These Silent Woods: A Novel(21)

“All right,” she mutters. On the fogged-up window, she draws a heart and writes her name.

I make a left and then a right and then keep on driving fast, six miles of road that coils and rolls, the dust kicking up high behind me. When I come to the gate I climb out, unlock it, pass through, lock it. We pull into the yard and I turn off the engine and rest my head against the wheel.

“You all right, Cooper?”

I nod and climb out of the truck, and a sense of relief and exhaustion hit me hard. “We made it,” I tell her as she hops down from the back seat, and she puts her hands on her hips and grins. I walk to her side of the vehicle and wipe her name off the window.

She bolts to the back of the Bronco and surveys the heap of gray plastic bags. “Just look at all the stuff.”

It takes hours to unload all the supplies. First we carry everything to the cabin. Once everything’s in, I move the Bronco, parking it behind the woodshed so it’s hidden. Just in case. Then we have to sort the items. Walt Whitman gets underfoot the whole time, lacing between our feet, his little tail high in the air. Finch unpacks the bags, examining the contents, reading the labels.

“Ritz crackers,” she says, holding the red and blue box in her hands. “These look good.”

“They are. They’re sort of buttery and crumbly.”

“Cheerios,” she reads. “Look at the little bee. I’m keeping the box once we’re done with these. I could cut out the bee and attach fishing line.” She waves the box around. “Hang it from one of the beams in the loft. It’ll look just like a bee, flying around.”

“You can pick one thing to try now,” I call to her, hauling a load to the root cellar. “We can’t open everything at once, or stuff will get stale. So, look things over and pick one.”

At last, she lines up her top five choices on the table: Ritz crackers, honey buns, pretzel rods, peach cups, Lay’s potato chips. She eventually decides on the honey buns.

Finch tries on all her clothes—a lengthy endeavor. First, we haul everything back to the bedroom, then she tries on each item and parades out to the main room, where I’m fixing a late lunch. Everything fits, thankfully. She’s particularly tickled with the pink gloves and wears them the rest of the day.

As we organize all the stuff and set everything in its right spot, such a sense of satisfaction comes over me that I start to whistle, and then Finch joins in, too. There’s a lightness to our work because despite the hiccups along the way—the chatty lady at Walmart, the snooping old man at the truck, Sheila and the sheriff at the gas station—we made it. We’re safe.





TEN




“Tell me about my mother,” Finch says, settling into bed, pulling the covers to her chin. On occasion she asks, and because I don’t have the heart to refuse her, I force myself to think of her. Cindy.

I never asked Lincoln for this, for stories, but there were nights when I could feel my own mother’s absence, the longing for her cold and palpable, and I wanted to think of her, imagine her there with me in my small bedroom with its Star Wars poster and crate of Matchbox cars. I wanted a story. I would’ve asked Lincoln for one, a memory—I remember thinking of it, but I knew that she was mad at my mother, maybe even more than I was. She’d been clear about that from the start.

“If your mother had died,” she said to me once, shortly after Mom took off, “we would mourn her. But she did something much worse than that, Kenny. Something a mother should never do, and so instead, we’ll pretend she never existed.”

Let me tell you: this was a troublesome and confusing task for a kid. How could I pretend my mother never existed when the only thing I ever thought about was her? I learned, though, that Lincoln’s reasoning held some weight. Over time, I didn’t think about my mother as much. Slowly, slowly, she began to dissipate from my mind, like a fog lifting and burning from sight, so that by high school, I barely thought of her at all.

“Which story, Finch?” I ask, squeezing in beside her on her little bed, my back propped against the wall.

“The one where she rescued the squirrels.”

“You sure?” I readjust, the round logs of the bedframe uncomfortable against my spine.

“Yes, come on with it.” She giggles and squirms.

“Your mother had a soft spot for animals. I’ve told you that before. Always wanting to rescue something, always in tune with the critters, and they were drawn to her. By that I mean, they would look at her different, the way sometimes the birds here will look at you.”

“‘I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them.’ Do you remember that one, Coop? Theodore Roethke. American poet, 1908 to 1963.”

Finch and her regurgitations of knowledge. “I remember.”

“It always reminded me of her. Well, it reminded me of how you say she was.”

Something pangs in my chest. “You want me to tell the story, or what?”

She nods.

“All right, where was I? Your mother. We had a cat at the farm, my aunt’s old pet, and she was a mean and feisty little thing. Hissed at you if you got too close, showed her teeth. Didn’t help that she was large, maybe fifteen pounds, which is big for a cat, and all black, which made her look even meaner, somehow. Her eyes sort of glowed more, you might say. Your mother loved animals, with the exception of that cat. Now, I will say, in your mother’s defense, she tried to make nice with Kitty, at first. Bought some cans of food, made her a little bed out of an old cardboard box, put some rags in it so it was soft. Well, Kitty would have none of it. She seemed to resent your mom even more for trying to befriend her. That’s just the kind of cat Kitty was. Cantankerous.”