Part 3
“We should have told him,” Nora said. “I was wrong about that.”
Owen searched her face. He looked too tired to work out whether he was in trouble, and she brushed damp hair away from his forehead without asking him to understand anything else.
“Dad knows now. I’m coming right behind you.”
At the road, Cal was waiting beside the ambulance’s open doors. He had not climbed in yet because he wanted Owen to see Nora arrive. As soon as she came out of the trees, he pointed her out to their son and moved aside so the medic could finish securing him.
Mara drove Nora to the hospital. On the way, Nora gave her the account she should have given Saturday, including exactly what she had promised Owen. Mara asked questions and wrote down the answers when they stopped; she did not tell Nora it was understandable or that it would have made no difference.
The cap lay on Nora’s knees. She tried to smooth the little white O until she noticed she was pulling a stitch loose.
While Owen was being examined, Nora asked a nurse to find out whether Daniel would see her. By early afternoon, their son was warm enough to complain about the hospital socks. His ankle was badly sprained, and the doctor wanted to keep him overnight because of the cold, dehydration, and time he had spent alone. Cal sat beside the bed peeling the crust from a sandwich while Owen explained that the lower half of the pipe had been dry until that morning.
He had eaten both granola bars Saturday. Later he had caught drips in his empty bottle and slept inside the emergency blanket, well back in the pipe where it was dry. He had blown the whistle until his lips hurt, then saved it for when he thought he heard someone. That morning, water reaching his shoes had forced him closer to the opening; it was there that he finally heard Daniel’s whistle.
Nora listened from the foot of the bed. Each detail gave her another place to imagine him, another hour during which she had been somewhere else.
“Why did you keep going?” Cal asked.
Owen picked at the blanket. “She kept getting farther away.”
He had gone out with the trail camera hidden in his pack. He wanted to move it somewhere the bobcat would look straight into the lens, instead of showing him the blurred hindquarters he usually got. He was carrying it between possible trees when he saw her; he followed her off the old road, and the ground beneath him gave way.
The camera had gone into the water. Owen had landed on a bank below the culvert and crawled inside, dragging his bad foot.
“You fed her after Mom told you to stop?”
Owen nodded. His gaze flicked toward Nora, then away again.
“I thought if she didn’t have dinner, she’d go somewhere else.”
Cal put down the sandwich. For several seconds he kept his hands flat on his knees, and Nora could see him deciding which of the things he felt would be useful to their son.
“We’ll talk about the camera when you’re home,” he said. “Right now I need to know whether anything hurts that you haven’t told the nurse about.”
Owen shook his head. Then, so quietly Nora almost missed it, he asked, “Can Mom go outside a minute?”
She began to ask why. Cal glanced at her, and she stopped, picked up her coat, and walked into the hall. Through the small window beside the door, she saw Owen catch his father’s hand with both of his.
Nora stood there until a nurse came to ask whether she was the woman looking for Daniel Shaw. He was awake, the nurse said, and she could visit if she kept it short.
Daniel sat propped up in a treatment room with his left arm in a sling. His shoulder had been dislocated; now it was back in place, though his face still tightened when he shifted. A clear bag of wet clothing rested on the chair beside him.
“How’s the kid?”
“Complaining about socks.”
“Good.” Daniel closed his eyes briefly. “He kept saying you’d be mad because he’d lost his camera.”
“I don’t care about the camera.”
“I told him that. Didn’t seem to help.”
Nora pulled a stool beside the bed. Without the rain between them, she could see that he had her mother’s narrow upper lip and a little ridge across the bridge of his nose. She tried to imagine growing older beside that face and had no memories with which to do it.
“Mara said you helped search Sunday.”
“West side. Yesterday too. This morning I went back under the old road. Rain had stripped some brush off the bank. Thought I might see something we’d missed.”
He had found the cap among the fallen branches, then heard Owen answer his whistle below. Nora looked at the sling and asked whether he had hurt his shoulder getting down to him.
“Coming back up,” Daniel said. “I was carrying him. When the path went, I landed on my side with him across me.”
He adjusted the sling, then stopped with his fingers hooked beneath the strap. “I thought that ground would hold us.”
Nora moved his cup closer. He took a drink with his good hand, spilling a little down the hospital gown.
“How did you know about me?” she asked.
Daniel reached toward the bag on the chair and stopped. Nora offered to get his wallet, and he nodded. Inside, behind a card he indicated, was a small photograph with softened corners.
A teenage girl stood beside the cabin holding an infant. Nora recognized Vivian’s heavy braid before her face. On the back was her mother’s name and a date eleven years before Nora’s birth.
“My parents gave me that when I started asking,” Daniel said. “They had her name. I didn’t try to find her until a few years ago.”
“You wrote to her?”
“Twice. Then I found the obituary. It had your name in it.”
He told her he had learned about the old family property while looking for Vivian. When the land trust needed someone to service its wildlife cameras, he asked for that parcel. He had done the work for years; the job gave him a reason to come to the area without deciding yet whether to approach Nora.
“I had your address in my truck,” he said. “Kept finding reasons not to use it. Then the missing-boy signs went up.”
Nora held the photograph by its edges. Her mother looked uncomfortable with the camera, one shoulder lifted, but her hand cupped the back of the baby’s head with a gesture Nora knew.
It was how she had held Owen while Nora rinsed shampoo from his hair.
“I’ve got letters for you,” Nora said. “Three of them. She left them in her recipe box.”
Daniel’s good hand stopped moving on the blanket. “Letters she wrote?”
“I think so. They’re sealed. She put a note around them. That’s how I knew your name.”
“When did you find them?”
“After the funeral.”
He looked toward the window. Nora could hear someone dragging a stool across the floor in the next room, a short scrape followed by a longer one.
“I didn’t know how to find you,” she said.
“Did you try?”
“No.”
She waited for him to look back. When he did, there was no anger she could easily answer, only a weariness that made her want to explain everything at once: the funeral, Owen asking for Grandma, the recipes in that familiar hand, the note that made the whole kitchen seem to belong to a stranger.
“She was so good with Owen,” Nora began. Daniel held out his hand for the photograph, and Nora gave it back. “I can’t hear that right now,” he said…
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