Epilogue
Alice
Six Weeks Later
My little fox stands at the edge of the meadow.
He has been here before, many times, watching the lights in the hollow with that particular expression I spent three months trying to get right — the one that reads as stubborn to a child on first look, and then, if they're paying attention, as apprehensive.
Those are not the same thing. It took me a long time to draw the difference, and longer still to understand why I needed to.
I set down my pen and look at the finished spread.
In this last illustration, the fox has one paw over the meadow's edge.
Just one. He hasn't totally committed. But he's not pretending the hollow isn't there anymore, either, and that felt like the right place to end it — not with arrival, but with the decision to stop manufacturing reasons to stay where he was.
My editor will love it, I’m sure of it.
I close the sketchbook and look around the cabin.
Cal's cabin, technically, though I've been here enough in the past six weeks that my sketchbooks have colonized the table and my coffee mug has claimed the left side of the cabinet shelf and neither of us has remarked on it.
He is outside on the porch, I can hear the low sound of his voice — a call with his supervisor, something about the trail documentation project that finally got approved.
I think about the version of myself who was lost and alone in the mountains six weeks ago. With Cal by my side, I’ll never feel lost or alone again.
The door opens and Cal comes in, bringing cold air and the smell of the outdoors. He looks at the sketchbook on the table.
"Done?" he asks.
"Done," I say.
He picks it up and opens to the last spread, the fox at the edge of the meadow with his paw over the line. He studies it for a long moment in that way he has, taking his time, not performing a reaction.
"He looks a little scared," Cal says.
"He is," I say. "But he's going anyway. He’s determined and brave."
Cal sets the sketchbook down and looks at me.
The afternoon light is coming through the window and lying across the table between us, and outside the mountains are doing what they always do — vast and indifferent and extraordinary — and I have the sudden, clear feeling that I could draw this moment, this specific arrangement of light and man and the particular expression on his face, for the rest of my life and not get tired of it.
"Good fox," Cal says.
"Good fox," I agree.
He pulls out the chair and sits down across from me, and reaches across the table and takes my hand, and the afternoon goes quiet and golden around us.
We stay there for a long time, the sketchbook closed between us, the story finally finished.