I’m Sorry Your Daughter Got Eaten by a Cougar
Photo: National Park Service. Old man Windson sends me up the mountain with a wagonful of food for Mr. and Mrs. Drake. He tells me that they have not been in his grocery since it happened. He also tells me that last time they were in, they did not stock up on nearly enough basic items to carry them through the past three weeks.
The weight of canned corn and two sides of bacon and rice and four and a bushel of peaches has me sweating by the time I make it to their house. I stand on their porch and huff and hope they will not resent my mothering. I know I should not presume, I know I have never been anywhere near where they are now, but I also know that everyone must eat. Everyone must have the strength to continue.
They let me in. “Bless you, Pickle,” they say. “You and old man Windson both.” I follow Mrs. Drake from the porch, down the hallway into the kitchen. She moves as though she is afraid of waking something huge. Mr. Drake unloads the wagon of food. We sip tap water in silence, though a couple of times Mrs. Drake opens and shuts her mouth. The only words that make it out are more ‘thank you’s. I wonder if perhaps she cannot say anything else. Maybe once you lose something so big, there is no point in holding on to little things like speech. Who needs it? What could it possibly do?
As I’m walking out, I notice a door of the hallway that is slightly ajar. Inside, there’s a long clothesline piled on the rag-rug, with clothes still clothes-pinned onto it. Little pink sweaters and polka-dotted skirts. Socks that would fit on my thumbs. A knitted hat with teddy bear ears.
The thunderstorms this year have been unpredictable. I imagine the Drakes standing on their porch, paralyzed with indecision. Do we leave the clothes out there to get drenched? Do we admit that it doesn’t matter? Or do we go out and take them down, touch them with our own hands for the very last time, because there’s not— there’s never going to be—
Carrying the whole clothesline in must have been a compromise. They didn’t have to touch a thing.
Some nights when I cannot sleep, I close my eyes and watch the cougar stalk the dark country of my eyelids. The cat is as big as the shuttle Davy drives. Its eyes glow gold and turquoise and green and a hundred other colors that exist nowhere else. Its front paws are human hands, and it is wearing bracelets. When it opens its mouth I see Phoebe Drake curled in its gullet, sound asleep.
I don’t mind playing delivery girl for old man Windson. With the valley so sparse, you snatch on any excuse for human interaction. And I pass the Drakes’ drive every day I head into town. Their place has the same feel as mine – both tiny houses, nestled back against the mountain, the huge quiet of the black rock and hemlock needles bearing down.
Except to be technical, I shouldn’t call it ‘my place’. Davy might take exception to that if he ever got wind of it. It’s unlikely, though. Eleven months out of the year he’s eleven hundred miles away.
Davy Drum. My wedding veil had not been in the closet for six months when he heard the call of the shuttling life and lit on out of
