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“I suppose your career change from psychologist to dogcatcher figures into this equation in some way that I can't fathom. Do you want to sleep on this for a few days and get back to me?”

She heard the hurt in his voice. “No. If I think about this any longer, my head is going to blow apart. This must look a little crazy from the outside, but the bottom line is that I'm staying here,” said Rocky. “I just bought a house, and I'm going to remodel it.”

“You bought a house?” His voice climbed an octave. “You should have told me. You had to be thinking about this for months. I needed to know long ago, not now when I've got to start a new job search. You know how this will affect all of us here. Thanks for the consideration. I am not going to say anything else because I'm too mad at you,” he said, followed by a click and a dial tone.

Rocky was expecting everything he'd said, only worse. He was right: she had been selfish not to tell him when she truly knew that she wasn't returning. Ray had been generous and kind, and Rocky was a terrible human being.

Peterson suddenly decided to wash her chest, a difficult access point for a cat. She stuck her tongue out as far as possible and then dipped her head forward, hoping to make contact with her multicolored chest. Cooper lifted an ear to assess a noise, a rustle of leaves and dried grass. Rocky had at least two creatures who agreed with her choice to stay on the island.

After the shame of her procrastination was exposed, she felt a wave of relief wash over her, not unlike the time when she was five years old and her father made her take a stolen pencil back to the Cumberland Farms store. After she had confessed to the clerk, she had not been sent to live out her childhood in a prison cell; she had sucked in the sweetest breath of air. Just like she did after telling Ray that she had resigned.

Chapter 12

I
t had been five days since the abrupt call from Natalie. Rocky left two more messages, trying not to sound too urgent, trying to sound welcoming. She slept at the rental house just in case Natalie called.

As she surfaced from sleep, she heard the crows waking, calling each other. She pictured the crows as a pack of teenagers, texting each other constantly, from the moment they woke until night when they tucked their beaks under one wing and slept.

Rocky had taken to feeding the crows at Tess's house when she practiced archery. She spread dried bread and stale crackers and experimented with feeding them bits of meat, which they had liked quite a bit. The crows had clear preferences: they would not eat pineapple or oranges, and their enthusiasm for vegetables seemed to change from day to day. One day she left some carrot peelings, and they were the food delight of the day. The next time she brought carrot peelings the crows ignored them, leaving them to the jays, who were clearly lower in the avian hierarchy and willing to take the castoffs from the crows.

She had been going to Tess's house three times a week to practice. She preferred to go in the morning before the wind came up. She fed the crows only after the last arrow had pierced the paper target attached to her stack of hay bales. She practiced with her longbow for an hour, then she collected her arrows, took down the paper target with its concentric rings, and placed the arrow, bow, and target on Tess's deck. Finally, she went inside to get the food for the crows. Once she noticed the crows' interest, she did not vary her sequence of behaviors. This was classical conditioning at work, and she was glad that her least favorite part of graduate training finally had a palatable use.

After months of this regime, the crows arrived precisely when Rocky sent her last arrow slicing through the air. A call had gone out moments before from a scout stationed in the tree branches. Rocky could only assume that the call meant that she was nearing the end of the cycle that preceded the dispersal of food. It was not a large island, and the robust bark of a call could have been heard over most of the land—not all of it, but most of it.

Rocky knew that crows were capable of counting—or more to the point, she knew that humans had been able to discern the counting capabilities of crows. Thus, it was entirely possible that the scout was calling out a number to the entire murder of crows.
She has two more arrows left. Come and get it.
She heard odd quacking sounds from the crows, and she didn't yet know what those meant, but she had identified the general sound of
come and get it.

Rocky had recently added one more element to the routine: changing the sequence of events slightly as an experiment. The experiment was so narcissistic that she was glad the crows couldn't tell anyone except the other crows. She had routinely said, “Hello, crows,” when she arrived, and “Good-bye, crows,” when she left. Did they have a name for her? Surely there was a special call for humans, although she had yet to decipher it. She wanted them to know her name. It seemed fair at this point in the relationship. In fact, she might have a better shot at a relationship with crows than with, say, a man. A man like Hill, who had said he was single, if separated. And then
bam,
his wife returns. The crows wouldn't ever do anything like that. Did they mate for life like mallards, swans, and voles? Maybe the most she could hope for was that after consistently feeding them, the crows would learn her name.

Rocky had long known that food is the strongest way to reinforce an action or a sound, and that food must be solidly associated with the desired behavior to form a well-traveled route in the brain. As she put out the bread, she said, “Rocky, Rocky.” This was a good two-syllable sound for the crows to learn. Who knows? And who knows when and how she would tell Hill about seeing Julie? How would she do it? Would he call her? Would he tell her instantly when he came to her house tonight for their previously planned dinner? Would he reach for her hand, looking glum and guilty, or awkward and pained, and spill it out?

Rocky and Bob had been married for eight years, and they had been together for a few years before that. She honestly couldn't remember how people break up. She wanted to hate Hill, but there was nothing similar to hate percolating through her. She was filled with wanting and desire, longing for his skin and breath. She wanted to tell him about Natalie, she wanted to be wrapped in his arms while she told him about the sound of Natalie's voice.

E
verything Rocky knew and believed said that she needed to tell Hill exactly what she'd seen and talk it out before her feelings turned into a gangrenous wound. In a fit of passive pouting, she wanted him to bring it up. The image of Hill and Julie from the night before was intruding into her thoughts, her body, and a huge glob of rejection had taken over her heart.

As if nothing had happened, he called and left her a message: “I'm back and I can't wait to see you. We're on for dinner? See you after work. I'll stop at the fish market. Let me know if you want cod or monkfish. Or do you want me to choose?”

The terror of rejection had been as unpredictable as a lightning strike. There is no way to know how lightning will burn through the cognitive circuitry, leaving one victim with a lifelong limp, while another will never be able to smell onions again. Rocky had suddenly lost her senses, her belief in love after Bob, and her ability to say what she was thinking and feeling. Hill was going to leave her, and in the hierarchy of breakups he was going to take the high road—no phone breakup, but a face-to-face, which ranked much higher than a text message or e-mail.

She knew which ferry he'd take and exactly how long it would take him to walk from the dock to her house. When he was within a mile of the house, Cooper stood and went to the door, looking over his shoulder at her.

“I'd love to know how you do that. Is it sound or smell or canine radar?” Rocky asked the dog. “Does the man have a vibrational frequency that you can hear?”

Hill appeared along the dirt road, swinging a white plastic bag. Rocky desperately did not want to let on that her heart had smashed into the windshield as she sat in pulverized awareness in her car, watching Hill and Julie in the house. She hugged him, hands on his shoulders, keeping one iota of control.

“I brought a loaf of French bread from the bakery near the Casco Bay Line. I know you like their stuff. Can I tell you how great it is that school is out and I don't have a mountain of papers to grade?” His summer job was teaching English as a second language to recently immigrated Somalis, and there was absolutely no grading. He pulled the baguette out of the white plastic bag, which also held his selection of fish. How did he keep that strange rosiness to his cheeks? A mere thirty-two years old, he was younger than her by seven years. If she was trying to accumulate reasons to hate him, being younger didn't count. Was this the last time she'd ever see him? She took the bread and the plastic bag and tossed them on the counter.

“Come and sit,” she said. All nine hundred square feet of the cottage pressed in on her as if she was out of alignment. She sat on the couch. If she had had an idea of how the night would go, it vanished when Hill arrived. Why wasn't she using every blasted communication skill that she promoted? Tell the man what she saw, ask for clarification, use “I,” and tell him how she felt. Settle in for an adult conversation. Rocky grabbed the bottom edge of her T-shirt and pulled it over her head.

“Rocky?”

Good. She had startled him, and as if she watched from a distance, she had startled herself. Her sense of equilibrium had come unhinged. She reached in back and unhooked her bra, shrugging it off in front of her. She slipped next to him on the couch and closed her eyes when his hands found her breasts. The air around them softened her throat and the connective tissues that held her together. This was how her house would smell forever with Hill tucked into it: feral, fresh, full of want. She wanted to grab one morsel of how her life with him might be.

Rocky had not counted on loving a hunter, a man trained to mute his intentions as he waited for the inattentive moment with a deer or a pheasant. She had been inattentive, and he had deceived her. This was the last time she'd touch him, and the secret knowledge gave her a drunken edge.

“Are you sure?” he asked, sliding his hands over her ribs, articulating each one.

Her back arched like a sea serpent cresting. “Are
you
sure?” she asked. This was where he would tell her, his essential honesty coming through.

Hill's hand cupped her breast, and a sweet gust of breath escaped from his lips. “I have been sure since the first day I met you,” he breathed into her ear.

An unclear and avoidant answer. Rocky slipped out of his arms and curled away from him, wishing that he would be the one to say it, to tell her about Julie. If he would do that, they might have the one-second window of opportunity to save themselves. But she had ambushed both of them with her preemptive strike.

“Weren't you going to tell me? I saw you with Julie,” she said, her voice still thick and liquid. “You're going back, aren't you?” she asked, pushing damp hair from her face. She made a feeble attempt to claw her way out of the pit of vengeful blaming that now threatened to trap her indefinitely. The night air surrounded her, and she felt suddenly naked and unprotected. Foolish.

Hill, far from the land of words, his lips already full and languid, tried to surface with a strong swimmer's kick. His dark eyes remained dilated, and he froze in the assault of her accusation.

“No. Wait, how did you see Julie? Where? Jesus, what just happened? Rocky, this is not a black-and-white situation. We're neck deep into divorcing each other, but . . .” He paused, his entire body pulling toward her. He reached a hand out to her cheek and touched the wet that streamed down her face.

“Are you okay? This is not what I wanted to happen, not like this,” he said, his words still heavy and thick.

“I drove to your house and saw you with her. You should have told me she was coming back. I trusted you,” she said, scooping up her bra and shirt, wiping the moisture from her cheeks, wishing she hadn't cried, wishing she hadn't already done something that she'd regret. Rocky leapt up with her clothes and ran for the bathroom. She slammed the door.

She wadded her clothes into a ball and hugged them to her chest. Hill tapped on the door. “Go away!” she yelled.

Silence. Hill was not a persuader or a cajoler. He would not beg. If she told him to go away, he would. He mumbled something to Cooper as he passed through the kitchen. He let the screen door slam on the way out. She pressed her forehead against the bathroom door until Cooper whined in protest and she opened the door. The black dog looked at her, then toward the screen door, then back at her. This was a language she could understand. “Oh, shit,” she said to the dog.

Rocky struggled back into her shirt, abandoning her bra, and ran out of the cottage, with Cooper at her heels. The gravel dug into her feet, slowing her usual long stride. She passed Melissa's house and saw Hill just ahead, near Bracken Road. “Hill, stop,” she called to him. He must have been stunned, she thought, or he would have heard her wincing along. The man could hear a leaf fall from a tree. She caught up with him.

“I want to know why. Why weren't you going to tell me?” she said.

Hill's eyes were red, but it was his anger that made her stop. Every protective mechanism in her system told her to back up, danger. He looked like he had been struck with a sharp stick: fists clenched, muscles tight, eyes dark and steady, lips fixed over his immobile jaw. She had never seen him like this.

“I thought you were leaving me, that you were coming here to tell me that it was over, you were going back to Julie. I should have said something. . . .” She extended one hand toward him and then pulled back.

“This is not at all like me,” she said. “I'm in unknown territory. Bob never, I mean, neither of us ever wandered.” Wandered? “I didn't know I would feel this horrible, it never occurred to me that you would lie.” Her teeth had begun to chatter, and not from cold, even though a breeze foretold rain. She looked over his shoulder and saw a bank of dark clouds advancing on the island.

Hill closed his eyes for a few seconds and his breathing changed; he was struggling for control, fighting against a force that clawed at him.

She knew she was supposed to say how she felt without accusing, labeling, or attacking. She knew everything she was supposed to say—she was the freaking expert at teaching this to young couples when they fell from grace into the first dark pit of fighting. So why was it so hard to say?

“I was afraid,” she said finally. “And now I'm so embarrassed, no, mortified, that it is taking every bit of strength to stand here instead of running away.”

Hill exhaled a long slow breath. She caught a new scent from him, hormone fueled, with an underlay of adrenaline.

“Why didn't you just say something, ask me? Isn't this what psychologists do, they communicate?” he said, flexing his fingers, releasing tension. A dim flash of lightning illumined a deep section of the incoming blanket of clouds. The long delay before the rumble of thunder meant the storm was still far off.

“Bob and I went from point A to point B, and we just kept going, we never veered from each other. I never thought of leaving him and never imagined that he'd leave me,” said Rocky.

“And yet he did leave you.”

Rocky nodded dumbly as the words hit her from a new angle, slicing in with discomfort, revealing the core of her fear.

“You're the widow, I know, the sad one, but have you noticed that I'm going through a divorce and it's the hardest thing I've ever done?”

She started to answer until Hill put up his hand. “I know that Bob can never come back. . . .”