Colm nods. He knows this town the way you know a place you've always lived in. He knows the motel and which rooms are quiet and probably the name of the woman who runs the front desk. This is his territory. He belongs here absolutely, and I drove into the middle of it with his daughter and his eyes looking out of her face.
"I should get back to the grounds," he says. He doesn't move. "I'm running the competition schedule today. The log-rolling heats start at two."
"We'll watch," Macie says authoritatively, without turning around.
Colm looks at her. "Yeah?" he says.
"Yes," Macie confirms. "Log."
"Big log," he agrees.
She turns then, and points at him, and says: "Man. Log man."
"Log man," he repeats with a chuckle.
"His name is Colm," I say. "Can you say Colm?"
She considers this. "Colm," she tries. It comes outKom, the L swallowed.
"That's close enough," he says.
He stands up from the bench, and he looks at Macie for a moment longer. Then, he looks at me and the anger is still there, a low even presence under everything else, but it's not the only thing anymore.
"Two o'clock," he says. "The viewing platform."
"We'll be there."
He walks away. Macie watches him go.
"Log man," she says again, satisfied.
I watch the set of his shoulders as he crosses the grounds — the particular stillness of a person holding something very large very carefully. I know that feeling. I've been holding it for two years.
The difference is I've had longer to get used to the weight.
four
Colm
Thelog-rollingheatsruncleanly. Twelve competitors, four heats, the crowd finding its rhythm over the first hour. I should be watching the timing judges, checking the re-staging between rounds, tracking the radio for the axe range update. I'm doing all of it. I'm also watching the viewing platform.
They're there. Macie is on the railing again, leaning as far as Mila will allow, shouting encouragement at the competitors in her own semi-coherent way. She cheers the same way for every heat regardless of outcome, which I find I cannot stop watching.
My daughter.Two years of a life I know nothing about — bedtime routines and first words and the specific way she needs to be held during a tantrum and whether she's afraid of the dark and what her laugh sounds like at six in the morning. Gone. I wasn't there. That's not something I can make right, no matter how I try.
The attraction to Mila, well, I'd be lying if I called it anything else. It's been there since the second I saw her this morning,which is inconvenient. She's the woman who didn't find me, and she's the mother of my child, and she's also, undeniably, the woman I've spent three years measuring every other woman against without quite admitting that's what I was doing.
She's standing at the railing next to Macie with her arms around the kid and she looks exactly like herself and nothing like how I remembered her because memory is never as specific as the real thing.
The final heat finishes. The crowd applauds. I relay the results to the judges' table and check the axe range status and hand the next two hours off to my deputy coordinator, a capable woman who has been doing this festival since I was in grade school.
Then I walk to the back side of the main stage.
It's quieter here. Behind the stage is storage — equipment cases, cable runs, folded seating sections leaning against the structure. The vendor noise and the crowd noise are muffled. This is where the festival staff comes to eat lunch without getting stopped every thirty seconds.
I hear her before I see her.
"—she's fine, she's going to be fine, she's done this at the grocery store, she will stop in approximately four minutes—"
