Part 94 (1/2)

But isn't that always how it goes?

Her birds found her before the end of the first week. Black wings, dagged edges trailing, whirled overhead as she thudded along sloped paths.

The crows were encouragement. She liked being the weird woman who ran early in the morning, beneath a vortex of black wings.

She had been to Stockholm, to Malmo where her grandfather had been born. She'd met her Swedish cousins and eaten lingonberries outside of an Ikea. She knew enough of the myths of her ancestors to find the idea of Thought and Memory accompanying her ritual expurgation of the selfinflicted sin of marrying the wrong man ...

. . . entertaining.

Or maybe she'd married the right man. She still often thought so.

But he had married the wrong woman.

And anyway, the birds were hers. Or she was theirs.

And always had been.

”Your d.a.m.ned crows,” he calls them.

As in: ”You care about your d.a.m.ned crows more than me.” As in: ”Why don't you go talk to your d.a.m.ned crows, if you don't want to talk to me.”

Her crows, the ones she'd taught to identify her, the ones that ate from her hand as part of her research, clearly had no difficulties recognizing her outside the normal arc of feeding station hours.

They had taught other birds to recognize her, too, because the murder was more than ten birds strong, and only three or four at a time ever had the ankle bands that told Dagmar which of her crows was which. Crows could tell humans apart by facial features and hair color, and could communicate that information to other crows. Humans had no such innate ability when it came to crows.

Dagmar had noticed that she could fool herself into thinking she could tell them apart, but inevitably she'd think she was dealing with one bird and find it was actually another one entirely once she got a look at the legbands.

The other humans had no problem identifying her, either. She was the heavyset blond woman who ran every morning, now, thudding along- jiggling, stone-footed-under a cloak of crows.

Things she has not said in return: ”My d.a.m.ned crows actually pretend to listen.”

Dagmar grew stronger. Her wind improved. Her calves bulged with muscle-but her finger still bulged slightly on either side of the ring. The weight stayed on her.

Sometimes, from running, her hands swelled, and the finger with the wedding ring on it would grow taut and red as a sausage. Bee-stung. She'd ice and elevate it until the swelling pa.s.sed.

She tried soap, olive oil. Heating it under running water to make the metal expand.

It availed her not.

There are the nights like gifts, when everything's the way it was. When they play rummy with the TV on, and he shows her his new poetry. When he kisses her neck behind the ear, and smooths her hair down.

She felt as if she were failing her feminist politics, worrying about her body size. She told herself she wasn't losing weight: she was gaining health. She dieted, desultorily. Surely the running should be enough.

It wasn't. The ring-stayed on.

”Cut the ring off,” her sister says.

But there have been too many defeats. Cutting it off is one more, one more failure in the litany of failures caught up in the most important thing she was ever supposed to do with her life.

That d.a.m.ned ring. Its weight on her hand. The way it digs in when she makes a fist.

She will beat it.

It is only metal, and she is flesh and will.

Perhaps it is her destiny to run.

One day-it was a Tuesday, so she had more time before her section-she followed the crows instead of letting the crows follow her.

She wasn't sure what led to the decision, but they were flocking-the crows with bands and the ones without-and as she jogged up on them they lifted into the air like a scatter of burned pages, like a swirl of ashes caught in a vortex of rising heat. They flew heavily, the way she felt she ran, beating into the ocean breeze that rose from the sea cliffs with rowing strokes rather than tumbling over one another weightlessly as the songbirds did.

They were strong, though, and they hauled themselves into the air like prizefighters hauling themselves up the ropes.

They led her down the green slopes of the campus lawn, toward the sweep of professionally gardened pastel stucco housing development draped across the top of the cliffs above. They turned along an access road, and led her out toward the sea.

She ran in the cool breeze, June gloom graying the sky above her, the smell of jasmine rising on all sides. Iceplant carpeted both sides of the road, the stockade fences separating her from a housing development draped with bougainvillea in every hot color.

A bead of sweat trickled down Dagmar's nose. But some days, she'd learned, your body gives you little gifts: functioning at a higher level of competence than normal, a glimpse of what you can look forward to if you keep training. Maybe it was the cool air, or the smell of the sea, or the fact that the path was largely downhill-but she was still running strong when she reached the dead end of the road.

Still heavily, too, to be sure, not with the light, quick strides she'd managed when she was younger. Before the marriage, before the divorce. But she hesitated before a tangle of orange temporary fence, and paced slowly back and forth.

She stood at the lip of a broad gully, steep enough to make clambering down daunting. A sandy path did lead into its depths, in the direction of the water. The arroyo's two cliffs plunged in a deep vee she could not see to the bottom of, because it was obscured by eroded folds.

The crows swirled over her like a river full of black leaves tumbling toward the sea. Dagmar watched them skim the terrain down the bluff, into the canyon. Their voices echoed as if they called her after-or mocked her heavy, flightless limbs.

She felt in her pocket for her phone. Present and accounted for.

All right then. If she broke a leg ... she could call a rescue team.

If she cracked her head open ...

Well, she wouldn't have to worry about the d.a.m.ned wedding ring any more.

She reads his poetry, his thesis. She brings him books.

She bakes him cookies.

He catches her hand when she leaves tea beside his computer, and kisses the back of it, beside the wedding ring.

She meets his eyes and smiles.

They're trying.

Dagmar pounded through the gully-trotting at first, but not for long. The path was too steep, treacherous with loose sand, and no wider than one foot in front of the other. The spa.r.s.e and th.o.r.n.y branches on the slope would not save her if she fell, and on the right there was a drop of twice her height down to a handspan-width, rattling stream.

Dagmar wanted to applaud its oversized noise.

Even walking, every step felt like she was hopping down from a bench. She steadied herself with her hands when she could, and at the steepest patches hunkered down and scooted. The trail shoes pinched her toes when her feet slid inside them. She cursed the local teens when she came to a steep patch scattered with thick shards of brown gla.s.s, relict of broken beer bottles, and picked her way.

She still had to stop afterward and find a broken stick with which to pry gla.s.s splinters from her soles.