“That’s so cool.”
“Is it gonna keep getting bigger bigger and bigger?” Tycho asked, holding his hands as far apart as they could go.
“I don’t know.” Orla took out her phone and snapped a picture of it. The kids, already losing interest, ran back to play. Orla dug around on Google, trying to figure out what search terms to put in. The signal was decent for once, maybe because of the cloudless day—or maybe this was the one spot in the yard where the mountains weren’t in the way. “I found it!” They ignored her, but Orla read through the listings, fascinated.
Shaw came out of the house carrying a pair of snowshoes and a map, a day pack slung over one shoulder. Wisely, he’d thought to put on sunglasses.
“Hey look!” Orla called. “We have a snow roller in our yard! That’s what they’re called…” She consulted her phone. “Also snow bales or wind snowballs. They’re a meteorological phenomenon. And yes, Tycho, they can get really big. Or many can form in the same place under the right conditions…”
No one was really paying attention to her. Tycho, catching sight of his father’s snowshoes, slogged over to the porch where he was putting them on. “Can I try?” he said, reaching out.
“Not this time, Tigger. These are too big for you.”
Orla kept her phone out as she waded back to the house. She’d always thought snowshoes were wooden and webbed, but the ones Shaw was fastening on were high-tech steel frames with strategically placed crampons. Julie had sent along some less expensive and smaller ones for the kids, hand-me-downs from Jamie and Derek. But evidently Shaw was planning a solo outing.
“No one cares about the phenomenon in our yard? Where are you going?” she asked. Behind her, she heard the whisk-whisk of Eleanor Queen’s snow pants as she strode over to join the rest of her family.
Shaw waved the topographical map. “Thought I’d survey the property—it’s all marked. And take some pictures. I’m psyched to start on my nature work. Mostly, I just wanted to walk around. Looking for inspiration, and the trees might tell me something.” He winked at Tycho.
“Do trees talk?” he asked his papa.
Orla caught the turn of Eleanor Queen’s head as she looked up toward the towering pine.
“Oh yes,” said Shaw. “But you have to listen very hard. See all these…” He gestured around them and both kids watched his hand sweep over the audience of attentive trees. “They speak their own language. They whisper it in their branches and send messages through their roots—they touch underground, rippling currents filled with all the news and gossip. Sometimes, when it’s very windy, they have a lot to talk about and you can hear them chatter and argue. But when the air is still, you have to concentrate.”
“What do they talk about?” Tycho asked.
“Oh, the things they’ve seen from way high up, and way down low. The animals and bugs who come to visit, the birds who build nests in their branches. In the city, we have the bustle of life in big apartment buildings. Here, we have the forest, busy in a different way.”
“Wow,” said Tycho, wide-eyed and enchanted.
Orla saw the effort Eleanor Queen was making to hear them, the community of trees, her utter faith that they were communicating with one another, or her, just beyond her range of comprehension.
“Papa doesn’t mean it literally,” Orla said to her daughter, tugging the left side of her hat back over her ear, trying to distract her.
“Oh, I do! I’ve learned amazing things from trees—why do you think I wanted to come here?” He winked again and Tycho knew his cue to join his father in a giggle. But Orla could’ve shoved snow down Shaw’s shirt. Couldn’t he see how impressionable his daughter was? Even if, at nine, she was better able to tell reality from fantasy than her brother, what did she know about the wilderness? It was dangerous to anthropomorphize things for the amusement of a sensitive child.
“Papa’s right,” said Eleanor Queen, her attention still on the trees. “I can almost hear them…”
Shaw grinned, but Orla gave him a see-what-you’ve-done glare—which seemed to prompt him to head off on his adventure. “Okay, my tribe, I will see you upon my return!”
Their property was officially just over six acres, but it was surrounded by heavily forested hills that looked endless. Only the flatter area immediately around the house had been cleared. Orla didn’t want to express her disappointment at his departure, not so soon after their awkward conversation the night before about not feeling safe. He’d seemed to take her concern seriously, but not so seriously that he considered her—them—in any real danger. Which was good, on the one hand, but he hadn’t even said anything over their oatmeal and bacon about going out on his own. She couldn’t decide if she was angry that he wasn’t sticking around to help the kids with their snow creature, or afraid of being left at the house alone for the first time. In the middle of nowhere. She wished they’d gotten the internet hooked up before they’d moved in. The rest of the world felt so far out of reach.
“Does your cell work out there?” She trailed behind him as he tramped toward the tree line behind their house, the snowshoes keeping him aloft. The signal on her own phone dropped to almost nothing as they neared the woods.
“Don’t know. I didn’t bring it.”
“What if something happens?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know…like you slide off a cliff and break your leg.” Things like that always happened in movies with mountains and snow.
He stopped before entering the forest. “I won’t go that far. And there are no cliffs out here. Don’t worry. Back soon!” She offered him her phone, but he waved it off. It was all so easy for him. Maybe it had taken those years in the city to make him realize this was where he belonged. He seemed to need no adjustment period and hadn’t once expressed a longing for the coffee places and delis that had so recently been a fixture of his routine. But she already longed for a twenty-four-hour diner with a menu as long as Moby-Dick and Spanish-speaking waiters who—such a cliché—knew what she liked to order.
“Papa?” Eleanor Queen ran over, the gloom of apprehension returning to her face. “What about the snow dragon?”
“Don’t worry, Bean, your mom can get you started. And I’ll help when I get back. Or—it’s not like the city—we can work on it a bit every day. This is all ours.” He spread out his arms. “The cold is staying. This snow’s not going anywhere.”
Shaw was good at making Eleanor Queen smile. Orla would always love him for that. Even if he did occasionally get sidetracked by his own impetuous ideas.
He tromped off into the trees, promising to report back on anything interesting he found or heard. The trunks looked so stark against the snow, like a thousand otherworldly doorways. A wind flittered in the branches, and Orla hoped the trees weren’t gossiping about her and her silly, urban, unprepared ways. At least Shaw looked like he knew what he was doing. Orla marched back to the children and, despite her original intentions, got on her knees and helped them build up their mounds of snow. “This can be the dragon’s back,” she said.