Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [3]
“Well, if it ever did, we’d have beachfront property. See this?” Julie Hutchinson held the bit of trilobite fossil up for her daughter’s inspection. “Once, these lived all over the place here. Swimming underwater.” Julie tried to remember if that was precisely correct—she had come up to these woods with her grandmother, who knew a lot more about the trilobites than she ever would. She and her grandmother had never gotten along all that well, except for their mutual love of nature and exploration.
Livy took the fossil into her cupped hands, and looked at it. Then, up to her mother. “Is it a dinosaur?”
Julie considered how she’d respond. She was screwed when it came to the precise classification of a trilobite. “Sort of.”
“Wow.”
After a minute of turning the fossil over in her hands, Livy passed it back to her mother, who dropped it into the small green knapsack they’d brought that had contained their bottles of water, and now also held the smooth pebbles, bits of shell, and arrowheads they’d collected during the late afternoon. Then Livy went back down to the creek, crouching to look around the rocks and fallen logs for more fossils.
Julie Hutchinson felt a gentle tingling in her hand, and for some reason, it made her think of Hut, the way he grabbed her hand sometimes.
The way he did when she thought he was in love with her. Back in the courtship days. Back before the storm clouds had come into their marriage.
An animal scent nearby—dead raccoon? Possum? She hoped it wasn’t too close. Immediately, she glanced over at her daughter, who was teetering back and forth on a log at the edge of the creek, her small feet curving around the wood as if trying to clutch it. Livy had an enthusiastic smile on her face, and she leaped from the log into the sandy edge of the creek, causing a splattering that nearly reached Julie.
“Liv,” she scolded. The hem of her daughter’s dress was already soaked. “Olivia Hutchinson, get out of the water.”
Her daughter looked down at the water around her ankles. “I’m only a little in it, Mommy. It’s freezing. I like it.”
Julie let this one go. She glanced across to the other bank. That warm odor of a rotting wild creature wasn’t unusual in the woodlands and the several creeks just beyond their town. Sometimes she saw deer pausing between thickets, and recently, she and Livy got to see a beaver swimming down toward its dam.
“We should get back to the car. We need to pick up Matty next,” Julie said.
Julie crouched down to pick up some small, nearly round pebbles her daughter had dropped. She glanced over at Livy, who stared across at the view beyond the ridge, to the slope that led down to the lake.
Her daughter’s face had a curious slant to it—Livy squinted, and her nose wrinkled slightly, her head gently turning a bit, not quite looking up at the trees, but nearly.
“Mommy?” Livy asked, detecting something was wrong. “Daddy says it’s all right.”
Julie pushed herself up from the muddy grass. “He always says that.”
“He said it just now.”
“On your brain radio,” Julie said, grinning. It was a joke between Livy and her father that they could communicate on something Hut had made up called a “brain radio.”
The wind came up again; it got a bit chilly; Julie was about to lift Livy up out from the muddy water, afraid she might get a bit of a cold from being out when the weather was about to make such a sharp change.
“Daddy’s in the city. He won’t be home ’til suppertime.”
“Silly you,” Livy said, teasing. “He’s here. He just said it.” She glanced around through the ferns and trees, as if her father were playing hide-and-go-seek with her. “Daddy?” She turned her head side to side, and then scrunched her eyebrows up, confused.
After Julie wiped her daughter’s soles off with her own shirttails, and slipped her small feet into what Livy called her “sockets,” the small white and pink socks, then into her shoes, they walked back down the path that led to where she’d parked the car at the shoulder of the road below. The wind picked up and died down frequently.