The sun had set by the time she tore herself away and said goodnight, promising Ohlan she’d return the next afternoon. She still wanted to spend a night with him, but it would have to be Friday or Saturday; she’d never get away with a school night.
As she hurried down the trail, her cell phone fired off the parental ring tone. She paused to dig it out of her pack.
“Hi, I know I’m late. On my way home now.”
“It’s almost six,” Mom said.
“Sorry—I lost track of time. Be there in ten minutes. Love you, bye.”
Holly ran the rest of the way to the trailhead, jumped on her bike, and pumped for home. The street light on the corner flickered on just as she turned onto her street. Dad’s car was in the driveway; she walked her bike past it and into the garage, then hurried into the house.
Mom looked up from checking something in the oven. When she saw Holly, she grabbed a couple of potholders and took out a casserole pan.
“Mmm! Lasagna!” Holly said.
Mom put the pan on the stove top and turned to her. “I really wish you’d call if you’re going to be late. Just so I don’t worry that something happened.”
“I know, Mom. I’m sorry.” Holly took off her pack and left it by the phone nook. “Should I set the table?”
“It’s already done. You can get the salad out of the fridge.”
Mom’s voice sounded frosty. She’d have to watch it, Holly thought as she opened the refrigerator. She didn’t want to piss Mom off.
Dad came in from the living room as she put the salad on the table. “You’re in disgrace, young lady.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Where were you?”
She bit her lip. “Doing some research. I’m going to write an article for the school paper. I’ll be working on it after school all week. Is it OK if I do my chores after dinner instead of before?”
Dad glanced at Mom, who was bringing in the lasagna. She sighed. “As long as you get them done before bed.”
“I will.”
“And remember, the college fair is Thursday. You’ll have less time for chores.”
“Maybe we should just skip it.”
“Nothing doing, miss,” said Dad.
Mom just kept frowning. Holly pondered how to get on her good side again as they sat down to dinner. Pick some wildflowers for her, maybe?
“What’s the article you’re writing about?” Dad asked as he passed the salad.
“Enchantment Spring Trail. They’re doing a big renovation project and they’re going to tear down the spring.”
“How can you tear down a spring?”
“There’s this concrete housing that was built to hold it. It’s not very pretty, but I think it should be preserved. I mean, it’s more than fifty years old. It’s part of our history.”
“Fifty years doesn’t make it an antiquity.”
Holly frowned at him, and he laughed. Annoyed, she stabbed at her salad.
“Well, you have strong feelings about this, obviously. That’s good. You’ll write a strong story.”
Holly’s mouth was full, so she just nodded. She didn’t really want to talk too much about it.
“Isn’t that the spring you and Madison visited?” Mom asked.
“Yeah.”
Holly ate a bite of lasagna, ignoring the long silence. She didn’t want to talk about Ohlan, either, not right now.
Dad came to her rescue, asking her about her first day of school. Holly obliged, telling them which classes she liked best and which friends she’d reconnected with.
“How did you wind up writing for the school paper already?” Dad asked.
“They had a flyer up in the lobby. Everything’s starting this week. I thought about going out for drama club, but the paper sounds more fun.”
“If it’s not too much work.”
“Well, I can always quit if I get tired of it.”
Mom asked about Dad’s day and the conversation drifted away from Holly, which was fine with her. She finished her lasagna and helped herself to seconds on salad, then cleared the plates and helped Mom dish up spumoni and biscotti for dessert. When that was done, she hurried through her chores, finishing up just before nine.
Alone in her room at last, Holly got out her laptop and surfed for information about the Conservation Corps. What she found was at least partly promising; some CCC projects had been given historical preservation status. Not all, though. She’d have to argue that the spring had some significance if she was going to get the destruction postponed.
She read through her copies of the Forest Service report again, looking for any detail she could protest. There wasn’t much, but she made a few notes, and poked around in Amanda’s book for some quotes about the spring.
She wound up rereading the village maiden story. It seemed obvious now that Amanda and Ohlan had been lovers, and that it was their love that had inspired the story. This time Holly didn’t feel jealous, though. Amanda was long gone, and Ohlan hadn’t had anyone since. If anything, Holly felt sorry for him, and determined to make his life more pleasant.
Starting with saving it.
Save the spring, then worry about Ohlan’s strength. She had a lot to do in the next few days.
Remembering her camera, she downloaded her photos from Chama and looked through them. At the end were the two photos she’d taken of Ohlan.
The first one, with the flash, looked amazing. Ohlan was not recognizable in it; instead it looked like something had splashed into the spring and sent a million diamond drops into the air, each one reflecting the camera’s flash, together roughly forming the shape of a human body.
Holly stared at it for a long time. Was this what Ohlan really looked like? Or did he look like anything at all?
She moved on to the non-flash photo and enlarged it until it filled her computer screen. This was the Ohlan she knew and—yes, loved. Her throat tightened just looking at the picture. He was softly smiling, softly glowing. Incredible.
She brought the two photos up side by side. Which was really Ohlan? Or were they both true?
What exactly was she in love with?
The illusion he showed her was beautiful, yes. The flash photo made her feel uncomfortable, but it was Ohlan, too. In fact the feelings raised by that picture were, if anything, stronger than those she had when she looked at his familiar image.
Ohlan’s beauty went beyond the illusion. His sweetness, his kindness. They way he looked after anyone who came to the spring, human or no.
She wondered if he ever had to fight. She couldn’t imagine it.
She set the “normal” photo as her wallpaper, then cleared the Chama pictures off her camera. She couldn’t bear to delete the two of Ohlan, though. She wanted to have them with her always.
~
The next day she wore a nice blouse and slacks—her “impress the adults” attire—and rode to school at an easy pace so she wouldn’t mess them up. She sat impatiently through her classes, picking up a couple of homework assignments that she’d have to deal with in the evening. When the final bell rang she went to the school library where she killed half an hour doing her geology homework, then put that book and notebook in her locker and biked over to the Forest Service office.
She was a little early. The receptionist was more friendly today, but Holly was nervous so she didn’t chat. Instead she sat on one of the two metal and plastic chairs and got out her notebook, looking over her notes. A moment later she heard the receptionist murmuring into the phone.
“Miss Parker? Mr. Drover will see you now.”
Holly grabbed her pack and stood. The receptionist smiled and came around the counter to open the door to Drover’s office.
“Thanks,” Holly said. She straightened her shoulders and went in.
The office felt small, maybe because the desk was huge, a vast expanse made out of some dark wood. The few things that were on it—computer, telephone, one tidy stack of papers—were perfectly aligned.
So Mr. Drover was a neat freak. Though he smiled when he looked up from his computer, Holly still felt intimidated.
“Hello, again! Please, have a seat.”
Holly took the chair he indicated, which was squishy and tried to swallow her. Mr. Drover swiveled his desk chair to face her, ignoring the computer as he laced his fingers over his stomach.
“What can I do for you, Miss Parker?”
Holly swallowed, finding her throat suddenly dry. “I’m writing this article for the Flight.”
He nodded and gave an encouraging smile. Holly glanced at her notes.
“I read the annual report that talked about the trail improvement project. It didn’t include anything about the spring’s historical significance.”
Drover’s brows went up. “The introduction discussed its history as a water source for the pre-Puebloan people that lived here.”
“But I mean the co—the concrete housing. That’s historically significant too.”
“It’s fairly recent.”
“1952,” Holly said, warming to her argument. “And it was a CCC project.”
He leaned his head to one side, frowning slightly. “What’s the angle of your article, if I may ask?”
Holly took a deep breath. “I think the housing may deserve preservation as a historic site.”
Mr. Drover’s jaw moved slowly, as if he was chewing on the thought. “Interesting.”
Holly turned a page in her notebook. “Were you aware that Amanda Cope wrote about the spring in her memoir of the war years?”
“Yes. The housing was built after the war.”
“But the site’s history is tied up in it.” That sounded lame, and her reference to Amanda’s book had backfired. Holly tried again. “It was constructed by the CCC. A lot of their projects are already protected as historical sites.”
Mr. Drover smiled. “Rather bigger projects than Enchantment Spring.”
“Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.”
“True. You know, I wish you had been at our public meetings to bring this up.”
“Meetings?”
“We held a series of meetings for public input over the summer. Perhaps you were out of town?”
Caught off guard, Holly just blinked. She hadn’t been out of town. She hadn’t been to Enchantment Spring, either. She hadn’t cared, at the time.
“We got a lot of good feedback about the project,” Mr. Drover said. “Most of it positive, I might add. I’m afraid no one spoke up for preserving the housing. You know, it’s not very attractive.”
Holly frowned. “That’s not the point.”
“And it’s no longer efficient. Have you seen it?”
“Of course.”
“When it was built, it was meant to keep the spring from running over the trail and causing erosion. The water comes up into the housing, which was intended to keep the spring accessible, though there have been problems with that. The water isn’t potable, you know.”
“I know.”
“And the housing has to be cleaned out on a regular basis. Leaves and so on can clog the pipes, and sometimes an animal will fall in and drown.”
Not if Ohlan’s watching, Holly thought. She glanced at her notes, feeling lost, looking for support.
“The water is piped away from the housing to the city’s reservoir,” Drover added, “but the pipes are old and corroded. We’ve identified several places where they’re leaking.”
“That wasn’t in the report,” Holly said.
“No, the report was an overview. It didn’t include the details of last year’s survey and analysis.”
“Could I see that, please?”
“Sure.” Mr. Drover punched a button on his phone. “Kelly, would you print out a copy of the Enchantment Spring survey and analysis for Miss Parker?”
“OK,” said the receptionist over the speaker.
“Thanks,” Holly said.
“You might also want to look at the comments we collected at the public meetings,” said Mr. Drover. “They’re online.”
Holly nodded and copied down the web address he read to her. She looked through the rest of her notes, but she’d used all the arguments she’d planned on. Her only hope, and it was a feeble one, was to start a petition to have the housing protected as a historic site.
Drover seemed to be reading her mind. “If it were in better shape, we might have considered preserving the housing, but the fact is it’s failing. We’d have to reconstruct it, redo all the pipes and so on. And it’s just not that attractive or valuable, I’m afraid.”
Holly bit her lip. She knew he was right, but what he didn’t know was that Ohlan’s survival was at stake.
She turned to a blank page and asked some more general journalistic-type questions. How had the project started, had Mr. Drover been one of the initiators, and so on. He answered them all politely while Holly took notes. She was really just marking time, though. Still trying to think of a way to convince him to put the project on hold.
The receptionist came in and handed Holly a few pages stapled together: the survey report. Mr. Drover rolled his chair forward.
“Thank you, Kelly. Does that about cover everything, Miss Parker?”
Holly looked at her notebook, frowning. “For now.”
“Here’s my card. You can call if you have any more questions.”
“Thanks.” Holly put the card and the report in her notebook, then slid it into her pack and stood. “Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.”
He smiled. “Sorry if they weren’t quite the answers you were looking for.”
She gazed back at him. He was nice, he just wasn’t seeing her point. Everything he’d said made sense, especially to someone who didn’t know about Ohlan.
“When’s the last time you were up at the spring?” she asked.
“Oh … must have been May. About when we were doing that survey. Why?”
“I just wondered if you’d spent much time there.”
“Not a lot of time, no.”
“You might want to look at what you’re destroying.”
He watched her with a bemused expression as she headed out the door. She nodded to the receptionist, then hurried away from the office and out to her bike, checking her watch. She didn’t have much time to visit Ohlan, but she wanted to see him, even if she didn’t have any good news. She’d checked out a book for him from the school library.
She biked across town and up Mountain Loop to the trailhead, then hurried up the trail. Ohlan stood up from the spring as she approached.
“Hi.” She smiled, feeling less than confident. Her big plan hadn’t amounted to much.
Ohlan smiled, sitting down on the edge of the coffin, inviting her with open arms to join him. She sat down and opened her pack.
“I can’t stay very long. I borrowed this for you. Can you keep it from getting wet?”
Ohlan accepted the book, pausing to read the title before smiling. “Yes. Thank you. I haven’t read anything in quite a while.”
She looked up at him, feeling tears start to sting her eyes. “Hope you like it.”
He set the book in his lap and caressed her hair. “What’s wrong, Holly?”
“Oh,” she said, brushing at her cheeks, struggling not to burst out crying. “You know. Worried. I don’t want to lose you.”
His brow creased in a frown. So he was worried, too.
He folded his arms around her, holding her gently. “Don’t let it trouble you. If my time is over, you will still remember me.”
That did it. She sobbed, and Ohlan’s arms tightened around her. He held her until she subsided to occasional sniffs, then kissed her eyelids, one after the other. That almost made her cry again, but she kept it together and reached up to touch his face.
“I love you.”
Ohlan kissed her. She reveled in it briefly, then pulled back.
“I have to go.”
His arms loosened and she stood, a bit unsteady as she grabbed her pack and started away. “See you tomorrow. Enjoy the book.”
“I love you too, Holly.”
She stopped in her tracks, wanting to run back to him, wanting to stay for the night. Swallowing, she looked over her shoulder.
He sat softly smiling, almost exactly as he looked in the photo she’d taken. She stared for a moment, wanting to imprint his image on her soul.
“Bye,” she said softly.
Ohlan lifted one hand in farewell. Holly shouldered her pack and strode for home.
She got in earlier than the previous day, which gave her time to start on her chores before dinner and earn a mild approval from her mom. After dinner, she finished up the chores and did her homework, by which time she was dead tired. She went to bed without even checking her email.
~
School was getting into gear. She had to pay more attention in classes, and received more homework assignments. She was starting to feel oppressed, and the fact that she hadn’t stopped the trail renovation didn’t help.
The weather didn’t help either. By the time school let out on Wednesday, heavy clouds had gathered overhead. “Teatime rain,” her mom liked to call it—the summer rains often came around four o’clock. This storm looked like it would follow that pattern.
Which meant Holly had less than an hour to get under shelter before it started pouring. She rode her bike straight to the trailhead, determined to spend as much time as possible with Ohlan to make up for the previous day.
The light in the forest was dim and the air was unusually quiet; no birds or critters hopping around the branches. It was as if the forest was holding its breath, waiting for the storm to break.
As Holly reached the spring, she saw that the glen wasn’t empty. A forest ranger was squatting by the west end of the coffin.
She choked back an angry “What are you doing!” and instead scraped her feet on the trail so the ranger would hear her. He looked up, glasses glinting beneath his hat.
“Oh, hello.” He stood, brushing his hands together, and faced Holly.
“Mr. Drover.”
He looked a lot less intimidating out here in the woods instead of behind his huge desk. He could have been any ranger, not the director of the district.
He smiled. “Thought I’d take your advice, and have another look before the project starts.”
“See anything new?”
“Same old wear and tear. See this coupling?”
He pointed to the corner of the coffin he’d been looking at. Holly glanced at the water, wondering where Ohlan was, then bent down to look.
Coming out of the corner of the box was an old metal pipe that dove into the ground. Holly hadn’t noticed it before.
“It’s almost rusted through,” said Mr. Drover. “Another winter and it would break, and we’d be back to a flooded trail and an eroding mountainside.”
Holly stared at it, blinking, wanting to offer an alternative to destroying the spring. “It can’t be repaired?”
“The whole pipeline is like this. All the way down to the reservoir. Replacing it would be a bigger project than the trail restoration. And see over here—”
He stood and went around to the east end of the coffin, where the drain-looking thingie was. Holly followed.
“That’s the intake, where the water from the spring comes into the housing. There’s something wrong there, too, because the flow-through isn’t as high as it should be, but we can’t even figure out the problem without demolishing the housing. The CCC set the whole thing in concrete.”
Holly bit her lip, feeling like her arguments, feeble as they were to begin with, were being pounded to smithereens. She shifted her gaze slightly, looking at the color of the water instead of at the intake. It was more greenish than gold in this dim light. A soft shimmer made her catch her breath, but it was gone again immediately.
“Did you see that?”
“What?”
“Movement. In the water.”
“Just a ripple in the inflow, probably.”
“Do you ever just look at the water? Look into it?” Holly asked.
He’d probably think she was nuts. She glanced up and saw him watching her, looking curious.
“Can’t say that I have. It’s just water.”
“But water is life.”
He folded his arms. “Oh, I see. A meditation. No, I haven’t done that, at least not here.”
“You should try it. You might be surprised.”
“What is it about this old spring that’s so important to you, Miss Parker?”
She couldn’t very well answer that. She gazed back at the spring, wishing Ohlan would appear. She was starting to worry.
“There’s magic here,” she said, shrugging. “I can’t really explain it. I was hoping you’d see it yourself.”
He gazed at her, glanced around the glen, then frowned down at the coffin. “Our aim is to make this place more beautiful, not less.”
Holly didn’t have an answer for that. The only thing that would give sense to her arguments was the one thing she couldn’t explain.
A rumble of thunder sounded overhead. Mr. Drover looked westward, up the trail.
“Sounds like we’re in for a dumper. Can I give you a ride home?”
Holly shook her head. “I’m going to stay a bit.”
“Well, keep out from under the tall pines.”
Holly nodded. She knew the routine about lightning. She stepped closer to the coffin, gazing down into the water.
“And don’t touch that water.”
Holly gave him a look of scorn. Instead of scolding, as she’d expected, he sighed.
“Keep safe, Miss Parker.”
“I’m always safe here.”
He stood looking at her, as if trying to figure out what she meant. Another distant peal of thunder rolled around the mountainsides.
At last Mr. Drover turned and headed down the trail. Holly listened until the crunch, crunch of his strides had faded completely away, and the silence closed in again.
“Ohlan?”
The water in the spring began to glow at once. Relieved, Holly watched as it grew brighter, then Ohlan stood up in the coffin.
“Where were you?” Holly said, stepping toward him.
“That man—an official—“
“He’s a forest ranger.”
“I thought he was here to destroy the spring, as you said, so I withdrew to the heart of the water.”
Holly frowned. “The project doesn’t start for a few more days. Actually, I was hoping he would see you—he has the power to stop it.”
Ohland looked down the trail, after Mr. Drover. “If he saw me, he would assume I was human.”
“Not if you were glowing, like now!”
Ohlan smiled sadly and shook his head. “Most people don’t notice that.”
“Well, if you changed shape—“
“He would manage to forget it, or rationalize it away. Believe me, Holly—only a very few humans are open-minded enough to see me as I am.”
She thought about the flash photo she’d taken of him—the storm of water droplets—and remembered how little she really knew about Ohlan. She tended to think he was human. Even she believed the illusion, when she knew it wasn’t real.
He bent down and reached into the spring, then stood again, holding out the library book she’d brought him the previous day. “Thank you. I enjoyed reading it.”
“You’re done already?”
“It’s been quiet.”
She accepted the book. “You kept it dry. How did you do that?“
He shrugged. “I protected it, as you asked me.”
“But you had it in the spring … except I didn’t see it there just now.”
“I had it in a safe place.”
Holly turned the book over, half-expecting to find a damp patch, but it was fine. She took off her pack and slid the book into it, then leaned it against the coffin.
“Would you like me to bring you some more?”
Ohlan nodded. “I’d like that very much.”
“What do you want to read?”
“Anything you consider interesting.”
She grinned. “Trains?”
He smiled back. “Sure.”
Brightness filled the glen, changing Ohlan to a mass of swirling droplets. Holly gasped, but he coalesced again before she could say anything, as if her eyes had just gone out of focus for a moment.
A crack of thunder hit the mountains, and a fat raindrop landed on Holly’s wrist. She glanced upslope, noticing the woods were even darker.
“Maybe I should go before I get drenched.”
“You won’t get drenched.”
Holly gave him a skeptical look. Ohlan sat on the edge of the coffin and beckoned to her. She couldn’t resist a hug, even if she did pay for it by getting wet. She sat beside him and he put his arms around her, just as the rain began in earnest.
None of it struck her. She looked up, and saw the raindrops sliding aside, as if a force field was repelling them. Rain danced in the water of the spring, but none of it touched Holly.
“Whoa.”
She looked at Ohlan, who grinned. A thought occurred to her and she tried to reach down. Ohlan held her tight, resisting her attempt to move.
“My pack!”
“I’ve got it.”
She glanced down and saw that the rain was staying off the pack. Relieved, she relaxed and snuggled against him, leaning her head on his shoulder.
“My water man,” she said. “Good trick.”
“Thanks.”
She looked up at him. “So I have to stay here as long as it’s raining, or I get wet?”
“I’m afraid so. If I could, I would escort you to the street.”
“That’s OK. I’m fine right here.”
Ohlan smiled and kissed her. Holly’s stomach tried to flip over—no matter how often she saw him, or kissed him, she never got over the thrill and the wonder. She kissed him back, again and again.
She wished the rain would never end.