Part 6
“Yes,” he said.
It came out before he’d weighed it, the way it hadn’t on the phone in October or at the station door. He heard it land and didn’t try to take it back.
“Through the summer,” he added. “I can’t promise you past that yet. I don’t know what I’ll be like in that house.”
“Neither do I,” Beth said. “That’s fine. That’s the first honest thing anybody in this family has said about that house.” A door slammed somewhere on her end. “I have to go. There’s a kid in the hallway with a fire extinguisher.”
She arrived in Montrose on the twelfth and drove up to Lake City in a rental with real tires this time. On the morning of the fourteenth they went up the county road behind Mai’s truck to the gate below the station, where the plow stopped, and walked the last mile and a half on snowshoes with Owen breaking trail.
Owen pulled the crate on a sled. He had been winter caretaker for seven months and had lost weight and grown a full beard and acquired the habit of talking to the station’s generator in a low, respectful voice. He had spent October pulling plot fifteen and every other piece of old line, tag, and flagging he could find on the upper bench and the basin floor, and he kept a pencil tally on the inside of the station’s mudroom door. Martin had read it the night before. Four hundred and eleven feet of line. Ninety-two stakes. Six aluminum tags from studies older than his.
They didn’t go up to the bench. The bench was under six feet of snow, and the plots weren’t there anymore anyway. They went to the willow flat below it, where the camera had caught the mother and her two kittens in October, and Mai set the crate down at the edge of the spruce with its door facing the trees.
K-31 was eleven months old and sixteen pounds. She had a GPS collar around her neck, a gray band that Mai had fitted under sedation two days before. On her left foreleg, just above the paw, the hair had grown back in a ring of pure white, an inch wide. It was the first thing anybody noticed about her now. It was all Martin could see.
“Everybody back thirty yards,” Mai said. “Behind the willows. No talking.”
They went back. Beth stood next to Martin, her hands jammed in her coat pockets. Owen crouched beside the sled. Mai pulled the cord that lifted the crate door, then walked backward to join them.
For a long time nothing happened. The sun was on the snow and the snow was so bright Martin had to squint. A gray jay landed in the spruce above the crate and complained about all of them.
Then the kitten came out.
She came fast, not low the way he’d imagined, but in one long bound that put her ten feet from the crate and up to her chest in powder. She stopped. She lifted her head and the black ear tufts went up and she held absolutely still, the way he had seen her hold still on the camera a hundred times, listening.
She was standing on all four feet. The white ring on her foreleg showed against the snow.
Something moved in the willows to her left. Martin didn’t see it, and neither did anyone else. K-31 did. Her head swung, her whole body shortened and gathered, and she was gone in three bounds through the snow, the big feet spreading on each landing exactly the way they were made to spread, left as well as right. A snowshoe hare broke from the willows ahead of her and the two of them vanished into the spruce.
Nobody heard what happened next. The gray jay flew off.
Mai held up her receiver and listened to the steady pulse of the collar moving north, away from them, into the timber. After a while she lowered it.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s it. She’s gone to work.”
Martin stood there. He had known for months exactly what this would look like. He had known she would not look for him, that she had never once in seven months seen his face, that this was the point and the whole of the point. Knowing it didn’t help. Something in his chest that had nothing to do with his heart went on hurting anyway, and he let it.
Beth didn’t say anything. She took one hand out of her pocket and put it through his arm and stood there with him until Mai started packing up the crate.
On the way back to the gate, Owen pulled the empty sled and Mai walked ahead with her receiver, and Martin and Beth came last. Halfway down, where the trail crossed the creek on a snow bridge, Beth stopped to look at the water running black under the ice. Martin, who had crossed that snow bridge maybe three hundred times, stopped too, and waited, and didn’t tell her it was safe until she asked.
They drove east two days later in Beth’s rental, which she paid a fee to drop in Columbus. It took two and a half days. Every four hours his phone showed a new point from the collar, and he caught himself counting the way Doug had taught him to count: day three, day four, out of sixty. They argued about the radio in Kansas and about whether he was allowed to drive in Missouri. He was not. In Indiana they stopped talking for most of an afternoon, and somewhere past Indianapolis Beth fell asleep with her shoes off and her feet on the dashboard.
The house was on a quiet street in Westerville with a maple in the front yard that had grown so much he didn’t recognize it from the road. Beth parked in the driveway where she had watched the hospice truck. She handed him the key.
“Your house,” she said.
He let himself in. It smelled of closed rooms and the faint, sweet dust of a furnace that had been running all winter for nobody. The living room was empty where the bed had been. Beth had put the couch back.
The calendar hung on the wall beside the kitchen window, where it had always hung. A free one from a hardware store, landscape photos of covered bridges. It was turned to August. He did not need to cross the room to see Ruth’s green ink on the July page underneath, but he crossed the room anyway, and lifted the August page, and looked.
First hummingbird. 6:40 a.m.
Beth stood in the doorway.
“I’m not going to sell it,” Martin said.
She didn’t answer.
“I’m going to live in it. If you’ll help me go through the study. I don’t want to delegate it.” He let the page fall back. “I can’t promise I’ll be good at being here.”
Beth came across the kitchen and stood next to him and looked at the calendar. Then she reached up, took it off its nail, and held it out to him.
“Then don’t leave it on August,” she said.
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇