Where the Lost Wander

by Amy Harmon

“It’s easy to be tough when I’m with you, John. But I don’t think I can do this by myself.”

But I’m too afraid to cry.

“So you be real careful about who you hate.”

I don’t know if anyone will come looking for me or baby Wolfe. I don’t know. John. John will come looking.

Naomi is leaving pages for me again.

“Naomi is . . . lost.”

“We will have to become entirely new creatures. Then we will all be lost people . . . like my mother.”

The pain was sharp, but it didn’t last. I almost missed it when it fled.

But I will do whatever you want me to do. For as long as it takes. I will stay with you until you’re ready to go.

For a brief, sweet moment, my heart is light and the snakes are quiet.

My rage is bigger now.

killed him, Naomi.”

“I’m bleeding. Finally. I was afraid.”

“I didn’t fight,” she says again, stronger. Louder, like she’s making herself face them.

I tell her I am trapped where the lost wander,

I feel close to her here. When these people are gone . . . when their world is gone . . . she will be gone too.”

“Forgive me, John,”

“Ma?” I whisper. “I don’t know what to do. Help me find my way home, wherever home is.”

“He is still Wolfe.”

He has killed for me before.

Are you angry with the bird because he can fly, or angry with the horse for her beauty, or angry with the bear because he has fearsome teeth and claws? Because he’s bigger than you are? Stronger too? Destroying all the things you hate won’t change any of that. You still won’t be a bear or a bird or a horse. Hating men won’t make you a man. Hating your womb or your breasts or your own weakness won’t make those things go away. Hating never fixed anything.

“We can’t change what is. Or what was,” John says slowly. “Only what could be.”

Transcendence is a world, a place, beyond this one. It’s what could be.

I gather her hair in my hands and knot it up again with a bit of rope,

but her hands are too stained to fix with soap and water.

“But you wouldn’t be Naomi without the stains.” “I have so many,”

It isn’t love unless it hurts,

She washed him and wrapped him in a small wool blanket with a stripe of every color.

Naomi said it reminded her of her mother’s coat, the coat of many colors, like Joseph sold into Egypt.

Footprints, too small to be a man’s, too large to be a child’s, sit on the surface of the snow. Beside the footprints, the toes clearly delineated, is a small set of paw prints, scampering away toward the trees. A woman and a wolf. I follow them, bemused, until they suddenly disappear.

“The mother came for her son,” I whisper, stunned. Overcome. “Yes. And now Naomi can go home.”

I realize now that life is just a continual parting of the ways, some more painful than others.

Worlds pass away.

Washakie. I’m sure one day, when ages have passed, his spirit will return there, and mine will have to follow.

but John still carried that pain.

Washakie didn’t ask about our babies and why there weren’t any, but before he left, he told John he would have a son.

John said he already had three May boys to father, but Washakie said there would be a whole line of John Lowrys, and John’s descendants would tell his story and honor his name.

When we saw him again the following year, I was rounded with child, and the night I delivered, there were tracks in the snow.