“Has it ever bothered you?” I asked. “His obsession?”
Sarah kept her eyes on the road. She wore a fuzzy sweater and corduroy pants. The inside of her car smelled like lavender. I worried I had pried too much, been too direct in my questioning.
“Some things you can get used to, and some things you can’t,” she said. “I’ve left men over much less, but, for whatever reason, I was willing to get used to this.” She braked lightly as she negotiated the sharper curves in the road. “I think, one day, he’ll find something that satisfies him and the quest will be over.” She went quiet for a moment. “I’m not even sure what that would be like,” she said. “What that would mean.”
I looked out the window. Clouds, marbled with gray, loomed like mountains. I wondered what it was about me that Peter had decided he couldn’t get used to. When we passed Urquhart Castle, the crumbling stone walls and fallen-in tower reminded me of a forgotten city.
I wandered through Reelig Glen, the dense vegetation brushing my knees, the shadows cast from the enormous Douglas Firs darkening the ground. The twinflower had eluded me on this excursion, but I had collected samples of pilwort, a small fern. I’d only covered a portion of Reelig Glen and would continue my search tomorrow.
As I walked toward the edge of the glen — where I would meet Sam, who also worked at the Botany Institute — I started thinking of Peter and the night he told me he wanted to move out. He had stood at our living room window, tall and slack-shouldered, his tie loose around his neck. He had taken up with someone in Georgetown’s zoology department, though, despite my repeated inquiries, he wouldn’t tell me her name.
“I’ve learned something about myself in the last few years,” he said. “I don’t do well with repetition and routine.”
“So you plan on going through the whole university, then?” I sat down and wedged a pillow between my knees. “For variety?”
“Emily,” he said. “This would be a good time to start taking me seriously.”
“What about our trip to Virginia Beach in February?” I felt my voice drop. “We’d talked about getting engaged.”
“That was a mistake,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it was.”
I remained on the sofa, legs pulled to my chest, gaze averted. The spring semester had just ended. Out of professionalism, he explained, he had waited until the end of the term to leave. I wondered how long he’d been planning his exit, how long other people had known about the turn my life was going to take, while I carried on, oblivious to the way things were shifting beneath me like the tectonic plates before a quake. I remembered a time, during one of my childhood summers in the countryside, when my cousin fell into a well. I had been the one to hear the faint bleating of her voice, to find her crouched in the stone bottom of the well, wet and cold and in darkness — an image I would, in the days following Peter’s announcement, be unable to shake.
That night, Peter left the apartment and didn’t return until morning. I stayed on the sofa all night, my face blotched and puffy from crying. He moved out two days later. A week passed before I was able to pack away the little things he’d left behind — his wash cloth, a blue bowl, an empty picture frame, an encyclopedia, a miniature globe — and push the Tupperware box underneath the bed.
After Peter was settled in his Cleveland Park apartment, I called the director of the Botany Institute, who I’d met when she was a guest lecturer at George town, and said I would be pleased to join the Inverness team over the summer. Before leaving Washington, I met Peter for a drink and he offered his new phone number.
“We’ll keep in touch,” he said, as though he had decided for both of us. “No reason to not be civil.” And, because I wanted so badly to not lose him in a completely permanent way, I had taken down his number on a cocktail napkin without argument.
I stopped, pulled a notebook and pencil from my backpack, and sketched the tear-shaped leaves that clung to a tree trunk: quick gray lines across the graph paper, on which I had also charted the proximities of different plant species. I photographed and measured the vines, as I did with all the specimens, and then returned the supplies to my backpack and stepped out of the forest.
I left the shade of the trees and entered a long field, the grass tall and curved from a light wind. In the distance, I saw Sam standing at our agreed meeting place. Every afternoon, he took my samples to the lab and then drove me back to the Craigdarroch.
“Find anything good?” he asked when I reached him.
“Not much,” I said. “Just a little pilwort for the lab.”
As we walked to his car, he mentioned seeing the monster hunters on his way to Reelig Glen. “They were crossing the lake in a motorboat,” he said. “One of them was looking at the water through some kind of telescope.”
I asked if it was McKay, but Sam shrugged and said he had been too far away to tell.
“The chances of you finding a thousand twinflowers are better than their odds,” he said. “If something is in that lake, I don’t think it wants to be found.”
“Maybe the twinflowers don’t either,” I said, eliciting a smile from Sam. When we reached the car, I glanced back once more at the dark thicket of trees and the shadows the shifting clouds had cast across the field.
After a dinner of oatcakes and salmon, which I took in my room, forgoing a meal with the monster hunters, I sat on the edge of my bed and dialed Peter’s number. It was late afternoon in Washington; there was a chance he’d be home if he wasn’t teaching a summer class or attending a meeting. I didn’t leave a message when the machine came on, but hung up and dialed the number again. After two rings, a woman answered, her voice soft and unfamiliar. I heard the boom of a television in the background.
“Am I speaking to 32 Hilyer Point?” I asked.
“No,” the woman said. “You’re not speaking to a house.”
“Is Peter around?”
She paused. “I don’t think he can come to the phone now.”
I sifted through the clatter of female voices from university parties and commencements, but couldn’t place hers. Before I replied, the volume of the television increased and I caught an actor’s familiar baritone; I recognized the voice from an old movie Peter liked, the one we periodically watched when there was nothing interesting in the theaters. I pictured him on the sofa, his long arms crossed behind his head.
“Are you watching The French Connection?” I asked the woman. “Has Hackman gotten to his ‘never trust anyone’ line yet?”
I stopped for a moment, pressed my fingertips against my cheek. The silence on the other end didn’t break.
“When the line comes, you should remember it,” I said. “It’s one of Peter’s favorites.”
I heard whispers and static before the dial tone buzzed in my ear. I dropped the phone onto the mattress and checked the clock that hung over the dresser. I’d passed Ian in the hall after returning from Reelig Glen and he had extended a late night drink invitation. They would all be in the malt shop by now, expecting me. Before leaving, I wrapped a shawl embroidered with gold and brown flowers around my shoulders. I scrubbed my face and combedmy hair, pushed my lips together and dotted them with red.
When I found the men in the malt shop, they were laughing loudly, apparently in response to a joke Theodore had told, though, despite Dale’s urging, he would not repeat it. I asked where Sarah was, and McKay said she was balancing the books in her office, that she often worked late into the night. Sarah had left an open bottle of wine for me on the bar. I poured myself a glass and joined the men at their table, where we all toasted the Craigdarroch.