“Yes,” he admitted with a sigh. “For the first years the boy had everything he could possibly want or need, his mother taught him the ways of the forest, and his father took him to town and showed him the ways of civilization.
“The happiness was not to last.” Luke closed his eyes again. “Marie-Rose had never lost her wildness, and once her babe was weaned, she would occasionally disappear into the woods, sometimes for entire days, leaving the boy in the care of her mate. At first this seemed no trouble, because the father’s business allowed him to stay home to look after the boy, or to take him into town on those days his mother was gone.
“The boy was too young to understand when things changed. He didn’t understand that the two disparate worlds of his parents were less compatible than even they had realized. He only learned later what had happened.
Luke heard his voice as it carried the story to its inevitable conclusion, recalling it with crystal clarity. He remembered waking that first time they had argued, hearing the sharp crack of angry voices in the kitchen, his mother’s lapse into French—which she seldom did unless she was very angry or very happy—and his father’s booming voice shouting back. He had crouched in bed, listening, fearful without knowing why, longing to rush in and stop them.
That had only been the first of many fights, conflicts that came one after another with greater and greater frequency. They were always careful to do it away from him, so he never heard much of what they said to each other, he only knew it hurt.
He began to catch his usually cheerful mother in tears, crying quietly where she thought no one could see, his attempts to comfort her made her smile but never took the sadness from her eyes. She began to disappear for longer and longer times into the forest, always returning with endearments and apologies, holding him tightly so that he could not be angry that she’d left him. But his father began to interrupt their quiet moments, to tell his mother she was not to go out, that she was to stay and look after their son and the house and forget her wild ways.
Luke had still not understood the anger between them, so potent that he felt it like a black cloud summoning a hard spring rain. But he saw his mother’s sorrow, and it was her he turned to, her he grew closer to, protecting her instinctively from the threat he saw in his father.
A day came when his father grew so angry that he came at Luke’s mother with a lifted hand prepared to strike; that was the day when Luke stood between them, holding his body as a barrier, defying his father with every ounce of a child’s strength. The blow had fallen on him. And his mother had gone at his father with a rage Luke had never seen before, so savagely that his father had fled the cabin.
That was the first of his father’s absences. He, too, always returned, often with soft apologies for Luke, and even for his mate. But things were never right again. The arguments became cold silences, the disappearances by his mother or father longer and longer. One or the other always looked after him, but he learned what it was to rely on himself, to be prepared for new shocks in a life that had opened up an unknowable abyss under his feet.
One day his father left and did not come back. He waited, and his mother did, in weary silence. A year passed, and he did not return. He left no explanation, no warning.
Luke remembered when his mother accepted that her mate would never return. She never spoke to him of it, never explained—but he remembered her wild eyes that day, her tears as she held Luke and rocked him, even though he had grown too old—her black hair tangled and her voice ragged as she sang a lullaby in broken French. That day, it was as if the light died in her. The wildness faded. Luke never understood until much later why his mother had been so terribly broken.