Although I spent a good part of my youth in the woods, now, with my spectacles and absentmindedly combed hair, I’m sure to my students I look not much different than agoraphobic English professors and two-legged lab rats who only see the light of day on their way to the student center’s vending machines.
I’m by no stretch a survivalist. My limit for the outdoors extends to how much fresh water and granola bars I have in my backpack. My understanding of the forest is more abstract and theoretical than practical in many situations.
Yet I learned something about the outdoors from my stepfather and had some common sense knocked into me by my ROTC drill instructors, who rightly regarded my intellectual curiosity as a battlefield handicap in most situations.
And in dismissing what little I do know, I think I may have set Juniper up for what happened.
Detective Glenn takes a call, and I sit here looking at the outstretched hand of the poor girl.
Her fingers permanently curled in agony when her body stopped producing the coenzymes that prevent the stiffening of muscles we call rigor mortis.
You only have so many hours in a semester to impart upon your students what’s important. I’d create endless different lesson plans trying to distill what I thought was absolutely critical. Somehow I managed to find the time to let them play video games on the lecture hall video screen—showing how hip I could be while teaching them how even a digital ecosystem can follow emergent rules.
Now I regret spending so much time on that nonsense, or on movie days when we’d watch a film like Avatar and try to rationalize an alien life cycle.
I should have been teaching them about survival.
The video games and the movies are a selfish indulgence. I have never been the popular professor, good at making jokes or just talking to my students. I’m often disconnected and isolated. These so-called fun teaching tools are my attempts to show them that there is a connection between the cool things in their lives and the world I live in.
Looking at the photographs of poor Juniper, I feel as foolish as a history professor strutting into class in a Captain America costume.
I should have been teaching her and her classmates to be safe, not trying so hard to get them to like me.
Juniper should not have been out there alone. Someone should have known where she was. She should have been packing a gun. She should have done all the things I don’t do . . .
Impulsive, curious, and oblivious, she may have learned more from me than she should have.
“Dr. Cray? You okay?” Glenn asks.
I realize I’ve gathered the six photographs of Juniper into a pile and clutched them close to me. Embarrassed, I set them back on the table.
“I’m sorry.” I push my chair back. “I should probably be going. If it’s okay?”
“Yes. Of course.” Glenn stands up and goes over to the door to open it for me. He stops before turning the knob. “I was just on the phone with Fish and Wildlife. They’ve got their best tracker here. We’re going to catch this animal. If that’s any consolation.”
I give him a weak smile. “We both know that it isn’t. The bear was just being a bear.” I take a gulp of air into lungs that don’t want to move. “She should have known better.”
“Don’t blame her,” Glenn replies.
I glance up. My words are terse and filled with self-loathing. “It’s not her that I blame.”
CHAPTER NINE
MIDNIGHT
A deputy drops me off at the motel parking lot in the late afternoon with a cardboard box containing my shoes, laptop, and other stuff they took from my room and my Explorer.
The door to the motel room still has a splintered frame where the tactical unit knocked it in. I should probably ask the front desk to put me in another one, but I just don’t care.
I shut the door behind me and use the chain latch to keep it closed. The bed is still unmade, but it looks like my pillows have been moved. If I had to guess, someone went over them with a sticky roller, gathering up hair. I suspect they weren’t just looking for Juniper’s blood. They were also searching for any other signs of her.
While Detective Glenn and I spoke, a technician was doing a cursory examination of what they found.
If a long brown hair had been discovered in my bedsheets or in the shower drain, I can bet that Glenn would have innocently asked if I was here alone or had any company. It would be the first step toward establishing if I was a liar and a potential killer.
Up until I left the sheriff’s office, I could tell Glenn was taking a careful measure of me. He’s met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of guilty persons. I’m sure he has his own patterns to look for. Everyone is unique, yet we all overlap in the way we react.
It would be easy to call me unemotional. And perhaps I am, if you use a literal definition of the word.
When my father died, I went from an outgoing if not extroverted boy to very withdrawn. My mother sent me to several psychologists. She was worried that I wasn’t dealing with my grief appropriately.
Sitting in their offices, I could really only articulate my feelings in yes-or-no fashion. When given a written quiz by one therapist, Dr. Blakely, that asked me specific questions about how I felt, what was going on in my head became apparent—at least to Blakely and myself.
Blakely sat my mother in a chair beside me and told her bluntly that I was managing this as well as could be expected. I wasn’t a sociopath or unfeeling. I just didn’t express how I felt or even recognize it the same way other people did, or in the same time frame.
The trouble is we expect the emote part of emotion. Humans are social primates, and our experiences have to be externalized to be acknowledged by others.
Mother never saw me cry. I used to think that’s what bothered her and why she sent me to the different therapists. When I was a little older and had the benefit of perspective—plus some insight from her second husband, Davis—I finally realized why she kept trying to get a second opinion.
She never cried.
Mother couldn’t admit her own guilt at not expressing the emotions people are supposed to when a loved one dies.
I have no doubt she felt the loss of my dad deeply. I know she loved him dearly. Everyone did. He was a selfless human who died trying to help other people.
I never judged my mother’s sense of loss by how she acted. It was as plain as an equation. When Dad died, the echoes of boisterous laughter and the light he seemed to radiate throughout our home were gone. A stranger to our house could sense that something was missing.
In retrospect, it reminds me of the stories my stepfather told about taking the train from West to East Germany when he was stationed in Berlin. Davis said it was like going from a color to a black-and-white movie.
When Dad was alive, the world was filled with color. Afterward, color only existed as a number on a list of hues. Everything felt muted.
My reaction to Juniper’s death was a slow burn. Glenn may now believe I didn’t kill her, but as I lie in my bed staring at the ceiling, I wonder if he thinks I’m the type of man who could.
What was I supposed to say when he mentioned her name? How was my face supposed to move? I don’t know. I’m sure the right response wasn’t to do nothing and stare blankly like a Greek statue.
At the end of the interview, Glenn gave me a second chance to react like a normal, feeling human being when he said they’d catch the bear. My response was that of a scientist, not a red-blooded man who should be driven to revenge for this injustice.
To be clear: I hate that fucking bear.
It may have been doing what comes naturally, but so does Ebola or cholera. I’d wipe them from the face of the planet if I could.
Bears are fascinating animals that share more similarities with us than we realize. They’ve adapted to almost as many environments as we have. They’re an extremely successful and intelligent mammal.
They deserve our protection.
But not this one. Too stupid to know that harmless young woman was no threat, it has to die.
Right now I wish I were out with the hunters trying to track it down.
That’s what I was supposed to tell Glenn. The right response was anger and the desire to do something.
He probably thinks I’m something worse than unemotional.