The End of Always: A Novel by Randi Davenport Page B

candle went out again and this time he did not relight it. When we came around a curve, he searched the shoreline. Then he pulled us out of the current to a rocky beach that was more shore than sand, just tall grasses waving and small stones and the dark pines falling away. He threw the anchor into the water and let the boat drag against its weight. He crawled over the bow and tested the line. Then he stepped to the side of the boat and took my hand. I cautiously stepped onto a rock and then another and then down until I stood next to him in the shallows, my boots wet, my stockings wet, my skirt wet almost to the knees.
    He had brought us to rest in a tiny cove that seemed carved by some ancient hand from the determined lines of the riverbanks. He told me to wait and then he crossed the beach and stepped through the branches into the woods. I was left by the river in silence, wringing the water from my hem, my shoes soaked and my hair coming unpinned. The wind tossed the branches and tossed the trees where August had disappeared. I could not see him nor could I see the place where it seemed he had stepped off the face of the planet. No light or house or farm or factory nearby, only the dark, moving river and the boat bumping lightly against the gravel.
    I stood under the stars and breathed in the watery river air and waited for him to come back. I felt myself all the more alive because I was alone and waiting. I felt myself all the more free because the river breeze lifted my heart and sent it sailing. My father was like bad news from a faraway place and completely missing on this early spring night. When I stood on that beach, it seemed to me that I had never met him and all I knew was the wind and the water and August.
    He led me across the grassland to a faint trail that led upward under the trees. We climbed past old limestone shelves that ran with trickles of water and grew dank with moss. We climbed above the shelves to a place where the forest floor softened with fallen pine needles and drifts of leaves, all brown and dry and yet still yielding, August’s hand on mine as the trail rose steeply into the night. At the top, he stood breathing and I stood breathless next to him. We looked back over the way we had come. He put his arm around me and I leaned my head against him. He told me that it was not much farther and it never seemed this far in the daylight. I nodded. Far below, I saw something glint in the grass by the boat. August turned away from me but I hung back. He turned toward me and asked me what was wrong.
    “I saw something,” I said.
    We stood together and looked over the limestone cliffs to the grassland below the woods.
    “Do you see the boat?” I said.
    He nodded.
    “It’s by the boat.”
    He squinted into the darkness.
    “I do not see anything,” he said.
    “Wait,” I said. And just then in the darkness a small flash of light, like a reflection in a tiny mirror on a bright day.
    “I see it,” he said.
    We watched but the light did not come again. The grass near the boat rippled and flattened and the wind pushed against us.
    “Let’s go,” he said. “It is nothing.”
    “August.”
    “It is nothing,” he said.
    We stood on top of the cliffs and looked down into the river. The grass moved and the boat rested and no light came.
    “You see?” he said. “Nothing.”
    He pulled me after him and I followed him along the top of the rocks to a place where the trail disappeared and nothing but a great dense wall of brush and undergrowth and tall pines stood before us. And then we stepped into the brush and there was a shed. When August lit a match and put it to another candle stub, I saw that the shed was fitted with a slatted board door that hung by hinges made of strips of raw deer hide. A crude window had been papered over with greasy butcher paper. August let the match burn down and then shook it out and put it in his pocket. He stepped forward with the flame of the candle stub before