Chapter 24
Astrid
My throat had gone raw an hour ago.
I'd been calling his name so long that the sound was coming out of me thin.
Duke was twenty yards ahead on the trail with the radio at his hip, going low and steady, Lou at the firehouse running point while the off-duty crew checked in section by section.
Audrey was at my shoulder in a parka that didn't match her sweatpants.
Her hair was in a knot she hadn't bothered to put any care into.
She didn't have lipstick on. I hadn't seen Audrey without lipstick on a workday since the eighth grade.
She wasn't filling the silence.
That was the part I kept noticing without letting myself say. Audrey filled silences as a rule. She'd been filling mine since the third grade. She wasn't filling this one. She was at my shoulder, calling Moose's name with me, and she was letting the rest of it be quiet.
"Moose!"
My voice cracked at the back of it.
"Moose, buddy!"
The wood was holding its breath. The cold had gotten into the soles of my boots. The light was high December gray at nine, the sun up but not committed to being up. I could see my breath every other step.
Duke stopped on the trail ahead of us. He listened to something on the radio. He keyed it twice.
"Mendoza's at the river bend. Halsey's working the ridge. Nothing yet."
"Copy."
"You hangin' in, Doc?"
"I'm hanging in."
He went back to walking.
I'd texted Duke at six-thirty-five. I stood at the open back gate in my robe and slippers with the prints in the frost going up the trail and could not make my hand do anything for a count I did not track.
Then I went back inside, pulled real clothes on, boots over two pairs of socks, and stood at the kitchen counter with the phone in my hand.
I texted Duke.
Not Audrey. Duke. Because Duke had been across the counter from me at the clinic three times in three weeks, his mother's spaniel at his hip, never once saying Easton's name and never once pretending the not-saying wasn't deliberate. Duke was the piece of Easton that had stayed.
His reply landed within a minute.
Duke
On my way. Don't go out alone again.
He was at the back gate in twelve minutes.
On the phone to Lou in fifteen. Audrey came up the front walk in twenty in the clothes she'd probably been wearing on her couch.
By eight, the firehouse off-duty list was in the woods behind Maple in sections, the Bishops had called the clinic, Joanne had pushed the day, and Mrs. Halloran had let herself into my kitchen with a thermos.
I let her.
I let all of it happen.
"Astrid."
Audrey, low at my shoulder.
"Yeah?"
"You're shaking."
"I'm cold."
"Mhm."
She didn't push. She put her gloved hand on my forearm for a count of one and took it back. She kept walking.
Duke pulled up at a fork in the trail.
Left went up toward the ridge Halsey was already working. Right went down toward the lake. The middle was the section we'd been working on as three.
He looked at the radio. He looked at me. He looked at Audrey.
"We gotta split. I'll take the ridge below Halsey. Audrey, you got the middle. Doc, take the south end down to the lake. Radio if you see anything. Don't go off the grid."
"Copy."
"You hear me?"
"I hear you, Duke."
"Stay on the trail, Doc. He'll come back to your voice before he comes back to anything else, and I want to know where your voice is."
"Okay."
He held my eye for a beat. He had the steadiness in his face that Easton had on a call. He wasn't pretending he wasn't worried. He was holding the worry off the floor.
He went up the left fork at the pace of a man who had a job.
Audrey turned to me before she went.
The cold had gone into the skin under her eyes. Her hair was coming out of the knot in pieces around her ears. She looked like the version of Audrey I'd never been allowed to see at fifteen, because Audrey at fifteen didn't let anyone see her.
She put her gloved hands on either side of my jaw.
"Hey."
"Hey."
"We're going to find him."
"Audrey."
"We're going to find him, Astrid Matthews. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you."
She didn't say his name.
She hadn't said it in three weeks. She'd been waiting for me to say it.
She was still waiting. She let her hands drop, turned, and went up the middle fork with the radio at her hip, her boots hitting the trail with the brisk forward beat of a woman who had decided what her job was for the next hour.
I went right.
We'd been looking for hours.
The trail to the lake was the one I'd walked a hundred times.
I knew where the root came up across the path.
I knew where the fallen tree was that you had to step over with one hand on the bark.
I'd walked it with Moose at my hip the morning I pulled the boy out of the water, and I'd walked it with Easton at my shoulder the afternoon of the heron, and I'd walked it alone every Sunday since.
I called his name.
The trail held the sound for a beat and let it go.
"Moose."
Nothing came back.
I kept walking.
I brought Moose out of the seven years. He was mine before there was a Brett at all. I cataloged him on the drive up Route 23 in September with the wedding china and the lamps and the rental car as the one thing in the passenger seat that was mine. He was the proof.
If I lost him, the seven years had no piece I got to keep.
I didn't let myself sit down on the log at the bend.
I kept walking.
"Moose!"
My throat caught on the second syllable.
"Moose, buddy! Come on."
The trail came out at the bank with the trees thinning, the gray of the sky widening overhead, and the flat dark of the water showing up between the trunks. I stopped at the edge of the clearing because my body stopped before my head did.
I pulled a boy out of this water in October.
I told Easton to take the slot at the other end of this water in November.
I called his name again.
A bark came back.
I didn't understand it at first. The woods had been giving me my own voice back for an hour, and the bark sat for a beat in the same space before I let myself hear that it was not mine.
I heard it again.
Moose.
I would've known that frequency in a room with a hundred dogs. I'd been listening to that bark for eight years, through doors and across yards and from the back seat of a car going seventy on the highway. The pitch of it. The small catch at the end.
I ran.
I came through the brush at the south end of the clearing with my hands up to keep the branches off my face.
I saw them together.
Easton was kneeling in the dirt at the foot of a fallen log with both hands on Moose's head.
Moose was wiggling against him at full speed, ears flat, tail going so hard his whole back end was moving with it, full-body wag, tongue out, licking Easton's chin, his jaw, the side of his neck.
Easton was laughing into the side of his face, low, the Queens at the edges of it.
I knew him before I'd moved.
The boots. The jacket. The blond hair pushed back from his forehead. Days of stubble. He hadn't looked up yet.
I ran.
I ran the distance I hadn't let myself close in three weeks, the distance I hadn't let myself close since I stood at the curb on Maple Avenue and watched a truck pull out of a driveway and turn at the end of the block.
My boots hit the dirt. My breath caught.
I closed the gap in half a dozen strides, went down on my knees in the dirt beside the two of them, and put my arms around Moose's neck with my face in the wet fur at his shoulder.
"Moose."
He was licking me now, licking the side of my face and Easton's jaw at the same time, head whipping back and forth between the two of us—the dog who had decided he wasn't going to choose.
I was crying.
I hadn't cried since the morning Easton left.
I held it through three weeks of clinic, through Caldwell carrying his cat through my door at seven-twenty, through the crewneck on the chair in the back office.
I held it through this morning at the gate and through the woods and through Audrey's hand on my jaw.
I was crying into a wet dog with Easton Ford's hands six inches from mine on the same dog's head, and I didn't care.
"Moose. You menace. You absolute menace."
He licked my chin.
I let myself stay there with my face in his fur. He was here. He was alive. He was leaning against the shin of the man I'd told to leave, and the man was here, too.
I lifted my face.
Easton hadn't moved.
His hands were still on Moose. His eyes were on me. His face had the look of a man who'd driven a long way and didn't know yet whether he'd been driving toward something or away from it.
"Astrid."
"Easton."
We were both on our knees in the dirt with the dog between us.
Moose settled across both of us with his chin on Easton's thigh and his haunch against my knee, and stayed.
Easton drew a breath.
"I need to tell you somethin'."
"Okay."
"I'm gonna say all of it. You let me get to the end of it."
"Okay."
"I didn't call the realtor in eighteen months.
I didn't pack a box. The packing tape and the Sharpie I bought the week of the funeral sat on the floor of my hallway for a year and a half, and I didn't touch either one.
Shane called me in September and offered me the slot, and I told him to put my name in, and I didn't make one move toward leaving Hartsdale after that. Not one. For two months."
He let it sit a beat.
"I'd decided to stay, Astrid. I decided before you opened your mouth at this lake. I hadn't said it out loud to a single person, including myself. But I'd decided."
I didn't move.