A week later, Katherine left for an early-morning shift. I came down at six and let Rufus out. He returned a half hour later, blood dripping from his muzzle. I checked him for injury and, seeing none, grew worried. I closed the dog in the kitchen and scoured the grounds. The back gate was open. Just outside the fence, I found the entrails, a revolting pudding of blood and shit, and a rake of childlike ribs where muscle had torn away. I began thrashing through the dense brambles, kicking and tearing, scouring for more pieces. It wasn’t until I saw a leg with a hoof attached and tender white spots on a brown hide that I understood I’d been reassembling a fawn.
The next thing I remember is being back in the kitchen, Daniel in his pajamas, sobbing, “Don’t murder him, Daddy! Don’t murder him!”
I couldn’t make sense of it. Then I saw my fist twisted through Rufus’s collar, choking him. Daniel screamed about a pack of coyotes, how Rufus had jumped from his bed during the night and hurled himself at the window trying to get to them.
“He didn’t kill the baby, Daddy! He was trying to save the baby! Save the baby!” He was hysterical with certainty.
I remembered then how I’d woken from a predawn dream, heard the snarls and yelps of coyotes rising, turning the sky red. Yet my fist knotted Rufus’s collar, and though he’d gone still, I couldn’t release it.
“Daddy . . . Daddy . . . Daddy.” The word fell from my son’s mouth over and over, staccato and dead, as if already too late.
The dog’s eyes were bulging. I released him and slumped in a chair, Rufus collapsing at my feet. Daniel threw himself on the dog, hugging and kissing him. When I pulled Daniel away, his face was smeared with blood, and I saw it again, the vision I’d first seen behind the shed, before I realized I was gathering pieces of a deer. It was a vision so visceral, so full-blown in imagery and sensation, that for years I believed it a premonition. It haunted me until Daniel became a young man and I chose to dismiss it as one dismisses the terror of monsters lurking under a childhood bed.
What I had first seen behind that shed was not the savaged carcass of a fawn but that of a boy. It was Daniel I’d seen torn to pieces on the forest floor.
* * *
—
A DECADE LATER, on a late-October morning, Rufus was too old to conjure a new dream for my son, too exhausted to reenvision a broken world. He too was grieving. He hadn’t eaten in days.
I forced my arthritic limbs to move, went to the dog, and knelt before him. I cupped his face and watched his eyes open. They were dull, and I sensed he’d retreated to a place he held inside himself. I studied him, believing it was only there, in those dark animal eyes, that I would find my son.
14
At noon, Evangeline entered the kitchen. The man, hunched at the table, jerked at the sight of her as if he’d forgotten he’d found a girl under his tree in the middle of the night.
“Hey,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. She was wearing an oversize tee and the pair of torn khakis from the box. “Hope it’s okay. My stuff was so gross.”
He scooted his chair back and stood, tall and formal, as if she were a lady and he a knight or maybe a poorly groomed ma?tre d’。 “Of course. Take whatever works. Fit all right?”
“A little big, but it’s better that way.” She laughed, knowing he wouldn’t get the joke.
They stood awhile, looking at each other. She kept thinking he’d say something, but he seemed okay not talking to this random girl in his kitchen. Maybe he didn’t have the energy. There was a hollowness to him, some great deserted need that made Evangeline want to run. Instead she wandered to a corner nook and picked up a framed photo of Daniel, surprised when it made her feel nothing at all.
“This your son?” she asked. She didn’t know why she did that, went straight in at the hardest part. Maybe she wanted to knock him off-kilter or cover her own dirty tracks. Or maybe, and this was most likely, she was just screwing up.
His mouth hung open a little. He closed it and said, “Yes.”
She set the picture down and turned to him. His skin had gone ashen, and she saw now that his clothes hung in great folds as if there were nothing underneath. She had no idea it would be like this, facing a man so far gone, pictures of his dead son littering the counter. She’d been so certain, so very certain of her plan, but seeing this man in the daylight, his suffering thickening the air, she doubted she had the strength.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should go. This was a mistake.”
“No. It’s fine. Really.” Though he tried to hide it, she felt his urgency. He took a moment to collect himself, then said, “At least let me make you some eggs.”
“Okay,” she said. She could use another meal before she took off. “That’d be nice.”
He shoved the books to the side and indicated for her to sit. She hesitated. “Would you mind if I started a load of laundry? I’ll clear out after that. I promise.”
Isaac said he wasn’t worried about her clearing out and showed her where everything was. By the time she returned to the kitchen, a plate of warm, cheesy eggs and thick-cut buttered toast was waiting. As she ate, he sat across from her. He pretended to work, but his eyes kept flicking her way, and when she licked the raspberry jam that slid down her wrist, he dropped his head to hide a smile.
After she’d washed down the last of the eggs with orange juice, after he’d cleared her plate and wiped the table underneath, he sat opposite her again.
“Evangeline,” he said. She’d told him her first name the night before, but he hadn’t used it till now. It seemed a heavy door he had to press open.
When he didn’t say more, she thought he might need confirmation. “Yup,” she said. “That’s me.”
He took a while to gather his words. She could see him mining for each one. Finally he said, “If it’s all right with you, Evangeline”—trying her name out again—“I’d like to contact your family, let them know you’re safe.”
Hadn’t they gone over this last night? She explained again how there was no one. Yet he persisted, and as more questions arrived, she decided to come clean with a new version of her life, one thoroughly, completely, absolutely true even if a few details were altered.
The way she saw it, people got all caught up in the minutiae of who did what when and missed core emotional truths. If a few so-called facts needed a tweak here or there to help those people understand—or to distract them from investigating her prior life in Port Furlong—she’d be happy to supply them.
In this version, she was an only child. She liked starting out with something true. She said she’d never known her father—also true—and that her beloved mother had died of thyroid cancer in Ohio a year and a half before. Not true, but emotionally somewhat accurate. As it turned out, the Ohio tweak was ill considered, since her geography was poor, and Isaac, who had cousins there, seemed puzzled when she couldn’t place herself relative to Columbus or Cincinnati.
She plowed on, explaining she’d bounced around with distant family for months, each growing tired of having their den or living room taken over by a girl they hardly knew. In March, she was sent packing to Seattle to live with an aunt she had never met, only to come home one July evening to find the aunt’s apartment cleared out. She loaded the aunt up with lots of boyfriends, a drug habit, and a cruel mouth—someone he wouldn’t be tempted to track down. Wouldn’t he want better for his newly found orphan girl? She said she lived on the streets in the U District after that. There were other kids, and it was summer and warm, so it wasn’t that bad.