Kingfisher(68)

“Nobody, living or dead, makes things easy even when you love them. Especially then.”

Jayne whirled through the double doors like a dancer, her purple hair swirling, her tray full of dirty dishes. “There’s a pair of black-haired, blue-eyed twin knights out there I think we need to keep. I’ll take one and you take the other, Carrie. They need a blue cheese dressing and a chowder.”

Ella reached for dishes; Jayne popped some corn muffins and butter into a basket and danced out again.

Carrie checked the bar when she finished work but found no Merle there. She went home and crept gratefully into bed. Sometime in the night, she woke up feeling odd, somehow amiss, then realized it was nothing, only hunger. Zed came in then from working the late shows at the theater, and she took in a long breath of the smell of hot buttered popcorn on his skin as he rolled in beside her. She went back to sleep and dreamed of Merle, or maybe she heard him in her dreams, singing his song of love or loss or dire warning to the night.

“You’re working too hard,” Zed told her sleepily the next morning, as they drank coffee together in the farmhouse kitchen.

“I’m not the one who has to get up at the crack of dawn and walk Harlan Jameson’s puppy.”

“That’s only for a week, while he’s out of town. I think you should quit working for Stillwater. He hasn’t told you anything. All he’s done is make you feel guilty about working for him. Your tightest pair of jeans is starting to sag on you. You’re getting some killer cheekbones, but I don’t think all this is good for you.”

“I’m fine,” Carrie said without really listening. “You should eat something. I could scramble some eggs.”

“There are no eggs. I looked. There’s no bread for toast.”

“Milk and cereal?”

“There’s a wilted stalk of celery and a jar of mustard.”

“Seriously?” Carrie put her cup down, went to stick her head in the fridge. “Well, where did— Who’s been eating—” She opened the freezer. “There’s ice cream. No. Frozen yogurt.” She stared at it, and felt something dark, constricting, ease around her thoughts, her heart. “He hates frozen yogurt. He says it’s unnatural.”

“Who?”

She looked at him, smiling. “My father. He’s been here laying waste to the kitchen.”

Zed didn’t smile back. “And this took you how long to notice? How many sandwiches ago did he finish your bread? How many bowls of cereal?”

“I don’t know. What does it matter? I miss him, Zed. I want so much to be able to talk to him again. I’m just happy he’s been here at all.”

“It matters because you’ve stopped bothering to feed yourself.” He got up abruptly, pulled the yogurt out of the freezer, and handed her a spoon. “Yogurt. It’s good for you. People eat it for breakfast. Eat some human food for once instead of those airy nothings you eat at Stillwater’s. I’m not moving until—”

“Oh, all right,” Carrie said. She prodded a spoonful out of the box, sucked on it until it melted. “Here. Your turn.”

“Finish it.”

“I will, I will, I promise. You’d better go before the puppy chews its way out of the house.”

He lingered, his forehead creased, his eyes dark, watching her excavate another bite, until the thought of the ravaging, whimpering beast tugged him away. “I’m bringing groceries tonight.” It sounded like a threat. “Somebody around here needs to exercise some common sense.”

She tossed the carton and the spoon into the freezer when she heard his engine start, and went outside to see if she could spot the errant wolf.

She found him by his singing.

Crooning, more like, she thought. If a wolf could. It was a gentle sort of whine, hitting notes of love, lullaby, and play, the sound a creature might make that had spent an entirely satisfying night, and looked forward to another just like it. She could not see the wolf though it sounded close, just behind a tree, or around the great fallen snag of a root-ball lying partly in the grasses, partly in mud the ebbing tide had uncovered. She followed the wolf song through the trees behind the house, the hemlock and cedar, the occasional apple tree orphaned by a long-forgotten farm, scattering the last of its blossoms among its roots. She saw the deer the wolf ignored, nibbling on a shrub. The song, a tangible thing now, like a beckoning finger, or the wolf’s shadow sliding out of eyesight every time she saw it, led her deeper into the forest, but never far from the tranquil shallows reflecting the flush of light in the wake of the rising sun.

The wolf sang. The song flowed into her ears, into her head and heart, then, like sunrise, it illuminated her eyes. She heard herself humming with it, now, seeing what the wolf saw, what it sang to, what it sang about. The daily ebb of water, the blue heron in the tree, the sleeping owl, the patient, peaceful trees, season after season of leaves falling, petals falling, needles flying, cones budding, petals forming again, opening again. The rich, tangled wealth of smells from the water, the living treasure buried in the mud, clinging to the long grasses, waiting for the tide to turn, return.

At last she saw the wolf, sitting on its haunches, waiting for her.

She walked up to it. It had stopped singing, just sat there, silent, motionless, its eyes the color of the drifts of morning mist above the waters.