“She was cruel sometimes. Just telling me I was the daughter of an earth spirit was a mean thing to do.”
“It wasn’t intended to be mean if she believed it.”
“She did believe it. But I think sometimes she realized what she’d done and felt bad about it. It was one of those times that she mentioned the name Bauhammer.”
“Poor woman. What pain she must have endured. I’m glad she had the comfort of her earth spirits.”
“But they’re why she took me.”
“Her sickness is why she took you. And who knows? Maybe the nurturing she saw in the earth helped her take care of you.”
Raven stared thoughtfully at the distant trees.
“Do you know what I think about her earth spirits?” Ellis said.
“What?”
“I think her deep appreciation of nature was altered, became exaggerated by her illness.”
“That’s probably true. She told me she and her mother would go to the Montana wilderness to help her feel better when she was sick. She said that was where she learned to speak to the earth spirits.”
“She was using nature to heal herself. I did that intuitively when I was a little girl, and consciously after your abduction.”
“What did you do after I was abducted?”
“I went to the western mountains to recover. That was how I eventually stopped using drugs and alcohol. Nature has incredible healing power. Audrey felt that, but she began to believe she could manipulate that power to act on her behalf.”
“She did. That’s what she thought she could do.”
“There is a kind of spirit in mountains, trees, and rivers. I feel that same as Audrey did. But I let the spirits be themselves. To project my being onto theirs could only diminish them.”
Raven looked at her curiously. “You see earth spirits?”
Ellis picked a few blades of grass. “This grass is making food for itself from sunlight. And that food feeds many creatures. I believe photosynthesis is a kind of miracle. The poet Walt Whitman called a leaf of grass ‘the journey-work of the stars.’”
Ellis laid the blades of grass in Raven’s palm. “I don’t need to see actual earth spirits in this field to find a million things that inspire me. When Audrey said you were born of a raven spirit, she turned your birth into a sudden act of magic that wasn’t half as miraculous as the truth. Imagine all the incredible events that had to happen for you to be here. The astrophysical, geological, and evolutionary processes that made you—and all life on earth—are the great wonders of our universe.”
Ellis kissed her daughter’s cheek. “You really are a miracle, you know.” She rested her hand on Raven’s baby bump. “And here you are making another.”
“I think it’s a miracle that we found each other again,” Raven said. “Do you ever think that?”
“It’s one of the most amazing miracles ever,” Ellis said.
Raven returned the kiss to Ellis’s cheek. The first kiss her daughter had given her. Ellis looked out at the field to keep from crying.
Together, they watched three crows flap over the field. When one of the crows called, Raven said, “Fish crow, right?”
“Yes. I love that sound.”
“So do I.”
Raven pushed up her sleeve to look at her watch. “Jackie’s plane landed in Gainesville a half hour ago.”
“We’d better get up to the house.”
“I can’t believe this day is finally here,” Raven said. “This week is going to be wild.”
“Wild” was an understatement. Soon seven people would arrive to spend their December holiday with them. The guesthouse would be packed with River, Jasper, Huck, and Reece in the downstairs room and Jonah and Ryan in the loft bedroom. They would all have to share one bathroom. There’d been lots of jokes about peeing in the woods.
The main house would be less crowded with five people and two bathrooms: Jackie with Raven, Jackie’s mother in the master bedroom, and Keith and Ellis sleeping on the screened porch. Ellis assumed most of the barn guests would be at the main house during the day or walking the trails. The weather was supposed to be warm.
Keith walked down the trail to meet them. “I was wondering when you’d come up. They’ll be here soon. Come look at what we did.”
When they arrived at the house, Ellis understood why Keith had sent them down to the field. He, River, and Max had brought pots of native pines, hollies, and magnolias down from the nursery. They’d put them on the porch and around the house, lacing miniature white lights in their branches. They’d strung the biggest loblolly pine from the nursery with lights and red ribbons and placed it in the living room.
“This is beautiful,” Ellis said. “Who bought the lights and ribbons?”
“I did,” Keith said.
“I should have known. You always wanted a Christmas tree.”
“And now we’re both happy. The tree is native and didn’t have to die. I’m going to plant that one on our property—as a memory of our first holiday with the kids.”
With the kids. She kissed him and whispered, “You’re adorably sentimental, you know that?”
“I don’t mind wearing the adorably sentimental pants in this family.”
“Speaking of pants, you’d better change,” she said, noting how muddy he was from moving the plants. River and Max were, too. Ellis put her hand on her heart to tell Max how much she loved the decorations. She squeezed River’s hand and said, “Thank you,” and for once he didn’t make a sarcastic joke. He was getting more comfortable with being loved.
The rental car with Jackie and Huck, their mother, and Reece arrived twenty minutes later. When Reece saw Raven, he said, “She looks like a balloon that’s about to pop. How could you do this to her, Jackie?”
“Do you want me to draw you a few diagrams?” Jackie said.
“Please no. Your PDA was always graphic enough.”
“The baby might have been conceived on your birthday,” Raven told Reece. “Remember the party we had?”
“I remember,” he said.
