After
AFTER
I run until the forest blurs. Fallen branches snatch at my feet. Only when my heart threatens to smash through my rib cage and my vision fades at the edges do I chance a look behind me.
Nothing but empty forest.
I stop and double over, clutching at my knees. An inane giggle erupts, then fades when I realize what I’ve done. I never should have run. Not from a bear .
I’m just lucky she didn’t chase me. So purely, stupidly lucky.
When the tightness in my lungs eases, I raise my head. Shadows crowd the forest, longer and bluer than expected, and I rub at my arms. Damn. I have no idea where I am, and it’s getting darker and colder by the minute. Which means I need to concentrate. Figure out how to get back to the cabin.
With a steadying breath, I unsling my backpack, then zip on my extra jacket and guzzle my entire bottle of water. I still remember Michael’s process from all those years ago and perform a rough calculation—I entered the forest going north, then ran toward the setting sun, so now my house should lie...
I choose a southeastern bearing, then adjust fifteen degrees to the west, like he taught me. If I aim for the cabin and miss in the easterly direction, I’ll enter open wilderness. But if I intentionally overshoot the other way, I’ll run into the road at some point. Better to do that and walk back than risk wandering into miles of empty woods.
I set off, making enough noise to warn off foraging bears. How could I have forgotten they always come out around twilight?
Thankfully, I don’t encounter anything larger than a squirrel, and after what feels like hours, the trees clear.
A strangled sigh works free as my boots bite into the graveled road. Early stars pierce the sky. Darkness seeps from the forest like spreading oil. I flick one of my lighters and flare the lantern, creating a sunshine bubble of brightness I carry into the falling dark.
By the time I stumble into the cabin, fatigue weights my limbs. I plunk the lantern onto the knotty-pine coffee table, build a fire, and collapse on the braided-rope rug. With my knees hugged to my chest, I gaze into the flames, wondering what would have happened if that bear had marked me as prey. Would anyone have found the leftovers afterward? Or would my parents have spent the rest of their lives wondering what had become of me?
Time slips by. I’m still staring into the orange glow when the phone rings.
I shake off my stupor. In town earlier, I emailed my mother to say I’d arrived safely, but she’ll still want to hear for herself. what just happened, I can’t even blame her.
I carry the ringing phone to my haven between lantern and fire—the cord’s plenty long enough to reach—then rearrange myself cross-legged and pick up. “Hey. Don’t worry, I’m safe.”
A pause crackles on the line. “Okay. Should I be relieved? Or concerned that you felt it necessary to answer that way?”
Air spirals from my lungs. It’s Michael.
No. No . Not Michael. Grayson.
“Um...” I say, making no attempt to sound less guarded. “Hi. Sorry. I thought you were my mom.”
“Well, that’s better than who you thought I was last time. But you should give your mom my condolences. She probably doesn’t enjoy sounding like a forty-year-old man.”
I blink. I can’t believe he just said that. Both parts. “You’re not forty. You’re thirty-nine.”
“True.” A low, silky laugh comes through. He sounds different this time. More relaxed. Less on edge. “I wish I could take the fact that you know that as a compliment, but...”
“Right.” It’s not his birthday I have memorized. “Why’re you calling me?”
“Because I said I would?”
“Yeah, but that was like...six hours ago.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
I wait, but apparently that’s a serious question. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to wait three days to call a girl again? Or whatever the rule is?”
The moment the words come out, I want to stuff them back down my throat. This is not a courtship. Or anything remotely resembling one.
“No, I don’t know that.” Grayson sounds dubious. “Where’d you even hear that?”
“I thought it was common knowledge.”
“It’s not. And it doesn’t make any sense. What’s the point?”
“It’s supposed to...” I trail off, frowning. What is the point? Who decided men should feign disinterest so no one will know how they really feel? And where does that end? With husbands compiling secret folders full of magazine clippings? Signing divorce papers without telling their wives? “I... Now you’re confusing me.”
“I wanted to call you,” he says. “So I called you. I can’t think of anything less confusing than that.”
Well. Touché.
“Besides,” he continues, “I was hoping you might’ve had a couple drinks and be in the right mood, this time.”
I pause. “Right mood? For what?”
“Telling me about your secret mission in the woods. The one I’ll never understand.”
I go still inside. Memories of Margo float to the surface like silvery bubbles emerging from dark water.
“Mina?”
“Yeah. I’m here.” I clutch the receiver until my knuckles go numb. The room seems to hold its breath, the firelit shadows and lemon scent of floor wax swirling together. Even the lantern’s flame stills as if in waiting.
It strikes me then how alone I am here. This warm oasis is nothing but a pinprick, a fleck of light amid this darkened ocean of trees. As the weight of my isolation hits me, I realize I actually want to tell him. Want to share that part of myself with someone. I even want to know what he’ll say back. Whether he’s the kind of man who looks up at the stars and sees elegance, or whether he left that sense of wonder behind long ago.
Still, I shy away from baring myself to a stranger without taking the lay of the land first. “You know, I tried to explain it to Michael once, and he thought I was crazy. You’ll probably think so, too.”
“Nah. Nothing you could say would change my opinion of you.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Yes, I can. Because I already think you’re unhinged. You married my asshole brother. Indisputable proof that you’re fucking nuts.”
Despite myself, I chuckle. “Okay. Maybe . Maybe I’ll tell you. But only if I have that drink, and only if you tell me something about you first.”
He draws a crisp breath. “Wow. I didn’t think that would actually work.”
I make a tsking sound Kate would be proud of. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. It has to be something good. Not some throwaway confession like how you only eat the top parts of muffins or secretly have a thing for women who bowl.”
He chuckles. “Nah. My bowling fetish and habit of dismembering baked goods are already public knowledge, anyway. I’ve got worse. Way worse.”
My eyebrows creep upward. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a whole fucking dungeon of things no one knows about me. But if we’re trading secrets, maybe you should tell me what yours is about. Just a general category, so I can see if I’ve got anything that matches up.”
I fiddle with the phone cord. “Okay. But it’s not a secret, really. It’s more like... Have you ever felt like nature could heal you? Help get you through something traumatic?”
He’s silent so long that I tense up. “ That’s what this is about?” he finally says.
“Maybe.”
“Huh. You know what? Yeah, I’ve felt that way lots of times.”
My breath catches. “You have?”
“Yep. One of those experiences even saved my life once, if you can believe that.”
I sit up straighter. “Really?”
“Really. And I’ll tell you all about it. But you should probably get that drink.”
“Okay. But it’ll take me a minute. Or two.”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Go ahead. It’s not like I have anywhere to be.”
“Shouldn’t you, though?”
“Probably,” he says. “But fuck it.”
A strange energy catches hold of me as I set the receiver on the rug. In the kitchen, I dig out the paper cups I bought at the market and pour from my bottle of Cabernet—twist-off, since I assumed the corkscrew would be packed up. In the bedroom, I shuck my dirt-smeared clothes and don a garnet-colored off-the-shoulder cashmere sweater and black leggings, all the while wondering if Grayson will still be on the line when I get back. But I don’t rush. Some rebellious part of me wonders how long he’ll wait. At what point he’ll deem his time too valuable for me to waste.
Michael would have told me to call him back.
But Grayson isn’t Michael, because when I arrange the daybed’s throw pillows into a cozy nest by the fire and climb in with my wine and the phone, he’s still there.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
A long pause. That strange energy intensifies, zipping around like wasps in my bloodstream. I try to soothe it with a gulp of wine. “So. Tell me what happened to you.”
Something clinks—ice in a glass, I think, which makes me wonder whether he’s drinking water or something stronger.
“I’ve never told this story before,” he says. “And it’s about as personal as it gets. So if you’re not up for that, say so now.”
I smile into the receiver. “Personal is kind of the point.”
“Okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I wiggle deeper into my pillows. The intensity of my brush with the bear slips away. There’s only me here, soft and warm and bathed in firelight while the wine expands on my tongue and Grayson’s smoky tenor purrs in my ear.
“This all happened in the Himalaya,” he says. “A few years back.”
“The Himalayas, you mean?”
“No,” he says. “That’s just a bastardized American way of saying it. People here get it wrong all the time, but in the local language, Himalaya is already pluralized. Saying Himalayas is kind of like saying sheeps . Or mooses .”
I turn that tidbit over. Grayson might be a drinker and a self-proclaimed mess, but I forget that he’s also an adventurer. That every stunning National Geographic photo represents a journey he’s taken which I’ve only dreamed about. He’s climbed mountains, dived oceans, watched the sun set over a thousand different horizons.
Amazing.
“Anyway,” he says, “at the time, I was in a...dark place, in my life. One of the darkest I’ve ever been in. And I got sent to Nepal, on assignment. My job was to shoot these caves there that had only just been discovered. They were carved out of the cliff face a thousand years ago, but had lain untouched for centuries because they’re so hard to get to. A ledge runs underneath, but there’s no way to get to it without ropes.”
I picture Grayson in climbing gear, scanning the rock face from beneath that scarred eyebrow while mountains jostle for space in a majestic sky. “Okay. Go on.”
“It was just a normal day. A normal assignment. I climbed up while my partner waited below, and when I got onto the ledge, I unclipped so he could follow. But then I turned to look at the valley we’d hiked up from, and something happened. I had this...moment. This episode . It was like the whole world poured into me, all at once. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at, and those mountains... Christ, those mountains. There’s something that happens, sometimes, in those high places, when the breeze rises on a clear day. The wind sweeps snow up off the summits, just shoots these fountains of sparks right into the sky. It’s called spindrift.”
A murmur catches in my throat. I’ve heard the word, but never knew what it meant.
“So there I was,” he continues, “standing on this precipice in the middle of nowhere, and the whole world was laid out below me. The spindrift made it seem like the peaks were exhaling into the sky, and it all just looked so...weightless, you know? Like the mountains were about to let go of the earth and float up into the blue. The whole scene hit me right in the heart, and it felt like life was reminding me that no matter how fucked-up things get, there’s always something beautiful somewhere, balancing it out.”
“Wow.” A delicate shiver dances through me. “You definitely understood the assignment.”
He gives a soft laugh.
“Then what?” I say.
“Then I stood there and thought to myself, well, maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe I just need to let go, like these mountains. Maybe I need to stop hanging on to this thing that’s slowly killing me. It was almost like I could hear something inside me, chanting it, over and over. Let go, let go, let go .”
I take a sip, but I’m too caught up to taste the wine. “And...that saved your life?”
“In the end, yeah.”
“But how, exactly?”
Rustling fills the line, as if he’s rearranging himself. “Because on that same trip, I climbed Everest, and what happened there had everything to do with those two words.”
“Everest.” Air rushes in through my teeth. “Where you were in that avalanche? Where you took that picture of yourself?”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Of course. I told you so already, in my email.”
“Right,” he says, momentarily gruff. “That’s right. Then you probably know the story, or part of it. Except there’s another part I never told anyone. And it’s that right before the avalanche, I was still reliving that moment on the ledge. Just trudging along, hearing let go, let go, let go with every step. Because it felt like if I could just get to the top of that damn mountain, maybe I really could. Maybe I could finally let go of this thing that had been rotting inside me for years. Finally be free of it.”
A pang twists in my chest. I know what it is without having to ask. Or rather, who. Lily. The woman whose death broke him in ways time has never reconciled.
“The point is,” Grayson says, “when I heard the crack and saw all that snow, I did exactly what I was shouting at myself to do. I let go. Physically . I knew I couldn’t outrun what was coming, so I threw down my axe. Ripped off my pack. Everything I could possibly let go of in those ten seconds went. And then the snow took me and I did my damnedest to swim upward, and when it was all over, I only ended up buried four feet down.”
I make a horrified sound. I know the basics—he spent eleven minutes entombed in snow before his climbing partner dug him out. Eleven minutes in the dark, starving for air, not knowing whether he would live or die.
“Four feet’s still plenty enough to kill you, but if I’d had all that gear weighing me down, it might’ve been more. I could’ve ended up ten feet down, and then Alex might not have gotten to me in time. As it was, I probably only had another few minutes. So in hindsight, yeah, that moment saved me. Those words did. And they never would’ve been in my head in the first place if not for that moment outside the caves.”
The back of my neck prickles. This is already so much more significant than my story. “And after that? Did you manage to let go of the past, too?”
His gritty laugh warms my ear. “That? Fuck no. Here I am, three years later, still hanging on to all my bullshit. I doubt I’ll ever figure that out. Living through an avalanche was easier. Way easier.”
He goes quiet. In the silence, the pull of his breath comes and goes like a reassuring tide.
Or a turquoise ocean , my mind supplies.
I pass a hand over my eyes. How strange that I can picture him so precisely when he has no clue who he’s talking to. It’s even stranger that I’ve spent well over a decade loving the hue of his hair, the angle of his nose, those delicate fingers. The sound of him breathing.
And the strangest thing of all? I feel like I know him. I can’t tell if it’s the voice, or the way he’s just shared without trying to make himself sound noble, or something else entirely. But listening to him talk this way feels undeniably intimate, as if he’s touching me on some deep level Michael learned to shy away from.
It emboldens me to say exactly what I’m thinking.
“There’s something I want to know,” I say. “Something I’ve wondered about ever since I saw that issue of National Geographic .”
“Yeah? What’s that?” His tone gains an edge, a sort of guarded hope I don’t know what to make of.
“What were you thinking about? You’d almost just died, but it looks like you want to say something. Like you’re trying to give someone a message.”
He makes a pained sound. “Jesus.” More ice clinking.
Probably not water, then.
“Nobody’s ever asked me that before,” he says. “People always want to know what it’s like to be buried alive. What it feels like to drown on dry land. Whether I saw a light, did my life flash before my eyes, blah, blah, blah, all that crap. Nobody’s ever asked what I wanted to say when I came back.”
I flush, feeling suddenly ridiculous. “Right. Sorry. That’s probably a stupid question. I’m sure you weren’t thinking about anything but survival.”
“No,” he says quietly. “I did have something to say. It’s just that out of the thousands of people who’ve seen that picture, you’re the only one who’s ever noticed.”
I wait. My breath thins to nothing.
“The truth is...” I hear an audible, scraping swallow. “I was thinking about her . How I’d never see her face again, never touch her skin, never wake up and breathe the smell of her hair. Never hear her laugh. Never piss her off by accident again, either. No matter how badly I wanted those things, it was impossible, and it didn’t actually hit me until that avalanche did. And then I realized it was over, all of it, and all I could think of was how badly I wished I could get to her, wherever she was. Like...like I was fucking drowning in the need to tell her what she meant to me. I wanted to say, ‘I love you, and you changed me, and you destroyed me, too, but I forgive you for that, and whether I die today or fifty years from now, it doesn’t matter, I am who I am because of you.’”
He lets out a shuddering breath. More ice clinks.
“Does that answer your question?” he finally says.
I squeeze my eyes shut to stop a tear from sneaking out, then follow his example and partake in a hefty dose of wine.
It’s a nonsensical reaction, this urge to cry over the depth of his love for some woman I’ve never even met. But there’s something so wretchedly, tragically beautiful about his pain that I catch myself wishing someone would love me like that. So brightly that it burned them.
Because I suspect, on a cellular level I can’t escape, that if I had died in that car wreck instead of Michael, he wouldn’t have said about me what Grayson just did about Lily.
“Your turn,” he says.
I take a few moments to collect myself. “You sound like a soldier who’s just gone to battle and barely made it back.”
He gives a dark chuckle. “That about sums it up. But don’t change the subject. You managed to get two confessions out of me, so now I get your one. It’s only fair.”
It’s more than fair , I almost say, because by the sound of it, he’s just ripped his heart open and spilled the contents into my lap.
Telling him about Margo almost seems like cheating. “My story’s not as intense as yours. Not even close.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” he says softly. “It just has to mean something to you.”
I swallow. “It does. It absolutely does. I just...don’t know where to start.”
“At the beginning.” His voice strengthens, as if the subject change has granted him a reprieve. “You asked if nature has ever healed me, which means it’s done that for you. So what did you need healing from?”
“Losing my best friend,” I say, grateful for the straightforward question. I can do straightforward. “She died. In Costa Rica. When we were in tenth grade. And I wasn’t okay after that. Not for a long time.”
Silence comes through the line, giving me room to find my way. All the details Michael never asked for slide free—first in snipped-off pieces, then in long gushes. I tell Grayson about how much I adored Margo, how clever she was. I talk about the time we watched that Christmas movie where the boy licks a frozen flagpole, then rushed outside together to see if our tongues would really stick. I describe the time we learned to catch food in our mouths by tossing Cheerios across the room while shrieking with laughter. And our freshman year of high school, when Margo posted our school for sale on Craigslist, then lingered outside the office with me, eavesdropping on the bewildered staff as they muddled through one awkward phone conversation after another.
“When I found out she was never coming home, it was like someone had dropped me into the bottom of a well.” I take another draft of wine. The bold, dry sting warms my throat. “I don’t know how else to describe it. It was like I was watching my life happen through this tiny porthole overhead while everything around me was dark. I hid in my room for days at a time, not eating. My grades tanked. I lost a bunch of weight. I’m pretty sure my mom thought I was going to waste away.”
Grayson grunts. “Grief. It’s the most challenging emotion in the human experience, isn’t it? The hardest to deal with. You’re not alone in that.”
I pause. It’s such a simple idea, but...I’ve never thought of it that way. “Yeah. You’re absolutely right. And I was only fifteen, and I had no idea how to handle it. I was just spiraling, and my mom finally decided to pack up the car and bring me here for the summer. Try to snap me out of it.”
“And being in the forest was the thing that finally helped,” he says. Only the barest hint of a question mark softens the words, as if it’s not a question at all.
“Yeah. It might sound silly, but...it felt natural, being here. Like forgiveness, and recovery. Like all the things people talk about finding in church, only I had to go outside to feel them. So I did. Every day. And by the end of the summer, I was better. Not great, but better. Margo being gone didn’t hurt any less, but it was like I grew bigger and stronger, enough to handle it. If that makes sense.”
“Perfect sense,” he says. “You know, the Japanese have a word for what you’re describing. Shinrin-yoku . It means something like...‘forest bathing.’ It’s based around the idea that nature is therapeutic.”
I stem a breath. “That’s a thing?”
“It’s a thing.”
I swipe away the tears that sneaked out during my soliloquy about Margo. “How do you even know that?”
“I know a lot of things.” He laughs. “Which is pretty ironic, considering that when it comes to this whole life business, I haven’t the faintest fucking clue.”
“I don’t, either. At least that’s how it feels, these days. I just hope being here will help me figure it out. Help me put myself back together.”
“I hope so, too,” he says, and sounds like he really means it.
For a few moments, I soak up the sound of him breathing. “You don’t think it’s stupid of me to come here? To ‘forest bathe’?”
“You’re talking to a guy who’s built an entire career around chronicling nature’s majesty. So no. I don’t think it’s stupid. At all.”
We lapse into silence. The quiet settles over me like a blanket. I feel warmer than I have in hours. Months. Years, maybe.
“So, what now?” he finally says. “You’re going into the woods tomorrow?”
“I did today, actually.”
“Oh yeah? How’d that go?”
I reach for my cup again but find it empty. “Pretty well, actually. At least until the bear showed up.”
“Bear?” he says. “Wait. Bear? What bear?”
“It’s not a big deal,” I hedge. “It was just a black bear. She came into the clearing I was in. With her cub. But it’s fine. I’m fine.”
“A mama? With her cub?” His tone sharpens, a complete departure from the smoky ease of earlier. “What’d you do? Put your arms up? Make yourself look big? You didn’t look her in the eye, I hope?”
“Um...” I shrink into the pillows. Of course Mr. Nature Photographer Extraordinaire would know what to do. “Not exactly.”
“You didn’t run, did you?” His tone goes flat. “Tell me you didn’t run.”
“Okay,” I say. “I won’t.”
When I don’t elaborate, Grayson groans. “Really, Mina?”
I make a sound of protest. “I was too freaked out to think straight. I just...reacted. But it’s fine. She didn’t chase me.”
He curses under his breath. “It’s not fine . Someone should be there with you. Someone who can...” He makes a strangled sound.
“What?”
“Keep you safe.”
I sit up. I don’t think I’m imagining the panic edging his voice. As if he truly, genuinely cares .
“I want to see you,” he says abruptly. “Face-to-face.”
I frown. “What? You want to meet me?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Right now. Where are you, exactly? This is a western Washington area code, so you can’t be that far away.”
I struggle to cobble together a response. “I’m up near Skykomish. It’s an hour and a half from Seattle, at least.”
“Okay, so it’s ten thirty now,” he says.
I shake my head. “This is crazy.”
“No. My brother’s widow is holed up in a cabin all by herself while a fucking bear prowls around outside, and meanwhile, I’m here, drinking Scotch and feeling sorry for myself and doing nothing even remotely useful. That’s crazy.”
For some reason, I latch on to the absolute least important part of that statement. “You’re drinking Scotch?”
“Always.”
I wince. I wish he hadn’t named the same drink Michael once favored, but I have no doubt it’s one of those twin things, since on a biological level, they’re actually the same person. “How many have you had? Are you too drunk to drive?”
“This is my second, and I’m only halfway through, so no, I’m not drunk. And I’ll put this glass down right now if you give me your address.”
I cast about as though I might find someone here to tell me what to do. My gaze catches on the lantern, which still burns steadily, but it offers no answers.
Nothing here but an empty room—so empty I can feel the weight of it, dragging at my limbs.
“All right,” I say, surprising myself, and rattle off the cabin’s address.
A jangle sounds—car keys, I’m assuming. “Great. I’ll see you in an hour.”
“No. You won’t get here until midnight. It’s an hour and a half.”
“Nah. Not the way I drive.”
I start to caution him about the road’s snaking curves, but it’s too late. He’s already hung up.