It warmed enough for her to remove her jacket, and the sunlight on her arms felt like a lemony kiss—she thought the phrase absurd, but that’s what it felt like. She stared at her appreciative arms and all the sun damage on them, the white spots and dark freckles and a few small red weird things that had popped up in the last year. “You gotta accept this,” she said to her arms. “It is what it is. The alternative is worse.”
To her right was a pile of what she guessed were elk droppings and an ancient cow patty and a very long nail that looked like one of the earliest nails ever made by humankind. What had such a nail been used for? How did nails get made by hand? When did people stop making them by hand? And what should she do with her day? And what was she doing?
Far away, she heard a gunshot, or what sounded like a gunshot, and she stilled, listening for more and feeling a little panicked. Hunting season, maybe? Wasn’t October the month her father had gone hunting with his friends? Now her ears were tuned in, and she heard the faraway sky-buzz of a jet and birds calling to one another and the plunk of something falling softly on the duff, perhaps a pine cone. She heard what sounded like the yapping of a dog down by the dirt road, and dripping snow, and what she heard most of all was the silence. The world could be so quiet, really.
She heard herself do the drama-sigh; she was definitely becoming a sigher and needed to stop, so she took out her journal so she could reroute her future. No more sighing. Meaning, no more living a life in which she found herself sighing. She wrote, New Life Goals for Ammalie So She’ll Stop Dramatically Sighing:
Body is just fine because it has to be. Butt dimples just part of deal. But also,
Could you pleeeeeeeeeease get serious about caring for it?
Meaning, exercise. Meaning, learn. Brain and body active.
Taken together: Take the remainder of your life seriously. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!
Be a good mom for Powell. Friend to others. Take care of the defenseless.
DO NOT GET ARRESTED.
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?
