NOVEMBER 15, 2011
Vale lies in bed in the morning flipping through news stories on her phone.
There are flash floods across Europe. A story about a Filipino-born woman, Cecilia de Jesus, a hospice worker, who drowned in her basement flat on Parnell Road in Dublin. A blurry photo taken months ago of beautiful Cecilia, in her blue scrubs, a smile across her lips.
The victims will be many, Vale thinks, staring into Cecilia’s dark eyes.
SHE DRIVES TO TOWN AGAIN, STOPS AT THE SHELL STATION for gas, walks the fluorescent aisles gathering crackers, peanuts, sparkling water.
A swallow is trapped inside the shed behind the barn—it crashes against the one window, panicked by Vale’s presence.
“I’m sorry,” Vale says, ducking, the swallow crashing again against the glass windowpane before darting out the door past Vale’s shoulder.
The bird has shaken her. She can’t get the name, Cecilia de Jesus, out of her head. Vale goes to the bed and sits down, checks the pillow, finds: a thin gray hair, three inches long.
Vale picks up that hair and holds it in her hand.
Is Bonnie’s hair gray now? It’s possible. The waterlogged Bible still sits in the corner where Vale left it. Nothing else seems changed.
Vale drops the hair onto the floor, walks outside and looks around on the ground. She finds a gray stone, the size of her fist, riddled with quartz. Inside she lays the stone on the pillow, rips another scrap from the back of the Bible, writes down her phone number, and slips out the door.
On the car ride home she hears about ten thousand protestors surrounding the White House two weeks ago to protest the XL pipeline. Good and evil, Vale thinks. Duking it out. Everywhere.
VALE FILLS HER BACKPACK WITH WATER, WINE, CRACKERS, candles, matches, and kindling, and walks to Lena’s cabin. She sits at the little pine table, room for two. One seat for her. One for Bonnie. Time seems to have no grasp there in the cabin—the shadows lengthen. She thinks how if the world goes to hell, this would be a good place to camp out. A wine-loving prepper in the backwoods. She lights a fire in the old potbellied stove, adds sticks from outside, lies down on Lena’s mouse-chewed bed, and falls asleep. Her dream is a collage: Jack, Neko, Bonnie—young, body streaking with joy—stripping off her clothes and stepping into the river. River sleek and smiling. She calls out to seven-year-old Vale, sitting on the bank. “Join me, honey-pie!”
The Vale in the dream wears thick wool pants, a thick wool jacket, boots and mittens made of soft deer hide. Her clothes are wildly inappropriate for the weather: all protection. She rises. In her right hand is something small and warm. She opens her fingers to see what it is—a bird, dead, its left wing bleeding.
Vale wakes, heart pounding. She’s cold, her hair tangled with stray horsehair from the bedding, pine needles, leaves. That bird: the sparrow who was in the barn earlier.
“Goddamnit, Bonnie,” Vale says out loud, rising. “I’m so tired of this.”
Vale pulls the leaves out of her hair, brushes them off the sleeves of her sweater. As she stands up she glances upward and notices a box, tucked between the rafters, that she hasn’t seen before. Dark wood, two feet square. She climbs up onto the bed to reach it. Pulls it down and opens the lid. Vale takes a deep breath. There are books inside: A Field Guide to the Birds, A Field Guide to Ferns, A Field Guide to Mammals. And underneath them: a small notebook, black, leather-bound.
The edges of the pages are dust-speckled, rippled from water damage. The paper has that particular old-book smell, mingled with the smell of mouse and woodsmoke. She opens the book and finds, rivered throughout the pages, drawings made with pencil and black ink. Drawings of bobcats, coyotes, moose, bears. Drawings of birds. Drawings of plants—ferns and trees and wildflowers. Drawings of Otie from every angle. There are words scattered here and there as well, a loose and sprawling script: The smell of leaves . . . what kind of bird? . . . the broken saddled rib of leaves!
“Lena,” Vale whispers.
Outside it starts to rain.
Vale sits down and reads: Sunday, dawn, mist rising. Bird shit on stone step out door. Crow? Jay?
Vale flips the page.
Adele says: near the sickness also lies the cure. Under the words: drawings of grasses, roots, leaves, their names scrawled below them: purslane, bloodroot, burdock.
Who is Adele?
Vale closes her eyes and breathes in.
She thinks of Lena with her long braid and fedora. Mother to Bonnie for one week and one day. She opens her eyes and turns the page again: a sketch of a three-legged coyote, looking out from behind some pines. Eyes wild, feral, curious. In the margins, in Lena’s hand—Three-legged-friend! Eyes: Kerosene. Meteorite.
Vale thinks—vodka. Heroin. Are they that different? A desire for what lingers near the edge?
Vale puts the book down. Feels a flush across her neck and back and spine. She shuts down the stove, closes the book, and stuffs it into the pocket of her coat. It’s late, cold, wet out there, the woods shadows—no watch, no word for time, Vale thinks, walking downhill, skimming past dark trees.