The Snow Falcon (49 page)

Coop swung his sight back to Somers and held it there. His finger tightened again. Susan spoke his name again, questioningly, as if she didn’t know him.

Ellis was still firing. Then Coop saw Somers begin to fall.

“Coop!” Susan screamed.

He wavered, closing his eyes, everything happening in slow motion, Somers peeling away from the rock. He squeezed the trigger.

MICHAEL OPENED HIS eyes, surprised that he could. He was on his back, spread-eagled and numb. He couldn’t move, couldn’t even think about it. Above, he could see blue sky and the shadow of the rock, then he heard the sound of crunching snow. He thought Ellis would come and finish him off, but it was Jamie who leaned over into his vision. There were tears in the boy’s eyes, and Cully was on his fist. The tattered end of her leash showed through his fingers. He was crying as he took off the thongs around her legs.

“I called her and she came down. I called, just like you said. You can hear me, can’t you?”

Michael couldn’t answer, but he blinked. His eyes were wet, and he felt a tear escape the corner of his eye and fall to join the snow on which he lay. He imagined it forming a crystal of ice. Cully looked around her, proud, bright-eyed. Dusky cream and gray. He could see the pulsing of a strong heart in her breast.

Jamie raised his fist, and she rose into the air.

Small, cold hands turned his head so that he could see her in the cool clear blue of the sky. She climbed, wings outstretched, and Jamie lifted Michael’s head so that he could see her as she drifted across the ridge and over the valley.

“She’ll be all right now, won’t she?”

Yes she will, he thought. He rose with her, and felt the wind in

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the air. They soared and turned, and far, far below, small converging figures made a tableau on the white ground. The rushing air made a faint whistling sound. Banking, turning, subtly altering the angle and plane of feathers, responding to minute vibrations in muscle and bone.

ON THE GROUND Susan reaches them, and Jamie runs to her. He is sobbing as she holds him. He speaks to her, a fact she absorbs as she looks into Michael’s eyes. They seem distant now, and a frost has formed on his eyebrows.

Above them, the snow falcon calls.

THE SNOW WAS ALL GONE EXCEPT IN

those places high up in the mountains where it remained all year. The soft warm sun of late May fell over the house that Michael had grown up in. Susan looked toward the river and up at the deepening blue sky, thinking it would be a hot summer.

She could hear the sound of men’s voices filtering through the woods from her own house, calling to one another with good-natured curses while they loaded furniture into the truck. They’d worked all of the previous day packing, and would be finished, they thought, by midafternoon. Then she and Jamie would get into her Ford with Bob in the back and they would leave. They’d drive up the track and turn away from town, twenty minutes later they’d hit the highway and turn south, and that would be it. Little River Bend would be behind them.

She turned back to the house, hearing a sound, and Jamie came around the corner. “Hi. I thought you’d be over here,” she said.

He smiled at her and flicked hair back from his eyes. “I was just looking in the woodshed,” he said.

“For Cully?”

“No. I know she’s not here anymore.” Jamie looked toward the mountains and shrugged. “Maybe I was.”

Susan went over and sat on the porch step, patting the space beside her. “Come, sit.”

He did, planting his sneakers in the grass. She resisted the urge to touch his hair, because she knew he hated it, and suppressed a smile.

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She sometimes thought about how easily she’d become used to hearing his voice after that first time. All the uncertainty she’d held deep within, that somehow she wouldn’t recognize him, that he would speak with an alien sound, she now realized was her fear of having lost something of him that she would never recapture. But it hadn’t been that way at all. It was as if in the moment she’d heard him speak, the intervening time had vanished and she had him back again, exactly as he was.

It had taken him a while to begin talking about David. Maybe three or four weeks after that day in the mountains when he’d let Cully go, she’d stopped on the way out of town beside the church.

“You can stay here if you like,” she’d said.

He’d looked at her with those serious wide brown eyes for a moment, then shook his head.

“No, I’ll come with you.”

He hadn’t said anything else then, and she hadn’t pressed him. They’d just stood together for a while quietly, but later that night, after they’d had supper, he’d said to her, “After we leave, we won’t be able to go to the church anymore to see Dad, will we?”

“Not as often,” she’d said. “But we can get back sometimes.”

He’d thought about that. “But we can still remember him, right? I mean, we’ve got pictures and stuff?”

She’d nodded. “Of course we’ll remember him. He’ll always be your dad, Jamie.”

She’d asked if he wanted to see the albums, and when she’d fetched them, they had sat at the table together going over them. Jamie had listened while she told him about each photograph, where it had been taken and when. He seemed to stare at those of his dad for a long time, as if he were trying to absorb the image deep inside himself.

Before he’d gone upstairs that night, he’d said to her, “I thought I’d forgotten him, but I haven’t.” Then he’d smiled a little and she’d hugged him, her eyes filling with tears.

He’d agreed to go back to Dr. Carey after that. She’d arranged weekly sessions until they were due to leave, and it was during the second of these that he’d finally talked about what had happened the day David was shot.

They’d been stalking a deer; Jamie had been beside his dad, crouched in the undergrowth, trying to see into a clearing through

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the trees. The deer had been skittish, sensing their presence, nervously looking all around, then lowering its head to nibble at grass.

David had signaled that they should try to get closer, find somewhere where they had a more open view. He’d lowered his aim and risen, starting to move forward, but Jamie’s coat had snagged on a sapling, and as he followed, the sapling had bent with him, then tugged itself free and shot back with a sudden noise. As David turned, startled by the sound, he’d tripped over a root and the gun had fired. It had been as simple as that. An accident caused by a moment’s carelessness.

David had remained conscious as he lay on the forest floor, rapidly losing blood. The way Jamie told it, he’d wanted to run for help, but David had stopped him, probably knowing that he was dying. All the same, Jamie had been terrified, shocked by the blood and the pallor of his dad’s face, and he’d torn himself from David’s weak grasp, running away, stumbling though the undergrowth. In blind panic he’d run back the way they’d come, but he’d become disoriented, and in the state he was in, everything had looked the same. Sobbing, he’d gone back again, and by then David had lost consciousness. Jamie had held him, lying beside him on the wet ground, until they’d been found hours later.

“I think that’s what he really feels guilty about,” Dr. Carey had said. “He feels he left his dad to die alone, that when he ran off, David was talking and still lucid, but by the time he got back again, his father was unconscious.”

The night after that session, Susan had asked Jamie if that’s how he felt. He’d thought about it for a long time, and then tears had filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. She’d held him while he’d wept and tried to articulate everything that was going on inside himself, speaking spasmodically between gulps for air, and she’d told him it was okay, repeating it over and over, rocking him in her arms.

“I left him, I left him,” he’d kept saying.

He was getting better now, Susan thought as they sat together on the porch. They could talk about it without him getting upset, but she saw in his eyes that he hadn’t entirely forgiven himself, and she knew that it would take time.

Across the clearing, Bob was sniffing around an old rotting log, his tail wagging, his coat glistening silky red in the sunlight. It looked

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so different now, without the snow. Now there was grass, and the woods were full and green, the air humming with insects. She imagined Michael standing back there in the cold, calling Cully to his fist from the porch railing, the way she’d seen in the pictures Jamie still drew and now painted.

“We ought to be going,” she said eventually, rising to her feet.

Jamie stood with her and took a last look around. The house had been sold; the new owners were due to move in the following month.

“I wonder where she is now,” Jamie said. “Cully, I mean. Do you think she’s okay?”

“I’m sure she is,” Susan said.

She called to Bob, and they started back through the woods.

COOP ARRIVED A short time before they left. He pulled up outside the house and got out of his car, watching the movers carry the last of the big items out to the truck. His expression was closed, and Susan didn’t know what he was thinking.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi. Thought I’d drop in, say good-bye.” He saw Jamie come out the door, carrying a box to the Ford, and raised his hand. “Jamie, how’s it going?”

“Hi, Coop,” the boy replied. “Is it okay if I take my plane with us, Mom?”

“We don’t have room, Jamie,” she said, and he shrugged his acceptance.

There was no trace of the way he used to act around Coop. He was just like a normal kid now, and Susan still couldn’t get used to it. She watched him go back into the house, turning away only when he was out of sight. She flicked a strand of hair back from her eye.

“So, everything’s all set,” Coop commented.

“Just about.”

There was an awkward few moments between them. She wasn’t sorry that she wouldn’t have to see him anymore, because every time she did she was reminded of that day. It was etched in her mind, the way he’d aimed his rifle, the long delay before he’d fired. It might have been just a second or two, but it had seemed like much longer. Much longer.

“Ellis got out of hospital last week,” Coop said.

THE

SNOW

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“I heard. What will happen to him?”

“Can’t say.”

Coop looked away, unable to meet her eye. “Susan…” he started to say.

She laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t, Coop.”

He stopped, then nodded. She’d already asked him once why he’d taken so long to stop Ellis that day, and the answer had been in his eyes. She hadn’t talked about it since, and she wasn’t about to now.

“Well, I guess I better get going,” he said. “I hope everything works out for you.”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

She watched him walk back to his car, and he paused just for a second as he got in, briefly raised his hand, and drove back up to the road.

THEY STOPPED AT a motel the first night, and after Jamie was asleep, she sat up watching TV until late. Eventually she picked up the phone and dialed a number, then waited while it rang. Somebody answered, and she asked to be transferred, then waited again, listening to the ringing tone.

“Hello?”

“Michael?”

“Hi,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

She smiled. “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“How’s Boston?”

SUSAN AND JAMIE were waiting for him at the airport when he landed in Vancouver. They drove to the hotel Susan had booked, and after they’d had dinner and Jamie had gone to bed, Susan and Michael sat up late, talking.

“How’re you feeling?” Susan asked.

He massaged the back of his neck, which still became stiff if he sat in one position for more than a few minutes at a time but which the physiotherapist said would improve if he kept up with his exercises.

“I’m okay,” he told her. “How did it go yesterday?”

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“Well, we left. Coop came by.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Nothing much. Ellis got out of hospital.”

“I decided I’m not pressing charges,” Michael said.

“I didn’t think you would.” There was a slight pause, and then Susan asked him the question that was on her mind. “So, what happened?”

He supposed it was something he would have got around to himself sooner or later, but Susan had persuaded him he should go to Boston before they moved to Washington, where they planned to live. While he was in the hospital, they’d spent a lot of time talking when she came each day to visit. There hadn’t been much else he could do, immobilized in traction while the multiple fractures he’d sustained in his fall from the cliff had healed. He had told her everything, all that he could remember about his childhood, the way he’d felt after he’d moved away and met Louise. He hadn’t left out a thing, uncovering every emotion, every detail of his descent into paranoia.

He’d even admitted that he still didn’t know, and probably never would, what he’d meant to do the day he’d returned to his apartment having just shot the man his wife had been seeing.

“I might have meant to shoot her, too. Maybe even Holly,” he’d admitted. He’d felt Susan ought to know exactly what had happened, everything that he was capable of.

“But you didn’t,” she’d said. “You didn’t.”

It was Susan who’d insisted that he go to Boston, that it was the last thing he needed to do before they could start a new life together, and he’d known she was right.

He got up from the bed while he talked, wincing a little at the stiffness in his back. In the end, Ellis hadn’t shot him, though maybe he’d tried to. It had been worked out later that he’d fired off half a dozen shots, the marks where they’d hit the rock descending in a line with Michael’s fall to the ground. It was the impact that had caused the injuries to his spine and legs. Ellis himself had taken a bullet in the back, and it had come close to killing him, though at the time Michael hadn’t known that.