"Audrey."
"We're going to find him, Astrid Matthews. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you."
She didn't say his name.
She hadn't said it in three weeks. She'd been waiting for me to say it. She was still waiting. She let her hands drop, turned, and went up the middle fork with the radio at her hip, her boots hitting the trail with the brisk forward beat of a woman who had decided what her job was for the next hour.
I went right.
We'd been looking for hours.
The trail to the lake was the one I'd walked a hundred times.
I knew where the root came up across the path. I knew where the fallen tree was that you had to step over with one hand on the bark. I'd walked it with Moose at my hip the morning I pulled the boy out of the water, and I'd walked it with Easton at my shoulder the afternoon of the heron, and I'd walked it alone every Sunday since.
I called his name.
The trail held the sound for a beat and let it go.
"Moose."
Nothing came back.
I kept walking.
I brought Moose out of the seven years. He was mine before there was a Brett at all. I cataloged him on the drive up Route 23 in September with the wedding china and the lamps and the rental car as the one thing in the passenger seat that was mine. He was the proof.
If I lost him, the seven years had no piece I got to keep.
I didn't let myself sit down on the log at the bend.
I kept walking.
"Moose!"
My throat caught on the second syllable.
"Moose, buddy! Come on."
The trail came out at the bank with the trees thinning, the gray of the sky widening overhead, and the flat dark of the water showing up between the trunks. I stopped at the edge of the clearing because my body stopped before my head did.
I pulled a boy out of this water in October.
I told Easton to take the slot at the other end of this water in November.
I called his name again.
A bark came back.
I didn't understand it at first. The woods had been giving me my own voice back for an hour, and the bark sat for a beat in the same space before I let myself hear that it was not mine.
I heard it again.
Moose.
I would've known that frequency in a room with a hundred dogs. I'd been listening to that bark for eight years, throughdoors and across yards and from the back seat of a car going seventy on the highway. The pitch of it. The small catch at the end.
