Porcupines in Trees

At midnight, she is still awake. The cabin is a noisy place, filled with the bang of a shutter, the groan of ancient plumbing. Lila wanders the rooms, unnerved by the density of the darkness. There are no streetlamps here. No ambient city glow, soaking up the stars. Trees clack in the wind outside. Lila shivers inside her robe.

Most of the day was spent driving. Two hours to make it out of Brooklyn. Another six, heading north through rolling hills, to reach the Adirondacks. The GPS gave instructions in clipped, clinical tones. Lila did not like being directed this way. Born and raised in New York, she was branded with a mental map of the city. She was never lost there. Now the silence presses against her ears. She misses the wail of sirens and the subterranean thunder of the train.

Simone, impervious, is sound asleep, taking up more than her half of the bed, as usual. Her droning snores carry all the way down the hall to the living room. Lila goes to the window and pulls the curtain aside. The lake is a smear of gray, and the mountains rise beyond that, black and two-dimensional, as though painted on the sky.

When the porcupine first appears, Lila assumes it is a monster. Her experience with the forest begins and ends with horror films. Something is snuffling among the bushes, cracking twigs and overturning leaves. Then the animal barges into the clearing, and, with a gasp, Lila takes in the quiver of quills.

The porcupine has a lazy, lumbering gait. As it moves, its armament clatters—an obvious warning, like a snake’s rattle. It noses through the grass, scratching at the ground with a paw in search of food. The creature’s head lifts, and it glances in the direction of Lila’s window. She wonders if it has sensed her there, watching. Despite the darkness both inside the cabin and out, she experiences a jolt as the animal’s gaze brushes her body.

The porcupine grows still, eyes unblinking, quills bristling like an eave hung with icicles. Lila lifts a hand in greeting, an automatic wave. In reply, the animal turns and shuffles back into the woods.

○

In the morning, Lila takes six pills, swallowing them with water. Simone stands next to her at the bathroom sink, brushing her teeth and watching Lila in the mirror. Two red. One yellow. Two blue. One purple. Lila chokes them all down. The water has a sulfurous aftertaste—or perhaps it is the residue of her medication.

At her side, Simone gargles noisily. Her white hair is bed-crumpled, her mouth chapped, her eyes heavy. Lila does not meet her wife’s reflected gaze. She keeps her attention focused on the furnishings of their rented cabin. The place is quaint in every particular, from the knotted pine walls to the leaf-shaped sconces to the cheery toothbrush holder. Sunlight filters through gingham curtains. Lila lines up her pill bottles on the counter, then begins to stack them into a tower.

“We have to check your stitches,” Simone says.

Lila examines herself in the mirror. Frizzy gray hair. Eyes as flat and dull as old dimes. Skin like dry clouds. She is sixty-one. In the last few months, her aging has seemed to accelerate. She is becoming less human, more papier-mâché.

“Lila,” Simone says sharply.

“I heard you.”

She holds out her wrists. The ritual is familiar to them both now. Simone has all the equipment ready—gauze pads, rolls of medical tape, antibiotic ointment. She removes the bandages, her fingers clumsy but gentle. Lila does not wince, even as the tape pulls at her wounds. Simone bends down, adjusting her reading glasses. Lila holds still.

The sight of her own injuries is still a shock to her. It induces a kind of distance in her mind, as though she is observing herself on television—a crime show, the gore sealed off behind a screen. Her forearms are marked by jagged red scars. Three cuts on one side. Four on the other. The wounds on her right arm are much more pronounced. This is to be expected, apparently, since she is left-handed.

Simone presses on the inflamed skin, checking for infection. Lila sucks in a breath. It helps to think of the injuries as something else. A drawing. A map. The crimson scars run like rivers. The stitches, bold and black, look like bridges. Her wrists could be the topographical representations of a faraway country.

“Seems to be healing fine,” Simone says. “Remember, no heavy lifting. Nothing over ten pounds.”

“I know.”

Simone reaches for the gauze, her expression weary.

“I saw a porcupine last night,” Lila says.

Simone says nothing, wrapping her wrists in white.

○

The trip was Simone’s idea. She first broached it on the way home from the hospital. This was a week ago, though it feels much longer to Lila. At the time, she was too heavily drugged to attend. She lolled in the passenger seat. The doctors had put her on a cocktail of mood stabilizers and pain pills. Simone’s question—a cabin, the mountains—flitted past her like a flock of butterflies.

But Simone persisted. She raised the matter again in the psychiatrist’s office, several days later, as she and Lila sat in plastic chairs, not touching. The room was dim, perfumed by cinnamon candles and illuminated by lamps with heavy orange shades. The hospital had referred Lila to Dr. Conroe. She was not sure what to make of him. She had never been to a therapist before, and Dr. Conroe had an odd manner. Bearded. Heavy glasses. Soft voice. He ruminated, interrupting himself and stepping on his own sentences. He seemed distracted, but Lila knew better. As they chatted about the weather, as Simone nibbled her fingernails, as Lila did her best not to fiddle with the dressing on her wounds, Dr. Conroe looked her over with shrewd eyes. He threw out the occasional question, as sharp as a slap. How was her mood? Was the medication making her nauseous? Was she still fixated on the kitchen knives?

Lila answered in monosyllables: Fine. Yes. No.

Simone had talked about her plan. A forest getaway. The natural world. It would give Lila a chance to heal, away from the noise and bustle of New York, away from their friends and prying questions, away from the apartment where Simone had not been able to remove the bloodstains entirely from the floor.

Dr. Conroe gave the trip his blessing. Lila was not in danger now, he said. The fresh air might do her good.

○

In the afternoon, Simone goes for a hike. Lila watches her banging around the cabin, strapping on her fanny pack and filling her water bottle. She knows better than to ask Lila to accompany her; the pills have left her too dopey for this kind of exertion. Before leaving, Simone fusses around her, helping her onto the porch swing. The air is both cold and humid, that peculiar mix of early spring. At last, Simone crunches off down the path. The trees reduce her to flashes of color—blue coat, red cap—before swallowing her up.

Lila breathes quietly. Her mind is empty. She has no thoughts, her head filled with cotton. It has been years since she has sat like this, without music, without NPR, without conversation. New leaves coat the trees. The whole forest is an almost indecent shade of raw, pale, hopeful green. In the distance, little waves dance at the edge of the lake, while the deep water remains serene and motionless.

It was Simone who chose this place. Lila has never been to the Adirondacks before. She is aware, however, that the mountains hold good memories for her wife. Simone used to visit the area as a child. She has often shared stories about cookouts and sing-alongs. Her parents, raising six children in Queens, were too poor to rent a cabin, as Simone and Lila have done. Instead, the family would camp in mildewed tents. They made fires for warmth, peed in the woods, boiled lake water to purify it, and subsisted on trail mix. Simone has spoken fondly of all these things. Building ineffective rabbit snares. Skipping rocks on the lake. Fishing with makeshift poles. The mountains were a haven for her. They were a respite from her family’s cramped apartment, the bedroom she shared with five brothers and sisters, the crush of the city, the indignity of school, and reality in general.

In her current state, Lila does not care where she is. Awash in medication, she is unattached to the physical realm. But she understands Simone’s desire to return to the mountains now, after the recent shock and trauma. It is instinct, rather than logic. It is a primal, ancient pull, like a salmon’s desire to swim upstream to a half-remembered, sunlit home.

Lila hears something moving. The bushes toss on the hillside. Her mouth goes dry. It might be a bear. There are black bears in these woods; Simone has told her so. Lila rises to her feet, shading her eyes with a hand. She takes a cautious step toward the cabin. If it is a bear, she must not bolt, since the action of flight might trigger a predatory response. Is she supposed to play dead? Or should she make herself look bigger? Why can’t she remember? The bushes rustle, the leaves dancing ominously. A twig snaps. A bird rises with a clatter of wings, startled into flight.

Then Lila sees it. A porcupine. She lets out a relieved breath.

The animal’s face is bemused and benign. It might be the same one from the previous night; there is no way to tell. Lila considers yelling for Simone, but she does not want to spook the creature. It bustles between the trees, its manner businesslike, like a commuter on a Manhattan sidewalk. The porcupine is bigger than a breadbox, but not by much. In the daylight, its mess of fur and quills seems rumpled, like a bad case of bed head. Clearly it has some ancestry in common with mice and squirrels, but the porcupine does not pause, in the manner of prey, to look around for predators. It does not notice Lila this time. It shoulders through a thicket of dense bushes. Stamping and grunting, the animal vanishes into the lattice of green.

○

Lila does not like the word depression. It has a geological sound, a fitting descriptor for a sunken patch of earth, not an emotional state. Not a form of mental illness. Not something that could claim a person’s life if left unchecked.

Still, it is her word. It is the name for her condition. Over the past week, she has found herself whispering it aloud. She has scribbled it on notepads like a reminder. The word has even cropped up in her dreams.

Until recently, she did not know she was sick. Dr. Conroe believes that she has been dealing with depression—undiagnosed and unacknowledged—for ten years. Maybe more. Probably more.

This is the nature of the disease, apparently. Depression is gradual, as subtle as nightfall. The sky dims by degrees. The shadows pool together. It is impossible to pinpoint the moment when the light is gone completely.

Now, looking back, Lila can chart her descent in terms of what she has lost. So many things have slipped into the gloaming, the air darkening, the horizon blurred. She has lost her brisk walk and her enjoyment of practical jokes. She has lost her love of knitting—an act that used to be both meditative and productive, good for her soul and her collection of hats. She has lost the desire to water her plants, which withered and died.

She has lost her ability to read for pleasure. The words on the page have become a barrier, not a window; she cannot find her way inside. She has lost her love of fine cuisine, subsisting instead on bread and chocolate. Occasionally, upon trying healthier fare, a salad or piece of fruit, she has found herself gagging, unable to get it down. She has lost weight. She has lost friends. Social outings are something to be endured or avoided. She has lost her wit and sparkle.

She never used to be aware of the passage of time, but now she feels every tick of the clock. She checks her watch throughout the day, tallying up exactly how many hours and minutes remain before she can go back to bed. She has lost her joy in her wife. She has lost her carnal desire for Simone, her lean torso and long hands. Lila no longer feels a rush of glad warmth upon seeing her wife for the first time after a day apart. She no longer feels much of anything on the positive end of the emotional spectrum. She has lost her capacity to make decisions, both large and little. Whether to brush her hair. Whether she and Simone should move to a smaller apartment. Whether the knives in the kitchen might be a reasonable solution to her problems.

Each loss, on its own, has been manageable. But together, they have amounted to nightfall. The sun dipping beneath the horizon. The blue wrung from the sky like paint from a rag.

○

At three in the morning, Lila is still awake. Beside her, Simone snores, one of her lanky legs crisscrossing Lila’s side of the bed. Lila gazes at the ceiling. Her medicine is a blender, whipping day and night into a frothy, undistinguished concoction. She has no semblance of a schedule at the moment. At last she hefts herself out of bed. Trailing a blanket over her shoulders, she shuffles down the hall. She will find something to read. Maybe she is medicated enough now to reclaim her love of literature.

The cabin is stocked with nature books about the local flora and fauna. As Lila touches the dusty spines, her wrists ache. She ignores this. She tugs a book about mammals off the shelf and settles in an armchair. Outside the window, the trees surge like kelp in a current, the sound of leaves as rhythmic as the sea.

Lila flips to a page about porcupines. With interest, she scans the image of the animal: Erethizon dorsatum. It is the second-largest rodent in North America. Only beavers are bigger. There is a drawing of a quill, scaly and sharp. The porcupine cannot throw these darts—as Lila feared—but they are deadly nonetheless, tipped with minuscule barbs to lodge in an enemy’s flesh.

From there, it only gets worse. The quills are designed to work their way into the body. Each contraction of the muscles tugs the weapon deeper. A coyote might try its luck with a porcupine, take a few quills in the shoulder, and die days later, its heart pierced by tiny swords. According to the book, a hunter in Idaho once cooked and ate a porcupine. Two weeks later, he perished in the hospital. One lone quill had perforated his large intestine, with slow but inexorable malice, from the inside out.

○

Lila wakes to the sound of Simone’s voice. There is a crick in her neck. She appears to have dropped off while reading about porcupines. The room brims with the ochre glow of sunrise.

Simone is in the kitchen, pacing and yelling into her cell phone. It is a work call; Lila can tell by her wife’s stentorian tone. Simone is an accountant, specializing in numbers and irritability. Lila pushes the hair out of her eyes, watching as Simone gestures to no one, her footsteps unceasing. She cannot talk on the phone without motion. The person on the other end of the line would never know that she is wearing flannel pajama pants, a ratty tank top, and an open robe that flaps with each stride.

Lila herself is retired. She spent forty years as a court reporter, lugging around a stenotype, sitting in overheated rooms, and warping her spine into an achy coil. On her last day, she left the office with a skip in her step, feeling like she’d shed fifty pounds. Simone could have retired too but chose not to. She claims to need her work. As much as it aggravates her, it organizes her life.

Lila gets to her feet. At the counter, she reaches for her pills, the bottles lined up in order, waiting. She is aware of her wife’s gaze on her back. Simone has stopped in her tracks, counting silently but palpably as Lila swallows. Two red. One yellow. Two blue. One purple. As soon as she is done, Simone resumes pacing again, bellowing into the phone.

Lila brews herself a cup of tea, thinking about Dr. Conroe. Since her hospitalization, she has spoken with him every day. He explained that she has been through a major depressive episode. He explained that the disease is part biological, part environmental. The likelihood of pain was coded into Lila’s genetic makeup, present from birth. All that was needed was the right trigger. The wrong trigger. Dr. Conroe has talked about catalysts and causes. So many things might have contributed to Lila’s downward spiral. Her retirement, one year ago. The illness of a good friend, five years ago. The onset of her menopause, ten years ago. The death of her mother, fifteen years ago. The fact that she and Simone decided not to have children, thirty years ago. All change is stressful, according to Dr. Conroe. Even events that seem positive in the moment can have a negative impact on brain chemistry. Depression is cumulative. It builds over time. It hides inside its slowness.

Lila returns to the couch and picks up the book she began reading last night, still open to the page about porcupines. She glances through it idly, sipping her tea. These animals, it seems, rely completely on their arsenal of quills. They do not have a potent sense of smell or hearing. They are not nocturnal, like other rodents, moving under the cover of darkness. Porcupines have put all their eggs in one basket—all their arrows in one quiver. Many inexperienced predators find themselves drawn to that plump, vulnerable shape, the slow shuffle. The porcupine looks like it couldn’t run more than a few feet without stopping to catch its breath. They are routinely stalked by young foxes, coyotes, and mountain lions. One bite, however, is all it takes. If the predator is lucky enough to survive those quills, it will never risk another encounter.

There is more, but Lila is already yawning. Endothermic. Bilateral symmetry. Sexual dimorphism. Omnivorous diet. She lays the book aside and curls up beneath her blanket, sedated, lulled, belly full of warm tea, eyes closed.

○

That afternoon, she calls Dr. Conroe. She has promised to call him every day without fail. He might as well be her parole officer.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

Lila sighs, sitting at the kitchen counter, swiveling her stool back and forth. This question is too complicated to answer. “Fine,” she says.

“I’m not asking as a formality, Lila. I want details. How’s the pain?”

“Mental or physical?”

He laughs, a genuine chuckle, ripe and warm. Lila finds herself grinning in response. It has been a while since she smiled.

“Let’s start with physical,” he says. “How are the cuts? The stitches should be coming out in two days, is that right?”

“Yes.”

Simone enters the kitchen and pours herself a bowl of cereal as a snack. Her pigtails seem unfinished, one side sleek, the other unkempt and crooked. She must have heard Lila’s voice and rushed out of the bathroom in the middle of doing her hair to snoop.

Dr. Conroe, meanwhile, is talking about dosage and milligrams.

“You’re at a hundred now,” he says. “That’s what’s making you feel sleepy. I might drop you down to seventy-five or even fifty, in time. But not yet. I want to make sure those compulsions keep their distance.”

“I see,” Lila says.

“How are you feeling about the kitchen knives?”

She glances at Simone again, standing at the sink to eat, facing the window, as though unaware that Lila is on the phone. On the kitchen counter sits a wooden knife holder. It is empty. The first thing Simone did upon their arrival was to gather up all the sharp objects in the cabin and hide them. Lila wonders how her wife managed this. Perhaps she dunked them in the tank of the toilet. Perhaps she buried them outside in the cold ground.

“Lila?” Dr. Conroe says.

She shivers a little. “Simone hid the knives.”

“Ah,” he says. “Good woman. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Lila runs her fingers down the line of her stitches. They are arranged like braille, a message printed on her flesh in a language she cannot understand. Soon they will be gone. In two days, she will return to the hospital. The doctors will inspect her wounds one last time, and then her recovery will begin in earnest. She will no longer have to wear uncomfortable splints at night to keep her wrists from bending. She will be able to type again. She will be able to carry grocery bags. She will be able to wash her own hair, instead of being shampooed like a child by Simone.

Eventually her mind will recover too. Dr. Conroe has promised this. The medication will take effect. The depression will subside.

But Lila cannot imagine it. She has been in the darkness too long. She pictures herself as a fish in a cave, sealed away from the sun. Over the years, the absence of light has altered her physiology. Her vibrant color has paled to an apathetic white. Her eyes have atrophied, leaving her bewildered and slow. Her skin has cooled. Her senses have dulled. She has become a still, pale shape, floating in the black.

On cue, Dr. Conroe says, “You should be feeling better any day now. Mentally, I mean. It’ll happen gradually. Mood is a funny thing.”

For a moment, Lila is almost too tired to breathe.

“I don’t believe you,” she says.

“It’s medicine,” he says. “It works whether you believe in it or not.”

○

Even now, she does not know why it was the kitchen knives. The steak knives, in particular. Some people choose poison, some jump off bridges, and some prefer a noose. But Lila never considered any other options. There was something so homey about the kitchen knives. Almost friendly. They had served her well, slicing cucumbers and opening recalcitrant packages of lunch meat. She was intimately familiar with their sculpted handles. They had been with her for years.

At first, the thought of suicide was vague. It came every so often, usually late at night—a gleam at the end of a long, dim tunnel. A sweet release. She would picture the knives, consider the idea, argue with it, and ultimately dismiss it. No, she could not do that to Simone. No, she did not want to die; she only wanted a measure of relief. Surely she would feel better in the morning.

But the notion was like a mosquito. It would drift off, only to return a while later. Buzzing in her ear. Irritating and persistent. Not worrisome—not yet. She would brush it away, and it would come back, away and back, over and over.

Then something changed. One morning, perhaps a month ago, she was doing the dishes. Simone was at work. The radio played as sunlight trickled through the curtains. Lila was washing the silverware, elbow-deep in foam, when she felt a shift in her perception. The air seemed to thicken. She lifted a knife and ran it down her wrist. A light tickle. She did not open the skin. She did not even leave a mark.

As soon as she had done it, her head cleared. She came back to herself as though waking from a dream. Shaken, she set the knife aside. She backed away from the sink. She left the apartment and did not return for hours.

After that, the knives were often on her mind. She visited them regularly in the kitchen. She picked them up and played with them. The compulsions came in surges. If she ran a blade down her wrist—tenderly, softly—it would relieve the desire. Afterward, she could detach. She could walk down to the bagel place. She could watch TV. She could think of something other than the knives.

She did not tell Simone. She did not tell anyone.

She was aware, even at the time, that she was in danger. But it was hard to see the situation clearly. Perhaps if she just waited, the ship would right itself on its own. Perhaps, if she did not speak of it, the whole thing would go away as mysteriously as it had come. Intellectually she knew that knives were not a pleasant thing, a joyful thing. Yet the compulsion itself was delicious, like the urge to eat an entire birthday cake or run outside in a thunderstorm. Wicked and wonderful.

As the days passed, she began to leave lines on her wrists, puffy and pink, like the innocent scratch of a fingernail. Sometimes there were scabs, flashes of festive red. The yearning increased. Lila grew weary of resisting it. She had never before needed to sift through her own urges, discerning which were rational and which were not. She wanted to nap. She wanted to eat chocolate. She wanted the knives. It was difficult to remember which of these ideas were acceptable and sane.

She has little memory of the incident itself. There was a sense of freedom, like dashing down a slope, out of control, unable to stop. The bright triangle of the blade. Blood on her shirt. Blood on the countertop. A high-pitched hum. Someone sobbing. A blare of lights and sirens. A cold, sterile room.

○

On their last day in the mountains, Simone puts her foot down.

“It’s a perfect morning,” she says. “Come with me.”

Lila is sprawled in the embrace of an armchair. Even in normal times, she is not outdoorsy. She dislikes the chaos of bushes and brambles. She finds the expanse of open sky alarming—too much air, too much light. She treats the natural world with the same dubious, dutiful attention that she might give an exhibit of unpleasant abstract art at MoMA. But Simone is holding out a second fanny pack, smiling her eager smile. With a sigh, Lila climbs to her feet.

The morning is chilly. The path winds downhill through dappled shade. Simone points out a hawk circling in the distance. She points out deer droppings, neat piles of black pellets. She offers Lila a chivalrous arm to help her over a fallen log. Her face is aglow with hope. This, Lila knows, is what Simone wanted all along. The two of them together. Hale and hearty. Clean air in their lungs. Blue sky overhead.

Lila grits her teeth. She is already dizzy from her medication, and it’s a struggle to keep her footing. Simone’s words slide past her on the slick breeze.

“I’m going to sit for a minute,” she says.

“Oh, come on. We’re so close to the lake. You can make it.”

“You go. Go without me.”

Simone meets her gaze, and they engage in the sort of silent argument that is the special province of long-married couples.

“I’ll wait here,” Lila says.

“Fine. Holler if you need me.”

As Simone crunches off down the trail, Lila sits on a stone. She can smell the lake, murky and deep. She has no desire to approach that gelid body of water. Simone hops over a tree root and disappears down the hill. Lila closes her eyes.

Someday she will have to deal with the devastation the past few weeks have wreaked in her marriage. It was Simone who found her. Prone on the kitchen floor. She had lost too much blood, lost consciousness. Her wrists were canyons of pulp and sinew. A crimson puddle gleamed on the tile. It had soaked her clothes and matted her hair. Simone was unable to wake her. She called 911 and sobbed all the way to the hospital.

Lila leans back against the rough bark of a tree. The branches sway in the wind, and she can feel the movement deep in the trunk. In recent days, Simone has looked at her without recognition. Lila understands this. To her wife, she has become two people in one body. The victim and the attacker. Simone’s dear, familiar partner and a dangerous stranger. Simone is old-fashioned, protective, quixotic. She would defend Lila with her life against any exterior threat. But there is nothing more interior than mental illness—in the bloodstream, in the brain. Simone cannot intervene between Lila and herself. Instead, she has been hovering. Eavesdropping on Lila’s phone calls. Keeping track of her pills. Watching her every move.

A crackling in the bushes catches Lila’s attention. She wonders if her porcupine has returned one final time. The leaves shimmy and dance, and she waits, holding her breath. But the underbrush is empty. It is the wind, nothing more.

Her fingers drift automatically to her stitches. She taps each one in succession, counting them like the beads in a rosary.

○

That night, on the highway, Simone drums her thumbs on the steering wheel in time with the music on the radio. She always goes into another world when she drives. To Lila, it seems to be a pleasant, hypnotic state, Simone’s foot pulsing in rhythm on the pedal, her brain busy with the stream of headlights. Lila herself is a nervous driver, happy to cede the wheel.

The moon rises, a dry curve of bone. Lila fumbles in her purse. Before leaving the cabin, in a fit of mischief, she stole the book about porcupines. Now, penlight in hand, she flips to the right page. As the miles slip past, the engine shuddering, Simone drumming, Lila reads. She learns that porcupines mate back to belly—not face-to-face, as scientists once believed. The old joke is true: How do porcupines have sex? Very carefully. The females give birth to small litters, between one and four porcupettes. For obvious reasons, the infants emerge with soft quills, more like modeling clay than fired ceramic. These usually harden by the second day of life.

The quills, as it turns out, are minor marvels. They are unique, in fact, in the animal kingdom. Each porcupine carries thirty thousand spikes on its back. Each spike is coated with an antibiotic substance, as potent as penicillin. When scientists first discovered this, they could not figure it out. Nature is rarely benevolent and never altruistic. It makes no sense to bundle a weapon in the same package as its cure. According to the book, a woman in Tennessee was stabbed in the arm during an encounter with a porcupine. The quill dug itself into her bicep. Two weeks later, it emerged from her palm. By that point, she had almost forgotten about it. The spikes are a strange mixture, at once harmful and harmless. As long as they avoid vital organs, they can pass through living tissue without damage.

Eventually, a biologist solved the riddle. He postulated that porcupines must climb trees. No one had ever witnessed them doing this, but it was the only way the situation made sense. If porcupines climbed trees, they might fall. If they fell, they could end up impaled on their own armament of spikes. Lila catches her breath, imagining it. The slip of a paw. The shock of empty air. The earth lurching upward. The collision. She pictures the animal on the ground, sprawled among the tree roots, bruised and battered and pierced like a pincushion.

In the book, there is a photograph of a porcupine lolling on a leaf-strewn branch, its feet slung casually on either side of the limb, its eyes half shut, dozing in its airy cradle. Against all odds, these creatures are happiest high in the air. They climb trees for food, for shelter, even for fun. Over time, their bodies have adapted for this purpose. Their claws are long and curved, their paws soled with rubbery pads. Their stomachs are capable of digesting bark. And the quills—as the biologist hypothesized—have transformed too.

Lila closes the book and clicks off her penlight. She leans her head against the cool window. The paperback is a comforting presence, clutched in her palm like a talisman. She imagines the injured animal prone at the foot of a tree. She pictures it rolling to its feet. Whimpering, bleeding, limping away. Finding a safe place to curl into a ball. Licking its wounds. Porcupines have evolved to climb trees and to fall. They have evolved to suffer and to heal. The quills will do what they are designed to do: they will travel through the dark pulp of the body, slicing the flesh, rending the muscle, and leaving behind no lesions, no bruises, no pain, no scars.

○

In ten years, Lila will return to the Adirondacks. In Simone’s company, she will come back to the mountains.

This will not be a spur-of-the-moment trip. The two of them will prepare months in advance, deciding to visit for just a weekend this time. They will rent a new cabin. A different view. A river instead of a lake. Autumn instead of spring. They will organize their schedule for recreation and beauty. They will travel at the crescendo of the fall foliage, when the trees flicker and glow like lit candles.

On a chilly evening, Lila will leave Simone snoring in an armchair, her reading glasses askew. The trees will surge overhead, messy jumbles of gold. The sky murky. The horizon darkening. Grabbing a flashlight, Lila will escape into the breeze. She will stride down the trail, leaving the cabin in her wake, pushing a sheaf of gray hair from her eyes.

She will be restless, eager to get away from the heat of the house, the fluorescent bulbs, and the garish paintings on the walls. Away from Simone, too, who will watch her with concern throughout the trip, speaking low and touching Lila tentatively, as though she is an unexploded bomb. Simone will even start counting her pills again—two yellow, with breakfast.

Lila will understand this concern while simultaneously resenting it. In her everyday life, she will no longer be a creature locked in darkness. Knitting, gardening, lunch dates with friends—she will have hobbies again, plans for each day. Sometimes the shadows will start to close in around her, but she can recognize them now for what they are. She can call Dr. Conroe, increase her medication, exercise self-care, and wait for the light to return.

But here in the Adirondacks, there will be echoes in the air. For the first time in years, Lila will be aware of her scars—faint tattoos on her wrists. She will not feel quite like herself: unsettled, unmoored. Not depression, but distraction. Not pain, but the memory of pain.

As the sky dims, Lila will click on her flashlight. A cold wind will wash down the slope, and flecks of red and yellow will whirl around her like rain. Somewhere nearby, Lila will hear the rush of the river. She will hear birds calling. She will hear a scuffle overhead—an incongruous sound. Her heart will give a startled jump.

A scratching. A snort. A crunch of twigs. Lila will take a deep breath, grip her flashlight, and point the beam upward.

A shape on a branch. Brown and white. Paws clutching the bark. A thicket of quills. Lila will laugh, a brash shout of joy. High in the tree, thirty feet in the air, will be her old friend, the porcupine. Despite the stiff breeze and the leaves coming loose in torrents, the animal’s pose will be casual. The tree will sway, and the porcupine will sway too. When the beam touches it, its pupils will contract. The quills will lift, indicating alarm, arching outward like a dandelion gone to seed.

Lila will step closer, peering through the haze of evening, still grinning. Above her head, the porcupine will shift position. She will watch its claws dig into the wood. Disturbed by the flashlight’s beam, the animal will grab hold of the trunk and begin to climb. It will ascend clumsily yet rapidly up a trellis of branches, the quills undulating and clattering. As falling leaves thicken the air, Lila will stand still, caught in a posture of helpless wonder. Before her eyes, the porcupine will scale the trunk, mounting into the upper branches, moving without fear or hesitation toward the stars.