Sightings

Chapter Twenty-eight

Outrage thundered through Sam’s mind as he strode down the road toward his house. Before he reached his driveway he heard Jenny’s car door slam and the car start. Without turning around he stepped onto the shoulder, afraid that her anger might equal his own and she might try to run him down. But she sped past him trailing a wake of fallen leaves. He watched her car until it was out of sight, then leaned against one of the posts on his split rail fence and took several deep breath. As the racing of his heart slowed, he let his eyes move from one end of the grand old house to other, along its straight roof, its sturdy sides and its ancient cracked clapboard. It was his house, his dream, and he drew from its strength.

Instead of going inside, he decided to take a walk and let his mind go blank. He continued up the road across the small bridge, and cut into the woods on the other side of the river. There was a path made by deer and bear that followed above the river as it wound into the valley between the hills. The bear would be sleeping after a long night of foraging, so he felt safe in entering their domain. After walking several minutes he sat down on a log which bore the teeth marks of beavers. He was amazed that they could fell a tree of such thickness. Below him at the edge of the river was their lodge. He gazed into the crystal clear water hoping to see a beaver leave the lodge, but then he remembered that they too slept during the day, snug in their house of mud and branches.

Sam watched the floating leaves, like golden gondolas swirling past in the rapidly flowing river. His thoughts turned to Sarah and the cruelty done to her by Vera, Jenny and her boss, Farwell.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that, Sarah.” He started to say more, but stopped, realizing how comforting it was to talk with her as if she were there. Then he went on. “It was cruel. People you thought you could trust turning against you. I would have run, too. But I think I would have run home to you, not off to San Francisco.” He couldn’t help the bitterness that crept into his voice, but there it was. “Why, Sarah? Why didn’t you come home? Why didn’t you tell me things weren’t right between us?

“I can see that Jenny’s blackmail wasn’t the reason you left. It was just the last straw. You were ready to go months before when you withdrew your money. But what an awful door to go through in order to find a new life. Madeline told me about your depression. About Dave Cowan, too.”

He exhaled a long breath and blinked his eyes. “That’s hard for me to admit. I should have been the one to bring you out of your sadness. But who am I to talk? You had Dave like I have Annie now. I love her, not in the same way I love you, but still I love her. Is that how you loved Dave . ,” he thought for a moment, “or someone else now?”

An errant breeze stirred the trees above him, then touched his face like the warm breath of a lover, like Sarah sitting beside him infusing his soul with her love. He fought to ignore it, wanting to hold onto his resentment and the questions whose answers disturbed him, but the sense of her presence was as real as the warmth of the sun.

“Sarah?” he whisper. “Sarah?” He held himself motionless, afraid the slightest movement would shatter this palpable sensation of her presence.

The only answer he heard was the ripple of water over rocks and the chatter of a red squirrel on a branch above his head. With half-closed eyes he stared into the water that curved around the beavers’ lodge. Then, to his amazement, he saw the long brown body of a beaver slip from the lodge and swim along the bottom of the river. He watched it until the reflection of the sun hid the beaver.

“Now isn’t that something? I thought they were supposed to sleep during the day.”

Silently, as if my magic, the beaver materialized on the surface at the other side of the river. There it floated as if waiting for something. He returned his eyes to the lodge just in time to see another, larger beaver swim out of the tangled mass of branches under the water. It passed beneath the mirror reflection of the sun, and soon emerged next to the other beaver. The female had come out first and waited for the male. As Sam watched the beavers, they watched him, then slowly, effortlessly, without a ripple, began to swim upstream together.

As he pondered this mysterious occurrence of beavers in the middle of the day, the shuckings of a pine cone began dropping on his head and shoulders.

“What the hell?”

Looking up into the tree he saw the red squirrel above him, jabbering at him and vibrating his tail insistently. “Hey you territorial little fella,” Sam laughed, “I’ve got as much right here as you do.” He got to his feet and instantly the squirrel darted to a branch in the next tree. “I’ll get you,” Sam joked as he followed him. Together they made their way to the road, the squirrel leaping from branch to branch ahead of him and Sam plodding along on the ground below. When Sam stopped to rest, the squirrel waited for him, chattering incessantly.

“Okay,” Sam said, “I get the message. It’s time to get off my butt, and find her.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine