notices yet more bodies heaped about the forest. Some are close to the river, winnowed now to a trickle through the undergrowth; the larger remains of foxes and badgers are farther away. She’s uneasy about leaving them; perhaps they’ll attract wolves.
She tilts her head up to the sky, allowing this thought to unfold: she never imagined that her dream of building a summer home in Norway would result in poisoning a river source that has existed since the last ice age. She’s the sort of person who’ll carry a spider to safety from the bathtub rather than kill it, and yet here she is, standing over the bodies of rabbits and squirrels, all dead because of her.
She bends over the remains of a bird, one she hasn’t spotted before and yet one she recognizes. A corncrake. She knows it from the website Tom showed her of the critically endangered animals in the region. The little bronze streak on its face and underbelly. She closes her eyes, her stomach dropping. So now they’re sacrificing endangered species on the altar of their dream house. This was not how things were supposed to go.
As she makes to pick it up she feels something tug around her ankles. She’s stepped into a bindweed. She lifts a foot, but it won’t let go. She reaches down to rip it away, but can’t get a firm grasp, so she removes a glove. Her fingers do not meet a weed, but something that feels like a hand. She looks down and screams. Long fingers are grasping her ankles. She can’t see who is pulling her, but the grip is so strong she falls over. On the ground she kicks and beats with her fists, and when she turns her head she sees two more bodies lying by the corncrake. They are not animals, but her daughters, Coco and Gaia, curled up as though asleep.
She screams again, a long shriek of horror that rings throughout the forest. She scrambles onto all fours, pawing around her for her girls. Finally she seizes them, gathering them in her arms and wailing in despair. It is some time before she realizes that she is holding not her daughters but the bodies of two more corncrakes.
Stunned by confusion, she drops the birds quickly and rises to her feet, staggering backward. A wind sweeps up the leaves, ruffling the corpses’ stilled feathers. Only when she is certain that she imagined her daughters lying there does she turn and race back to Granhus, her heart beating in her throat.
* * *
—
You OK?” Tom asks, pouring her a much-needed glass of red.
She nods, says nothing, and drinks half the glass in one go.
“Whoa, there,” he says. “Sip it.”
She nods again, but looks at the glass as if it contains the elixir of life. He grins. “I suppose two glasses won’t kill anyone. Are you all right?”
She nods fervently. “I checked on the girls. They’re in their beds.”
He tries to work out what this statement has to do with anything. “Let’s sit down. Put some music on.”
She follows him into the living room, still jumpy. He gestures at the velvet sofa—the one she likes—and makes her sit down. Then he rubs her foot, and she leans back with her eyes closed. When she returned from the woods she went straight to the girls’ bedrooms and spent a good half hour with each, reassuring herself that they were alive. Then she took a shower, washing off the mud and tears. But her mind is yet a tempest of confusion. Why is she seeing things that aren’t there? She knows exactly what Tom will say if she breathes a word of this. He’ll give a look that insinuates she’s crazy, or that she’s overdoing it, and she’ll feel even worse than she does now. For not only does she feel wracked with bewilderment, but she feels emotionally scattered. She recalls this silent effect of breastfeeding from the first time when she was eyes deep in oxytocin, the hormone that produces milk and also encourages maternal bonding. Forget bonding—she just wanted to blub all the time, like a tap turned on by remotely sad news stories or Facebook pics of kittens. It’s back again, that sensation of being cut loose from her composure and having no control whatsoever over her emotions.
But she won’t say any of this to Tom, who still looks perplexed when she explains that she feels extra angry and anxious right before her period. She keeps