Page 7 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“And then by the time we left, we wanted to stay another week at least,” I finish with a small smile. “Yes, I remember.”
Daniel smiles back at me, and for a second, we simply stand there, letting the cottage work its time-worn magic. It seeps into our bones, settles our souls. We just need to be patient and let it. Not resist its soft, sweet tug, its quiet promise that here and only here can you set your world to rights.
From the living room Mattie lets out a howl of frustration. “This Wi-Fi issoslow!”
After dinner, we manage to recapture a little bit of that magic. Mattie and Ruby clear the table while I wash dishes in the sink, and Daniel dries. Then we build up the fire, and I get out the marshmallows; we toast them over the dancing flames as night draws in, an unending blackness outside, unrelieved by the moon, hidden behind by a bank of clouds.
“It’s soquiet,” Ruby says, as she snuggles into me, her mouth rimmed with stickiness, her body warm and solid curled into mine.
“Yes.” We have all said that so many times already, in varying tones—wonder, disbelief, trepidation, peace. I squeeze her shoulders, and she leans her head against me.
Mattie is curled up in the old wicker chair opposite, where my mother used to always sit. I can picture her there, with a cup of coffee in hand, or maybe some knitting. She was a diligent, determined knitter—all my kids have baby cardigans and booties she knit, in various, elaborate styles, with crocheted lace, colorful patterns of dolls or sheep. I didn’t appreciate it all nearly as much as I should have, accepting the blankets and booties almost as a matter of course, putting them away in drawers with barely more than a murmured thanks.
It wasn’t until my mother stopped, about six years ago, after trying to knit some mittens for Ruby and being unable to follow the pattern, frustrated by her inability, and maybe a little scared by it, too, that I started to realize the level of concentration and effort they took, not to mention the sheer amount of time. None of which, I realized, I possessed in the slightest. I’d never even knit a scarf.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” Daniel says, and I blink the apparition away, the memory lingering in my mind like remnants of mist, the whispers of ghosts. Mattie is in the chair, not my mother.
“Yes, it is.” I smile at Mattie, who has thawed slightly since having connected to the outside world via her phone. Although we deleted all her social media, we still allow her to text her best friend Lily, who is a genuinely nice girl and was not part of the problem that engulfed my daughter’s life in the shape of a seventeen-year-old boy named Drew and his gang of no-good friends. He, thankfully, is out of her life, hopefully forever.
And itisnice here now, I think, with the fire crackling, the cottage finally warm, or at least warmish, the night outside so dark and making us feel even cozier. Is there any sound more comforting than that of a crackling wood fire, the shower ofsparks, the settling into the grate? Daniel and I share a smile that feels both conciliatory and complicit, a bridge being built, a joke being shared. Mattie licks the marshmallow off her fingers and Ruby burrows more deeply into me, elbow digging into my side, but I don’t mind. I want to live in this moment; I want to quietly glory in it, spin it out.
Then the contented quiet is split by an unearthly sound from outside—a long, lonely howl that echoes through the still night, on and on, before finally fading away into silence.
Ruby jerks up straight, her eyes wide. “What wasthat?”
“A wolf,” I reply after a moment, reluctantly, because I fear the girls are going to freak out; and the truth is the back of my neck is starting to prickle. The sound is unlike anything you’d hear in the Connecticut suburbs, ghostly and eerie and alarmingly close.
“Awolf?” Mattie stares at me in incredulity. “Are you serious? There arewolveshere?”
“Mattie…” I stare at her helplessly. Does she not realize we’re in the Canadian wilderness? There are wolves, and bobcats, and bears, not to mention all the other fauna—squirrels, chipmunks, foxes, deer, and, yes, snakes, although harmless ones. I think. Has she never seen a wildlife documentary on PBS? Maybe she hasn’t.
“Of course, there are wolves here,” Daniel says, the voice of calm and reason. “We’re in the woods, Mattie. But that wolf sounded far away—its howl was echoing over the lake. I think it’s probably on the other side.”
Ruby shivers and then burrows even deeper into me. I put my arm around her again and we all sit in silence, waiting, I realize, to hear the howl again.
“The wolves won’t hurt you,” I tell Ruby, but I realize I don’t sound convinced because I’m remembering the moment of sheer terror when I once came face to face with a wolf on the dirtroad. I was about eight or so, walking as quietly as I could, so as, ironically, not to attract the attention of wolves. It came out right in front of me, stared at me for an endless moment while I stood there, trembling; its eyes were a vivid and surprising ice blue. Then it trotted silently down the road,towardme, for a heart-stopping second, before, indifferent to my presence, it loped off into the woods. “They really won’t,” I say, more firmly this time, and Mattie just shakes her head and reaches for her phone, as if the internet will somehow ward off the dangers of the wild.
“Do you know where your dad kept his guns?” Daniel asks quietly, a while later when the girls are getting ready for bed. “He had a .303 rifle, didn’t he? And a .22.”
“Yes…” I don’t want to think about guns. My dad had them only as a precaution, mostly.
“We should find them, make sure they still work,” Daniel says. “Just in case.”
As if to punctuate his statement, the wolf howls again, and I wonder if it sounds closer. “I think he kept them in the bedroom closet,” I tell Daniel. “They really should be in a gun safe, but…” That wasn’t so much of a thing, back in the day.
Daniel nods, mountain man in action. “I’ll take a look.”
The wolf is still howling intermittently, its long, lonely sound making me tense every time, as I put Ruby to bed up in the loft, arming her with plenty of blankets and a hot-water bottle. Her eyes are wide, the blankets drawn right up to the tip of her nose.
“Why do wolves howl?” she asks, and I pause, trying to think, but then I realize I don’t know.
“I think,” I say slowly, “they’re just saying hello to their wolf friends.”
Ruby gives me a look of blatant skepticism, but then she snuggles under the covers, and I know the answer has satisfied her enough to go to sleep. And it’s mostly true, isn’t it? It’s aboutmarking territory or something like that, I think, but again I realize I don’t know.
There’s so much I don’t know, I acknowledge as I climb the ladder back down to the living room. Daniel is in the bedroom, the guns in their cases laid out on the bed. I look away. I’m not that courageous wild woods girl of my childhood, I realize with a lurch. Maybe I never really was.
FOUR
