Hi there, Tracy, Helen called out and I nodded. Didn’t make no sense for her to be here, nobody was sick.
Dad was already making his way across the yard, jogging a little. When he reached her, he give her a peck on the cheek.
She glanced at me. Everything all right? she asked.
We’re fine now, Dad said, then called over to me, Trace, come say hi to Helen.
I took my time. Leaned the axe against the stump, wiped my hands against the front of my coat. Watching the two of them grin at each other.
Hi, Tracy, Helen said. Heard you had an adventure. Glad you’re back safe.
Hi, I mumbled.
Come on inside, Dad said to Helen. We’ll rustle up some lunch.
I know you said not to bring anything, she said. But I may have accidentally made brownies, and there was no way I was eating them all myself.
Accidentally? Dad give her a grin.
I’m not real hungry, I said, but they was already ambling toward the house, walking side by side. Not touching but familiar, easy with each other.
Come inside, Dad said over his shoulder. He wasn’t asking.
Scott had put out sandwich stuff for lunch. When we come in he rushed over to give Helen a hug. Any more lynx sightings? he asked.
Not since the one that came pawing at my window, Helen said. Next time you come over, I’ll show you the shots I took. There’s one, he’d been drinking from the creek, and you can see drops of water still clinging to his whiskers.
No kidding!
While Helen and Dad got their lunch, I pulled Scott aside, hissed at him, You been to her house?
Like a million times, he said. She lives right outside the village.
How long has this been going on?
He rolled his eyes. Do you ever pay attention to anything other than your traps?
All through the meal, he and Helen talked like old friends, about the books they was reading and the pictures they’d took, they said things like aperture and overexposure, the words like a code between them. I tuned them out and thought about what Scott had said. A whole autumn of barely heard conversation coming back to me. Weeks I’d spent scheming on how to sneak out of the house at night and worrying about whether Tom Hatch had come back, while Dad had stood nearby and told me about the nurse at the clinic who’d struck up a conversation and laughed at the things he said, it reminded him of how easy it used to be to get Mom to laugh. In the barn, in the yard, I worked and planned and budgeted the money I’d stole off the trail, divided it up among race fees as Dad remarked how sweet it was of Helen to bring him a loaf of the bread she’d baked over the weekend. He’d have her out sometime, he’d said as we cleaned the dog yard, we could all have a nice dinner together, get to know each other. But I was only listening to myself.
I folded my arms when I’d finished eating, glowered at them, then put my plate in the sink. Glimpsed the shed, so silent and still, Jesse might of slipped away when we wasn’t looking. All at once I was certain he was gone. My chest ached and a heavy loneliness settled over me.
Dad looked on while Helen and Scott talked, a small smile on his face. For once, I could feel what he felt, even without drinking. How this, the four of us sharing a meal, must of felt familiar to him. Like home.
I pulled my chair out again, sat back down. Dad glanced at me, and his smile got bigger.
Helen lingered all that afternoon and evening, she pitched in with chores and took it on herself to shovel the front walk, then showed Scott how to make a meringue. She had Jesse’s knack for quick learning, it seemed, she’d watch you do something long enough to understand, then jump in, wrangling a dog on her own or resetting a deadfall near the frozen creek. Dad had practically pushed me toward the trailhead when Helen asked about my hunting and trapping. We come back to the yard with an ermine and a squirrel and Helen took out her own knife to help clean our catch.
That’s a nice blade, I told her when we’d finished skinning the bodies.
She wiped her knife clean. Thanks, she said. When I moved up here, back when I was a little older than you, my dad gave it to me. Said a girl on her own ought to know how to use a knife.
We stood outside the kennel at opposite ends of the little butchering table. Dad was up at the house, getting dinner together. Every few seconds the shape of him haunted the window, once or twice our eyes met and even from a distance I could see the eagerness in his.
You and Bill remind me a little of me and my pop, Helen went on. Back in Montana, when it came to knowing your way around the farm, Dad didn’t make much distinction between boys and girls. He taught us all how to milk a cow. Drive a tractor, shoot a gun.
I cleaned the blade of my knife, then folded and pocketed it. Mom and I had cleaned dozens of critters together, had hunted for hours side by side, and I could of come up with maybe a handful of facts about her history, a few details about her childhood, and nothing at all about the time just before she met Dad. She had stood behind a wall all my life, one I never could scale.
Isn’t Jesse from Montana? Helen asked.
Just passed through, I heard myself say. The words echoed in my head, in Jesse’s voice.
It’s a shame he’s not feeling well, Helen said. Maybe we should check on him? See if he’s up to dinner tonight.
No, I said too fast. Then added, He’s probably asleep.
I hope he’s not running a fever. There’s a nasty bug going around. You know, I have my travel bag with me, I really ought to—
I’ll check on him, I cut her off.
She raised her eyebrows.
Later, I said and slipped the ermine skin on the wooden stretcher.
Helen smiled. You like him?
My cheeks flushed. I tacked the legs down and spread the stretcher. After a few hours the skin would be dry and ready to work to softness so Dad could take it into the village and sell it.
It’s okay if you do, Helen said. Your dad says he’s a good guy.
I might of been on fire my face was so hot. I wondered if she would of felt the same if she knew Jesse’s secret. If Dad would of felt the same. Would he still say Jesse was a good guy? People don’t like learning they have been lied to. Maybe it was the same with Hatch, Jesse had lied to him, and that’s why Hatch had chased him all the way to our woods. I searched inside myself for the answer, but I hadn’t got that part of the story.
Helen’s grin got bigger and I shot her a glare, but she was busy stretching her skin, she didn’t see. It wasn’t like she thought. I understood Jesse, but I still couldn’t trust him. If I could of chased him off our property, shoved his pack and all his money in his arms, and be certain he would go on his way, I would of done so in a second.
Except whenever I convinced myself of that, an exhaustion rolled over me, a real, physical thing that made just standing up seem like the most difficult task anyone ever undertook. It wasn’t my weariness. It was Jesse’s. Now that what happened behind the barn had stopped playing on a loop in my head, I could focus on the other brief glimpses of his life I had got with one taste of him. His spent legs as he walked alongside highways and shivered under a cold rain. His heart slamming in my chest when he run down a street in the dark. A pair of men shouting after him, a freezing night in a small town, a good situation gone wrong. This was how he’d made his way north. I couldn’t stitch every part of the story together, but I could hear the train whistles and truck engines and noise of passing traffic that was the sound track of his journey. To look at the handful of places he’d grown to like, see each of them for the last time.