I inhale, and I can’t feel my frozen chest. I still can’t look at her.
“Hey…” She wraps her arms around my waist.
Don’t do that.
“Is it the noise?”
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter. Shake my head.
“What is it then?”
She strokes my shoulders. I can barely feel it through my jacket. But my hands are free. My hands are free to reach into my pocket.
“It’s okay, baby.” She wraps her arms around my neck and pulls me lower. Her lips touch my face—ice cold. I feel her stand down off her tiptoes.
“Is it me?” She whispers. “I’ve been feeling like it’s triggering for you. Something about this. Coming here?”
She knows me, this girl. Gwenna misses nothing.
It’s an effort to open my eyes. To look at her face. Gwenna, whom I love. Gwen, for whom I’ve waited my whole life.
That I have to do this…
That this is the end. It hurts so much. I ease my hand into my pocket, wrap my fingers around the gun grip. I look into her lovely eyes, although it almost kills me.
“Gwen…”
Part One
He takes her in his arms
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
But he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end
You’re dead, nothing can hurt you
Which seems to him
A more promising beginning, more true.
— Louise Gluck, from “A Myth of Devotion”
ONE
Gwenna
October 20, 2015
“Shit!”
I smack the mouse with my whole palm, making my giant iMac monitor quiver on my desk. Then I lean in, squinting at the frozen image of the woods inside the bear enclosure.
“Ugh.”
Just like the last two times, I’m pretty sure that right beside that tree—right there, near the upper right-hand corner of the screen—is…something. The ground and limbs and leaves don’t match up right. I can’t explain it. It’s as if a ghost is there, making things almost imperceptibly blurry. Someone in a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak. Someone in the universe’s best camouflage.
I seem destined to go crazy, though, because each time such a thing has caught my eye on one of the bear cams, it’s been impossible to tell for sure.