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By Root 262 0

Anna disappeared into her world, where even she was a stranger, and Rafael found himself alone once more. This was his night hour, when he was fully awake, conscious of the life of those trees that circled the field, the faint moon. Yet he was alone. The last time Rafael had laid eyes on his father was the morning he had seen him walk from Aria’s grave. Rafael had needed him in the months that followed, to coax him back into the world. But there was no communication or evidence of his father’s whereabouts. There was a maze of small towns, even cities, he could have been in. Rafael had become parentless. It was as if neither of his parents could exist without the presence of the other. Rafael had lost each wing of protection.

Anna came up behind him in silence and put her hands on his shoulders.

You went away again.

No, I am still here.

Good, I want to talk to you about something.

To do with us …

Not us, she said. Something about me.

Then suddenly Anna stopped thinking, her hesitation disappeared. Ahead of them a hare was peering from the border of darkness. She waited for it to take a leap into the light. Curiosity, courage, it was what they both wished for beneath their pounding hearts.

Out of the Past

For some years Claire had been living two distinct lives. During the week she had a job in San Francisco with a lawyer named Vea, a senior deputy in the Office of the Public Defender. The work was mostly arduous research, and Vea had walked Claire through the craft and process of it, noting there was something carefully obsessive in this woman who was able to recognize a mouse of information miles away. Then, on weekends, Claire disappeared. She would drive out of the city to the farm south of Petaluma and spend an hour or two of the Friday night with her father.

They sat and ate dinner across from each other. She noticed how much older he seemed. She was aware of how his clothes looked loose on him now, although he still appeared a severe man, precise as a utility in the way he moved and the way he talked at the kitchen table. He was the one who, in his twenties, had cleared most of the land, working long days, and fought back coyotes and badgers that were supposedly as ferocious as wolverines. She and Anna had heard that he’d once tracked a cougar for several days with a pair of bluetick hounds that eventually treed the two-hundred-pound animal, and that he had shot it out of the branches. The girls had yearned for him to dramatize such incidents, turn them into great adventures from his youth. But he had refused, always laconic and silent about the landscape of his past. Even now, he and Claire circled the episode that led to the absence of Anna in their lives, never speaking of it. It was as if the loss of Anna had consumed him and then exhausted him, until he had in some way concluded his emotion, the way he had probably done after the death of his wife, when his daughters were too young to know about it. And even if the pain and his fierce love of Anna were still somewhere, loose in his skin, he and this remaining daughter would now be silent about it. The last time Claire had spoken of Anna, her father had raised his palm into the air with an awful plea for her to stop. There was no longer a closeness between him and Claire; whatever intimacy had once existed had always been engineered by Anna.

During these visits Claire would see him again for a brief moment the next morning, before she rode into the hills with a rain slicker, water, and food for the next thirty-six hours in a pannier. She and the horse climbed into hills that some part of her had always believed were her true home. Here she was uninterpreted by family life, could be dangerous to herself, feeling the thrill at coming upon a campsite at night after being surrounded by a ground fog, that divine state of being half lost, half bewildered, and conscious of a wisp of smoke from some campfire.

She risked everything out there, taking narrow trails too fast in moonlight, swimming in turbulent river currents, cantering over No Hands Bridge