They’d spent the morning stacking the lumber they’d had delivered under a nylon canopy, then set up a second canopy as a work area and place to store tools. The guy who delivered the lumber told them there had been a terrible accident down near the center of town last night—a school bus carrying high school kids went off the road. Three dead, twenty injured. The road was still down to one lane while the police worked the scene.
“My cousin was on that bus,” the lumberyard man told them. “She’s okay, but her and the others, they say the driver swerved to avoid a woman in the road.”
“My god,” Nate said. “Was the woman hit?”
“No sign of the woman when the fire department got there. Just the wrecked bus and a bunch of hysterical, hurt kids.” The lumberman looked out at the trees, eyes on the path that led down to the bog.
“Terrible,” Helen said.
“Maybe that’s what you heard last night?” Nate asked. “Screeching tires? Sirens?”
She shook her head. She was familiar with those sounds; with the highway not far from their condo, she’d heard them plenty back in Connecticut.
“I doubt you would have heard anything way up here,” the lumber guy said.
“Sound travels in funny ways,” said Nate, more to himself than the lumberyard man, as if he was trying to convince himself that the accident might well have been what Helen had heard.
Once the lumber was stacked, she and Nate started framing one of the walls.
The work had gone well at first. They got out all their shiny new tools and had taken turns doing the measuring and cutting. They quickly found their groove, moving together, making great progress. It felt good to be doing carpentry work again; it made her think of all the time she’d spent working with her father, of how satisfied she always felt at the end of the day. And there was something meditative about working with tools: you had to clear your mind of everything else and focus on what you were doing. She felt calm. Peaceful.
Until things started to go wrong.
She started thinking about the scream she’d heard, about the bundle with the tooth and nail. It ruined her focus.
Nails bent. Boards jumped. Things didn’t line up in real life the way they did on paper. Helen was put on edge by the chop saw, which they were using to cut the framing lumber to length. Each time she brought the blade down and watched it bite into the wood, she was reminded of last night’s scream.
They had argued when Helen had cut something too short. “I thought you said ninety-two and five-eighths,” she said.
“I did,” Nate told her, checking the plans again. “That’s the length of all the vertical studs.”
“Well, that’s where I marked and cut.” She’d used the tape measure and made a careful line with the metal square and the chunky carpenter’s pencil. “Just like all the others I just did.”
“Maybe you read the tape measure wrong,” he suggested.
“You think I don’t know how to read a tape measure?” she’d snapped.
“No, babe, I’m just—”
“Cut the next one yourself,” she’d said. She hadn’t meant to. This was so un-Helen. She was on edge. Prickly. It was the lack of sleep. The memory of the hideous scream. The tooth and nail, which Nate had taken to calling “our strange gift.”
“Hey,” Nate said, coming up and rubbing her shoulders. “What do you say we call it quits for today. We can go for a little walk. Then I’ll go into town and pick us up a pizza and a bottle of wine. Sound good?”
She’d agreed, apologized for being such a shit, and they’d put away the tools and walked down to the bog. It was a five-minute walk, downhill through the woods. The air was sweet and clean, and the path was layered with a thick carpet of pine needles. It really was beautiful. Along the way Helen spotted delicate, balloon-like oval pink flowers.
“What are those?”
“Lady’s slippers,” Nate said. “They’re a member of the orchid family. But I’ve gotta say, it’s not the foot of a lady I think of when I look at it.”
Helen smiled, leaned down to study one. It was a delicate flower, almost embarrassingly sexual.
“So, I’ve been doing some research, and it turns out Breckenridge Bog isn’t a true bog,” Nate told her. “It’s a fen: a boggy wetland fed by underground springs.”
“A fen,” Helen echoed.
“Yeah, most bogs are just fed by runoff. They have very little oxygen. A fen, on the other hand, has streams and groundwater that give it more oxygen, richer nutrients in the soil and water.”
They got to the bog, which was circled with pine, cedar, and larch trees. There were a few small cedars growing up in the bog itself. The ground was a thick carpet of spongy moss floating on water. There were sedges, low bushes, thick grass that cut their legs as they walked. Their feet were sucked down. It was like walking on a giant sponge.
