Ammalie wanted nothing more than to run away from everything, but squeezed her eyes shut and begged herself for bravery, if only to bear witness to the grief. “Does washing the shoes really help?”
“Maybe,” the ranger said. “Sure, it might be greenwashing—some people argue so, even my boss—because the wild pigs spread the fungus too, and by closing certain areas to all humans, including hunters, the situation might just get worse, because there would be more pigs, you see?”
“I wish it were easier to know what to do,” Ammalie said. “With so much in life.”
“Aye, living on earth these days is hard and complicated, but it’s easy to know we could do better.” The ranger’s red curls bounced as she nodded her head, and then she bid them farewell.
They continued to stand, Richard’s arm around her. She tried to breathe calmly. Then, she leaned more fully into him. Richard squeezed her shoulder in acknowledgment. Such a small moment, such a grand thing communicated.
She wasn’t ready to turn her face toward him and look into his eyes, and so she kept her face forward, pointed at the bark of the tree. “I guess I wonder about my own greenwashing. In my life. Like, my own struggle to square my gratitude for nature…with…with, I dunno, my basic knowledge that I’m underestimating the required action. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“I’ve been changing a lot lately, but it’s not enough. Humans are not changing fast enough.”
“No.”
“It gives me a queasy feeling. I felt like this once when standing on a bridge in New Mexico, a bridge over a very deep gorge, so very deep, and it makes you feel queasy about everything. It’s like that, but bigger. I’m queasy about my treatment of the planet. I flew to New Zealand, after all! Does that make sense?”
“Sure,” he said. “I suppose that is the conundrum of eco-grief. How do we mourn something that hasn’t happened, but instead is happening. The severity of what happens next is dependent on how we act now. And yet we do almost nothing. Because it’s hard to know what to do. It’s hard to change.”
“Exactly,” Ammalie said, and now she reached out her hand so that it was touching his stomach in a sort of half hug.
Richard, she realized, was tense too. They needed to stand side by side like this for a moment, to get their bearings.
He breathed in and put his hand on hers, both hands resting over his stomach now. “A scientist friend recently told me, ‘We might be living in the coolest year of the rest of our lives. Try to remember what it feels like.’ Can you believe that? It was so hot last summer. So many fires. And then floods. But what if this is the coolest one forever?”
“The coolest year…for the rest of my life? God. I hope not.” And it did shock Ammalie—the very idea ripped at her heart.
“I no longer wish to be a dutiful descendant—but rather a good ancestor, you know?” He pressed lightly on her hand. “What kind of ancestor do you want to be? That should be a guiding question for us all.”
“Not a lazy one, that’s for sure.”
“One who tried his damnedest to do right,” he said.
She turned to face him then, so that they were pressed against each other. His hands slid to her waist and he pulled her to him at the same time that she reached up and touched the back of his neck and brought his head down, so as to be clear that she was the one kissing him.
CHAPTER 20
What was more fun than lusty sex in the back of a van? It conjured the frantic fumbling of teenagers needing secret spaces. Not to mention the romance of a misting slender waterfall outside, cascading down from a mountaintop in this secret place he’d known about. A green jungle dripping with rain. A sunset sending shafts of light through distant clouds.
Her three orgasms were fed by the sensation she was getting away with something, getting away from the boringness of sex-in-beds, of middle-life routine, of old patterns. Fed by the energy of them both getting something too long withheld. Both obviously hungry—there was no other word for it. And for her, of having the first new body naked next to her in decades. And his lovemaking! Different. Attentive. But not in a ridiculous formal and serious and silent way, but rather punctuated by humor and laughing and complaints about a cramp in his leg and the other atrocities of getting older. She hadn’t felt so much pleasure in bed for…Well, she couldn’t remember; she didn’t have time to remember.
For the first go-round, her brain was still yakking away, wondering if this was wise or not, worrying, worrying, trying to deal with the zillions of things that surely zip across most people’s brains at such moments, if the truth were told, but finally, finally, finally, it went silent. Her body reigned. Her mind went as quiet as the sky, interrupted by only small twinkles of thoughts.
They rested, snuggled, napped, commented on the stars, kissed and talked more, made love again. Richard was dozing and she was staring out the window at the moon, her hands between her legs to better feel the swollen pleasure, when her brain registered one clear thought: Finally.
Her life had been rife with incomplete and unfulfilled touch. Levi in her dreams. Kit and Dan’s kisses. Even the somewhat disconnected and distracted sex of the later years of her marriage. What she had needed was rolling around and laughing and gasping and gentle bites and serious glorious fucking. Finally, finally, finally.
Her body was chilled with cooling sweat and she was coming back into the challenges of reality. She’d have to think this through—but later. Not while resting, not on the drive home, not when he pulled up at the base of the driveway.
“I’ll walk you up,” he said.
She shook her head no. “I’d like to go the rest of the way, if you don’t mind.” He opened his mouth as if to say something, but she interrupted. “How about we’ll clarify all this later? This is perfect as is, let’s let it be.”
He nodded, handed her a scrap of napkin with his number. As she was walking away, she looked in the window at him. “That was deeply human, deeply amazing, you know.”
He nodded his assent, and his smile was that of someone human and kind and relieved to have been seen, and to have seen someone else. She felt the same way. She turned to hike up the mountain toward her little shack of a home, moonlight and headlamp guiding her way.
—
First light woke her. She pulled on clothes, grabbed her day pack, and was out the door into the dull light of a new day. Something Richard had said triggered a suspicion. Last week, when she’d gone to swim in the pure lake that Aroha had told her about, she’d hiked until the thin path disappeared into the jungle. Conveniently, this is when her lungs wore out too. As in Colorado and Arizona, she’d wanted to do one hike that pushed her to her max, and as she stood there catching her breath, she’d noticed some light pink plastic ties circling the base of trees. She had assumed it was the work of some previous artist, the remnants of some installation of some sort, but in the middle of the night, she’d startled awake: The pink ribbons had not been battered or old or faded.
Why pink ties? Why new?
The hike was easier this time, perhaps because she was clear on her purpose. She stood, panting, above the lake and very far above the sea, in a swath of pink plastic ribbons floating on the breeze. Not an art project. She had only assumed that because that was what was in her purview. Now another idea had been introduced; her worldview had been widened.
Oh. Oh, oh, oh.
She had her phone out and was taking a lot of photos, including one that showed the pure lake downslope in the distance, so that the location could be gauged. Then, for the first time since being in New Zealand, she took her phone off airplane mode. She breathed in deeply and texted the photos to the number Richard had given her with a hopeful look. But this was not the type of communication he’d hoped for. Now everything would change. She knew this. Now she needed to leave. She’d crossed some invisible line into becoming visible. But she also knew now that she’d proven herself to herself that day of leaving water. She’d proven herself to community during the snowstorm. Now she was proving her selflessness. “Once you find yourself, it’s your obligation to lose yourself,” she said to no one, watching the pink ribbons flap.
—
When rain started lashing down from the sky upon her return, she hardly noticed. Did not really register, even, the faraway siren going off, signaling some accident. She packed her bags and tidied the place—she’d leave first thing in the morning, or perhaps even today, if the rain let up. It was only because of a change in the light—a streak of lightning?—that she stopped, startled. The image of the doe in the forest flashed into her mind—a creature on alert, ears raised, nostrils flared, body ready to run. She moved to look out the window, curious now to see what was sounding like an explosive storm.
She felt her eyebrows quirk. Oh, oh, oh.
In the flash of lightning, she could see two dark figures, heads bent against the onslaught as they trudged up the path, which was now more like a stream. One smaller and one larger. Then it went dark again. Then they were lit again. Dark, light, dark. The larger one slipped and the smaller helped him up and they paused for a moment, turning to look back down the hill, presumably where they’d parked. The rain was coming down in fierce sheets now. As they stood, uncertain, Ammalie did the same at the window, willing them to turn back. Surely, they were wondering if they could simply come back another time. Why walk in such a storm?
