Forgive yourself. He would have died anyway.

She held the journal in her lap and decided to stay. And to fully own that decision so she could stop fretting. Decision made. She’d not turn on a light, she’d use minimal hot water and heat, she’d right her wrongs, she’d let go of any last shreds of guilt. She had her excuse ready to go. She’d sit with her berserkly contradictory emotions and come to terms with all of them or somehow let them float away into the Colorado sky. She’d find peace—some good-enough, attainable version of it—and that would be that. Her goals were as clear as last night’s stars.

—

The sky was somehow so curved that it reminded her of a blue bottle. The air was clean and damp from the melt, the world was as silent as Chicago was loud. Empyreal. She hiked on and moved up the mountain, coming across something that might be bear dung, then the prints of a rabbit and perhaps a fox in the snow, still left in circles under the trees. She was startled by a deer who was startled by her. They considered each other, and she wished she could flick her ears as the deer did, though she did stomp one foot in response to the deer’s stomp.

Whenever she heard movement, she sought it out; it was always the birds, either ones down low in the grasses or ones up high in the pines. There was also the low roar of something, which she realized was uninterrupted wind moving through the mountains. She watched a raven that seemed to be following her, or at least tracking her, and yakking with a shrill repeated sound that reminded her of a frog. “Yo, eyes in the sky,” she said up in its general direction, and it took off, black wings against blue sky.

This is so glory-fucking great, she found herself repeating in her mind, by which she meant: that I can just go. One of the hardest parts about relationship—or at least, her relationship with Vincent—had been the pacing. Vincent had always been so slow—she’d always been waiting, ten or a hundred times a day. He’d kept her waiting in the most mundane of ways: To get into the car with everything. To turn the actual ignition. To back up. To park. To sit longer at a meal than she wanted. On a hike, as he stopped to look at rocks. At a grocery store, he considered all the options. He even had long pauses in his sentences when he spoke.

God, she’d tried to be patient, hadn’t she? How many times a day?

And perhaps had he sometimes been slow on purpose? To exert some control?

Or had she just imagined that?

A few times, they’d had bad blowups about it. She had simply wanted to move at the pace that she wanted to move. Wasn’t that a legit request? Why was he so comfortable making others wait?

Well, now she could. Move at the pace that felt natural.

She wanted to be truthful! Admit it was nice to not have him alongside her! To be so unfettered! And then, as she turned back to look at the empty cabin, she supposed that this was not what she had wanted exactly. Both were true at once. If there was one thing that Vincent’s death had taught her, it was that incompatible feelings coexisted all the time.

This is what it is. Miss him and be relieved. This is what it is. I’m alive and he’s dead. This is what it is. Her mantra corresponded to each footfall in the forest, with a faraway dog yap sometimes chiming in.

—

She did not go back to the cabin when she’d first had the impulse to do so or even when she’d started cussing with exhaustion and frustration; she kept pushing on because today was Day Uno of her New Vida, which was also going to include learning some Spanish because she was tired of being a white-bread midwestern woman who was unaware of too much. At some point, it was her fault. It was embarrassing. It was small. She would not be a Karen, as Powell accused her of being. Or was it a Becky? She couldn’t remember names that she didn’t assign herself, but anyway, the point was: She’d admit her failings, her privileges, and try to do better. And she’d start now, and mark it by having a Long-Hike Day.

She moved quickly through the aspens, their shimmering yellow leaves still dripping snow. This was close to the same hike she’d done with Vincent. They’d left the cabin and headed up in this general vicinity, though they’d gone much slower, he stopping to finish sentences or to tell a story, which is something he often did, as if walking and talking were not mutually compatible. She stopped twice for photos, and once to stretch, since her back hurt from all the driving and sleeping in her car. Just like the high-country weather, her emotions changed fast, and just as with the weather, she could see them.

“Vincent, hey Vincent,” she said softly to the sky, which felt absurd, but how else could she address him? “Love basically is being fascinated with someone, isn’t it? And you had lots of fascinations, but I wasn’t one of them. You had geology. Stargazing. Bird-watching. Family history and ancestry. Weather stations. The history of the Civil War. Vikings. Viking footwear. Viking sail-making. My god, you even had a stamp collection! All those nights in the basement! I could go on and on and on and you were always down there, ya know? Doing whatever. Anyway. Now I’ll find my own damn interests.”

The raven squawked at her specifically, and the wind blew generally, and her own mind worried for her sanity. But talking aloud felt physically good. Crazy, perhaps, but so what? When had society decided that talking aloud to oneself was a sign something was off?

She cleared her throat and started again, loudly now. “I’m feeling shitty these days, Vincent! Grief over aging, grief over you, grief of a job lost, grief about the planet, grief over war—plus my body is still doing whatever the fuck it’s doing. But I can get clear if I. just. start. telling. the. truth. So, first and foremost, I might have saved you if I’d been better prepared. Don’t give me that no, no, no bullshit, because truth was, I might have. I just stood there and I got you water! Water! If I’d called 911 sooner, well, that would have been helpful! You didn’t need water. I am really, really sorry about that. Please tell me that you died thinking of the truest and best version of our love? That you weren’t bitter?”

Her knees buckled then. Of their own accord, almost. As if she needed to be kneeling to say this. She knelt fully and peered at the sky. “Vincent, there’s one last thing I need to tell you: I was going to leave you.” She paused and then started again, more calmly. “I was waiting for Powell to be out of the house. And Mari and I were…planning on doing it together. She’s leaving Maximo. That sounds weird, I know! It is weird. Two friends timing it so they could go through divorce as a team. But it just became apparent that we were both wanting a divorce, so we decided to do it together, just like we decided to have kids at the same time, remember? Except that she couldn’t ever get pregnant, or stay pregnant, so I did it alone. And now she’s doing the divorce alone.”

She paused. “So, that’s the hardest truth. I felt…well, we were a sinking ship, and I was close to drowning, so I had to swim away, and I figured you probably felt the same. But I never wanted you dead. I really somehow thought you’d be in my life, and wow, I’ve gotta say, it feels so very strange, to have wanted you gone, but not this gone. I had lost you already, you being in your basement all the time—and then I planned to lose you again, divorce-style—and then I really lost you, via death! That all feels really fucked!”

She felt interrupted by something, and so cocked her ear, but all she heard was a bird cawing nearby and a dog yipping far away and the drips of snowmelt on trees. Then she realized she’d been interrupted by a smell—the strong vanilla smell of a ponderosa pine. She turned and looked at the tree she was kneeling near, which was rather enormous, in fact. The orange-brown-red bark was actually quite beautiful, and she moved closer so that she could lean her nose into it and pick away a small flake. Then she saw it had a barbed wire wrapped around the trunk, down low, and that one of the loops of wire was reaching out in her direction. She pushed the wire back toward the bark, where apparently it belonged.

But why? Why wire? Why was there barbed wire around the tree?

Her eyes followed the ancient remnants of strands of barbed wire that were tangled in the undergrowth and then disappeared under the earth in two directions. The tree, apparently, had once been used as a corner fence post.

Well, okay. She stood and turned to go, thinking Poor tree, it’s being strangled, that sucks, people cause so much damage, but then swung herself back around and studied the tree for real. The loop of barbed wire was clearly digging into the bark. But trees just adapted and did their own thing, right? Although the tree had never asked for barbed wire. She felt confused by humanity’s sloppiness, but also annoyed that she cared about the situation at all; it was not her problem. She tried to get clear on the situation by listing the basic facts on her fingers, one by one:

Was the wire cutting into the tree’s bark?

Yes.

Was the wire needed?

No.

Would the tree do better without the wire?

Yes.

Should she do something about the wire?

Yes.

Was she too tired and lazy to do something about the wire?

Yes.

Should she allow that to be the case?

Fuck, no, she supposed not. Not on the first day of her new life.

She shrugged off her pack. In her emergency pack, she found her multi-tool, which she’d never really used, so she spent time flipping things out and then back, muttering “Huh!” with each new revelation. A screwdriver with a switchable bit! A bottle opener! A knife! And of course, the main tool, which was the pliers and wire cutter, too small for the job at hand perhaps, but certainly the best option. She wedged the blades between one strand of the wire and squeezed.

Nothing. She squeezed so tight that her hand ached; her face scrunched with the effort. Still nothing. She tried again, pressing every bit of strength into that hand, and pressed it into the tree so as to get a good angle, and then a fury took hold and she squeezed all of her anger about everything with a loud and long stupid fucking fucccck youuuuuu to everything. But the wire did not cut.

She stopped, rested her forehead on the tree, which now smelled like a whole vanilla factory. Tried again, and then again, and the third time one strand split. The second strand was easier, and the moment that it flew backward—she had to leap out of the way—she could have sworn she heard the tree breathe. She felt a surge of glee—she’d done something right!

She stood underneath the tree and gazed up at its branches meeting blue sky, put her palms against the bark, then hugged the tree and smelled the vanilla gift it was offering back. “I’m sorry you had that strangling you,” she whispered into the trunk, and she didn’t want to get too woo-woo about it, but she felt the tree thrumming with relief.

Finally, she stepped back and put her mouth on her rasped knuckles, tasted the blood, and winced. They really hurt, a burning-type hurt, and her eyes burned with tears. With freedom comes pain. Or at least that’s the wisdom she arrived at as the Sea Creature sadly swam around her chest when she pulled out her first aid kit to bandage her aching hand.

CHAPTER 4

Some dog’s yapping was unmistakable and insistent and was accompanied by the occasional yowl. Or maybe yowl wasn’t the right word; she’d never quite heard such a sound. It was back down the road, and always in the same spot, and her brain couldn’t figure out a plausible reason for the ruckus. As she sat and drank a glass of red wine, she scanned her memory: There were no houses on the road for such a long distance, and, as far as she remembered, there were no campgrounds here, it being private and not public land.

How far did sound travel? How worried should she be?

She didn’t want to drive to go check, of course; someone might see her and take note of her license plate or general presence. Plus—two glasses of wine and snowy, isolated roads and it would be dark soon. Nor did she want to walk that far, though how far was hard to gauge. So she ignored the dog and the human who was presumably with it and hoped they’d just go away. Besides, she’d already done her good deed for the day.

But the yapping did not go away. And dusk was coming.

“No, no, no, no, and fuck and fuck and fuck,” she muttered, because checking on this dog and its likely human owner would require so much work. The human would notice her presence; everything could potentially get fucked up; it would ruin everything. But what if the dog—or the person—needed help? She could not, in good conscience, leave a dog yowling so wretchedly in the night.

She groaned and stood. It would be good practice, she supposed—packing up her stuff, leaving the house as she’d found it. Besides, it would occupy her—what other great thing did she have to do? So she packed up, loaded her car, and drove for ten minutes down the dirt road, taking it slow since icy patches on shady spots made her feel precariously close to the steep edge, and she pictured her and the Grey Goose toppling down a mountain, rolling, rolling, rolling. She saw no dog. The barking continued, though, when she pulled over to listen. Finally she saw movement in the trees, not too far from the road, a midsize dog lunging in her direction but held by a rope or something that kept jerking it back. She looked all around through the forest for a person, but there was nothing else moving. As she had with the wire-bound tree, she felt only confusion. What was she seeing, exactly?

She sat in the car for a moment to assess—always best to sit and watch, she figured. But she didn’t see anyone, so she got out and turned on her headlamp and walked closer, close enough to see the dog up close—white chest and gray mottling and very fluffy; perhaps a mutt with a lot of border collie?—and then saw that a stream of blood was meandering down the white fur on the forehead and was also smeared across the floppy gray ear. Christ almighty, it was hurt! It was tied to a tree. It was still quite young, not quite puppy-young, but not yet grown, its paws being too large to fit the rest of the body. A teenager of sorts. A bloody, skinny, half-grown pup.