Page 57 of Shifting Gears

“That doesn’t really answer the question.”

When Nora’s bag of trail mix disappears from her hand, she’s too distracted by Sarah’s bluntness until it’s too late to notice that her snack has been pilfered by a seagull. The bird is making off with the Ziploc bag in its beak, squawking all the way.

Dani wades onto the shore from the river, picking up a nearby stick and throwing it at the retreating bird. It misses by a wide berth, but Nora appreciates the effort.

“Stupid shit-hawk,” Dani yells after it, cupping her hands for volume, but the seagull pays no mind. Dani’s presence soothes some of the anxiety sparked by Sarah’s questioning, but it still hovers on the edges of her mind.

“Shit-hawk,” Nora says as Dani flops onto a damp towel next to her. “Never heard that one before.”

“It’s true, though. They do nothing but crap and steal,” Dani mutters. She opens a can of pop and takes a few hearty gulps,and Nora watches her throat bob for a few seconds before she considers getting a drink of her own to cure her sudden thirst.

As the day marches on, Nora becomes aware of a bigger problem than her own guilt: She needs to use the washroom, and the path to the little town building housing the public restrooms and a single vending machine is being guarded by the biggest Canada goose she’s ever seen. Nora tries to put off the inevitable, but eventually it becomes a necessity.

She’s had just about enough of birds, today.

The seagull incident has left Nora nervous. She tries to act nonchalant as she slips into her sandals, but the goose seems to sense her hesitation—it pauses in its slow pacing over the grass when she approaches. As if it can smell her fear, it starts to hiss.

Nora considers calling for Dani, but yelling for someone to come save her from a stupid bird seems ridiculous. Cowardly. Instead Nora gathers her courage, and she steps forward.

The moment she does, the goose lets out an absolutely hell-rending honk, puffs up its wings, and charges straight at her.

Nora manages not to scream, but a massive, hissing demon bird is running at her at full speed, flapping its gargoyle wings. There’s not much she can do besides let out an undignified squeak, drop her bag, and run.

She sprints not back toward the group at the beach but instead to the left, ducking around a thick tree trunk and hoping that she can avoid being bitten. The goose is persistent, giving chase even when Nora has gone out of sight, and Nora is just wondering if it’s illegal to kick the country’s national bird like an avian football when it lets out a disgruntled squawk from behind the tree.

Nora peeks around it, breathing heavily, to see that the disruption is Dani. She’s holding a wet beach towel like a whip.

“Square up, big fella!” Dani yells, spinning the towel and then snapping it at Nora’s feathery nemesis. She doesn’t even flinch when it hisses again. “Get outta here!”

The goose stands up to Dani for a moment—it charges with its wings akimbo, snapping at her calves and leaving a red mark near her ankle—but Dani shouts and snaps the towel again, and the bird seems to concede. With a final angry honk, it takes flight and disappears over the hill toward the boat launch.

Dani turns around, throwing the towel over her shoulder and saluting in Nora’s direction. “Need an escort?”

Nora laughs. She takes Dani’s offered arm, all previous stress forgotten. “My knight in shining towel.”

“You should see what I can do with a slingshot.”

* * *

As the summer rolls on, Nora’s new lifestyle makes something obvious that Nora hadn’t realized before.

Nora was lonely before this, and not fleetingly so. She’s been deeply, intensely lonely for most of her life, in a way that she couldn’t detect until she started spending so much quality time with someone. Multiple someones, actually, now that Dani insists on inviting Nora to game nights and dinners with her friends and family.

She’s had Kayla and Ash, but Nora has always held even them at arm’s length. She’s been quietly pushing them away ever since she took over at CromTech. Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the effect is the same. She’s had more genuine and enjoyable conversations with her best friends now that she lives several hours away than she ever did when they worked in the same building.

In Riverwalk, Nora can stay up late—not to finish paperwork or run conference calls to different time zones but to stargaze or go to karaoke night or even just to watch movies on her couchuntil she falls asleep with her head in Dani’s lap. It’s so easy to lose herself in the rhythm of Riverwalk, even if she can always hear the clock ticking down.

In fact, Nora gets so lost in the new facet of her relationship with Dani that she entirely forgets to update Kayla and Ash about it. When her phone rings with a FaceTime request for the first time since they started seeing each other, Nora has a moment of full-blown panic after she instinctively hits the talk button.

“Hey, stranger,” Kayla says, a hint of reproach in her voice as her face comes into pixelated view.

“We thought maybe you’d been carried off into the woods and murdered,” Ash quips.

Seeing their faces brings a warm, familiar feeling. It looks like Kayla got new glasses, and Ash’s beard is a bit longer than Nora remembers. They’re calling from Nora’s office, which looks unchanged.

Nora doesn’t miss it at all. She misses her friends, sure, but she doesn’t have the desire to pack up and go home that she thought she would at this point in the summer.

Perhaps the messy sheets and the remnants of last night’s activities scattered around her bedroom have something to do with that.

---