“And sometimes they have special powers,” Marie adds. She’s playing along, I realize with relief.
“Exactly. Like, they can transform themselves. They can metamorphose.” She says the word carefully.
“Like the butterfly.”
“Yes.”
“How long has she been here in your woods?”
“Oh, not long. A few days. She arrived just before you came.”
I swirl the scouring pad around. The steam pours off.
“Do you know the story of Daphne and Apollo?” Finch asks. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “It’s from one of our books. Apollo was stricken with love for Daphne, a wood nymph and the daughter of the river god, but she wanted nothing to do with him. She just wanted to live in the woods. Because, well, she was a wood nymph. Anyway, Apollo chased her, and she ran and ran, but he was faster. He was closing in. But just as he was about to get her, she called out to her father for help, and poof! She turned into a tree.”
“Is that what you call your friend? Daphne?”
“Sometimes.”
I hear the rustle of a page turning. “And what’s this?”
“That’s where she lives. See all these big rocks? She hauled them up from the river for her fire ring. She’s not very big, but she’s strong.”
“That seems fitting,” Marie says. “A nymph would be robust and capable.”
“This is her tent. Plus she has a chair that folds up.”
“So colorful and imaginative. I like the blue kettle.”
Finch’s voice drops to a whisper. “You want to know a secret?”
Upstairs, Marie must nod. I picture her leaning close.
“You have to promise not to tell Cooper.”
I clink a glass, making noise so it seems like I’m not paying attention. I hold my breath, wonder if I should cough or clear my throat—something to stop the conversation—but I also want to know what Finch is about to say.
“I promise,” Marie says.
“I didn’t imagine her. She’s real. I go visit her sometimes.”
I drop the forks into the Dutch oven, the metal clanging loudly. “Does anyone want some hot chocolate?”
Finch hollers and scoots down the ladder, and Marie follows.
After hot chocolate, I begin the long event of getting Finch to bed. We brush her teeth, wash her hands and face, read.
“Finch,” I say, finally tucking her blanket beneath her chin, “I’d like you to quit talking about that girl.”
She heaves, pulling the blanket up over her mouth. “You weren’t supposed to be listening. You said when two people are talking and you secretly try to hear what they’re saying, it’s called eavesdropping, and it’s rude.”
“I know. But this is a little different—I’m your father, and it’s my job to keep an eye on you.” I place a hand on her knee. “Sugar, I’m asking you to quit obsessing.”
“I’m not obsessing. She’s my friend.”
“I’d like you to put it from your mind,” I say, sternly.
She wrinkles her nose. “I can’t.”
I take a deep breath. It’s becoming a concern, the fantasizing. The way she blurs the line between reality and make-believe. I realize she’s only eight, but I’m not sure she even knows the difference all the time, and it worries me. “You can, and you must.”
I lean down and kiss her forehead, walk to the door and tell her good night.
* * *
Out in the main room, Marie has brewed two cups of tea. She sits on the couch, waiting. Outside the cabin, the temperature plummets and the wind howls, tugging old snow from trees. Come morning, I’ll need to shovel everything out again. The truth is, Marie does most of the talking, and I’m content to sit and listen, to hear her voice, to watch the light from the candle flicker over her face, the wide brown eyes, the tiny nose and wide lips. Is it possible for a person to grow more attractive over the course of a couple of days? Because she has, to me. Earlier today, I found myself wanting night to come, wanting to open up. But Finch’s conversations have reminded me that I can’t afford to do that.
“I met him in Oxford. My husband. Ex. I was twenty and studying abroad,” she says, sliding her slippered feet across the coffee table. “Twenty years old! So young. And unreasonably innocent, I suppose. I thought I had a grasp of myself. I thought I knew how I wanted my life to look. And then I met him. It was—it was like waking up.”
I don’t tell Marie that the same spring she was gallivanting around Oxford, Jake and me were fighting what was, at the time, our worst skirmish yet, pinned down for four days in between a speck-on-the-map town and a constellation of caves so befuddling that even my preternatural instinct for geography couldn’t quite get a handle on them. Phillips, wounded the first day, was slowly bleeding out and brewing an infection that was beginning to smell. At night, we spooned, all four of us, unprepared and so very cold. By the end, we were drinking our own urine. Although of course what happened later on, the next tour, would make all of that seem like nothing.