in and take everything, like they did at Murrelet Grove.”
“We have film now.”
You can hear it in the music of her recorded voice: the belief that affection might solve the problems of freedom yet. Then the film cuts to black. No one sees what happens next between the two humans, there on the forest floor, between the banks of fern and Solomon’s seal. No one, unless you count the countless invisible creatures burrowing beneath the soil, crawling under the bark, crouching in the branches, climbing and leaping and banking through the canopy. Even the giant trees breathe in the few molecules per billion of homecoming dispensed into the air.
PATRICIA HEARS from a quarter mile away: Dennis’s truck thumping down the gravel washboard road. The sound gladdens her—glad before she knows she’s glad. In its way, the crunch and whir lift her as much as the wheezy cheep of a Townsend’s warbler skirting the edge of a clearing. The truck is its own wildlife rarity, although this creature appears every day, as punctual as the rain.
She drifts down to the road, feeling how edgy her wait has been, these last twenty minutes. He’ll have lunch, yes, and the mail, her mixed bag of connections with the outside world. New data from the lab in Corvallis. But Dennis: That’s the installment her soul now needs. He steadies her, his listening, and she wonders with delighted horror whether twenty-two hours might be too long to go between sightings. She comes up close to the halted truck and must step back when he opens the cab. His broad arm swings around her waist and he nuzzles her neck.
“Den. My favorite mammal.”
“Babe. Wait till you see what we’re having.” He hands her the mail and grabs the cooler. They climb the slope to the cabin, shoulder to shoulder, at peace with each other in silence.
She sits on the porch at the cable spool table, thumbing through the mail as he unpacks lunch. How can the masterful duplicity—Important information about your insurance. Open at once!—find her even here? She has lived far from commerce for decades, and yet her name is a hot commodity, bought and sold endlessly as she sits in her cabin reading Thoreau. She hopes the buyers aren’t paying much. No: she hopes they’re being extorted.
Nothing from Corvallis, but there’s a packet from her agent. She sets it down on the wooden slats, next to her plate. It’s still there when Dennis brings out two small, magnificent stuffed rainbow trout.
“Everything okay?”
She nods and shakes her head all at once.
“No bad news, is there?”
“No. I don’t know. I can’t open it.”
He doles out the fish and picks up the packet. “It’s from Jackie. What’s to be afraid of?”
She doesn’t know. Lawsuits. Chastisements. Official business. Open at once. He hands her the envelope and flicks the air, nudging her courage.
“You’re good for me, Dennis.” She slips her finger under the sealed lip and many things spill out. Reviews. Forwarded fan mail. A letter from Jackie with a check paper-clipped to it. She sees the check and yelps. The paper falls to the ground and lands facedown, in the always-damp earth.
Dennis retrieves the check and wipes it clean. He whistles. “Jeepers!” He looks at her, eyebrows high. “Misplaced a decimal point there, did they?”
“Two places!”
He laughs, his shoulders shuddering, like his antique truck trying to turn over after a night below freezing. “She told you the book was doing well.”
“There’s a mistake. We have to pay it back.”
“You made a good thing, Patty. People like good things.”
“It isn’t possible. . . .”
“Don’t get excited. It’s not that much.”
But it is. It’s more than she has ever had in any bank, her whole life. “The money’s not mine.”
“What do you mean, it’s not yours? You worked on that book for seven years!”
She doesn’t hear him. She’s listening to the wind coming through the alders.
“You can always give it away. Write a check to American Forests. Or maybe to that chestnut back-cross recovery program. You could invest it in the research team. Come on. Eat your fish now. Took me two hours to catch these guys.”
AFTER LUNCH, he reads her the reviews. Somehow, in Dennis’s radio baritone, they sound mostly good. Appreciative. People say, I didn’t realize. People say, I’ve started seeing things. Then he reads her the readers’ letters. Some of them just want to thank her. Some of them confuse her with the mother of all trees. Some of them make her feel like Miss Lonelyhearts.