Beneath the Trees Read online

  “Yeah. Well, we’ll keep you in the loop as we move forward,” she said, brusque and noncommittal.

  She moved as if to get up from her chair. He widened his stance and crossed his arms over his ample stomach.

  There’s no way he’s doing much fieldwork with a gut like that, she thought.

  “Fascinating creatures, coyotes are,” he said. “Amazingly adaptable. Able to exploit any environment, from the center of New York City to the remote wilds of Montana.”

  “Yup.”

  This was information accessible to anyone who’d ever watched a PBS nature show, she noted to herself.

  “We should collaborate,” he said. “Work together more closely.”

  Colden said nothing.

  He stared at her. His eyes drifted down from her face, over her shoulders, then stopped. Colden flushed, hot and claustrophobic, and then stood up abruptly, bumping him with her chair.

  “Sorry.”

  But she wasn’t.

  He finally took a step backward and pivoted so that there was just enough room for her to pass. As she pushed through the opening between him and her cubicle wall, she was forced to brush up against his shoulder. His breath, moist and slightly rancid, filled her nose as she fled.

  Storms were promised, but they never came. The day before Thanksgiving, Colden closed the door on her echoing condo and drove through an atmosphere of monotone gray, back to the mountains. Her truck smelled of the stale oil staining the wrapper of the sandwich she’d eaten as the highway signs ticked past. It was late afternoon when she pulled off the highway. She passed the long-decrepit signs for a once-vibrant amusement park that had closed before she was born. She stopped to fill up the truck and buy a six-pack at the one-pump gas station near the exit ramp, putting her beer on the small square of open space on a counter cluttered with Slim Jims, a jar of pickled eggs, energy shots, smoking paraphernalia, and a display of dry gas. An hour later, she pulled into the driveway of her parents’ home and saw, through the lowering light and the uncurtained windows, the silhouetted heads of her father and his wife, Sally, sitting on the sofa. She filled in the rest of the details she knew she’d find when she walked inside: the local paper littering the expansive sectional; the small side table with two mugs holding a few damp dregs and collapsed tea bags; the wood stove with a compact fire crackling within its iron confines; the two cats, either curled in a lap or draped over the back of a chair; the smells of something nose-tickling and hunger-inducing, chili or stew, a casserole or hunk of meat, simmering or roasting on the stove or in the oven. This was home. She knew she took it for granted, even as she felt a deep-seated appreciation for her good fortune seep upward from her gut and fill her face with warmth.

  She was pleased to be there. She was relieved to know that she had no classroom teaching obligations for a full year. She was glad to put Albany behind her.

  She stepped from her truck and went into the house through the back door. She levered off her boots, shrugged off her coat, put her six-pack in the fridge, liberated one for herself, and wandered over the worn-to-a-patina wood floors and compressed oriental carpet to the large living room, where she collapsed into one corner of the sofa. Her father and Sally smiled at her. A gray cat extricated itself from a small rocking chair and padded over to her, imposing itself onto her lap with a deep purr. Sally set down the stack of papers she was reading.

  “I don’t need to interrupt,” Colden said.

  “No, no,” Sally replied. “Happy to stop reading yet another report about the sorry state of our juvenile justice system.”

  Colden wanted to complain and whine about her trip to Albany, about the annoyances of being in the city, the drudgery of academic committees and departments, Larry. But her concerns always seemed so petty compared to what Sally dealt with in her life as a social worker—every day she managed a steady onslaught of people who had very little and then made the worst of even that.

  “How was Albany?” her father asked.

  Colden lifted and dropped her shoulders, took a swig of beer.

  “Irritating, as always. But necessary. And I don’t have to go back for a few months. So it’s in my rearview mirror.”

  Sally reached forward for Colden’s beer, took a long swallow, then handed it back.

  “Did you do anything fun?” Sally asked.

  Sally was forever trying to nudge Colden away from work and into a social life. Colden was forever resisting her efforts. She rolled her eyes dramatically in response to the question. Sally shook her head in return. Colden asked if her father had been out to see Gene.

  “Yes. There was a small leak in his roof.”

  “Glad to know his days of ladder climbing are finally behind him,” Colden said.

  “And a few repairs to the doors of his outbuildings so that he can actually close and secure them.”

  “Working doors? What a concept,” Colden teased.

  “Any more thefts?” Sally asked.

  “Nothing recently, it seems,” Dix replied. “We got things tightened up for winter, so hopefully, it will stay that way.”

  “I heard of a few other incidents recently,” Sally said. “Small stuff. A few cans of food. Some camping supplies.”

  “Not the normal stuff of meth heads or drunk teenagers,” Colden noted.

  “Whoever this is leaves the shotgun and booze but makes a light raid on the pantry,” Dix observed.

  “Sounds like someone in need,” Sally said.

  “Speaking of need,” Colden interjected. “I’m starving, and something smells delicious.”

  This remark broke the spell of their conversation and lightened the mood. They lifted themselves from the sofa, gathered in the kitchen, and filled plates with her father’s venison chili, cornbread, and salad. After the dishes were washed, Colden hugged Dix and Sally, shoved her feet back into her boots without lacing them, and clomped through the dark, down the familiar path to the cottage that she had made her home within a home.

  The cottage had been built by her father’s parents, whom Colden had never met, in the style of a classic Adirondack lean-to. Constructed in traditional style, with logs milled from their own property, notched and sealed with oakum, it had been decorated simply, with tab-top linen curtains, a Mission-style rocker, birch-twig-style bed and small desk, an iron lamp, and pegs for clothes. Colden had added only an electronic tea kettle and a Wi-Fi booster so she could work. Her father, as he always did, had turned on the heat and the single bulb porch light, to ensure it was comfortable when she arrived.

  The cottage was a place both full of and free from memories. She had begun staying there during her trips home as an undergraduate at Cornell. There was no decision, just a sort of slow migration away from the room she’d grown up in, down the hall from her parents, with her martial arts and archery trophies, schoolbooks and science manuals, the toy moose her father had given her as a baby, now missing an eye and with one antler bent at an oblique angle, resting against the pillows on her bed. As a child, she visited the cottage from time to time with her father to help him with maintenance and repairs. She’d help him replace the oakum that mice had tried to pull free and sweep the droppings they left behind. They’d wipe down the cobwebs that formed in the corners where the ceiling met the wall, replace pillows that had become mouse nurseries, patch the roof when a blown-down tree branch raked a few shingles free, wash the linens on the bed that no one ever used. Sometimes they’d fish or swim in the shallow, gravel-bedded stream that was a mere fifteen steps away. In high school, the cottage became the place she occasionally took friends to hang out by the fire pit. It was the first place she’d made out with a boy, an awkward experience due to his inexperienced clumsiness and the braces that covered her teeth. It was the first—and last—place she’d smoked a joint and discovered how much she hated the blurry feeling the weed induced. It was where she started to get used to the idea that her peers didn’t think she was cool. It was also where she discovered she didn’t care about
being cool.

  And it was where she first started to ask questions about her mother, her “real” mother, as much as she hated the word. Her birth mother. Colden still struggled with how to think about, how to place the woman she had never met. Entering the cottage on this unseasonably mild late-November night, she recalled the day she found the barrette. They were stripping the bed of linens. She must have been about eleven or twelve. No one stayed down there, but Dix always kept the place cleaned and ready, as if it was a guest room, even though they never had guests. While sweeping her hand between the mattress and box spring, her fingers found something hard and plastic. She liberated it and showed it to her father.

  “That was your mother’s,” he said without affect.

  Colden remembered how the phrase gave her pause. Sally was her mother. But Sally didn’t use tortoiseshell hair ornaments. Dix had sat down on the bed and taken the barrette from his daughter’s hand, turning it this way and that, each movement seeming to shake free a memory.

  “Miranda had thick, honey-colored hair,” he’d said. Then he paused and added, “Like yours.”

  The comparison had made Colden uncomfortable, a feeling that she came to associate with her mother.

  “She kept it long. We always joked about finding strands of hair everywhere. On the pillows. In the sink. In our food.”

  Colden had wondered where all these strands had gone. She’d never found one herself.

  “She lived down here,” Dix continued. “For a little bit. Before we became a couple.”

  “Why?” Colden had asked.

  “Why what?” her father had countered.

  Colden remembered being unable to get more specific in her query. At that time, she knew so little. Only that her mother had experienced some sort of tragedy or tragedies, she and Dix became a couple, never married, and then she moved out for some reason, to some sort of hippie commune or something, found out she was pregnant, died soon after giving birth. Sally had been involved in some way. She’d met Dix when she came to tell him about the daughter he never knew he’d had. That was how they’d met and fell in love. Trying to get Colden back from the commune. It was too big of a story for a little girl. Now, even as an adult, her mother’s tale—because it was something she’d been told but had not experienced—felt more burden than legacy.

  “Why did she live here?” Colden had finally asked, those many years ago.

  Her father was always careful and measured when he spoke. Even more so, whenever, as rarely as it was, the topic of Miranda came up.

  “She’d lost her family and her home. She needed a place to live. To feel better. To start over.”

  “Did it work?” Colden had asked. “Did the cottage fix everything?”

  She remembered that it took her father a very long time to answer.

  “For a time, it did,” he’d said. “For a bit, yes, the cottage did fix everything.”

  This evening, some fifteen years later, with each step she took closer to the low, dimly lit front door, she felt as she imagined her mother must have: that for a time, at least, this little dollhouse tucked into the edge of the woods by a stream could—would—fix many things, indeed.

  5.

  “Are you excited?” Sally asked when Colden came into the house the next morning.

  “Excited about what?” Colden asked in return as she poured herself a mug of coffee.

  She knew what Sally was referring to; she just didn’t want to give in to her nudging and prodding.

  “About getting out on the moose-tagging project?” Sally insisted.

  Over dinner the previous evening, Colden had told them that after the holidays were over, sometime in January, she was going to join a moose-tagging team that included biologists from the Department of Natural Resources and a private contractor. They would be heading out in helicopters, looking for moose, then dropping in, subduing the animals, taking samples, checking their condition, and fitting them with radio collars for tracking and monitoring. The collars would help them understand how far the animals had to range in search of scant forage during the harsh winters. They also wanted to overlay moose movements with beaver pond locations and see how and if the two overlapped. Data like this would help determine both land use and hunting policy, as well as, hopefully, determine some of what was causing the moose population to stagnate. The team, without Colden, had been doing this for a couple of years. Colden had been helping organize and analyze the data. But this was the first time she was going along for the actual collaring.

  “Oh you know, Sally,” Colden said with practiced nonchalance. “All in a day’s work.”

  “C’mon, Colden,” Sally said. “Helicopter rides and netting moose. Sounds really wild.”

  Colden gave her a tight smile and bobbed her head. Sally crossed her arms over her chest.

  “What is wrong with you, Colden?” Sally said. “Why aren’t you more, you know, enthusiastic? I mean this is cool. Don’t go all science-y and Spock-like on me.”

  Dix, who was cracking eggs, one-handed, into a pan at the stove, snickered. Sally was often exasperated at both his and Colden’s temperate, laconic personalities. Yet, it was true that Colden was holding back her enthusiasm. She wasn’t sure exactly why. She didn’t know if she was just playing with Sally or if her attitude had something to do with her flagging and frustrated interest in the project overall. In fact, she had been hoping the excitement of helicopter rides and radio collars would reignite her passion for the work.

  “Nothing is wrong, Sally, dear,” Colden said. “It’s just, you know, work. It’s just my job. Yours involves paperwork and juvenile delinquents. Dad’s involves trucks and tools and vacation homes. Mine, well, some days, my job involves moose and helicopters.”

  “And hot guys in pilot uniforms?” Sally said, raising her eyebrows hopefully.

  Colden shook her head indulgently at her stepmother’s teasing. Sally often made it clear she thought Colden didn’t get out enough. Which was certainly true. Colden often countered that there was lots of time for a social life and there was less time to establish herself as a scientist. There were plenty of men out there and always would be. There were far fewer grants and research opportunities.

  Colden took the plate her father handed her. Two fried eggs, a slab of toast, thick cuts of bacon. The plate he gave to Sally had exactly half the portions. Sally was smaller in stature and frame than Colden, naturally wiry and lean, hated exercise, and looked at food as no more than an occasional necessity to the pesky task of staying alive. Dix’s plate was piled with an extra egg and more bacon, as if he’d taken what should have been Sally’s. They sat at the table, ate together, and discussed their plans for the coming weeks. Dix would be busy—many people gathered their families at their Adirondack “cabins” for the holidays. As caretaker for the wealthiest and fussiest of those in their area, he had to lay in firewood, scare off mice, seal up cracks, repair furniture, and in general, make these often-enormous homes feel both comfortable and rustic for their owners. It was a busy time for Sally, too. The holidays were stressful for even healthy families. The people she worked with, who lived on the margins in the best of times, often blew up or broke down around the holidays.

  In contrast, Colden had little to do. She was up-to-date on all her reports and grants. It was a quiet time in academia. She was winding up her online course with just another easy-to-grade test ahead. She and Dix and Sally were not much for celebrating the holidays, the three of them. They usually opted to spend Thanksgiving serving at a soup kitchen and eating grilled-cheese sandwiches, themselves, and spending Christmas visiting a homeless shelter, senior home, or hospital, dragging along one or more of the rescue dogs Dix collected, in the hopes that a wiggling canine would cheer up the residents. This year, Colden hadn’t even made these sorts of plans. It didn’t seem like Dix or Sally had, either. Colden spent most of her time in the ensuing weeks, as the year wound down, sprawled across the living room sofa, reading books and articles, snacking
on crackers and handfuls of nuts, and making cup after cup of tea. When Dix and Sally weren’t working, they joined her.

  Meanwhile, snow fell steadily outside their windows, big flakes piling up fast, coating the bare maples, the stark birches, and the lush evergreens with a thick layer of white. Many evenings, after dinner, Colden didn’t even return to the cottage but instead crawled, contented, into the single bed of her youth, her knees pulled high up, her hands pressed together beneath her cheek, a cat tucked against the small of her back. She slept darkly, deeply, dreamlessly for ten hours a night. It was as if she was recovering from something. Or maybe readying herself for something.

  January came on bland and dry. The snows that had softened the landscape were whipped away by aggressive winds, leaving the denuded trees, flinty boulders, and brown earth looking raw and abraded. Evergreens offered the only relief of almost-color, their dark branches swaying and scraping, storm-tossed in the cold gusts.

  The day the collaring project was to begin, Colden left the house before dawn. She drove along black, twisting, two-lane roads with dense trees growing right up to the pavement. When she got to the small airport where she was to meet the rest of the team, they were already there, sitting in the small lounge area, sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups. She waved at Jack, the only person she knew, as he was a colleague from the Department of Natural Resources who also taught the occasional class at the university. He stood up, pulled a chair out for her, and introduced her to Liam, the pilot, and Darryl, the animal wrangler. She’d worked with Jack many times. He’d been a guest speaker in several of her classes. They shared information and experiences. He was what she thought of as a solid, north-country guy. Married to a schoolteacher, three kids, hunted, fished, boated, liked country music. Had no interest in pop culture or foreign cars. Not intellectual, but super-smart in a resourceful, practical, useful way. The kind of guy you’d want around if you were stranded on a desert island. Colden was fond of him in the way she would be toward a friend of her father’s or an uncle. Not that she’d had experience with either of those sorts of relationships.