CHAPTER TEN
The ridge-top site was the kind of view that made consulting work tolerable, even on contracts Claire wasn't happy about.
Open exposure east, the valley floor a long stitched green below, and the unnamed area she'd been pulled toward since site seven visible across the middle distance like a small dark hand laid flat on the land.
She set Helen down. Knelt at the rock face. Put her hand on it.
The land opened.
Not the pulse of site seven. Bigger. A sustained pressure, low and warm and continuous, like a furnace door open against her palm.
The pressure carried direction. It pulled her attention east, across the middle distance, toward the dark hand of land at the horizon.
It told her, in the wordless way her hands had been telling her things since she was eight, that here was a part of there, and there was the actual thing.
Her body went still.
The full-body stillness. The one she hadn't allowed herself since she was sixteen. Today she didn't try to stop it.
She lost ten seconds. Then twenty. She made a reading. Numbers in the normal range. Made it again. Same numbers. A third time. Same numbers. The instruments were silent. Her body was saying things her instruments weren't equipped to record.
What do your hands say, baby.
Helen at the creek bed. Helen at the rock shop in Bend.
Helen on a basalt shelf in late August, present, warm, exactly as Claire remembered her — and Claire was kneeling on cold stone with her hand against the rock and her grandmother in the room with her, and her grandmother was not, she understood with a clarity her professional self would be embarrassed by later, dead.
Helen had only, briefly, gone away.
Helen was here.
She didn't let herself cry. She hadn't cried at the funeral and she wasn't going to cry on a contract.
She heard her name.
"Claire."
Jackson. Twenty meters off, where he'd been all morning, monitoring at distance. He'd moved closer. She hadn't noticed.
She turned her head.
His face was a face she hadn't seen on him in nine days.
The professional reserve had gone out of it.
He was looking at her the way a man looked at something he understood.
Not at her body. At her. He'd seen what was happening, the way he'd seen her hand open and close at the trailhead two weeks ago, except this time he wasn't filing it.
For the first time since she'd stepped out of her truck on this contract, he was present.
"I need a minute," she said.
"Take it."
He stepped back. Not away. Back. To a distance that gave her room without removing himself from the equation. He stood on the trail with his hands at his sides and his coat open and his eyes on the trees and not on her, and the wolf in him, she thought, was very calm.
She turned back to the rock.
She put her hand on it again. The land was still pulsing under her palm. Slower now, as if it had said the thing it needed her to know and was waiting for her to acknowledge having heard. She acknowledged. She had heard. She would come back.
She stood up.
Jackson, ten meters off, didn't move.
"I'm done for the day," she said.
"Okay."
"I want to drive back."
"I'll be behind you."
She packed. Her hands weren't steady. She let them not be steady.
He didn't watch her pack. He stood on the trail with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the middle distance, and when she shouldered her bag and started down, he turned and walked behind her at the standard twelve-foot distance, the way he'd walked behind her every day of the contract, except today the distance had a different weight.
It was the distance of a man standing watch.
At the trailhead at end of day he stopped beside his truck. Looked at her once.
"If you ever want to talk about what just happened up there," he said, "I'm available."
"Okay."
She didn't commit to talking. He nodded as if she had. She got in her truck and drove back to the cabin in town and didn't, for a long time after she got there, take her hand off the wheel.
She'd been seen.
She didn't know yet who he'd become, when he saw her.
She suspected.
She drove to Mae's at 7:00 because she could not be in the cabin alone.
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