“The dynamic is changing anyway. You and Griff changed it. Me and James changed it some more. Everybody adapted fine.” Ripley sits back on her heels and shakes out her hands. This doesn’t help the tingling as much as it used to. It’s carpal tunnel, probably, but she can’t stop working no matter what it is.
“This is different, Rip. The end of summer is in sight. People are worried it’s going to wrap up on a strange note.”
It definitely will, for Ripley. She’ll surrender her lease on Yellowtail in a little over five weeks. As Ripley drives away, Cara and Griff will stand arm in arm, ready to settle in for a winter and a life together. They’ll invent new nicknames for each other every few days—currently it’s Grippy and Care Bear, neither of whichRipley wants to dig into too deeply. Every time Griff walks past, he’ll press his thumb to the knobby bone where Cara’s neck meets her shoulders, and she’ll look up and smile.
Ripley will go back to her dad’s trailer for the winter. Maybe she’ll work remotely as an anatomy TA at the med school in Billings.
James will go to the APS meeting and then back to London. No one will spread out her hair or mumble incoherent praise into her skin or shiver when she scratches a pattern onto his back that ends with her hands arranged along his shoulder blades like wings. No one will touch Ripley in a way that holds any secret meaning.
She probably won’t be okay for a while.
“I won’t have to do this for much longer, Cara. Just until we get Beauty in her crate. The chances of finding anything else we’d have time to excavate are basically zero at this point.”
In a way, it’s a relief. Ripley’s already cutting it close with the end-of-August scanner appointment. The late booking maximizes the chances of finding the rest of Beauty, but they’ll have only three weeks to get their results written up and posted before the APS meeting.
Cara sighs. “Ripley…”
Footsteps crunch along the bottom of the canyon. It’s James, of course. Ripley would know the vibrations of his measured heel strikes with her eyes closed and her ears blocked. She’ll be listening for them until the day she dies, she’s pretty sure.
Cara walks up the canyon to meet him. The two of them exchange low, hushed words, then Cara’s steps recede and James’s get closer.
“Ripley.”
It’s just her name. One word. Two syllables. It shouldn’t makeher feel the way Cara looks with Griff’s thumb on the back of her neck. It shouldn’t make her feel like crying with care and exasperation and worry and all the other emotions he’s managed to pack into it.
“Yes, James?”
He drops to a crouch, extending an open hand.
She pretends she doesn’t know what he wants. “You’re in my light.”
“Exactly,” he says. “Give me the hammer.”
She sets her chin and keeps working.
“My old cabin has been empty since Mindy left,” he says.
“Why are we talking about that?” Mindy emailed Ripley after her weekend at Clever Girl to invite her to stay in touch. Ripley doubts they will, but it was such a classy move that she replied,I’d like that.
“Because I can move out if it’s too much,” he says. “If what’s happening between us is part of what’s driving you to wreck yourself right in front of me, I will.” He speaks so tenderly, she wants to lie down and die here and have some strange being dig up her bones in another hundred million years.
“Don’t move out, James.”
Living with him is the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to her. She feels him—feelsthem—everywhere in that room. She’s been on top of him, beneath him, on her knees in front of him. She’s come every possible way, from quick and explosive to tender and drawn out, her body overcome by a long, sweet, sorrowful note.
She wakes up to the sounds of him getting dressed for his early-morning rides, the weight of him settling onto the edge of the bed as he puts on his bike shoes, then lifting away again.
The third day he was there, he hammered two tiny nails intothe wall and hung a pair of framed photos. The first one is him and his sister Daisy. He’s in his late teens, already over six feet, skinny except for the rounded cheeks that make him look heartbreakingly young. In the crook of his elbow is a toddler with a tangle of dark curls, her chocolate-covered hands plastered to his face. They look lit up with love. Theyshinewith it.
In the second, James is maybe six. He’s standing next to a river in Scotland or some green, hilly place, holding up a very modest-size fish and absolutely beaming. Behind him is a redheaded woman with his same bright eyes and long legs, her hands resting on his shoulders. He’s young, but it’s obvious that one day, he’ll be at least as tall as she is.
When he’s out on his bike and she’s in the cabin, she takes the photos down, filling her mind’s eye with his knobby knees and gap-toothed, recurved grin, and makes herself sick wanting albums full of pictures like these.
Sometimes he’ll take a call, and she’ll pretend she isn’t listening to him joking with his cousin Sarvesh, his accent suddenly twice as strong, or making dorky dinosaur jokes with colleagues during one of his increasingly frequent conference-planning meetings.
Once, he had a tense, cryptic conversation with his older sister, who seems to be the family fixer. “No, Marie, I can’t make it this year.” A pause, and then: “Because I can’t, that’s why. I’ve been at his party for the past thirty-four years. I can miss one year.” A longer pause; he paced to the window where Ripley’s bed used to be before they pushed the beds together. “Fine. You may FaceTime me if you absolutely must.”
“FaceTime can get pretty glitchy out here,” Ripley warned him when he’d ended the call, hoping he’d tell her what it had been about.
