Page 17 of Property of Prophet

“I’m not sure going back is the thing I’m supposed to do next.”

Her hands stop on the glove. “Because you don’t remember it?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

I look at her, and she waits.

“Because I’m starting to remember this.”

Her eyes hold mine. “This?”

The cabin, Bear, her, but I don’t say any of it.

“Yeah.”

Something moves across her face. Quickly gone before I can think about it too much, not relief, not disappointment. The lamp throws its little bit of gold light along her jaw, and I find myself watching it the way I watched the aurora the other night. Same complete, stupid attention. Same sense of something too big to look away from, even though looking is going to cost me.

She slowly sets down the glove, as if her hands decided something before the rest of her caught up. Neither of us says anything for a long moment. The gap between us, which isn’t that wide in a room this small, closes. The heat off her skin reaches me, the same way the stove did that first morning. I know that if I lift my hand right now and put it against her jaw, she will not pull away.

So, I do.

Two fingers, light, the way you would touch something you aren’t sure you have earned the right to touch yet. She goes still, stiller than I’ve ever seen her, a different kind of still than the question stillness. Her breath catches, and her eyes lift to mine, and there’s nothing clinical left in the way she’s looking at me. Just a woman, looking at a man, in lamplight, with her whole face open.

I want to close the rest of that distance more than I’ve wanted anything since the snow. I can feel exactly how easy it’d be, and exactly how much it might cost her after, and it’s that second part that keeps my hand where it is, thumb resting at the corner of her jaw, neither of us moving any closer. I don’t know yet what I’d be bringing back to her if the way back ever opens up. I’m not going to let her fall for a man who might take her down with him without meaning to.

So, I don’t kiss her. I let my hand drop, slowly as it rose, and her exhale sounds like relief and loss at the same time. I figure mine probably does too.

“Get some sleep, Doc,” I say.

“Don’t call me that.”

“You keep answering to it.”

She picks up the glove, hands not quite steady, and neither of us says another word about any of it. The night closes over the moment the way snow closes over a track, doesn’t erase it, but smooths it down enough that you’d have to know already it was there to find it.

The moose shows up at dawn.

We’re both at the window with our coffee, which has turned into its own small ritual these last few weeks, standing in the gray that passes for morning out here, not talking, just watching the clearing for no reason. It’s there, and it’s doing something slow worth paying attention to.

He comes out of the tree line without any warning, the way the biggest things in this country always seem to. A bull, old by the rack on him, broad through the. He moves as if nothing has ever once given him a reason to hurry, his breath rolling off him in clouds. Snow is taking his weight with a sound I can hear through the glass. Step. Pause. Step.

He stops square in front of the cabin.

Not near it. Not passing through on his way somewhere else, which is what every other animal in this clearing has always done, give or take a curious look. He is close enough that I could count the hairs on his muzzle if I felt like it. He slowly turns his head and looks at me.

For a stretch of time that goes well past anything I’d call coincidence, his eyes hold mine through the glass, no fear in them or challenge, just a plain, patient kind of acknowledgment. The way you’d look at someone you recognized from a long way off and didn’t expect to run into this morning.

Then he turns and walks back into the trees, unhurried, and the clearing is just a clearing again.

“That happens,” Lily says, after a while, her coffee gone cold in her hand. “They come through here. Not often, but they come through.”

“Not like that, it doesn’t.”

She looks at me sideways. I don’t have a good answer for the look, only the same certainty I’ve been carrying since the woodpile, that something in this country knows my name even when I don’t, and just went to a fair amount of trouble to tell me so.

That night, something comes to the tree line that isn’t the moose, and isn’t whatever stood there the first time either.