ERIN STOOD BENEATH THE OAK TREE AND RAN HER HAND ALONG the rope. It was frayed and weathered, but it still held the tire she had sat in as a child as her father pushed her from behind. “Higher, Daddy!” she had screamed, her body arcing toward the sky. She remembered the feel of it: the press of his hands on her shoulder blades, a little girl’s certainty that they would always be together.
“I wouldn’t trust it,” David called out to her. “It’s been a long time since you swung on that thing.”
Erin turned and looked back at him. “You startled me. I didn’t hear you coming.”
“Sorry,” he said, and smiled as he approached from the farmhouse. He stopped halfway to the oak tree and placed his hands on his hips, and Diesel—David’s constant companion—stopped alongside of him.
“I made us some dinner if you’re interested,” he said. “You’ve been standing out here for a while now. It’s almost seven.”
“Thank you. I was just . . . enjoying the evening.”
David nodded. “Late May is my favorite time of the year. All that warm weather is still ahead of us.” His face brightened. He was thinner now and had a tendency to become winded when he walked. It had been six months since he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. Robbie had insisted on telling the truth about what had happened to Abel Griffin. Once it became clear that the district attorney was not going to press charges, Erin had accompanied her father to the oncology center in Billings. He’d been pleasant and even jovial with the doctors as they discussed his options—chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, and a few experimental trials that were under way at the time. David had listened carefully to the things they had to offer, but he had declined all of it.
“I’m sorry,” he told Erin on the long drive back to Wolf Point. “You can be angry with me if you want.”
“I’m not angry. I just . . . don’t understand why you won’t at least give it a try.”
“Would you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I would keep fighting. I wouldn’t give up on this.”
“I’m not giving up,” he said. “I just don’t want the treatment. There’s a difference, you know. They might be able to extend my life for a couple of months, but . . . we’re not talking about a cure here. There are side effects. It’s not how I want to spend the time I have left.”
Erin wrapped her arm around the tire swing as a breeze kicked up from the east. The leaves rustled above her, and somewhere in the sway of the branches were the years they had shared together, the time never quite as long as she wanted it to be.
They lived on the outskirts of Wolf Point, Montana, a place where people sometimes went missing. A long time ago, they had buried her mother here, beneath this very tree. She was buried in Wolf Point Cemetery now, along with all the others. A modest headstone bore her name: HELEN REECE. BELOVED WIFE. CHERISHED MOTHER. They went there often, not just to visit her mother but to visit all of them. Angela Finley, Rose Perry, Curt Hastings, Marian Montgomery . . .
At the other end of the cemetery were the headstones for Miles, Abel, and Connie Griffin. There had been a strong debate about whether to allow them to be buried in the same graveyard as the others. In the end, the city had held a vote, and the people of Wolf Point had decided to let them stay. The town had bulldozed the two houses but had paid for the burial of Abel and his mother. Erin visited those sites as well. Many of them did. It was the process of forgetting and remembering—making peace with the past as they looked toward the future.
She walked the short distance from the oak tree to where David stood in the yard. Her right ankle ached a bit. It was stiff in the mornings, and maybe it would be for a long time to come. It was okay, she decided. She was alive and finding her way again. The ankle was one more thing to help her remember.
“Will you stay in Wolf Point,” Robbie had asked, “or do you need to get back to Colorado?” It was a question Erin had been contemplating since she’d first returned here.
She had blamed her father for so much of what had happened after the disappearance of her mother. Had he really given up on finding her, or had he been dealing with the loss of his wife in the only way he knew how? In the time that followed her disappearance, David had fallen deeper into himself and had pulled away from his daughter in every way that mattered. You abandoned us, Erin had thought as a child, and then she’d left him here for fifteen years while she struggled with her own loss and fury, telling herself that her hometown had nothing left for her. Now that she was back, Erin was rediscovering her father and realizing that there were things here worth holding on to. She wanted the time back again, the years that she had squandered, but the best she could do was to take advantage of the days ahead.
Erin wrapped her hand around her father’s arm and walked with him to the house. They mounted the front porch steps and turned for a moment to look out across the land and the sweeping expanse of the sky above them.
This is Wolf Point, Montana, she thought, a place where people sometimes find their way home again.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
David looked at her and nodded. “It’s been waiting for you,” he told her, and he leaned over and kissed her on the temple. They stood there for a while surveying the landscape, and when he opened the screen door for her, the soft creak of its hinges was a sound from her childhood, exactly as she remembered. “Welcome home,” he said, and the years since then and now seemed like nothing at all.