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The eastern sky at dawn has gone malevolently red. The redwoods are humbled before the conflagration in the cosmos. Andrew lets Scarf out into the fenced backyard. Color-blind according to the experts, he's more interested in what this new day offers the nose.
Andrew is up early, having promised to cook breakfast for Carol before she heads south. They don't wake Ellie. They catch up. She's about to hit the anniversary of her divorce--six years.
He has always appreciated her beauty, and she's figured that out, of course, and that's where it lies.
"Come see us," she says, and Andrew figures she means everybody who's left in California. They embrace, and Andrew feels the impression, the heat of her, a throb like a ghost limb, and she lingers, and then the Jetta and its undercarriage of grit are gone.
Ellie's dressed for school. She and Andrew treat Scarf to an early-morning romp at the dog park.
"Why do you think Scarf did that?" she asks.
"I guess he's getting protective--the farmer said he'd do that."
"Sean's really a nice guy."
"Well, maybe we'll have him and Delta over."
There's someone on the path. Fritz, it turns out, Abrahamson's dachshund, in his odd sausage-scuttle. Paul huffs behind him, sporting a water bottle on the belt of his khaki shorts. He waves but doesn't stop. Fritz leads them into a soft-orange horizon.
Andrew takes stock of Muir Park's geographic context, the slopes and outcroppings, and the long low bowl, a natural amphitheater surrounded by redwood trees. It is good of the city to set aside this place.
"Are we home?" says Ellie.
"Did you feel the earthquake the night before Carol came?"
"I felt something, I fell back to sleep."
He almost says that California is their home, and Wendigo is just a part of what will always be home. But that's Jana talking, because she used to say things like that, and for now, maybe until their second October, it has to be the thing that he says.
"Me too," he says.
She startles Andrew with a gutsy two-finger whistle that Sean showed her. Scarf looks up and back, strangely, as if he does not remember them, and continues to sniff his way down what the people in Wendigo call a varmint's trail.
END
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