Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (28 page)

T
HE morning she saw the figure stealing away from her barn—a gray-hooded figure visible only as a pale silhouette as it strode briskly, shoulders hunched, through the fog—she did not know at that moment whether it was morning or night and had to look at the clock on the stove, which read only 6:37, and then at the blue digital numbers on the microwave, which told her the same, and then she had to check the sky for the glow of either sunrise or sunset and saw that the world was at its brightest behind the barn, to the east. The sunrise looked like a fire burning in the woods behind the trees, and the fog was the fire's smoke, and the person hurrying through the smoke and toward Metcalf Road was maybe the person who had started the fire.

On the table in front of Charlotte were a ten-milligram Valium, an empty bottle of pinot noir, and a mug half full of tea. Charlotte put her hand around the mug, felt its warmth, and watched the figure moving quickly past her house. Then Charlotte went to her studio and peeked out the window and watched the figure hurrying away alongside the driveway. The figure did not step into the driveway but stayed to the damp grass until it reached Metcalf Road. It then crossed the two lanes of asphalt, jumped a shallow drainage ditch, and disappeared into the low brush on the opposite side of the road.

Charlotte remained at the window awhile longer, piecing together what she had seen. The glow of red behind the barn was, she knew, from the sunrise and not from a fire. The fog was fog, not smoke. The hooded individual had not been a large person and had moved with a certain degree of agility, an athletic, though stealthy, grace. That person, she knew, had come from her barn.

She thought of Denny Rankin. She thought of Dylan Hayes. She wondered if the fog could play tricks on the eyes, could make a person appear bigger or smaller than he really was.

When she crossed back through the kitchen to the mudroom, she glanced at the knife block on the counter and briefly considered grabbing one of the Wüsthof knives, the big chef's knife probably, something visibly frightening, but in the end she decided to go empty-handed and defenseless. It no longer mattered to her if she was attacked. She had come to think of violent confrontation as inevitable.

She did not move quickly as she laced up her boots and shrugged into the heavy jacket, and she took note of this fact, the almost-fatalistic fashion in which she dressed.
Just like when we searched the woods,
she told herself. She remembered every detail of that event, yet it seemed to have happened months or even years ago.

Outside she fell into a measured stride, neither fast nor slow but of the same unhurried pace with which not long ago she had strolled the back roads and lanes, the Nikon hanging from a strap around her neck, a small sketch pad in her pocket, a hickory walking stick in her right hand just in case she encountered an angry dog. This time her pockets and her hands were empty. She could feel the dampness of the light fog collecting on her hands and face. By the time she reached Metcalf Road, her skin was shiny wet.

The opposite side of Metcalf Road, across from her yard, was lined with thick bushes, aspens, and crabapple trees, none more than eight feet high but all crowded together, a wall of slender, entwining branches. In front of this ran a drainage ditch overgrown with weeds, and between the ditch and the bushes, a strip of tall scrub grass.

Only by scrutinizing the scrub grass could Charlotte discern where the hooded figure had moved through the brush.

As she stood there considering the path, Charlotte realized that something had quieted inside her. The anticipation of imminent violence was gone. A violent person would have cut a wider swath through the grass. An angry person would not flee. Whomever Charlotte was pursuing, he was not an angry, violent man intent on doing her harm. Charlotte doubted, in fact, that it was even a man.

She crossed the ditch and followed the slender path into the aspens. The branches were heavy with buds, though no leaves had yet appeared. She walked hunched forward, one arm raised in front of her face as she ducked branches and pushed others aside.

The wide clearing of tall scrub grass came as a surprise. Charlotte had often gazed across her front yard to the blue hills in the distance, the Tuscarora Mountains, but she had never guessed that this stretch of open land lay behind the heavy brush along the side of the road. She had imagined that the brush continued on and on until it met the stand of hardwoods approximately three hundred yards back, and that the hardwood forest continued all the way back to the mountains. Instead, here was a kind of prairie of knee-high grass. It ran as far as she could see to her right and left.

The slender path through this grass ran straight ahead another eighty or so yards, into a small copse of birch clustered in a circle. The sun was high enough now and the fog sufficiently thin that a pale, red glow lay over the grass like a tempera wash of crimson. Charlotte looked at the colors and the light and at the jewels of moisture glistening like pale rubies, and the pain in her chest began to pulse.
Why does beauty hurt so much?
she wondered. She dragged her hand through the grass as she walked and felt the coolness and the way the moisture sprayed up and away from her hand and the soft forgiving sway of the grass between her fingers.

She had only stepped past the first slender birch, had noted as she did so that it was a white birch, the bark like peeling paper—
The kind of birch Frost loved,
she told herself.
The kind we used to shinny up and ride to the ground
—when she became aware of the sobbing deeper into the trees, the small whimpering sounds that made her think of a child, so that she thought,
Jesse
, and almost said it aloud but didn't. She moved closer, more cautiously now, now for the first time deliberately softening her footsteps.

The hooded figure sat facing away from her, sat against the last birch before the clearing opened up again into tall grass and, ten yards farther, a long, low patch of blueberry bushes. The sun did not reach into the trees where Charlotte stood, but the figure was sitting on the edge of the sunlight, fully illuminated, too tall and slender for Jesse but still petite, a woman, her knees raised to her chest and her arms wrapped around her knees, her forehead resting on her arms as she quietly sobbed. She was wearing jeans and tennis shoes and a denim jacket atop a gray hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled well forward, concealing even the sides of her face from view. Her canvas tennis shoes were soaked through from the wet grass, as were her jeans to the knees. Except for the clothing, all Charlotte could see was one ungloved hand, the right hand wrapped around the left elbow. The fingers were slender and long, the nails short—strong, feminine hands, red and chafed from the cold.

“Livvie?” Charlotte said.

The figure became very still, held her breath, and did not move.

“Livvie, it's me, Charlotte.” She moved closer now, had her hand out to touch the woman's shoulder just as Livvie unfolded herself, lifted her head off her arms and dropped her arms from around her knees and turned to look up, but when Charlotte saw the face inside the hood, she was stopped momentarily by the sudden snag of her breath in her throat, but she recovered in an instant, and, saying “Oh God, Livvie,” dropped to her knees and wrapped the other woman in her arms and held her close while together they wept in the soft, red sunlight on the dew-wet grass.

C
HARLOTTE tried not to think about how energized she felt as she led Livvie back to the farmhouse. She did not like to admit that she had not felt so alert or purposeful for what seemed many, many days. Livvie seemed so small and helpless in comparison to the other Livvie, the adamantly hopeful one at the candlelight vigil; the thoughtful, unselfish one who would not accept Charlotte's braciola.

In the mudroom Charlotte quickly dropped to her knees to untie Livvie's sodden shoes. Despite Livvie's protests, Charlotte pried off the shoes and wet socks, then she dragged Livvie into the kitchen and had her sit at the little table while she dried the woman's feet and rubbed some warmth back into them with a clean dish towel. Then, ignoring her own wet shoes and the tracks they made across the tile, she filled a large mug with water, dropped a tea bag into the water, and set the mug in the microwave. While the water heated, Charlotte hurried upstairs, found her thickest pair of cashmere socks, returned to the kitchen, and pulled the socks over Livvie's feet.

Charlotte asked no questions until she had cleaned the blood off Livvie's face. She had questions to ask, a hundred questions, but even as her mind was racing with those questions, another part of her mind was piecing together a plan. For more than a week now she had felt heavy with despair, grew heavier with it day by day until she no longer knew or cared what day it was; then suddenly, during the past hour, something had changed, the fever of despair had finally and suddenly broken.

She could help this woman, she knew she could. She could change Livvie's life. And in so doing maybe save her own soul.

Is that selfish?
she wondered as she dabbed at the dried blood on Livvie's swollen lip.
But isn't all altruism ultimately selfish? If there is such a thing as God's mercy, isn't even that a selfish gesture in the end?

“So how did this happen?” Charlotte asked from the sink. She soaked the washcloth in warm water, wrung it out until the water ran clear, then dampened it, folded it into a small square, and placed it in the microwave for ten seconds.

“Is my nose broken?” Livvie asked.

Charlotte ran a fingertip down the bridge of Livvie's nose, then a finger and thumb along the side. “I don't think so. There's almost no swelling that I can see.”

“It feels like it's broken.”

“It's the cheekbone that you're probably feeling. That's where the real bruise is. I think we should get this x-rayed.” She laid the warm cloth atop the bruise and held it in place.

“My lip's bad, too, isn't it?”

“About the size of a golf ball. You hold this cloth in place while I get another one for your lip.”

“Aren't you supposed to put ice on a swelling?”

“Are you?” Charlotte said.

“Ice to bring the swelling down. Then heat. I think that's how it's supposed to be.”

“I can look it up on the Internet,” Charlotte said, but her mind was racing now with other plans.

“Can I just get some ice cubes, maybe? Wrapped up in a washcloth?”

“I have crushed ice,” Charlotte told her. “That's even better.”

Now that Charlotte knew what she would do while Livvie was there in the house and resting, she was feeling calmer and clearheaded. In her mind she could see the next hour or so playing out perfectly, with a quality of the inevitable that made her believe it was surely the right thing to do. She wrapped a handful of crushed ice in a cloth and handed it to Livvie. “Can you hold them both in place while I get you a couple ibuprofens?”

“Could I just maybe lie down on your couch a few minutes?”

“I think we need to go to the emergency room,” Charlotte said, though she knew that Livvie would resist, and that she, Charlotte, would give in to the resistance. “What if your cheekbone is fractured?”

“Can we just wait and see when the swelling goes down? I don't have any insurance.”

“You don't get insurance coverage from the generating plant?”

“They pay me as an independent contractor. All I do is clean.”

“They're cheating you,” Charlotte said.

“Plus, I missed work last night.”

“Is that when this happened?”

“Most of it. Round two came about two A.M. or so.” Livvie tried to smile with the side of her face that was not swollen, but the result was more of a grimace.

“You're amazing,” Charlotte told her.

“Can you tell me that while you show me where the couch is?”

“You just wait right there for a minute.”

From the medicine cabinet, Charlotte took two Tylenol PMs and a Vicodin.

When she returned to the kitchen, she placed the tablets in Livvie's hands. Livvie said, “These two are the ibuprofens, I guess. What's this big one?”

“For the pain.”

“The ice is helping a lot already.”

Charlotte handed her the mug of tea. “Take them all, Livvie. Don't try to tough this out. I already know how strong you are.”

“I've never been a big fan of pills,” Livvie said, but she reached for the tea mug all the same.

“Good,” Charlotte told her after the pills had been swallowed. “Now let's get you upstairs to bed.”

“Honestly, a few minutes on your couch is all I need. And then I'll get out of your hair. I'm sorry about disturbing your day like this.”