Thursday

CHAPTER 3

“Hello. You’ve reached the voice-mail of Will and Angela Banner. Please leave a detailed message for my entertainment and someone might call you back.”

The feminine voice that spoke after her father's outgoing message provided lengthy options and Leah sighed impatiently. As the prompt tone beeped, she paused. Her father usually returned her calls within a couple of days, but she had received no word from him in nearly three weeks, during which time, she had left several messages. Leah dropped the phone to the blanket that covered her lap as she sat upright in bed, leaning against her pillows.

Moving to Helix, seven hundred-seventy three miles southwest of her parent’s home near Big Knife, had seemed like a great idea a couple of decades earlier when they had still been young and strong. But, as the years passed, the distance she had purposely placed between herself and her childhood home had become a source of anxiety.

Leah had launched herself from Big Knife in order to establish her own life and career. Her two semester attendance at the community college in Helix had run afoul of her ingrained initiative. That, coupled with youthful impatience, had driven her attempt and success at passing the state realtor’s exam. So, by age eighteen, Leah Banner had begun her adult life as a member of the Helix business community.

Maybe their phone is on the fritz or maybe Dad just forgot to charge the battery, she thought. But three weeks?

She sucked in a quick breath at the thought of the orphan her mother had taken in the previous autumn. Leah’s imagination sparked and then exploded as the graphic thought of a wounded grizzly bear going berserk, ripping, snarling and tearing attacked her morning contemplation. She shuddered as she pushed the horrible vision from her mind. During her visit home the previous Thanksgiving, Leah’s mother had showed her the wounded, sleeping bear in the tool shed.  Leah had turned to Angela disbelievingly and said, “Mom, what are you thinking? You can’t keep a bear.” She had then implored her father, “Dad, reason with her.” But he had only shrugged his shoulders and said; “You think it’ll do any good?” he had then turned and walked back to the house.

The bear had begun to play indistinct roles in a recurring nightmare; an opera that had been plaguing Leah’s sleep in recent weeks. The dream would begin with Hank’s father, Old Wolf Shoyo rocking in his chair on the back porch of his cabin, his eyes closed. In her dream, Leah was a little girl again. She sat on the porch looking up at Old Wolf as he rocked slowly. She could hear him whisper as his lips moved. Soon he was speaking a name in repetition and rocking faster. She joined him in his mantra. It built and grew until she and the old man were shouting aloud. The bear would walk slowly out of the dark murky trees into the clearing behind the house. He seemed to float through the low fog toward her. Old Wolf threw his eyes open just as the bear reached them. The animal leaned in to sniff Leah’s face. She was screaming aloud helplessly “Osiahapahnu,” the name being chanted; the only portion of the dream left unremembered as her own voice would awaken her.

Opening her eyes, Leah erased the grotesque vision. It was only a dream but her anxiety was real.

No one would just happen by to help. They were on their own up at the lake; no electricity, no land-line phone service and no wireless phone signal.

Six years earlier, Leah had talked her father into purchasing a wireless phone in order to make use of voicemail. She had also tried to sell him on the idea of putting up a satellite dish for Internet reception. This had fallen completely on deaf ears. But her father, Will, did agree to the phone and, to Leah's surprise, a television dish. He now spent most evening hours watching the news channels and having one-way arguments with the pundits on the TV screen.

On one visit home, she and her parents had been walking the Marble Mountain trail.  Halfway up, her phone awakened with a signal strong enough to make a call. She stopped to show her father the bars. His feigned confusion had caused her to over explain the system.  She said “Dad, you can check your messages and answer the calls from up here when you take your walks.”

“So, now I need to get one of them little phones now?” Will rubbed his chin.

“You redunded,” explained his wife Angela, as she slapped his arm, leaning around her tall husband to see her daughter’s phone screen for herself.

“I what?”

“You redunded. You said ‘now’ twice.” Angela looked up into his face.

“That’s not a word, Sweetie.” Will spoke carefully and looked at Angela with eyes full of contrived compassion, slowly shaking his head. “I believe the word you are looking for is ‘superfluouisiated.’”

She hit him again.

“I’m not too keen on having a little phone dictate where I’ll be taking my walks from now on.” He directed this to Leah, still speaking slowly. His manner indicated that he was being very patient with the women in his life.

Leah and her mother were rarely taken in. “Don’t be silly, Dad. If you had a phone, you could take it along with you. You could check your messages when you’re up here. I need to hear from you more often. And the signal is good down at the mailboxes, too. So, when you get the mail, take your phone.”

“OK, we’ll stop and get one tomorrow when we take you to the airport. Maybe we can leave early so you can help us choose one. I suppose they’ll trap me into a contract. We fight for our freedoms politically, only to willingly surrender them to some fat-cat corporation. It might be a good thing really, I guess. If the Good Lord comes for me I’ll just remind Him that I can’t go yet, I got a phone contract, have to keep my word, you know.” Will had then leaned down to kiss his daughter on the top of her head.

He turned and walked the path back toward the cabin, muttering loudly. Leah and her mother smiled knowingly at each other as Will exaggerated his confusion. He gestured first with his left hand and then his right, as if trying to get it straight. “Take a walk--check for messages. Take the phone--go to the mailbox.”

There were two, side by side fastened to a common board atop a post down at the county road turnaround. These mailboxes were fashioned into miniature log cabins with red flags on the right side and names on the front. The old Honda Civic, parked between the lane and the box labeled Banner, had seen better days. Shoyo was the name prominently displayed on the other box. The lane leading away from the Shoyo box swung around the ridge to the northwest and ended at Hank Shoyo’s cabin on the tree line, walking distance north of the Banner place via the lake trail.

Leah knew that Hank never turned his phone on except to make calls. He left it under the seat of his Jeep. Those things going off all the time, Leah remembered her father’s partner saying, it’s like people just walking in without being invited. Hank Shoyo never checked his voicemail either, so leaving a message asking about her parents would be wasted effort. Leah doubted if Hank had ever taken the time to learn how to retrieve messages from his phone.

She pondered the ages of her loved ones. “Daddy’s eighty-one…” Her voice trailed off as she comprehended the age. She had arrived at the halfway point between her birth and her parent’s ages. She always thought Hank to be about the same age as her father, although when questioned, “It keeps changing,” was his answer.

From down the hall, her bird chirped and whistled at the sound of her voice. “Morning, Jazzy.” The pleasant distraction lightened her mood and she smiled and then sighed. “Why have I let them live up there alone all these years?” She cocked her head sideways in thought. Let them?  

She had learned to lean on the horn when topping the ridge that began the last leg of the old two track trail that led down to the large cabin by the lake. The way, often rutted and slow going allowed her folks, having heard her signal, plenty of time to put their clothes on.

Leah honked her salutations, but Hank’s was whistled. His shrill signal, (also for the purpose of avoiding a naked surprise), after the quarter mile walk along the path through the woods and along the lake shore between the two cabins, always brought Dog running and barking from the Banner front porch.

No rest home for the Banners, thought Leah. What home for the elderly has woods where they can run nude, giggling like school children? What retirement village has a lake where Dad can take his morning swim? It amazed Leah that her father still walked out onto the boat dock upon rising every morning, in the warm season, to dive into the frigid waters of Marble Lake. In winter, he replaced this ritual with falling backward, unclothed, into the snow off the back deck, to create a snow angel, often in sub-zero temperatures.

            “It’s good for the circulation—keeps the blood flowing. Ain’t that the truth, Anj?” Leah remembered her father teasing her mother. “Ain’t that the truth, Anj?” Leah smiled. He often repeated himself when her mother ignored him, which she did often when he pressed her to join him in some playful banter. Her mother, having heard his tired old wit for many years, enjoyed making comments of her own, proving that she could easily keep up. “I’ll just take it as it comes, Old Man.” She would pause for effect. “When,” then she’d smile sweetly, “if.”

Leah’s memories awakened her longing. “I’m homesick,” she said with subtle surprise. What happens to people who grow old without loved ones--without children? She wondered. Who holds them up? She shook with a shiver of loneliness. “Leah Banner doesn’t need anyone,” she lied, “except…”

“Are you still there?” asked the automated voice, the small words spoke quietly to Leah from the handset lying in her lap. “Press one for more op . . .” Leah pressed the off button. No more messages, I’ve left too many already, she thought. The helplessness of the situation brought a furrowed brow over her green eyes. A tear of frustration leaked onto her cheek.

The increasing light of morning glowed through her window and equalized the weak blush coming from her bedside lamp. She switched it off. Sunlight focused on the wall opposite the window. Sudden shadowed movement across the lighted wall caused Leah to jerk with alarm. Sucking in a breath and holding it, she slid slowly down into the bed. Fright kept her silent as she waited, straining to hear further evidence of an intruder--a tap, a creaking footstep in the hall, or a quick careless breath.