Descent by Tim Johnston Page B

shadow and went wobbling off into the west. When Sean was small they would come here to watch the small planes take off and land, and Grant had told him the story of Sean’s great-grandfather who had been a navigator on raids over Germany and whose plane had been shot down. How one of the crewmen came home two years later to tell that he’d seen the boy’s great-grandfather parachute out just ahead of him but had lost him in the night sky, and when the crewman was captured he expected to see the navigator in the camp, and when the war was over he expected to see him at the army hospital, and then he expected to see him back in the States, but he never did. No one ever did.
    Th
e story had put into the boy’s mind the story of a man who dropped into a forest far from the war and the cities, a black forgotten forest where a man could walk for years and never come across another man nor the end of the forest. Back home his young wife and his son wept over his gravestone but the man was alive in the forest and he lived there for so long that he forgot that there were such things as wars and cities and families. He simply became, like the deer, the owl, the fox, a thing of the woods. And like them he one day died, not from war, or the violence of another man, but because he’d grown old and could no longer hunt and could no longer protect himself from the other things in the forest.
    I think you should come back with me to Colorado, Grant said.
    Why?
    You don’t seem very happy here.
    Am I supposed to be happy?
    Grant looked at him.
    Th
e boy took hold of the brace he wore over his jeans, the steel bars to either side of his knee, and gave an abrupt, adjusting jerk. What about Mom?
    What about her?
    She needs me here, remember?
    Grant nodded, absently. I think it would mean more to her right now if you came back with me, he said. To help look.
    For a time the boy said nothing.
Th
en he said: She bought me something, out of the blue. Guess what.
    What.
    A model airplane.
    Grant studied his son’s face—grown thin in the last year, like the rest of him.
Th
e soft blond mustache he ought to just shave. His son had lost interest in model planes years ago, he knew, though dusty fighters still patrolled the skies of his room.
    Sean, he said. Did Mom ever tell you about her sister, Faith? Her twin?
    Th
e one who drowned.
    Yes.
    No. Caitlin did.
    What did she tell you?
    Th
at mom had a twin sister named Faith who drowned when they were young.
    Grant nodded.
Th
ey were sixteen, he said. Your age.
Th
eir folks, your grandparents, would rent a house on the lake for two weeks every summer—swimming, suntanning on the dock. One day they left the girls alone to go into town.
Th
ey left little Grace with them. Grace was walking by then and she walked right off the end of the dock. Do you mind if I smoke?
    No.
    He lit the cigarette and went on, describing the day as Angela had described it to him one night just before their own daughter was born (long wretched night of no sleep, of fears bursting all at once from his wife’s breast): the two teenage girls on the porch painting their toenails, talking to a boy on the house phone, accustomed to their mother watching the baby.
Th
e moment when something splashed and they looked at one another—each seeing in the other, in her twin, her own face of immediate comprehension. Immediate fear. Two girls running as one to the end of the dock and diving in. Angela could see little Grace down among the rocks like a sunken doll.
Th
e water wasn’t deep and she quickly had her in her hands and she came up kicking, reaching for the dock, calling out, I got her, I got her. But Faith hadn’t come up. Was still down there looking, she thought. She got Grace onto the dock and turned her on her stomach to push the water out and then turned her over again and as she blew into the tiny mouth, filling the tiny lungs, she was thinking about both sisters: the one she was trying to save with her breath and the