Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

He watched as the energy company crew lowered the boom with its cage and the truck drove away.

N icholas asked Suzette to walk with him to the woods.

They spoke little on the way down, batting between them recollections of schoolteachers and the venial offenses of childhood. They stopped at Carmichael Road, and looked across at the woods. Neither said a word for a long while.

The trees had been given new life by the recent downpours. The sun winked on their leaves, which shimmered with green luster, and their lightly laughing tops rolling up the gentle hills to the river. They were still dark and dense, but there was no foreboding anymore. No sense of things lurking. No gravity to draw you in, no ill shiver to send you hurrying. The woods were plain, and vulnerable.

“It’s gone,” said Suzette.

“Yes.”

“ She’s gone.”

“Yes.”

Suzette nodded, took his arm, and brother and sister walked home.

H annah waited and waited for him to come.

Eventually, the telephone rang, and she ran to the living room to answer-but her mother beat her to it.

Mrs. Gerlic was speaking with him. Her voice was snipped and severe, warning him not to call, that Hannah was fine, thank you, but to please stay away. She hung up.

But Hannah knew he would come. He was a good man, a fine man. A brave man. A little misguided, though.

Her leg was healing nicely. She felt quite good and told her parents so. She went to Miriam’s funeral and cried at all the right spots.

The police asked her questions about the night that she and Nicholas went into the woods, but she said all she could remember was finding a shotgun on the path and touching it even though she knew she shouldn’t, and dropping it and it going off with a very scary bang. Everything else was… Well, that was all she could remember.

She said she was sorry for sneaking out, and everyone believed her.

But she did remember. She remembered everything.

Including His promise.

She was angry that Nicholas hadn’t come, but that was okay. Things would work out in time.

In weeks and months, after her parents were lulled by normalcy and their tears were done and they’d grown bored with watching out for Hannah, she would be allowed again to walk to school and back.

Then she could go back into the woods.

She could build a new place.

Replant the garden. Tend her trees.

And get back her pretty man.