Part 6
Elena marked the forest tract for review, including the access clearing behind the memorial bend. Before she left, she made Beth walk through the reasons for choosing it: cover, room to travel away from traffic, the family’s original range. Danny’s cross wasn’t one of the reasons she wrote down.
The next weeks filled with calls over the radio and maps carried in with supplies. The tract was accepted, but the transfer needed more than an approved dot on paper. Clearances moved slowly, the access road deteriorated, and the field team wanted the youngsters assessed through another season before committing them to a winter without the project’s support.
October passed. Then November.
Beth called the store from town and asked to extend her leave. The assistant manager was handling the work well, the owner told her; they could hold her place longer, but they would have to talk again in the spring. She thanked him, then sat in the truck and recalculated what remained of her savings.
The cabin stay stretched beyond the original estimate. Beth hauled wood, checked the protected service gates after snow, and continued the work Elena assigned as the wolves grew into yearlings. Their independence had to persist through the months when it was least convenient to watch it.
During the long evenings, she carved three wolves from a scrap of soft wood. Flint’s front feet came out too large. She considered starting over, then remembered how he had looked coming down the draw in July and left them alone.
By spring, the final assessments were complete. The road to the approved clearing had reopened, the paperwork was through, and a transport date was set. When Elena read it over the radio, Beth looked at the calendar without answering.
May fifth. One year since the rescue, four since Danny’s crash.
She hadn’t asked for the date. A field crew’s availability and the road work had put it there. Beth wrote it beneath the last entry in her notebook, then closed the book with both hands.
Before dawn that morning, the handlers loaded the three secured crates into her pickup. There was no small carrier now. Willow’s sons took up almost as much room as she did, their weight settling the truck onto its springs.
Elena checked the tie-downs and went over the transfer with Beth. The team would follow and clear the approach; Beth could open the doors from the protected side once everyone was positioned. She had done enough gate work by then to repeat the sequence without looking at her notes.
The highway was damp, with old snow under the trees higher on the pass. Beth drove slowly past the turnout where she had once left her flowers in a storm. She continued to the forest access track and turned in, the memorial pine visible below through a break in the branches.
They placed the crates at the clearing’s edge, their doors facing deeper into the woods. The trucks and the people withdrew from that direction. Beth stood beside the first latch with her gloves on, aware of the ordinary weight of the metal under her thumb.
She opened Willow’s crate and stepped clear. For several seconds nothing happened. Then the gray muzzle appeared, followed by one forepaw feeling for the ground beyond the threshold.
Willow came out and stood in the air moving through the clearing. Her coat lifted along the shoulders as she turned toward the trees. Beth could hear her drawing in the unfamiliar morning, or perhaps a familiar place changed by a year; she had no way to know which.
Flint emerged from the second crate as soon as Beth released it. Wren took longer. He leaned forward, withdrew, then stepped down and moved toward his mother, brushing his shoulder against his brother on the way.
The family gathered beyond the empty crates. Beth stayed where Elena had told her to stand. There was nothing in her hands except the gloves she had begun, without noticing, to pull off.
She wanted Willow to look at her. When the wolf did, Beth found that wanting more came just as easily: one step closer, one last touch of the nose, some small act she could take home and use whenever the house became too quiet.
Her lips parted around the first sound of the name.
Willow turned toward the forest. Beth closed her mouth and held her place while the wolf walked away, both sons following. At the first line of trees, the mother stopped and looked back over her shoulder.
The howl rose from her before Beth was ready for it. Flint joined, then Wren, their voices carrying above the clearing and beyond the road. Beth stood with one glove hanging from her fingers until the sound broke apart in the timber.
Willow moved first. The three gray bodies passed between the trunks, visible, hidden, visible once more farther up the slope. Then Beth could no longer separate them from the trees.
She waited until Elena came beside her. The woman said only, “Take your time,” and went to help the crew with the empty crates. Beth put her gloves back on before walking down toward the turnout. When she got home, she would open Danny’s door.
At the pine, she secured fresh sunflowers beneath the cross. The little wooden pack fit into the sheltered space between two roots, where the spring runoff wouldn’t take it. She turned it so the three blunt faces pointed toward the woods.
A distant howl reached her as she stood. Two other voices followed, faint enough that she stopped moving to listen. She stayed beside the tree until they faded, then brushed the dirt from her knees and went back to the truck.
Passing the mile marker still hurt. Yet she could keep her eyes on the road beyond it, where water shone in the shallow wheel tracks and a truck was climbing toward the pass. She drove until she reached a truck stop and pulled into a space at the far edge of the lot.
Three hours went by there. She bought coffee, let it cool, and watched people walk between parked rigs and the entrance. Each time she thought of starting the truck, she saw the door at the end of her hallway. Finally she left the unfinished coffee and picked up her keys.
It was evening when Beth reached home. She put her bag inside the front door and walked down the hallway, passing her own room. At Danny’s door, she took hold of the knob and turned it.
The door opened against a ridge in the carpet. Beth pushed gently and stepped into the room for the first time in four years, bringing a narrow strip of hallway light with her. Dust lay along the bookshelf, and Danny’s comforter still made the small hill over the pillow where she had left it.
She sat on the bed. A crayon had rolled into the space beside the nightstand; she could see its torn paper wrapper but couldn’t quite reach it without getting down on the floor. For a while she looked at that instead of anything else.
Then she bent forward and cried. She stayed when the first fierce spell passed, sitting among his things without trying to decide which should remain and which might someday move. There was a long time between those questions and anything she could answer.
“I’m going to try, Danny,” she said. When she left the room, she left the door open a few inches.
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