As he sits at his desk at the New Caledonia Corvus Research Facility and Sanctuary on Mount Khogi, Weary is trying to keep it together.
Ever since he made that call to the Parrish Island Police Department and spoke to the detective with the little clown voice, there has been nothing online. No Visa charges, nothing on ShutR, nothing nowhere in all the places he looks, except big fat echoes of zero, which his imagination is happy to fill with endless and varied disasters.
It’s all been one looming, terrifying, cavernous zilch.
He can’t work. He can’t concentrate. He can barely eat; he’s become a danger on the road, and he keeps walking into rooms and forgetting why he’s there. He found his car keys in the refrigerator, and left the coffeepot on to burn. Think! he begs. Focus! he cajoles. Get it together! Use your God-given strengths! Not happening. It’s impossible.
The silence is making him nuts.
After those glory days, too! Information, pouring down like the rain in the Mount Khogi jungle. It had been so easy to find her. Isabelle plus Parrish Island, and, bam, there she was. Island Air appeared first, and then it all made sense. That’s how Henry must have met her. That first day. The story always makes sense. Weary opened the Island Air website, and her photo was right there on the About Us page. Isabelle Austen, the same glowing young woman on the boat.
Isabelle Austen. A treasure trove! Old swim meet results from the local high school. Yearbook photo. A LinkedIn résumé including her experience working at a small publisher in Seattle. Wouldn’t Henry love that? Egomaniac would assume she’d have an in to get those maudlin, knockoff Poe poems published.
And more, so much more! Isabelle Austen receives a scholarship from the Rotary Club! She graduates from the University of Washington with a degree in English! She lives in an apartment for a long while in the U-district (small, drab). She marries! She divorces! (That was quick.) The ex’s name is Evan Donaldson, works for GenCrest Pharmaceuticals, looks like a glory-days-are-over jock turned sales guy. His Facebook page shows him raising lots of beer mugs with the boys like he’s still nineteen. Jerk. She deserves better.
For days, Weary is satiated. He gazes at the photo in Seattle Magazine: Roger Thurston, founder of Evergreen Publishing, and Isabelle Austen, editor, celebrate the release of Mark Elliott’s Trout Summers. He surveys Isabelle’s last address in the Seattle neighborhood of Queen Anne, where she lived with Evan Donaldson. It’s a building with a brick façade; a similar apartment currently for sale shows bright windows and a small kitchen and an inner courtyard with garden space. Next door: a park, and on the other side, a Mexican restaurant called El Toreador. Weary reads the menu. He walks along the street via Google Maps, turns down unfocused corners by clicking wide arrows. He checks out her old workplace, Evergreen Publishing. (Nice views. Right in front of a bus stop, though.) He reads Isabelle’s well-written five-star Amazon review for The Princess Bride.
And then he speeds forward in time, moves with Isabelle to Parrish Island. Change of address: 52 Possession Loop. The house is small and charming, with graying shingles. It overlooks the sound. It’s hard to see any more than that, as it’s protected on all sides by large trees. But look there—52 Possession Loop, owned by the now dead mother, Margaret Austen.
He puts together the picture, comprehends the personal storyline of poor Isabelle. A brief marriage to that dweeb, a divorce, returning home after the mother dies to run the business that—according to the Our History page—had been handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. Weary spends time on Margaret, too. He scours the Web for information about the tiny airline, peruses the photos of the pilots on the site, reads about the planes, scrutinizes the annual profits, smaller than you’d think. There is Maggie’s hundred-dollar contribution to the Democratic Party, and her bitchy quote about Fourth of July fireworks in the San Juan Islander. On the more personal end, he discovers that Margaret was divorced from Edward Young Austen, who passed away (the family requests no flowers) shortly after. There’s little to be found about Isabelle’s father, except a brief line in the Puget Sound Business Journal about a new job at Chambers Insurance, St. Petersburg branch.
Daily, Weary types in the address: 52 Possession Loop. He map-strolls down the road, curvy and looming with evergreens, one that must be hell at night. He investigates all the houses along it, “drives” the roads that lead to town. He “walks” the streets of the island, explores the stores and the waterfront, treads the wide swaths of pastures speckled with private homes and B&B’s.
Henry North is there somewhere.
It’s the same thing every day until suddenly it isn’t. It happens. He types 52 Possession Loop and something unexpected occurs. A blip. A change.
A Record of Sale! Holy hell! She sold the place! Meaning: She’s moving. Meaning—he knows it, he feels it in his bones—she’s moving in with Henry.
It pops right up like a friendly toasted waffle, Isabelle’s change of address: 58 Possession Loop.
Henry, Henry, Henry. Right down the street the whole time.
He panicked, he admits. Well, shit! It was the big shift he feared, and so soon, too. He remembers quite clearly what happened to Sarah after she moved in with Henry and then married him—how that commitment started the downward slide of Henry’s insecurity and paranoia and general bad behavior, which Sarah tried to manage but could never manage. Weary saw the house sale and was flooded with alarm. He could think only of the terror of Sarah’s last days on that boat, and Virginia’s last moments, standing on that cliff. He had to do something. Someone had to know what was going on over there, if they didn’t already. The phone was in his hand before he realized it, the number dialed. He paced the room, heart thundering, jungle heat adding to nerves and sweat as he spoke to the clown-voiced officer before abruptly hanging up. Then he ran to the toilet, retched up his horror and regret.
And now, silence.
The last Visa charge was a U-Haul rental from Eugene’s Gas and Garage, on Front Street.
Maybe Isabelle’s ditched him, and the silence is only the lovely sound of Henry’s ruined heart.
Maybe they’ve barricaded themselves inside his house, together, against a common enemy, the police…They’re in a standoff, so to speak, using up rations of fancy cheese and fine wines, expensive, bland crackers.
Maybe Henry is in a deep depression. Maybe the stress has taken its toll, and he’s in bed with the covers over his head. He hasn’t showered for days. He’s contemplating suicide. (One can wish.)
Maybe he’s sick. A terrible flu. Summer pneumonia. Something vicious that could kill him (more wishing). Maybe Isabelle—still blissfully ignorant due to police who don’t do their jobs—is making him soup and fetching him glasses of ginger ale. Maybe she’s caught it, too, and they’ve been staying in, eating what’s left in the cupboards because they’re both too wan and frail to shop and cook.
This has to stop. Weary’s losing it. He must try to stay busy. Honestly, he doesn’t need to try. Weary is busy. He doesn’t just sit around thinking about Henry. Running a research facility is no walk in the park. He is swamped—counting birds, watching birds, catching birds, banding birds. Managing assistants. Attempting to discover the effects of temporal change in design of tools, and quantifying what appears to be the aiming of candlenuts onto rocks to extract kernels. Providing proof for newly found wonders: the way Corvus use their beaks for the equivalent of human hand gestures; the way they will name their captors. He also supervises the work of Matias Vargas, a Ph.D. student from the University of Auckland—research topic: Cognition and Neuroanatomy in New Caldonian Crows.
Do you see? He is not just plotting the downfall of Mr. Marvelous. He has a staff, and donors, and students, and lots and lots of winged charges. Right this minute, Lotto is waiting for him in the field. But after a morning of click-tap-nothing, Weary needs something to satisfy him. One small wired reward, one benevolent screen tidbit to quench and temporarily gratify. After his recent technological frustrations, he needs his go-to, his teddy bear in a lightning storm. He’s seen the video a hundred times or more. He taps the sideways triangle and it begins to play. There’s Gavin Gray’s voice. Professor Gavin Gray, dearest friend, deceased mentor. Pancreatic cancer, he didn’t have a chance. It’s an old video. North was still in Weary’s future when it was filmed. This research facility was. Gavin Gray was years away from his own death. But it’s comforting to hear Gavin Gray’s voice. It fills Weary with sweet nostalgia, gratitude. Weary has Gavin Gray to thank for this position now. Everyone needs someone like Gavin Gray in their life, someone who believes in you, who reaches out a hand, who keeps your secrets, even.
Sarah deserved that, too, damn it.
“We’re in the jungle of Mount Khogi,” Gavin Gray says. He’s offscreen, speaking in hushed tones. “We’re observing Corvus moneduloides.”
The bird hops about on a tree branch. In the background, there is the twitter and chirp of the Mount Khogi forest. Corvus squawks a friendly awp before setting to work. First, he locates a forked twig. Next, he removes and discards one side of the fork. The camera zooms in on his black velvet head, his long, determined beak, snipping and snapping, removing leaves, tidying and perfecting. Making a tool. Light filters through the thick forest cover.
“Beautiful,” Gavin Gray whispers.
It’s the word beautiful that gets Weary every time. Also, the fixed, almost tender determination of Corvus. The bird does not care about the research assistant’s camera. It does not care about Gavin Gray’s wonder-filled eyes and pad full of notes. It does not care about inclement weather or a spring day or a stubborn strip of fleshy bark or the amount of hours it all takes. It cares only about its solitary mission. Weary admires this to no end.
“That’s all for now,” Gavin Gray says from another time. The video ends. Weary’s heart fills—with love and appreciation and respect. With sadness. With loss.
There is a soft knock at the door. “Yes?” Weary calls.
Lotto pops his head in. “You’re still here, Professor? I was getting worried.”
“You came all the way back. Apologies, Lot. I got hung up with these evaluations.”
“It’s raining like a bastard out there,” Lotto says, and it must be, because his hair is splattered to his head, and his boots are dripping.
“Let’s go.” Weary snags his rain jacket from the coat tree on the way out.
It is raining like a bastard, as Lotto says. Their heads are down. They hunch their shoulders as they tromp up the trail.
Maybe Henry North has gotten a job and is now too busy to cook or date. (Ha.)
Maybe he’s had a family crisis.
Maybe Henry North himself has been pushed off a cliff. Maybe he is swimming for his life, choking on seawater and his own terror.
Weary knows, he does, that his mind is trying to be kind with these vivid scenarios. They keep him occupied. They shield his vision from the maybes he can’t bear to imagine: Maybe it’s over, and all of this has been for nothing. Or worse. Much worse. Maybe she’s still with him, and the clock is ticking.