Sierra rolled her eyes when Tom made her practice the same few steps over and over, but she got the hang of it faster than most. Much faster, in fact. Then he pointed out a few of the easier animal tracks to follow: duck prints in the mud looking like engraved anchors; the childlike handprints of raccoons. It was a hidden world, right here in her hometown, and her astonishment at it seemed genuine. She let out little exclamations. “Holy Hannah!” and “Oh my word!” She used curious old-lady expressions as she bounced ahead of him. She soon began spotting things on her own.
The danger, as for all beginning trackers, was that she overtrusted her sense of sight. Emerson had once called the American public a giant, ambulant “transparent eyeball.” That was an accurate assessment, Tom thought. America’s chief exports these days were mostly visuals: advertisements, movies, music videos. Tom had Sierra shut her eyes about a quarter of the way into the park.
Sierra giggled for the first minute or so, just as any kid would, but he taught her how to swivel her head to locate the sounds occurring in the woods. Acorns spattering on the forest floor. Wind soughing through the waxy leaves of the white oak made a different sound from the red oaks, if you paid any attention. Rain would sound different too, he told her, spattering through the lobed leaves; she should try listening sometime.
When he closed his own eyes he could discern the world around him stirring to life. Here, you never entirely lost the sound of automobiles swishing by in the distance. But closer sounds rose up as well. They emerged from behind the usual wall of ambient sound. Squirrels angrily chattering—they misplaced most of the nuts they buried, Tom explained; squirrels were dull as ditch water compared to the common crow.
He had her practice locating the sound of a thrush singing its heart out on a low branch, the bird repeating the same musical phrases over and over, then switching to a new one just when it had it right. This listening exercise was especially good practice since the birds were dun colored, small and dumpy till they flew past you in a blur.
Three red-winged blackbirds chased away a falcon, scolding all the way. He told her to open her eyes and watch them go.
“How do they do it?” she asked in amazement. “He’s so much bigger. Why doesn’t he just turn around and eat them?”
“The power of community,” Tom said. Then, lest he sound preachy—“Or maybe the falcon’s just lazy.”
On the low branch of a pin oak Tom spotted the first red cardinal he’d ever seen close up, and Sierra teased him for his excitement. “Wow,” she said. “Let’s call the press.”
“The only way a red cardinal ever reaches the UK,” Tom explained, “is if they get carried onshore by some tourist with no more sense than to leave the bird behind.” There’d only been a handful of sightings on the British Isles, and Tom wasn’t one of them. The bird was a beauty. For him, it was the experience of a lifetime. He’d expected to be dazzled by the scarlet feathers but he hadn’t been fully prepared for the loveliness of its singing.
“Hear that?” he told her. “The cardinal harmonizes with itself.”
“No way.”
“Double voice box. —Hear that upsweep?” They listened together.
“Don’t you have any birds where you live?” she asked.
“We do,” he said. “Just not that one.” Cornwall had more than its fair share of feathered creatures, mostly coastal but all sorts, really, from mute swans to kingfishers, ducks, winnards, and kittiwakes. No cardinals, though. And no nightingales, either, he told her, that most British of birds.
“There’s a famous poem about a nightingale,” she said. “By a poet named John Keats.”
She must have thought he was a stupid prat who had never opened a book. “Now more than ever seems it rich to die. To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .” Yeah, he’d heard about a poet named John Keats.
But Sierra was good at the tracking bit, he’d give her credit for that. She spotted a w
ild turkey feather from two yards away, and he told her she could take this one away with her, but never to just grab any old stray bird feather or, depending on the species, you might end up behind bars.
“That’d be pretty funny,” she said, “after everything I’ve done—if I ended up in jail over this thing.” She waved the long turkey feather at him with a sardonic expression.
But he noticed she hung on to that striped feather like a kid who had won a prize. She ran her finger along the white bars against the bronzy black. Tom told her in many cultures turkey feathers were considered omens of good luck.
“This?” she said, tapping her fingertip against it, but looking pleased.
“A fallen feather is a gift from above,” Tom told her. “Course it all depends on what you believe—if you believe in anything. That feather is a part of the bird, it’s not just a bit of decor that you run off on a machine or buy and sell in a tourist shop. It represents trust, honor, strength, wisdom, power . . .”
“All that in one turkey feather, huh?” she said. She was looking flushed.
“So they say.” He made the girl sit down and rest on a large flat rock. He was afraid Sierra might overexert herself. She was red in the face and seemed a bit out of breath from the climb. He didn’t know what symptoms to watch for, exactly. But she refused to plunk herself down till he did. He said nothing, just sat and let the sun warm the top of his skull. A veery trilled at a distance. He relished the quiet for a few minutes.
“You’re probably wondering why I tried to off myself,” she said.
“No. Not really,” he answered.
Sierra grimaced. “Well then, you’re the only one in the world who doesn’t.”
“Right,” he said. His stomach sank. He was no good at these kinds of heart-to-heart talks. Best to stick with the nature stuff. More about feathers.
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