Chapter 15 MAYA
MAYA
The bus door slides open and they pour out.
Small bodies in bright jackets, backpacks bouncing, voices already climbing over each other before their feet hit the ground. A teacher at the door counting heads, one hand out to slow the ones moving too fast.
I used to be her.
The one who knew every name, who spent the week before a field trip making sure everything would be perfect, building it up day by day until the kids were vibrating with it.
I was the one with the clipboard who knew which children would need reminding to stay with the group and which ones would surprise you, the quiet ones who turned out to be the most engaged once the real thing was in front of them.
The sound comes through the glass. High and layered, children's voices overlapping, and for a second I'm not here. I'm in a room that smells of paint and the particular warmth of twenty children in a space built for them. I know every face. I know every name.
Then diesel from the idling bus comes under the door and I'm back.
My chest feels like a closed fist.
I reach for the reception counter. My hand finds a pen cap beside the sign-in sheet and I close my fingers around it. The edge bites into my palm. Sharp and small and specific. I press harder and focus on that.
The children are inside now. The room is full of their noise and their movement and I'm standing in the middle of it with a pen cap cutting into my hand and the tears are right there, right at the surface, and I think with what's left of my composure: not here.
Not in front of twenty kindergartners who have no idea what they've walked into.
I feel a tug on my jacket.
I look down.
A girl. Red jacket, dark eyes, looking up at me with the gravity of a child who has an important question and will not be kept waiting.
"Is it true, Miss? Do wolves eat people?"
I open my mouth. Nothing comes.
The teacher's voice, the warm and engaged and what a great question voice. It's gone. There's just me, pen cap in my fist, looking at a child who is waiting.
Then Reid is beside me.
He goes down on one knee, trying and failing, to put all his height at the level of a five year old.
"No," he says. "Wolves don't hunt kids. And these wolves are behind strong fences. Everyone's safe."
The girl considers this seriously. "But Ashley says he ate Little Red Riding Hood. And I'm wearing a red jacket."
Reid's expression doesn't change. "Ashley's thinking of a different wolf. That one's fictional. These ones are real, which means they follow real rules." A pause. "Real rule number one: they don't eat people in red jackets."
A beat.
"Or any other colour."
The girl absorbs this with great seriousness. Then she spins and launches herself back into the group. "Ashley, you were being silly."
I open my hand.
The pen cap drops onto the counter. The mark it left in my palm is red and precise, a small crescent pressed into the skin. I look at it. Then I close my fingers softly and let my hand drop to my side.
Something has moved. I don't know exactly what Reid did or how it crossed the distance between us but it did. The fist in my chest has loosened one degree. Not gone. One degree.
I look up and he's watching me. That steady, unhurried attention that asks nothing back.
He leans in close. "Are you okay?"
I reach out and close my hand around his bicep. The muscle under my fingers is solid and warm and I squeeze once and nod.
He straightens. Turns to the room.
"Okay." His voice carries without being raised.
The children settle with a speed that surprises me.
"Before we go anywhere. Three rules." He holds up fingers.
"No running near the enclosures. No screaming.
Stay behind the railings at all times." He looks at them steadily.
"They're not dogs. They're wild animals.
We watch them quietly. Everyone understand? "
A ragged chorus of yes and yeah and one solemn nod from the girl in the red jacket.
Reid looks at me briefly. "I'm sorry. I forgot this was today." He tilts his head toward the hallway. "My office is just through there. You can wait there if you want. They'll be gone in about forty-five minutes."
I look at the children. The teacher is gathering them at the door, counting again, the patient and practised count of someone who has done this many times and still loves it. A small boy is studying the wall map. Two girls are whispering behind their hands, eyes wide, already thrilled by something.
The ache in my chest shifts and makes room for something else to sit alongside it.
"I'll come," I say. "I can help."
The children are quieter than I expect once we're outside.
Something about the enclosures does it. The scale of the fencing, the way the trees go tall and close around the path.
They cluster together and move in a group and Reid walks at the front and I walk at the back with the teacher and watch him.
He stops at the first enclosure and explains what they're looking at, why the animals are here, injured or orphaned, unable to survive in the wild on their own.
He explains what wolves eat and how a pack operates and what happens to an ecosystem when the apex predator is removed, and he does all of it in language that is simple without being small, and the children ask questions and he answers every one directly.
A boy asks why wolves can't just live with people like dogs.
Reid thinks about it for a moment. "Dogs chose to live with people a long time ago. Wolves chose not to."
The boy nods. Done.
I watch Reid with a child who won't go near the fence.
A small girl near the back, hanging slightly behind the group, watching the enclosure from a distance that feels safe to her.
Reid doesn't call her forward. He doesn't wave her over or crouch down or do any of the things that would make his attention a pressure.
He just moves to stand near her and talks about what the wolf inside is doing right now.
Matter-of-fact. Specific details. What the pacing means.
Where the animal is looking. Until the girl takes one small step forward on her own.
Then it's over. The children file back to the bus, and the teacher shakes Reid's hand and thanks me and counts heads one final time at the door. The bus engine turns over. The voices thin and then disappear down the drive.
I stand in the parking lot.
The cold is clean after the rain, the air washed out and sharp. I look up.
The sky has changed completely. The grey is gone.
What's left is blue, a deep clear blue that goes up further than seems possible, and the light in it is the specific light that only comes after the rain.
I stand in it with my face up and I feel the morning moving through me.
The pen cap. The girl in the red jacket.
Reid on one knee on the reception floor.
The wolves. The children. All of it at once, moving through me in a single wave, and I let it move without trying to stop it.
Reid comes to stand beside me. His hand finds mine.
I hear the reception door and Doris appears in the frame. She looks at Reid. "You heading out?"
"For today," Reid says.
Doris looks at him the way you look at something that doesn't compute. "It's not even noon."
She looks at me. Back at Reid. At our joined hands. And with a knowing smile says, "Right. See you tomorrow."
"You don't have to," I tell him, once Doris has gone back inside. "I'm fine."
"I want to show you something,"
We take a new path, rising through the trees.
The ground underfoot is soft and gives slightly with each step, wet pine needles and dark earth, and the cold works through my jacket in a way that feels good now, clean rather than punishing.
Reid's hand is still in mine. I'm aware of the specific warmth of it, the weight of it, the way he holds on without gripping.
The trees open as the path climbs, the sky coming in between the branches in wider and wider pieces, until we come out onto a ridge and stop.
The valley is below us. Enormous and open, green and white and grey-blue in the distance, the mountains ringing it from every side, and the light is moving across it in long slow sweeps where the clouds are breaking further west.
I don't have words. The scale of it takes mine and gives me nothing back.
Reid stands beside me. His shoulder is close to mine and his hand is still in mine and we share this without speaking.
"After I got the call about my sister," he says, "all I could think was to get to the boys as fast as I could."
I listen.
"It wasn't easy when I arrived. Two boys grieving.
I was grieving too and still adjusting to civilian life.
All of us adjusting to this new painful reality.
" He pauses. The wind moves across the ridge, cold and steady.
"I saw a grief counselor for a while." He looks out at the valley.
"One thing stuck. She said emotions are like seasons.
They come whether you want them or not. But, they don't stay forever.
If you wait long enough, the sun comes back. "
He pauses.
"Like today," he says. "It was raining this morning."
I look at the light on the valley floor, the way it moves across the snow and the dark trees, slow and indifferent and beautiful.
He squeezes my hand once.
Then the quality of his voice changes. Something lifts in it, the weight of what he was carrying shifting aside to make room for something else. "When the boys were being impossible and I didn’t knew what to do," He nods at the open air below us. "I'd come up here and I'd roar."
I look at him.
"At the valley," he says. "Whatever was in me. I'd send it out."
"You're not serious."
"Completely."
He turns to face the valley and opens his chest and roars. Loud and long, from somewhere deep, and it goes out across the open air and the mountains take it and the echo comes back smaller and then it's gone and there's just the wind.
He looks at me.
"Your turn," he says.
"I can't."
He steps behind me. His hands settle on my shoulders, large and warm and steady, and he brings his mouth close to my ear. His voice low.
"Let it all out," he says.
I face the valley. The enormous open indifferent space of it, the mountains holding it from every side, the light moving across everything below that doesn't know or care what I've been carrying.
I open my mouth. Something comes out. Small and thin, barely a sound.
"Louder," Reid says. "You can do better than that."
I try again. Bigger. My ribs expand around it.
"More."
Something gives way.
Something that has been sealed for so long I forgot it was there, and suddenly it's open and everything that's been behind it is coming through.
I scream at the valley and the scream gets bigger and I let it get bigger and it's coming from the place where I put everything I couldn't afford to feel.
The classroom. The phones going off simultaneously.
The faces turning toward me. Being fired.
The legal process and its failure. My mother's soft words and the months I spent making myself smaller and smaller trying to disappear from a life someone else destroyed.
The scream builds.
Then the words come up through it like something that has been waiting a long time for air.
"Fuck you!"
The valley takes it.
I pull in a breath.
"FUCK YOU."
The mountains don't flinch. They just hold it and let it go, and from somewhere I didn't know still existed, from somewhere beneath all the careful management and the small safe life I've been building out of what was left:
"YOU DIDN'T WIN! I WIN! I AM HAPPY!"
The last word tears out of me and the valley takes that too and I'm out of breath and my face is wet and my hands are shaking and the wind is cold on my cheeks and the light on the valley below is gold and moving and the sky above is that deep impossible blue.
I turn around.
Reid is looking at me. Not with pity. Not with the careful softness of someone managing a fragile thing.
He's looking at me the way he looks at the wolves. Like something that has just shown him their savage untamed nature.
I close the distance and I kiss him.