I cross my arms. “You wait for them to come to you. Like the rabbit.”
He turns his gaze to me. Yes. He doesn’t have the speed or claws of other animals. But he has stealth.
I see a silvery flash go by. I point. “Kiro!”
He gives me a look. “You scared it.”
There’s another. It’s kind of exciting.
He pulls his hand out of the water and comes back to shore. “I’ll teach you. Come on.”
Part of me wants to say no—I won’t learn. I won’t live here—surely he’s not imagining it anymore. But he’s teaching me things, starting to trust me. It means something. “You think you can teach me to fish with my hands?”
“It takes patience, that’s all.”
He leads me out, helping me balance on the massive trunk as we go a ways over the rushing water. He shows me where to stretch out, shows me a limb to hold on to. I go onto my belly and lower my hand in. It’s cold.
He goes farther out on the same limb and lies in the opposite direction, so that we’re facing each other, our hands dangling in the cool flow of water. “If your fingers get too cold, pull them out—slowly. Or switch hands.”
You can see all the way to the gloomy depths. Fish flash by. Sometimes big ones—trout, maybe? I have no idea.
“Is this how bears catch fish?” I whisper.
“They more scoop. They have speed and claws.”
“How are you doing?” I ask.
His hand is a sinewy blur in the water. “The dizziness is gone.”
“I don’t mean that.”
He’s silent for a while. Then, “I can’t stop thinking about them.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s hard to stop thinking about a thing.”
His gaze meets mine. “Like the kitten.”
The cold water gurgles by, flowing through my fingers like cool velvet. “Yeah.”
“I spent a long time puzzling about the kitten,” he says. “When I was lying there.”
I actually stopped thinking about the kitten for a while. Free of the fucking kitten. I don’t want the kitten back on my mind.
“You said it cost you everything. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling, wondering what it meant.”
“The kitten isn’t important.”
“Did it die?”
“No.”
“You always said you lost everything because of it.”
He remembers. Of course.
“Why did the kitten cost you everything?”
I’m about to remind him I don’t talk about it, but I look up and meet his gaze.