Nest was silent a moment, thinking. “Mom believed, though, didn’t she?”
Her grandmother nodded wordlessly.
“What about my dad? Do you think he believed, too?”
The old woman reached for her cigarettes. “He believed.”
Nest studied her grandmother, watched the way her fingers shook as she worked the lighter. “Do you think he will ever come back?”
“Your father? No.”
“Maybe he’ll want to see how I’ve turned out. Maybe he’ll come back for that.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
Nest worried her lip. “I wonder sometimes who he is, Gran. I wonder what he looks like.” She paused. “Do you ever wonder?”
Her grandmother drew in on the cigarette, her eyes hard and fixed on a point in space somewhere to Nest’s left. “No. What would be the point?”
“He’s not a forest creature, is he?”
She didn’t know what made her ask such a question. She startled herself by even speaking the words. And the way her grandmother looked at her made her wish she had held her tongue.
“Why would you ever think that?” Evelyn Freemark snapped, her voice brittle and sharp, her eyes bright with anger.
Nest swallowed her surprise and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just wondered, I guess.”
Her grandmother looked at her for a long moment without blinking, then turned away. “Go make your bed. Then go out and play with your friends. Cass Minter has called you twice already. Lunch will be here if you want it. Dinner’s at six. Go on.”
Nest rose and carried her dishes to the sink. No one had ever told her anything about her father. No one seemed to know any thing-about him. But that didn’t stop her from wondering. She had been told that her mother never revealed his identity, not even to her grandparents. But Nest suspected that Gran knew something about him anyway. It was in the way she avoided the subject-or became angry when he was mentioned. Why did she do that? What did she know that made her so uncomfortable? Maybe that was why Nest persisted in her questions about him, even silly ones like the one she had just asked. Her father couldn’t be a forest creature. If he was, Nest would be a forest creature as well, wouldn’t she?
“See you later, Gran,” she said as she left the room. She went down the hall to her room to shower and dress. There were all different kinds of forest creatures, Pick had told her once. Even if he hadn’t told her exactly what they were. So did that mean there were some made of flesh and blood? Did it mean some were human, like her?
She stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror looking at herself for a long time before she got into the shower.
CHAPTER 3
Old Bob backed his weathered Ford pickup out of the garage, drove up the lane through the wide-boughed hardwoods, and turned onto Sinnissippi Road. In spite of the heat he had the windows rolled down and the air conditioner turned off because he liked to smell the woods. In his opinion, Sinnissippi Park was the most beautiful woods for miles- always had been, always would be. It was green and rolling where the cliffs rose above the Rock River, and the thick stands of shagbark hickory, white oak, red elm, and maple predated the coming of the white man into Indian territory. Nestled down within the spaces permitted by a thinning of the larger trees were walnut, cherry, birch, and a scattering of pine and blue spruce. There were wildflowers that bloomed in the spring and leaves that turned color in the fall that could make your heart ache. In Illinois, spring and fall were the seasons you waited for. Summer was just a bridge between the two, a three-to-four-month yearly preview of where you would end up if you were turned away from Heaven’s gates, a ruinous time when Mother Nature cranked up the heat as high as it would go on the local thermostat and a million insects came out to feed. It wasn’t like that every summer, and it wasn’t like that every day of every summer, but it was like that enough that you didn’t notice much of anything else. This summer was worse than usual, and today looked to be typical. The heat was intense already, even here in the woods, though not so bad beneath the canopy of the trees as it would be downtown. So Old Bob breathed in the scents of leaves and grasses and flowers and enjoyed the coolness of the shade as he drove the old truck toward the highway, reminding himself of what was good about his hometown on his way to his regular morning discussion of what wasn’t.