Vella Munn - The Return of Cord Navarro

He couldn’t let the conversation continue. Matt was waiting for them to find him. And if Shannon went on, she’d only open wounds she’d spent years healing. He didn’t want her hurt any more than she already was. “You know why I had to be gone.”

“Oh, yes. Yes. We were drowning under medical bills and that had both of us scared. But, Cord, there’s another kind of drowning-of the soul. Of love.” She dragged her hands along her temple and grabbed twin handfuls of hair. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just so raw right now that-”

Although he simply nodded and returned to tracking, he was left with the realization that nothing about their conversation felt complete. The few times she’d spoken to him after that horrible day when he’d walked into an empty apartment stripped of her essence, she’d said only that his silence had been more than she could stand.

Nearly seven years ago they’d gone their separate ways. Neither of them needed any more pain.

But it hadn’t all been pain. She’d once been more important to him than life itself. Around her he’d felt whole. Vulnerable and incapable of telling her how much she meant to him, but whole. All she’d had to do was stand in front of him and hold out her arms to him and he would have died for her.

She’d once owned him heart and soul. Didn’t she know that?

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply through mouth and nostrils to clear his head of the cobwebs she’d always been able to spin inside him. Matt. Today was about Matt.

Still, because he was tracking with his eyes and not his ears, he didn’t need the silence she said she hated. After a few minutes, he drew her attention to a tree trunk that deer used to rub their antlers against, pointed out some black bear sign, and even showed her the entrance to a fox den nestled under a moss-covered boulder.

“How do you know where to look for a newborn fox or where a deer has bedded down?”

“Time and experience. My grandfather. John Muir.”

“The naturalist? What are you talking about?”

“He and Gray Cloud spoke the same language. I learned from both of them.”

Shannon didn’t speak, but he easily absorbed the questioning in her eyes. Looking out across an endless carpet of green, he sought inside himself for an answer. “Muir believed that everything in nature fits into us, becomes part of us.”

“You-”

“Not me. There’s more to Muir’s philosophy than that-about rivers flowing, not past, but through us, vibrating every fiber and cell of our bodies, making them glide and sing. Those aren’t the exact words, but it expresses the way I feel when I’m here. Part of nature.”

“Part of nature.” She breathed the words. “I never knew you had that kind of poetry in you.”

Made a little uneasy by what he’d revealed about himself, he gave her a casual-too casual-smile, “I try to hold on to what Gray Cloud told me because I believe there’s a timelessness to his wisdom.”

“Yes, there is. I’ve never thought about that before.”

“Not just him. I’ve found other sources, Indian prayers-Rachel Carson, William Wordsworth, George Washington Carver. Carver said that if you love something enough, it will talk with you. I love being out there where I can hear nature talking. I can’t imagine that ever changing.”

“That’s-” Her eyes glistened. “Beautiful.”

Without knowing he was going to do it, he touched a tear caught in her right lashes. She smiled, a slight, shy gesture. “Anyone can become tuned in with nature,” he went on, the words tumbling out of him simply because she’d smiled at him through tears he was responsible for. “All they have to do is listen and observe and love that world. You live out of doors. You must know what I’m talking about.” “I…think so. I don’t have the words you do to draw on, but they touch me.” She blinked away her tears and tried another smile. “Obviously they do.”

Although he turned to gaze at his green and brown and blue world, he sensed her eyes still on him.

“I don’t think you would have done that at eighteen,” she whispered. “Told anyone, not even me, about the poetry that has meaning for you.”

“No,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have.”

“Maybe it’s because you were still finding out who you are. I say that because I felt the same way. Growing up takes longer than we think it’s going to, doesn’t it? Eighteen isn’t nearly as mature as we’d like it to be.”

“No. It isn’t.”

After a few minutes of silence, she began talking about caring for orphan rabbits and a fawn whose mother had been hit by a car. Then, when he thought she might have run out of anything to say, she told him she’d seen so many deer this year that she barely paid any attention to them. But she could never dismiss the sight of an elk. Matt, too, had a fixation about them and when one occasionally came into the pasture with the horses, he considered his day complete.

Then, when the trail they were. on briefly became as clear as a highway, she admitted she wanted to buy a mountain bike so she could find and explore paths like this. She said she enjoyed most of her customers. A few had unrealistic expectations of what horseback riding on a well-worn trail was like and she’d had to learn how to deal with her customers’ reactions.

His attention spread between her and Matt’s erratic progress, he told her about competition between different law enforcement agencies and how that sometimes complicated his work.

He described the untouched view of natural forest land from his deck. She smiled, a little wistfully, he thought, then asked if he’d ever gotten the wide-angle lens for his camera he’d been talking about. He had, he said, surprised that she’d remembered.

As the day dragged on, he learned more about Shannon’s interests than he’d ever known and felt gifted because she wanted him to understand those things about her. Listening to her talk about her admiration of a local wildlife photographer, he was again struck by her enthusiasm for life.

That was what he’d fallen in love with-that and the way she’d freely given him her body and, he’d thought, her heart. What had scared him back when he was too young to truly understand the complexity of love had been the totality of his response to her body. Even with her walking behind him, out of sight much of the time, his body remembered.

Getting his work off the ground had put a great deal of strain on their marriage, but it had been nothing compared to the aftereffects of Summer’s death. Was it possible to mend what they’d once had? Maybe he-they-shouldn’t try. After all, they’d each built new lives for themselves. However, life had brought them back together, at least briefly.

He was halfway through telling her about his reaction to spotting a massive grizzly while being flown into Denali Park in Alaska by a ground-scraping bush pilot when he spotted a series of unexpected prints. Because he’d stopped to study his surroundings innumerable times, he didn’t think she would be alarmed when he did it again. Still, he was glad she couldn’t see inside his head.

Three or four people-men, probably, by the size of the prints-had been here in the past couple of days. The rain had washed away some of their tracks but not enough that he couldn’t draw out the information he needed but didn’t want. Their boots were new; they carried considerable weight on their backs, which altered their stance; they walked not like people out for a leisurely stroll, but cautiously and with purpose in mind.

Hunters?

The men followed the deer trail for another fifty yards before veering away from it. Although he continued to look for them, the prints didn’t reappear. Hadn’t they known what they’d come upon? he wondered. He wanted to go back to where he’d last seen the tracks, but if he did, Shannon would ask why he’d left the trail, and he’d have to tell her he was being forced to ask himself whether it was more important to find Matt or men with rifles.