When my father stirred, I set down the knife and crawled into his lap. His head rolled up from his chest. He blinked at me a few times and then shifted back in his chair. He didn’t ask where I’d been. I was just five, but I had free roam of the property, including the curve of cliff that hung over the ocean. Whenever Rei visited, she told me not to go near the cliffs, and I would laugh at how scared she sounded. Rei was a grown-up and grown-ups weren’t supposed to be scared of anything.
“Bear sat on me,” I told my father, tears welling with thewords. My arms were sore and streaked with dirt. “He wouldn’t let me up. He hurt me.”
“Poor girl,” Dad said, pulling leaves from the tangle of my hair.
I sunk against his chest. His arms were warm around me.
“Is it my fault that Mama is dead?”
“Of course not. Did Bear say that?”
I nodded. I couldn’t look at him.
My father held me with one arm as he leaned to the side and lifted the cans on the porch one at a time and shook them, releasing small clouds of wood dust each time he set one down. When he found a can that suited him, he sat back in the chair again and drank.
“Bear misses your mama a lot, but it’s no excuse to say those things to you.”
“He hates me.” The truth of my own statement caught me by surprise. I squirmed in my father’s arms. It was true. Bear hated me. That was why he had those knives in his eyes when he looked at me in the grove. It was why he never played with me.
“He loves you. I know it. If you don’t feel it, you’ll just have to believe me.” My father hugged me. “You’re full of light, Merrow. When you’re full of light, it’s easy for you to love and be loved. Even Horseshoe Cliff loves you. Did you know that? It turns your little footsteps into heart-shaped stamps in the dirt. I see the hearts you leave everywhere I go.
“Do you know what happens when Bear walks on the land? Dust rises up and makes him cough. He’s not easy to love like you are, and there’s a reason for it. He was born chock-full ofcomplicated emotions that make him do things neither of us would ever think of doing. The things he has done have welded together to form an anchor that he has to drag around everywhere. He’s heavy with the things he has done, the things he has seen. But you are light, little Merrow. You are as light as a bird. Nothing holds you down. Whenever you choose, you can fly.”
I loved when my father spoke this way, with poetry instead of plain words. But at that moment I did not understand him. My encounter with Bear had left me exhausted. The sun hung just above the ocean, and the sight of it made me tremble. My days were full of adventure, but at night my imagination got the best of me, and I hated being alone. The wind whistled against the side of the house outside my bedroom, and the blanket on my bed scratched me, and I didn’t like to walk outside to the toilet shed alone, so I lay awake and worried I would wet the bed. The mice came alive at the prick of the first star, their feet always whispering, their eyes always searching. I would grow hungry lying awake, and the only good thing about that was that my stomach groans kept the mice from climbing onto my bed. Bear wouldn’t let me sleep in his room, and my father cried out in his sleep in a voice that scared me even more than being alone. On warm nights, my father used to let me sleep in the pasture with my pony, but ever since half the chickens had been killed, he wouldn’t allow it.
“It’s my birthday,” I reminded him now.
“I know it.”
I searched his face, but he was looking out at the scruff ofmeadow that spread from the porch to the sea, and he didn’t meet my gaze. He had soft brown eyes and a dark beard and dark hair to his shoulders and skin that was sort of pink—the color that a strawberry turned after it stopped being green but wasn’t quite ripe yet. He said that Bear and I took after our mother with our green-brown eyes and golden skin that never burned and pale brown hair that striped yellow in the sun.My little acorns,my father called us, which made me laugh because Bear was anything but little.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
We walked together every day. We checked on the chickens frequently because we’d lost half of the old brood to coyotes over the summer, and even though the new chickens were settled in now with the old, the blood that stained the coop ramp had not faded. We fed and watered the horses, Old Mister and Guthrie. We often walked the garden rows, rewarding ourselves with tiny sweet tomatoes that burst between our back teeth. Or we looked for wood for Dad’s miniature houses. Or stuffed steel wool into holes to keep mice out of the cottage walls and sang about answers that blew away in the wind.
I always felt my father’s love for the land as we walked it. If he saw my footsteps everywhere, I saw his handprints everywhere. He had built our cottage and planted every tree in our orchard. Later, when he was gone, he was never really gone, because he was everywhere.
Now, we ducked between the rails of the paddock fence he had built years before I was born. A strange sound came fromthe lean-to at the end of the pasture. I dropped my father’s hand and ran toward it, worried for the horses. There were hunting animals all around—animals I’d seen, like the mean, bold coyotes that had eaten the chickens, and ones I hadn’t seen, like mountain lions. Diana, my father’s old dog, used to guard the land at night, but she’d died a week before the coyotes attacked the chickens. Bear told me that the coyotes must have been watching us all along, waiting for Diana to die. Now I sensed the coyotes’ invisible eyes following me around the land just as I sensed the moon peeking from the sky all day, impatiently waiting for its turn to shine.
My mother had died, Diana had died, and the chickens had died. Still, it had only lately occurred to me to wonder what might happen next.
“The horses are fine,” I heard my father call behind me as I ran.
And he was right; the horses were fine. In a corner of the lean-to, separated from the horses by a bank of hay bales, I was astonished to find a puppy.
I clambered up and over the hay bales into the makeshift pen and lifted the puppy, a wriggling, yipping whirl of black and brown, into my arms and laughed.
“This little guy,” Dad said, looking down at me, “is all yours.”
When the puppy licked my chin, his sharp teeth raked my skin, but I didn’t mind one bit. I couldn’t believe he was mine. He squirmed in my arms, pressing his body against the bruises left there by my brother. I thought of Bear kneeling over me,pinning me down, the knives in his eyes. My mouth went dry. The puppy was mine. I looked up at my father.
“What about Bear?”
He ruffled my hair. “It’s not Bear’s birthday, is it?”
I shook my head and tried to smile. My stomach felt knotted. I hugged the puppy tight to my chest. Bear didn’t want a dog, did he? Had he cried like I had when Diana had died? No. I had never seen Bear cry over anything. I guessed he was too old for crying, like my father. Dad’s eyes were only wet when he stared too long at the horizon at night. Bear said I did all the crying at Horseshoe Cliff while he did all the work. I decided then and there that I would take on more chores, and I wouldn’t spend so much time wandering around lost in imaginary games, and I wouldn’t cry. The puppy was already mine. He licked my chin, cooling the scrapes he’d left there. He smelled of hay, of home, and I could feel his little heart skittering around as though trying to reach mine.I will love this dog forever,I thought. What could Bear do about that?
My father leaned over the hay bales and rested his big warm hand on my shoulder. “Happy birthday, Merrow,” he said. “Enjoy your new pal.”
