He watched her indecisively for a moment. “Want some cocoa?”
“What? No, I don’t think so.”
“ ‘Cause I was going to make some for myself.”
She saw from the look on his face that he needed something to do. “I’ll take some tea. Some Lemon Zinger, with honey.”
He brightened. “Great. I can do that.” He went to the woodstove and checked the kettle, which was always left to steam gently at the back. “Almost full,” he said. He got out two mugs, measured Nestle’s and evaporated milk into one and honey into another. He put the tag of the tea bag underneath the bottom of the mug with honey in it. “So when you pour the water in, the string and tag don’t go in, too,” he said. He looked over his shoulder. Kate was back to staring into space.
It was the first time Johnny had had to carry news of the dead and dying to anyone, and the task made him feel very odd. He wondered if Kate had felt like this when she had come to tell him his father had been killed. For the first time, he wondered how she had managed. She’d almost been killed, too, or so they said, because she had never mentioned it. She’d been moving slowly and carefully that day, he remembered, as if it hurt to do normal stuff like walk and sit. She’d had bandages on her arm, her hands and face had been skinned and bruised, and the hair that used to hang to her waist in a big fat black braid had been sheared off, all raggedy, not even and neat like it was now. He wondered who had cut it off, and why. He wondered why she didn’t let it grow back.
He knew Ruthe and Dina, too, maybe not as well as Kate, but well enough. He’d been to their cabin several times since he’d moved to the Park, and he’d liked the two ladies, even if they were older than God. Dina had started right in on him, wanting to know how much he knew about the Park and what lived in it. He was interested, and she didn’t talk down to him, so he didn’t mind. She had showed him a photo album that started out with weird little rectangular black-and-white pictures and ended up with normal ones- in color, with digital date stamps in the corners. There were pictures of bears and moose, and one of two bald eagles fighting each other in the air, only Dina had said they were mating. There was a picture of Dina standing twenty feet in front of a walrus haul, with what must have been thousands of walrus, and a picture of Ruthe standing in what looked like the middle of a vast herd of caribou, the animals stretching out all around her, over an immense plain, as far as the eye could see. A mink peeked out of a snowbank; a beaver got caught slapping his tail; a wolverine, fangs bared, looked like he was about to charge. “He was, too,” Dina had said, cackling; “we barely got out of there in time.”
There were pictures of tracks of every kind-in the mud of spring and the swamp of summer, but mostly in the snow: the long stride and enormous feet of a wolf, the smaller prints of a fox, and the tiny prints of a vole.
In one picture, the hip-hopping tracks of an arctic hare vanished, just stopped altogether. “See?” Dina had said, pointing. Feathered ends of wing tips left a ghostly clue in the show on either side of the tracks.
“Wow,” Johnny had said, awed.
“A golden eagle, from the wingspan. Aquila chrysaetos,” Dina had said, and she had made him repeat the words until he had the pronunciation correct. “Of the family Accipitridae.”
“I’ve only ever seen bald eagles,” he had said humbly, and when she’d turned the page, there was a picture of a golden eagle in flight, at about five hundred feet up, the photo shot from the window of a plane. He could see part of one strut.
“Is that a Super Cub?” he said.
Dina was impressed. “Yes.”
“Is it yours?”
She nodded. “It’s at the strip in Niniltna. How did you know it was a Cub?”
He looked back at the picture of the golden eagle. “My dad was a pilot.”
“I know. I met him. He drove a Cessna, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. A one seventy-two.”
“I remember. Lycoming conversion.”
“Yeah.”
“Sweet little plane. What happened to it?”
“My mom sold it when my dad died.”
The kitchen timer had dinged then and Ruthe had taken a sheet of cookies out of the oven, the best oatmeal cookies he’d ever eaten. She sent him home with a bagful. She was pretty, and as smart as Dina. He’d liked them both, and he was sorry there would be no more evenings spent at their cabin eating fresh-baked goodies out of the oven and looking at pictures of otters sliding down a snowbank into a creek.
The tea had steeped and melted the honey and he’d stirred all the lumps out of the cocoa. He added marsh-mallows to the cocoa and carried both mugs to the table, sitting down across from her. “How long did you know them?”
“Hmm? What?” She looked down and saw the mug. “Oh. Thanks.” She curved her hands around it, warming her fingers, which felt suddenly cold.
“So how long did you know them?”
“Ruthe and Dina?” She stared down at the surface of the tea, a golden yellow. “All my life. They were friends of my grandmother.”
He nodded, very serious, and wiped marshmallow from his mouth. “Emaa.”
“Yes.”
“And she’s dead, too.”
“Yes.”
“Is the tea all right?”
“What? Oh.” She sipped at the tea for form’s sake. “Yes, it’s fine. Thanks, Johnny.”
“You’re welcome.”
She put up a hand to rub her forehead. “It’s hard to believe. They seemed, I don’t know, larger than life. Like they’d live forever.”
“Like Dad,” Johnny said, nodding.
She looked at him then. “What?”
“Like Dad,” Johnny repeated. She didn’t think he knew it when a tear slid down his cheek. “He was like, I don’t know, God. I didn’t think anything could hurt him. Well, except you.”
He was only fourteen and he’d been orphaned by one parent and had orphaned himself from the second as a deliberate act. He was trying so hard to act grown-up, to take matters like divorce and separation and death in his stride, to be independent and autonomous and to move on and keep moving without looking back. Kate knew the feeling.
She didn’t make the mistake of denying she’d ever hurt his father, and she didn’t try to apologize. “I know. He was kind of… indestructible, I guess.”
“Except when he died,” Johnny said.
“Except when he died,” Kate said.
“Can you tell me now?” Johnny said in a low voice. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I told you what happened, Johnny. Those hunters we were guiding started shooting at each other, and we got in the way.”
“All of it, this time,” Johnny said.
She met the blue eyes fixed so determinedly on her face, saw the pleading look in them. His whole body was tensed with the need to know of his father’s last hours on earth. It wasn’t that she hadn’t meant to tell him the whole story one day, when he was older and could handle it. And she could handle telling it.
“Can you? Please, Kate?”
It seemed, after all, that she could.
She followed Johnny into town the next morning, waving good-bye as he took the turn for the school gym, where Billy was having his new baby party. Johnny wanted to learn to dance, and Park Air had announced there might be dancing. Besides, he liked Billy, and he thought it was cool that he had a new baby all the way from Korea. He’d looked up Korea on Kate’s atlas, so he felt ready.
Kate’s first stop was the Step. She walked into Dan’s office, Mutt at her heels, to find the ranger with his feet propped on the sill of the window and his hands laced behind his head. He had a moody expression on his face. “Hey,” she said.
He dropped his feet but not his hands, until Mutt insisted on a head scratch. “Hey.”
Kate sat down opposite him. “I heard.”
“I figured.”
“You okay?”
“I been suspended.”