Page 89 of Run Rabbit Run

For a few minutes, with the ocean roaring and the gulls wheeling and Ezra a few steps back letting me have the illusion of walking alone, I feel something I don't have a name for anymore.

Not freedom. Freedom's a word from the old language.

Something smaller, sadder, and survivable.

A loosening. A long leash paid out across cold sand.

He watches me the entire time.

I can feel it, the weight of his eyes, the way you feel weather coming.

He's letting me walk toward the water to see if I'll keep walking.

He's always testing the length of the leash, and I've learned that length so well I stop at the exact place he'd have stopped me, turn around before he has to say my name, and walk back to him across the sand on my own two feet.

That's the trick of it, the patient work he did on me.

I do the stopping myself now.

He doesn't even have to hold the other end anymore. I hold it for him.

"Good?" he asks, when I reach him.

"Good," I say, and the terrible truth is that it isn't a lie.

By summer he gives me the work back.

Not all at once.

A camera first, left where I'll find it, the way he leaves everything, a gift that's also a leash that's also a test.

Then a suggestion, gentle, that the forest behind the estate is some of the finest he's ever walked, and wouldn't I like to film it, and wouldn't the light be good on the north ridge in the early morning.

The north ridge. Where the pit was. Where he caught me.

He knows. Of course he knows. The thing is, he does by accident. I don’t sense the cruelty in it.

But he says it so mildly, wouldn't I like to, and some starved creative part of me that's been dark for months flickers awake at the idea of a camera in my hands and a shot to set up, and I hate that it flickers, and I say yes.

We hike up in the blue dark before dawn, the way I used to hike a hundred mornings before this one, except now there's a man three steps behind me who owns the mountain and a camera in my pack he bought me and a route he suggested that I already know ends at the exact place the ground opened under my feet.

I find the spot before I mean to. My body finds it.

That's the horror of the trained thing he keeps talking about, the way my feet still know this country even when my mind would rather not.

The pit's been filled in. Of course it has.

Smooth ground now, ferns coming up through it, moss knitting over the seam the way moss knits over everything on this mountain, patient and green and erasing.

If I hadn't dropped through it myself I'd never know. A woman could film a sunrise here and call it the most peaceful place she'd ever stood.

I set the tripod up ten feet from where I fell.

And the light comes up gold over the valley the way he promised it would, and it's beautiful, it's genuinely beautiful.

My hands do what they've done ten thousand times, framing it, finding the shot, chasing the exact moment the sun clears the far ridge.

For a few minutes I forget where I'm standing.