Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“This calls for a toast,” I said.

I poured four small glasses of wine and handed them around. I felt detached from the news. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe it, but I still believed its opposite, too, and these two opposing thoughts were in different corners of my mind, refusing to budge. It was as though I was witnessing good fortune through a lens of personal defeat. But what had been my defeat? So I smiled, smiled authentically, certain that my body language wasn’t giving me away. This was truly wonderful news, after all.

We raised our glasses.

“To…” Kent began.

To what?

To the absence of cancer?

“To freedom,” said Blake at last.

“Yes.” My mother smiled and nodded. “To freedom.”

We drank, and as we drank I began to see that the toast applied to all of us. I watched Blake nudge my mother and laugh. The sunlight now fully flooded the house, drenching the table and torn paper like spilled orange juice, and I marveled at how Blake always had the perfect thing to say at the perfect time. My mother broke from us to open another bottle of wine, and I joined her in the kitchen. She is going to live, I thought, trying desperately to believe it. My mother is going to live.

“To life ,” I said.

“Yes, sweetie. Can you hand me the corkscrew?”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“Yeah, you know.”

“Well, go back to work, for one. But not today!”

Bottle open, she pushed past me to the dining room, filled the glasses, and began cleaning up the paper she’d torn.

High clouds glowed orange in the sunset sky. My mother was in bed, Kent passed out, and I was sitting on the back porch steps with Blake, nursing the last beer in the house. Night sounds were beginning to fill the air, birds and crickets and small scurrying creatures, and a breeze tapped together the long, spiky branches of the monkey puzzle tree, tapping like fingernails on a tabletop, like the sound of waiting.

“I bet half of what you hear at night,” I said, “is just what you’d hear in the day if the day wasn’t so loud.”

We were sitting close, though it wasn’t cold, and the skin of Blake’s bare shoulder brushed against my arm as she leaned forward to flick an ant off her toe.

“Can you believe that bus thing?”

A strange new sound came alive, louder than the rest. Not a bird — it was some kind of instrument, a flute maybe. Or some kind of recorder? It was a haunting, hollow sound, and while it wasn’t playing melodically, it was obviously intentional, a kind of meandering note that twisted and bent as though drunk.

Blake turned to me. I could feel her stare on the side of my face. “You know about the bus thing, right?”

“I guess not,” I said, “because I just said ‘what bus thing’ in my head.”

“Some guy shot a bus driver? And the bus drove off the Aurora Bridge and landed on an apartment building?”

“Jesus. When was this?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

Clearly this had been the cause of the traffic I’d been stuck in with Echo. I thought of the man who’d smoked Echo’s weed. An undercover cop? I finished the beer and gently tossed the bottle into the driveway.

“Do you intentionally avoid the news or something?” Blake asked. “This was the only thing that’s been able to push the Seattle Lights off the front page in days.”

“You remember my neighbors Josie and Happy? I think I’ve told you about them. Little girl named Alice?”

“You were over there when I picked you up.”

“Yeah, well, Josie tried to commit suicide yesterday, I think.”

“You think?”

“Well, she ‘hurt herself,’” I said, using air quotes.

“That’s kind of not the same thing, is it?”

“Did you see my air quotes?”

“Who are you getting this from?”

“Her husband. He brought their daughter here, and we watched her while he went to the hospital.”

“Yesterday?”

“Something about how he said it. ‘Josie hurt herself.’ I don’t know. But so I was preoccupied.”

“It just careened off the side of the bridge, apparently. No one else died, which I basically can’t believe.”

“What the heck is that, do you think?”

“I don’t know. One of those slide whistle things?”

“Yeah, I bet you’re right.”

We listened for a while, but the playing stopped and there was laughter, then the laughter died off and the night sounds returned. Or, rather, they became noticeable again. Then again, I thought, some of them could very well have paused; birds, for instance, scared by the slide whistle. Cats, curious.

Blake leaned over and kissed me.

BLAKE AND I STOOD in the pea patch behind Cooper’s house. A family of rabbits munched on red leaf lettuce nearby; the mother eyed us warily as her babies huddled over their lunch buffet. A woman who’d been kneeling in a neighboring flowerbed stood and, seeing the rabbits, angrily scared them away, stomping her feet.

“Little fuckers,” she said.

“Aren’t rabbits good for gardens?”

The woman looked at me like I was stupid, which probably wasn’t far from the truth. She took off her gardening gloves, pulled out a pack of Marlboros, lit one.

“No,” Blake whispered, “I’m not sleeping with him.”

Since our kiss, my curiosity about Dale had deepened, and I’d begun to second-guess my earlier conclusion that their relationship was sexless. Perhaps I’d just decided that for my own piece of mind — something that had been easier to come by when I’d given up hope on us myself.

“But.”

“But nothing.”

It was obvious Blake was hiding something, but I figured I could work on her slowly. I had the entire summer, suddenly, to do what I wanted. “Okay.”

We went in through the basement door and up the steps, and I found myself looking forward to seeing this man, who, despite his relationship with Blake, seemed harmless enough — he was an overgrown eight-year-old, with all his childish enthusiasms and sincere fascination with the world.

Dale greeted us with coffee, pointed to a map he’d laid out on the table that had held his clock.

“ That , my friends, is what we’re up against.”

The map was of a wooded area south of Seattle.

“There’s a Tidemark Forum retreat out there this weekend,” Blake said. “And Dale wants us to go.”

“Us?”

Cooper stood beside me and pointed to an area he’d circled, the letter W scrawled in the center. “Weyerhaeuser,” he said.

“That’s that,” I said, “you know, that tree-growing company.”

“More precisely,” Cooper said. “Tree gene-manipulating company.”

Blake was sitting on the couch, thumbing through a magazine, and she looked up just as I looked over. “Just hear him out.”

“I’m not not hearing him out,” I said, irritated. “I’m waiting to hear what there is to hear!”

“You’re frustrated,” Cooper said, “and I don’t blame you one bit. Let’s start with Tidemark.”

It was true; I was frustrated. But not with him, or this. I was frustrated by Blake’s assumption that I was impatient. Was she upset that I’d asked her about sleeping with Cooper? I thought this had been a pretty reasonable thing to ask. It was possible she felt our kiss had been a mistake, but if so, why hadn’t she said so? I tried to make eye contact with her again, but she was ignoring me.

“Okay,” I said.

“Tidemark is just a cover. Tidemark is a way to get close to Weyerhaeuser. You see,” and here he pointed back at the W, “Tidemark is the only organization that owns land anywhere near here. Weyerhaeuser began buying it all up at well above market value — our first red flag — but Graves refused to sell. He didn’t need the money, and the forest there holds special spiritual significance for him.”