River’s End

what will they do when she starts to beat her wings against the bubble?
    And what will she do if she doesn’t?”
    Noah got to his feet. “I think I’ll walk down, too. Never seen a beaver.”
    “He has a kind heart,” Celia commented, smiling after him.
    “Yeah, and he also has a curious mind. I hope he doesn’t try to pump her.”
    “Give him some credit, Frank.”
    “If I didn’t, I’d be going to look for beavers, too, instead of taking a nap.” With that, he stretched out and laid his head in his wife’s lap.
    Noah found her sitting on the bank of the river, very quiet and very still. It made a picture in his mind—very much like, yet so very different from, the one he had of her as a small child running from grief.
    Here she simply sat, her cap over her butterscotch hair, her back straight as a die, staring out over water that ran fast and bright and clear.
    She wasn’t running from grief this time, he thought. She was learning to live with it. It was sort of her personal river’s end, he supposed.
    Her head turned quickly at his approach. She kept her gaze steady on his face, those rich eyes of hers solemn, as he moved to her and sat down.
    “They come to play here,” she told him in a low voice. “They don’t mind people too much. They get used to them. But you have more luck if you don’t make a lot of noise and movement.”
    “I guess you spend a lot of time just hanging around.”
    “There’s always something to see or do.” She kept scanning the river. He made her feel odd in a way she couldn’t decide was pleasant or not. She only knew it was different from anything she’d felt before. A kind of drumming just under her heart. “I guess it’s nothing like Los Angeles.”
    “Nothing at all.” At that point in his life, L.A. was the world. “It’s okay, though. Mom’s big on nature and shit. You know, save the whales, save the spotted owl, save the whatever. She gets into it.”
    “If more people did, we wouldn’t need to save them in the first place.”
    She spoke with just enough heat to make him smile. “Yeah, that’s what she says. I got no problem with it. Mostly I like my nature in the city park, with a basketball hoop.”
    “I bet you’ve never even been fishing.”
    “Why should I?” He sent her a quick flash of a grin that had the drumming inside her picking up its beat. “I can walk right into McDonald’s and buy a fish sandwich.” .
    “Yuck.”
    “Hey, you want yuck? Sticking a defenseless worm on some hook and drowning it so you can pull up some flopping, slimy fish.” The fact that she smiled a little, that her eyes shimmered with a mild and adult kind of humor, pleased him. “That’s disgusting.”
    “That’s skill,” she corrected, almost primly, but she was looking at him now, instead of at the river. “Isn’t it crowded in the city, and full of noise and traffic and smog and stuff?”
    “Sure.” He leaned back comfortably on his elbows. “That’s why I love it. Something’s always happening.”
    “Something’s always happening here, too. Look.” Forgetting her shyness, she laid a hand on his leg.
    A pair of beavers swam cheerfully upriver, their slick heads skimming the surface, ripples shimmying over the water in widening pools around them. Then, like a dream, a heron rose up over the opposite bank and glided with a majestic flap of wings across the river, so close its shadow flowed over them.
    “Bet you never saw that in the city.”
    “Guess not.”
    He amused himself with the beavers. They were really pretty cute, he decided, circling, splashing, flipping over to swim on their backs.
    “You know about my mother.”
    Noah looked over sharply. She was facing the water again, her face set, her jaw tight. There were a dozen questions he’d wanted to ask if he found the opportunity, but now that she’d opened the door he found he couldn’t.
    She was just a kid.
    “Yeah. It’s rough.”
    “Have you ever seen any of her movies?”
    “Sure. Lots of them.”
    Olivia pressed her lips together. She had to know. Someone had to tell her. He would. She hoped he’d treat her like a grownup instead of someone who needed constant protecting. “Was she wonderful in them?”
    “Haven’t you ever seen one?” When she shook her head, he shifted, not sure how to answer. The best answer, his mother often said, was the simple truth. “She was really good. I mostly like action flicks, you know, but I’ve watched hers on TV. Man, she