Chapter 15 #2
"Mm." I press the cotton to the heel of his palm. He doesn't flinch at that either, but his eyes follow my hands like they might do something he needs to see coming. "For the record, a normal husband calls somebody. He doesn't personally wrestle the wildlife."
"I'm told I'm not normal." The corner of his mouth moves. "By you. Repeatedly. This morning, about the cat."
"The cat is different. The cat chose you. You can't be blamed for the cat." I turn his hand to get the light on the puncture between his knuckles, and he lets me move it like it isn't his, like I've borrowed it. "Hold still."
"I am holding still."
"Hold stiller."
He goes quiet then, really quiet, staring at my hands cleaning his like he's never seen a person tend a wound before.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing." He clears his throat. "Nobody does this."
"Does what? Cleans a wound? It's not advanced, Isaak, I do it to goats."
"Not the wound." He's having trouble with the words, which I have never seen. "Nobody does this. The fussing. The part where you're angry I got hurt."
"I'm not angry you got hurt. I'm angry you're being stupid about a doctor." I dab the cotton, gentler than my voice. "Who patched you up when you were a kid?"
"Nobody patched me up."
He says it like it's nothing, no weight on it at all, and the nothing in his voice guts me. Three weeks I've spent learning he has no memory of being cared for, none, that nobody ever did this for him. Somebody should have, a long time ago, over some childhood scrape. Nobody did.
"Well, I do," I say, because if I say anything bigger I'll cry, and he'll never let me touch him again. "So sit there, let me work, and quit looking at me like I'm defusing you."
The corner of his mouth goes. "Are you not?"
"Jury's out." I wrap the heel of his palm, snug, the way Hollis taught me to wrap a hock. "There. You'll live. Try to fight the next apex predator with a weapon like a normal rich man."
"I'll keep it in mind." He turns his bandaged hand over, studying my work, and then he says, not looking at me, in a different voice, "You'd have gone down there if I hadn't woken up. You'd have put yourself in the middle of that."
"I did put myself in the middle of that."
"Nora." Just my name, low, with the weight on it the careful version never has.
"You can't do that. Not anymore. The fastest way to get to a man like me is through the soft thing he can't stop looking at.
You, between a barn and a pack, screaming, is the worst nightmare I have. I have professional nightmares."
He's not wrong, and the look on his face is dead serious, with blood drying under his fingernails to prove it. But I have spent my whole life being told where the gate is, and I didn't sign up for a bigger gate. Everything my father gave me instead of softness rises up to meet him.
"I hear you," I say. "I'm not going to promise you I'd do it different, though.
I won't stand in a warm house and listen to something die because saving it puts me at risk.
I can't. It's not in me. You married a woman who runs toward the burning barn, Isaak.
You should know that about me now, while it's still a cat. "
He looks at me a long moment, and I watch him decide not to fight me on it, just set it somewhere behind his eyes, not gone, only put down for now.
"While it's still a cat," he repeats, in the tone of someone agreeing to terms he fully intends to renegotiate.
It's full dark by the time I go back out to settle everyone for the night, the mare, the dogs, the three barn cats that came home. I take the long flashlight because the coyotes made me jumpy, because I want to see the fence the big one tested before I sleep.
I find the panel down at the bottom of the slope where the ground drops to the creek.
The wire's down, peeled back into the dark, a hole a coyote could walk through standing up, and I crouch to look at it out of pure habit, twenty-some years of mending wire.
The habit is what catches it. This is wrong.
Coyotes don't break fences. They go over, or under, or through a gap that's already there.
They don't make the gap. This wire didn't tear, didn't rust through, didn't get bent down by a branch.
The cut ends are bright. Clean. Two diagonal bites, top strand and bottom, the kind you get from a tool, from somebody who came up the creek bed in the dark with fence cutters, opened my husband's perimeter, then went home to bed.
I crouch there a long time with the cold coming up through my boots, telling myself reasonable things.
A neighbor's hand. An old cut. The state park does trail work.
There are a hundred boring reasons a fence gets cut and only one bad one, so I should put it down where I put everything.
I don't put it down. Somebody came up that creek bed in the dark, low and quiet, to make a door for the soft things behind it.
I don't tell Isaak that night. I tell myself it's because a clean cut isn't proof, because I'll look in daylight when I'm not spooked. That's the lie I go to sleep on.
The truth is I've just spent an evening watching a man tear a coyote apart with his hands to keep me safe, and I am not ready to be the one who tells him the danger is already inside the fence.