I had a dream that I was in the woods with you.
In the shadows beneath fluttering yellow leaves.
Light flickering like film.
The trail was littered with the aspects of a perfect Autumn about to fall; downed branches waiting, clumps of wet grass clinging, and you there with me.
I think of how long it has been since this moment actually happened.
How tired I am.
Holding onto you like a river clinging to the back edge of the rain.
But there, in the woods of a dream, I was running.
The wind was warm, the air was soft, my hand was in yours.
In my dream, we were together, although I never once saw your face.
I would have stayed asleep forever to be with you.
I
*Ryan*
It appeared as if she was falling. Wren Magee’s silhouette disappeared into the darkness of the night sky as she leaned against the tinted glass of the bridge connecting the school of medicine with the sprawling corridors of the hospital. From where Ryan sat, too big to fit beneath the metal buttress, she looked frozen at the moment before the fall. The moment when the body is already pitching backward, yet the mind hasn’t caught on.
A split second of irrational madness, exhaustion, Ryan told himself. He felt foolish for how his heart jumped in his chest, watching Wren’s body drop into the muted lights of the city, coming to rest against the veil of glass. Crawling through the peripheral of his mind, he looked for validation. I need sleep, he confirmed while putting his hand out, testing the firmness. The glass pressed back, cold and ungiving.
Moving from the window to her, Ryan ran the back of his fingers along her cheek, casting dark shadows like spiders down her face. Wren appeared wilted. Perhaps, he worried she was unwell. It wasn’t uncommon for Wren to fall ill and not recover for weeks. Her body had a talent for turning the benign into something complicated. Something hard to treat.
As a man, Ryan thought he could fix it if only given a chance. As a doctor, he was forced to admit how much of the healing process was up to the patient. Humans were horrible animals: lying, begging, and cheating even with the noose of disease hanging heavily around their necks. Poor historians, hiding what they should show, showing with both hands what doesn’t matter. And yet, some managed to harbor the ability to heal themselves when all other measures fail, or worse, to die when they shouldn’t.
The problem with Wren was she liked being sick. It gave her a place to hide. It made all her excuses and covered her tracks, especially those leading to dark spaces. He studied her. She stared in abeyance back at him. Her eyes submerged and yet entirely under control, a portrait of someone holding their breath. Her body was feral. She had a strong nose, and high-set cheeks crested with freckles; he realized she was smiling at him. No one smiled at him like that, not even his wife.
Ryan was the hallmark of tall, dark and handsome, a nascent of hard lines fixed in angular beauty. Except for his eyes which were heavily lidded, almost sullen looking. He could have been genuinely appealing to the opposite sex if not for his offensive mannerisms. Beneath his dark, short-cropped beard, he wore a near-permanent scowl. It matched the deep, cynical wrinkles on his forehead. He had a habit of invasively staring that made everyone around him uncomfortable. In place of polite acknowledgment, Ryan used curse grunts and was shockingly blunt.
He was criticized for being unapproachable so often that he stopped trying to figure out what it meant. How he successfully navigated the interview process for his medical education was a mystery even to Ryan. He knew he was well hated; only called on for his skills which weren’t that rare, tolerated as a novelty by the nurses, and feared by his students. All of it compounded the mystery of Wren Magee. The one person not only willing to wade but willing to bathe in the choppy waters surrounding him.
“Who is watching Farley tonight?” he asked.
“Ollie is,” she answered, tugging at a wrinkle in the hem of her knee-length skirt. “I hate being called into work at night.” She shook her head, laughing, knocking loose a pile of dark hair pooling on her shoulders, sending it tumbling down her back.
He handed her a cup of coffee. Wren removed the plastic lid to take a sip. He knew it was too black and bitter; it was too late to get a decent cup for them to share.
“Do you hate being called away from home? Or do you hate the subject of the press conferences that get called at night?”
His question was a token dropped in a vending machine. He hoped to get something he might like in return for the effort. And he did. Wren’s sensual lips parted, and her smile slowly rose over the paper rim of the cup.
“I don’t know?”
Ryan was so lost in his thoughts he had forgotten his question.
“I like driving in the dark,” she said, looking beyond him. “I like watching the street lights bounce off the city as I get closer. It reminds me how far away I live, tucked away in the mountains. I always wonder where all the people are going, if they’re happy or sad. And if they’re driving to something or away from it. I like working, but I don’t like leaving the hospital at night when it is all over. Even though I am going home to Farley, the drive home makes me sad.”
He tried to picture Farley. It was late on a school night. She would be sleeping, leaving the man Ollie impotently waiting like a sheepdog in Wren’s house. The familiar question snarled and snapped as he let it rove through his mind. How did that man get himself so far into Wren’s life without her pushing back? For as public as Wren’s face was, her mind was immensely private.
Wren’s phone buzzed. “Oh shit,” she jumped, handing back the coffee. “We need to get down there.”
Offering her his hand, her eyes landed dangerously long on his wedding ring. He thought she might deny him, but after a moment, she accepted it. Slowly getting to her feet, Wren held onto him as she smoothed her skirt. Together they walked the long hallway; the carpet cleaners were already hard at work attempting to erase the marks of the living from the hospital floors. Moving down the echoing concrete stairs, their hands brushed together, catching for tiny moments, and releasing.
They entered the conference room separately, Wren Magee, Public Relations Officer for the Hospital and School of Medicine, through one door and Dr. Ryan Moore a second later through the other. Glancing at the table of microphones, Ryan rolled his eyes. Impulsively, he ran his hand down his shirt to straighten a tie he was not wearing. He forgot he was still wearing green surgical scrubs. The press conference had been scheduled to follow the final surgery, which had started late and ran long. The fault was his. The delay dragged Wren back to work later than he would have liked. Feeling guilty, he used the little remaining time to meet her.
Ryan hated cases like this one, injuries that drew public attention. Giving cause for the hospital to display the surgeons for the local news, like alley cats up for adoption. When all he wanted to do after a long day was go home and slip into a glass of gin. The only salvageable part of the evening was getting to see Wren.
Taking his place, he did his best not to look openly hostile. Wren passed behind him, pausing long enough to adjust the collar of his white lab coat and hand him a printed copy of the OR report. A report he had rushed dictated before going to find her. At the bottom were notes printed in Wren’s flawless handwriting. He was at a loss about how she produced a hard copy, let alone found the time to annotate it.
“Here it is, Dr. Moore. Let Dr. Miller take the questions. Repeat it before answering if you’re asked something directly, repeat it before answering, and you’ll do fine.” The insult was glaring. Clearly, Wren thought him too stupid to answer questions about his own goddamn patient.
She moved down the back of the table, stopping briefly behind Dr. Miller, a greying walrus of a man, saying something into his ear that made him laugh. His belly shook the table, increasing Ryan’s longing for a drink. Wren sat down at the third and final chair, fixed a smile, and nodded to the Press.
Ryan thought he saw it again. It was what he was looking at on the bridge right before she leaned into the glass. The vanguard of his unease. A fleeting shadow had crossed her eyes. Leaving Ryan with the image of Wren cloaked, like Little Red Riding Hood, moving among the tall, tenebrous trees, pulling chunks of dripping raw meat from her basket, feeding the wolves trailing at her feet.
“We want to thank you for coming out at this late hour with such short notice,” Wren began.
Ryan sneered. It wasn’t short notice. The press conference was scheduled 32 hours ago on the contingency that the patient survived. Had he not, it would have been postponed, defaulting to Wren to meet the Press alone in the morning, in one of the sad-looking rose gardens where she would dispense the bad news; the critically injured police officer had not survived his injuries.
But he did survive., with Ryan working under the lights of the OR, pushing his team to close. Checking the time, he dispatched a medical student to call for Wren. When Ryan was removing his gloves and gown, Wren’s car was already descending the mountain, spilling out of the darkness into the crush of city lights. Wren’s job was to close the incident for everyone—everyone except for the people who mattered. The officer and his family would linger in the hazy limbo of the SICU for weeks, their lives forever as broken as his body.
“Dr. Ryan Moore, the lead surgeon on the case, will briefly describe Officer Lambert’s condition. Then Dr. David Miller, the Surgical Intensive Care Unit head, will take a few questions regarding his prognosis going forward. Due to the lateness of the hour, we encourage you to be brief,” she said, making direct eye contact with a middle-aged male reporter known for his long-winded inquiries.
The room collectively laughed. Ryan audibly scoffed, causing Wren to turn in her chair just enough to deliver a wide smile down the table at him.
You’re so fucking charming, Wren, he fumed. If he pulled a jab like that, he would be called an asshole. Actually, it took far less than that for Ryan to be called an asshole; all he had to do was walk into the room.
“Before I hand over to the surgeons, I want to say on behalf of all of us at the UH hospital, our prayers and thoughts go out to the Lambert family and the State police force in this challenging time.”
Wren took an uncharacteristic stunted breath, cracking her polished speech. Whatever she was holding was about to come up for air.
“Doctors, it’s been an incredibly long week. I am sure both of your families are missing you. Let’s get you back to wives, so they don’t have to sleep alone. Dr. Moore?”
Ryan closed his eyes, clenching his jaw to keep from swearing aloud. Because if it were true, if his wife were sleeping alone, then she wouldn’t be pregnant again, and Wren wouldn’t be staring through him as if he was incorporeal.
With his eyes shut, he could see Wren hiking before him as the June snow fell around them. Three steps behind her watching her strong shoulders as she jumped over the boulders up the trail. After months of struggling to keep his feelings for her in check and finding it impossible, the moment materialized. He was a married man, securing his path to her with lies, a dozen to his wife, another dozen to his secretary, a handful to his chief resident, and one to Wren. He told her his dad was flying in for a visit and needed help finding a hiking trail he could take him on. Needing to see it in person to make sure his father could navigate it safely.
And after all his planning to get her off the medical campus alone with him, a storm had forced them to seek shelter in the trees before reaching the summit. Thunder growled up from the ground. Lightning cracked so near the charge had licked his skin. Panic had crawled out of the corners of his mind but not enough to turn him back.
Lightheaded from the altitude, his legs were on fire from the hike, the snow stinging his exposed flesh like angry bees. When he leaned in to kiss her, Wren laughed at him. She had known what he was doing all along, and she was laughing. Her words ripped through his body. “I’m not what you think I am.”
He told her he didn’t care what she was. He was in love with her.
“Yes, Dear,” she said. “But do you think that’s a good idea?”
And there she was, staring down the table, completely denying him. She looked so sure of it. He might have believed they were total strangers and that everything between them was gone except for the one thing she could never erase. The child sleeping on the other side of the mountains was his.
“Dr. Moore?” Wren urged.
Ryan looked down at the paper on the table before him. His hands were shaking. “Yes, thank you, Ms. Magee,” he cleared his throat, “At 4:28 PM today, Officer Gary Lambert was taken into the OR for the final of three surgeries to repair the damage caused...
*Ollie*
A cascade of pink sunlight poured into the two-story, century-old farmhouse, deepening the red tones in the exposed brick and sending rosy flames across the wide plank floors. The drifting rays illuminated the knife marks in the wood beside the dish drainer. Oleander James sighed, wedging his thumb into one of the deeper scars.
“Belle Lumiere.”
This is why Wren doesn’t turn the lights on until after sunset.
A flash of images like a flock of startled starlings exploded in his head; the beat of Wren’s dark eyes, the forever autumn of her skin; blushing with the room, he stopped himself. Ollie didn’t want to think about Wren. Thinking about her gave a voice to the words running through his head. Of course, it would be easier to avoid if he wasn’t standing in her kitchen—or if he didn’t feel the way he did about her.
He turned his attention to Farley, perched on the counter like a bird munching away on a plate of buttered toast. Her little bow mouth closed tight with effort as she chewed, dipping the last of the toast in a puddle of jam on the corner of her plate. Sweeping his forearm under her shadow, specks of stick red jam lodged in the sheen of blond hair as he scraped the crumbs into the sink.
The toast was a peace offering. Wren had left dinner for them, as she always did. This time it was a pan of peas and potatoes with tiny squares of ham. Each potato was a perfect half-moon, each square of ham the same size. Farley barely touched hers, frowning, sliding her plate to Ollie to finish.
“You know she made this for you? I don’t like ham. When you chew it, it tries to chew you back.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that, kid. She didn’t mean anything by it.”
“She doesn’t do accidents,” Farley had countered.
Ollie made her toast from a loaf of dark molasses-smelling homemade bread. Then he washed the dishes without asking Farley to dry them. By the time she finished eating, and the plates were all put away, the glow in the kitchen was gone. Turning on the lights, he glanced at his watch. “The days are getting longer.”
Farley, a sharp child with quiet corners and a habit of deep watchfulness inherited from her mother, corrected him. “The days are always the same long,” she said, pushing him over to crawl behind him and get a drink from the faucet. “Only the light changes.” She smiled, water dripping from her chin. “When is my mom coming back?” she asked, jumping down.
“She didn’t say.”
Farley tugged on the untucked tails of his flannel shirt. “You’re in your desert clothes. Does that mean you have new photos of the horses?”
He was in his desert clothes. He had only made it to the first stoplight in town when Wren texted asking if he wouldn’t mind watching Farley. His answer should have been no. He had orders to get out and photos to develop.
“I do. Would you like to see them?”
Wildly nodding, Farley’s auburn hair, overdue for a brushing, bounced in long tangles around the gentle slope of her face and shoulders. Ollie sent her to the front hall to retrieve his camera bag from its resting spot under his goose-down jacket. The jacket smelled damp and smoky no matter how often he dropped it off at the dry cleaners around the corner from his print shop.
They remeet in the library, a quiet room in front of the house. Its tall leaded windows were shrouded by a line of thirty-year-old lilac bushes, wrapping the room in perpetual stillness. Kicking off his boots and removing his faded flannel shirt, Ollie made a futile attempt to clean himself up before throwing himself down on the couch. The aged leather felt like home; initially, it belonged to Ollie’s oldest brother Sim. It was gifted to Wren when Sim’s wife Betsy redid their living room.
Farley climbed in beside him, the sweetness of the jam on her breath. Her hair charged with static from her cotton socks skimming across the wood floors tickled his nose. He tried patting it down. When that failed, he ran his hand over her head, brushing it away with his fingers. Farley made a soft noise like a cat purring. Then she licked the palm of her hand and smacked it on top of her hair, announcing, “It works better with spit.”
Ollie started to say something and changed his mind. Farley was only a child, but at times she had the western charge of her mother, and he had the Canadian pause of his. Pulling out his camera, he pushed the pack of Djarum Blacks to the bottom of the bag. He had forgotten to pull them out and hide them in his glove box.
“That’s the big herd. I think I counted about forty.” He clicked the photos one by one. “Do you remember how to say horse in french?”
“Jument,” she chirped.
“Yeah, that’s a girl horse. What about a boy?”
She blinked her eyes, thinking.
“Chavel,” he said, giving her the answer.
“Chavel,” she repeated. “How do you say it in Spanish?”
“I don’t know. My mom didn’t speak Spanish, only French and English. You’ll have to ask your teacher.”
He watched her try to form an image of Ollie having a mother; the effort slipping from her face, she moved on, asking, “Who takes care of the horses?”
“We’ve been over this, Farley. No one does. That’s what wild means.”
“Yeah-but, do they want to be pets? Pets have people who take care of them.”
“I think they like being free even if it means their life is hard sometimes.”
“You like wild things, don’t you, Ollie?” Her voice was growing dusky.
“I do.”
Farley snaked her tiny hands around his big arm. “I’m not wild. I’m a pet because people take care of me. My mom is wild. No one takes care of her.”
He agreed; Wren is wild. However, the allegation that no one cared for her offended him perhaps a little more than it should come from a six-year-old.
It was how he had met her, answering her handwritten note for “Help” posted on a bulletin board at the library advertising for the help of a carpenter. The handwriting had made him curious, the house’s location on Widow’s Lane even more so. Wren must have already been pregnant. He tried to remember exactly what she had looked like. Standing in the shadow of the dilapidated house with an air of professionalism, he couldn’t quite place.
Wren was a study in contrast with her bruni skin, appearing almost pale against the darkness of her hair and eyes. She had soft freckles on stern bones, a hard stare, and a delicate full lip smile. They were about the same age, late twenties at the time, which had also surprised him. Over the phone, Wren sounded older.
He distinctly remembered the feeling she gave him. There was a heavy gravity to her. A finely masked skittishness Ollie thought he recognized. Attempting to be as non-threatening as possible, he remarked on the house and its long history, which she had bought from the original owners’ family trust the previous year. Then about the hot springs nestled between the two five-acre plots. And the notorious reputation of the wide irrigation ditch separating the backfields from the national forest boundary.
Wren talked easily, but he could tell she was attempting to assess if he was dangerous. Ollie wasn’t small. He had thick German arms, big hands, and broad shoulders. He was handsome with his blonde hair, blue eyes, and all the good romantic French Canadian features of his mother’s side. He was shaggy and unshaven, never presenting as clean-cut as he should have been.
He had given Wren references over the phone. He told her how he owned the Print Shop on Main Street, making prints, primarily for ski tourists, and he was a photographer, doing carpentry as a side job. Although, he didn’t tell her he was a calligrapher and how there was hardly a building in the historic old mining town of Hastings reborn as a ski resort without his mark. He was self-conscious about it. His printing and murals were like late-night reflections staring him down. Always a new imperfection waiting to be noticed and troubled over.
He told her how he had grown up in town, moved away for college, returning a couple of years after graduating. His older brother Sim was married to Betsy James, the sheriff. He mentioned Mrs. Manning, the widow who lived on the only other property serviced by the small dirt lane, had been his high school English teacher. Wren hired him, and from there, their friendship was almost instantaneous, the easy-going Ollie and the mysterious Wren. Still mysterious, he thought. Again the guilt rose.
Farley’s feet hit the floor with a small thump. Stooping to pick up a book, she asked, “Are you coming?”
A mischievous closed-mouth smile pinned beneath her mossy brown eyes. It was her mother’s smile. Farley disappeared out the library door. Ollie listened as she shut the bathroom door. The toilet flushed, and the water ran. Outside he heard a car. The headlights scratched at the fence of mulberries banking the front yard. He knew it wouldn’t be Wren returning this early. It would have to be one of Mrs. Manning’s adult children checking on her.
Ollie rubbed his eyes. His back was sore from four days worth of driving around on washboard roads and waking up freezing from sleeping in the back of his truck on an air mattress that leaked air all night. The step stool pinged against the tile. The water ran again. Then the door opened, and Farley’s footfalls padded down the hallway towards her bedroom.
Getting up, he went to the kitchen to get a glass of water for Farley and dig out one of the frosty ginger beers Wren kept in the fridge. Different brands, the same idea as the ones Betsy, his sister-in-law, stocked in her icebox. He made his way to Farley’s room at the end of the library hall. Outside the door, he rehung a jacket on the peg rack. While there, he picked through her backpack, checking to see if her completed homework made it to its correct folder to turn in for credit the following day. By the time he stepped into her room, she was already asleep. The book she had taken from the library floor was locked in her arms like a teddy bear, Tall Tales of Wild Horses, by Oleander Q. James.
Setting the water on the table beside her bed, Ollie bent with the intent to kiss her, then he remembered the spit trick she used for her hair, and he changed his mind. Turning off the light, he closed the door, heading for the spare bedroom across the hall.
*Wren*
The dream is always the same. It starts with falling, the weight of still water closing around her. Then the gathering of the coldness steals the breath from her body. She knows what comes next; pink blood-tinged foam, blue lips, and-
Wren would awake, gasping for air.
The summer Farley turned five, Wren rented them a crooked yellow beach house. It took two days to drive there, and instead of fields or woods, its backyard was sand and waves. It creaked in the wind. The sky, untethered by the mountains, reached forever.
Farley played in the cold waves with two little girls whose families rented the beach house next to theirs. Together they dug for tiny translucent sand crabs and read books on a big blue towel spread over the hot sand. At night Wren and Farley ate peanut butter toast with sliced red apples for dinner and watched the sunset into the sea. In the mornings, they walked the beach collecting shells under the weight of the misty air and the crying gulls. The salt and sand crawled up their legs.
At first, Farley was afraid of the morning fog. After Wren explained how it was like a cloud, she accepted it. On the rare morning that the fog failed to appear, Farley seemed to miss it. Wren showed her how to make fog in a mason jar using ice when they returned home from the beach. That way, Farley could see it anytime she wanted.
To Wren, the dreams were like the fog drifting in from the ocean at night. Frightening at first, but once she knew what they were, Wren could see the beauty of the water. The way the light streamed beneath the surface, reaching emerald columns glinting with golden silt. The silkiness of it on her skin, in her mouth, in her nose, even in her belly. The silence pushed into her lungs, the stillness in her mind. If she could bottle up the dream and see it whenever she wanted to, she would.
If she had been given a choice, she would have chosen to drown.