Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [30]
All right, then; fascinated by animal scat though she was (the last straw for her ex-husband, that part of her thesis), she was not about to eat it, nor eat after a mouse, either. She walked to the end of the porch in her heavy wool socks and continued out to the boulder under the wild cherry. She shook the hunks of yellow cornbread and crumbs onto the ground, adding her loss to the nebulae of birdseed glittering there. Then, dispirited utterly, she went back inside, sat at her table, and ate cold ravioli out of a can while she finished recording her notes. To hell with the body’s cravings.
Before sunset she rose from the table and stretched because she was cramped, then walked out to the porch for no good reason, just in time to catch the unusual sight of a luna moth flying in the daytime. The surprising ascent, like a pair of pale hickory leaves caught in an updraft, arrested her there in the doorway. She watched it flutter upward gradually by increments: up, down, then a little higher up, as if it were climbing a staircase in the air. Deanna didn’t realize she was holding her breath, even when she released it finally as the creature reached the upper leaves of the chokecherry, landed there, and held on. Luna moths were common enough up here but still never failed to move her because of their size and those pale-green, ethereal wings tipped with long, graceful tails. As if they were already ghosts, mourning their future extinction. This one was out of its element, awake in broad daylight. A busy chipmunk might have rousted it from a lower resting place. Or it was possible she was witnessing the fatal, final disorientation that overcomes a creature as it reaches the end of its life. Once, as a child, waiting with her dad in a gas station, she’d found a luna moth in that condition: confused and dying on the pavement in front of their truck. For the time it took him to pump the gas she’d held it in her hand and watched it struggle against its end. Up close it was a frightening beast, writhing and beating against her hand until wisps of pale-green fur slipped off its body and stuck to her fingers. Her horror had made her want to throw it down, and it was only her preconceived affection for the luna that made her hold on. When these creatures danced above their yard at night, she and her dad called them ballerinas. But this was no ballerina. Its body was a fat, furry cone flattened on one end into a ferocious face like a tiny, angry owl’s. It glared at Deanna, seeming to know too much for an insect and, worse, seeming disdainful. She hadn’t given up her love for luna after that, but she’d never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace.
It was later, long past dark, after she’d pinched out the lamp and was nearly asleep in her cot but not quite, when she heard him outside. Those were footsteps, she felt sure, though it wasn’t the crackle of a step that she’d heard. It wasn’t anything, really. She sat up in bed hugging herself under the blanket, holding her braid in her mouth to keep herself still. It was nothing, but nothing isn’t an absence, it’s a presence. A quieting of the insect noise, a change in the quality of night that means something is there, or someone. Or was it less than nothing, just a raccoon waddling through his endless rounds, come to scavenge the cornbread she’d thrown out?
Finally she heard something definite: the crackle of a step. She groped for the flashlight she kept under the cot, slipped her bare feet into her boots, and got to the door, where she stood quiet, looking out. Should she speak? Why didn’t he come?
Out in the darkness beyond the end of the porch where she scattered the seed—that was where he was. She could actually see movement. She put the butt end of the flashlight