“What’s that?” Nate asked, when she bent over to investigate.
“A little piece of red string,” she said. It was tied around the base of a small bush.
“Maybe it just blew in there and got stuck,” Nate suggested.
“No,” Helen said. It was tied in a neat bow. “Someone put it here.” Helen untied the string—bright red and made of nylon, she guessed—and slipped it into her pocket. As they walked back along the path, she found several more pieces of string, all tied around trees, saplings, and bushes, the loose ends hanging, waving in the breeze like little caution flags.
“Maybe the land was surveyed,” Nate said.
“Maybe,” Helen said, knowing this wasn’t it. The red strings were too haphazard for that. And what surveyors used string and not plastic tape? Now that she was looking for them, she saw them everywhere—some weathered and frayed, and some looking bright and fresh.
When they got back, the first thing Nate did was pull out his field guide to eastern birds. “Turns out it’s almost impossible to tell a male from a female,” he said. He had his new nature journal open and was doing a quick sketch of the bird, recording details of the sighting. Helen had given him the Moleskine notebook as a gift when they were packing up for Vermont. “I thought it could be a sort of field journal. To keep track of your wildlife encounters at the new house.” Nate loved it. And now the great blue heron was the first official entry.
He started reading her heron facts from the field guide: habitat, mating, and gestation. “Though they hunt alone, they nest in colonies,” he was saying. He stopped and jotted a few of these facts down in his journal. “A female will lay two to seven eggs.”
Helen was only half listening. Her eyes were on the opened bundle Nate had set on the kitchen table: the little nest that held the tooth and nail. She hadn’t wanted to bring it into the house. She thought the best thing to do would be to take it out and bury it deep in the woods. Throw it into the bog, maybe. Then she had the irrational idea that it would act like a seed; that if she attempted to bury it or toss it into the bog, it would sprout, grow, turn into something powerful, something with more form, somethingalive.
“Did you know that despite their size, herons only weigh about five pounds?” Nate asked, not looking up from his field guide. “Unbelievable, right? It’s the hollow bones. All birds have hollow bones.”
Helen took in a breath. Her head ached. Her own bones felt solid and stiff as concrete, heavy and sore.
“Weren’t you going to go get us wine and pizza?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he said, closing the book. He ran into the bedroom to get changed and grab his wallet.
“Hon?” he called as he walked back down the hallway. “Did you take any cash out of here?”
“No.”
He shook his head. “That’s weird. There’s about forty bucks less than I thought I had.”
“You used a bunch of cash yesterday,” she reminded him. “At breakfast, then later at the store. Oh, you went out and got beer, remember?”
“Right,” he said. “Maybe I spent more than I thought. Or maybe that kid at the store didn’t give me the right change.” He counted the money one more time, stared at it with a puzzled expression, then announced he was off. “Be back soon,” he promised.
. . .
By the time Nate returned with pizza and two bottles of wine, Helen had taken the world’s most unsatisfying lukewarm shower and changed into sweats and one of Nate’s T-shirts.
“This one’s from a vineyard in Vermont,” he’d said proudly, holding up the bottle of Marquette.
This was to be part of their new life: buying local. Eating and drinking local.
But the truth was, at that point she didn’t care if the goddamn wine was made from skunk cabbage from the bog: she just wanted a drink.
Nate had also bought a local paper. The story of the crash was on the front page. Helen saw the smiling school photos of the dead teenagers and flipped it over, unable to look. It was too terrible. She was trying hard not to take it as an ominous sign of their new lives here.
She took a deep breath, looked away from the newspaper.
We are meant to be here,she told herself.We are living the life of our dreams.
“There’s going to be a vigil tonight at the high school,” Nate said. “Maybe we should go.”
Helen shook her head. “No. I can’t bear it. And it would be weird. We just got here. We’re not really part of the community yet. I’d feel…voyeuristic or something, you know?”
Nate nodded. “I see what you mean.”
After they finished the pizza (which was crappy, with too-sweet sauce and canned mushrooms, but still satisfying) and polished off the first bottle of wine, Nate got out his laptop and started playing the animal noises.
