Coming Home

They slept in the hut that night, wrapped in their sleeping bags on the wooden floor, listening to the stream outside. Nora woke once in the night and lay still looking at the rectangle of dark blue sky in the small window. There were more stars than she had ever seen from home. Too many to count. Too many to even try.

She thought about her grandfather looking at this same sky, thirty years ago, alone in this same hut. She thought about her father as an eight year old, fearless and fast, running the ridge and swimming in the freezing stream. She thought about how a place like this could hold all of that at once, all those different people and all those different years, and still just be a small stone hut in a valley with a window full of stars.

She fell back asleep feeling something she could not quite name but that felt, she thought, a little like being part of something larger than herself.

In the morning Felix was up before her, which was unusual. He had already started a small fire in the fireplace and was boiling water for tea when she woke up. He looked pleased with himself about this.

I found the wood stacked outside, he said. And there is tea in the tin on the shelf. Someone keeps this place stocked.

They had tea and the last of their food sitting in the hut doorway watching the valley come awake. A deer appeared at the far edge of the stream, drank for a moment, and then slipped back into the long grass. Birds moved in the trees on the hillside. The stream made its steady unhurried noise over the rocks.

The walk back was on a different path, skirting the base of the mountain and coming around to the village from the east. It took most of the morning. By the time they came down the last lane and could see the rooftops of the village, both of them were tired in the good way, the way where your legs ache and your shoulders are stiff but you feel very solid and settled inside.

Grandpa Ren was in the garden again. Same chair, same blanket. But he sat up straighter when he saw them coming through the gate and his face changed in a way that was good to see.

Well, he said.

We did it, Felix said. He sat down on the grass beside the chair and started talking immediately, the way he always did when he had something important to say. He told Grandpa Ren about the ridge and the wind and the lunch at the top. He told him about the cave entrance between the boulders, and the three chambers, and the stalactites in the third chamber, and how they had turned their torches off and stood in the complete dark.

Grandpa Ren listened with his eyes closed and a small smile on his face that did not go away the whole time Felix was talking.

And the hut, he said. Tell me about the hut.

Nora sat down on the other side of the chair. She told him about the visitors book. About finding his two entries. About their father at eight years old, swimming in the freezing stream.

Grandpa Ren opened his eyes. They were bright and dark and paying full attention, the same as they had always been.

You found those, he said quietly.

We found them, Nora said.

He reached out and put one hand on Felix\'s head and one hand on Nora\'s, the way he used to when they were very small, and he kept them there for a moment without saying anything.

Then he said: Good. That is exactly right. That is exactly how it should be.

He meant the entries in the visitors book, Nora thought. The chain of them, one generation to the next. She thought he might mean other things as well.

She looked at Felix across their grandfather\'s chair. He was looking back at her. He gave a small nod, which meant nothing in particular and everything at once, the way things between siblings often do.

Above them the Hartwell Mountains stood in the clear morning sky, the same as they had always been, holding their caves and their ridges and their valleys quietly, the way mountains do.

They had been there before any of them. They would be there long after.

But for now they belonged to this family.

***The End***