“Were you in love with my mother?” she asked him suddenly.
He looked at her in surprise, his lean face intense, his green eyes startled. He shook his head. “I think I could have been if I had gotten to know her better, but I didn’t get the chance.” He smiled. “Isn’t that tragic?”
They walked up through the spring-mounted children’s toys toward the spruce groves. “You look like her,” Ross said after a moment.
Nest glanced over at him, watching him limp alongside her, leaning on his staff, his gaze directed ahead to where they were going. “I don’t think I do,” she said. “I don’t think I look like anybody. Which is just as well, because I don’t much like the way I look, just at the moment.”
Ross nodded. “We’re our own worst critics, sometimes.” Then he cocked an eyebrow at her. “But I like the way you look, even if you don’t. So sue me.’”
She smiled in spite of herself. They passed through the spruce trees to the turnaround and the cliffs. There were two cars parked at the cliff edge and a family on the swings nearby.
She thought back to Bennett Scott and the feeders, picturing it in her mind, remembering the night and the heat and the fear. She thought about Two Bears and wondered suddenly if he was there in the park again. She glanced about to see if she could spy him, but he was nowhere in sight. She let her thoughts of Two Bears and the spirits of the dead Sinnissippi drift away.
She led Ross to the gap in the fence line and through to the cemetery beyond. They walked along the edge of the blacktop roadway, through the rows of marble and granite tombstones, across the immaculate grass carpet, and under the stately, silent old hardwoods. The mingled scents of pine and new-mown grass filled the air, rich and pungent. Nest found herself strangely at ease. John Ross made her feel that way. The longer she was with him, the more comfortable she felt-as if she had known him a long time rather than for only a few hours. It was in the way he talked to her, neither as a child nor as an adult, but simply as a person; in the way he moved, neither self-conscious nor protective of his damaged body, not favoring it in an obvious, discomforting way, accepting it as it was; and mostly in the way he was at peace with the moment, as if only the here and now mattered, as if taking this walk with her were enough and what had gone before or what would come after had no place in his thoughts.
They walked through the rolling green of the cemetery and down its tree-shaded rows of markers to where her mother lay, out on a bluff overlooking the river and the land beyond. Her mother’s headstone was gray with black lettering and bore the words BELOVED DAUGHTER & MOTHER just beneath her name, Caitlin Anne Freemark. Nest stared at the grave without speaking, immutable and remote, borne to other times and places on the wings of her thoughts.
“I don’t remember her at all,” she said finally, tears springing to her eyes with her admission.
John Ross looked off into the trees. “She was small and gentle, with sandy hair and blue-gray eyes you couldn’t look away from. She was pretty, almost elfin. She was very smart, intuitive about things others would miss entirely. When she laughed, she could transport you to a better time and place in your life if you were sad or make you glad you were there with her if you were happy. She was daring and unafraid. She was never satisfied with just being told how something was; she always wanted to experience it for herself.”
He stopped, went silent suddenly, as if he’d come up against something he did not care to explore any further. Nest did not try to look at him. She brushed at her eyes and bit her lip to steady herself. It was always like this when she came to visit. No matter how much time had passed, it was always the same.