When she finally told her grandmother about Wraith, her grandmother’s response was strange. She didn’t question what Nest was telling her. She didn’t suggest that Nest might be mistaken or confused. She went all still for a moment, her eyes assumed a distant look, and her thin, old hands tightened about the mittens she was knitting.
“Did you see anything else?” she asked softly.
“No,” said Nest, wondering suddenly if there was something she should have seen.
“He just appeared, this dog did? The feeders came close to you, and the dog appeared?” Gran’s eyes were sharp and bright.
“Yes. That first time. Now I just see him following me sometimes, watching me. He doesn’t come too close. He always stays back. But the feeders are afraid of him. I can tell.”
Her grandmother was silent.
“Do you know what he is?” Nest pressed anxiously.
Her grandmother held her gaze. “Perhaps.”
“Is he there to protect me?”
“I think we have to find that out.”
Nest frowned. “Who sent him, Gran?”
But her grandmother only shook her head and turned away. “I don’t know,” she answered, but the way she said it made Nest think that maybe she did.
For a long tune, Nest was the only one who saw the dog. Sometimes her grandmother would come into the park with her, but the dog did not show himself on those occasions.
Then one day, for no reason that Nest could ever determine, he appeared out of a cluster of spruce at twilight while the old woman and her granddaughter walked through the west-end play area toward the cliffs. Her grandmother froze, holding on to the little girl’s hand tightly.
“Gran?” Nest said uncertainly.
“Wait here for me, Nest,” her grandmother replied. “Don’t move.”
The old woman walked up to the big animal and knelt before him. It was growing dark, and it was hard to see clearly, but it seemed to Nest as if her grandmother was speaking to the beast. It was very quiet, and she could almost hear the old woman’s words. She remained standing for a while, but then she grew tired and sat down on the grass to wait. There was no one else around. Stars began to appear in the sky and shadows to swallow the last of the fading light. Her grandmother and the dog were staring at each other, locked hi a strange, silent communication that went on for a very long time.
Finally her grandmother rose and came back to her. The strange dog watched for a moment, then slowly melted back into the shadows.
“It’s all right, Nest,” her grandmother whispered in a thin, weary voice, taking her hand once more. “His name is Wraith. He is here to protect you.”
She never spoke of the meeting again.
As Nest wriggled her way through the hedgerow at the back of her yard, she paused for a moment at the edge of the rutted dirt service road that ran parallel to the south boundary of the lot and recalled anew how Sinnissippi Park had appeared to her that first time. So long ago, she thought, and smiled at the memory. The park had seemed much bigger then, a vast, sprawling, mysterious world of secrets waiting to be discovered and adventures begging to be lived. At night, sometimes, when she was abroad with Pick, she still felt as she had when she was five, and the park, with its dark woods and gloomy ravines, with its murky sloughs and massive cliffs, seemed as large and unfathomable as it had then.
But now, in the harsh light of the July midday, the sun blazing down out of another cloudless sky, the heat a faint shimmer rising off the burned-out flats, the park seemed small and constrained. The ball fields lay just beyond the service road, their parched diamonds turned dusty and hardened and dry, their grassy outfields gray-tipped and spiky. There were four altogether, two close and two across the way east. Farther on, a cluster of hardwoods and spruce shaded a play area for small children, replete with swings and monkey bars and teeter-totters and painted animals on heavy springs set in concrete that you could climb aboard and ride.