In the Woods
Lucy Bryan
Twelve hours after our cat Lyrock disappears, we stand on the deck behind our summer rental. Nate leans into the railing—shoulders hunched, head hanging. I pace the smooth wooden planks. Beside us, the bodies of moths beat against our kitchen windows. A humid wind hisses in the dense, dark canopy overhead. In the valley below, a tractor trailer screams down Highway 36.
I wonder if Lyrock is injured or trapped. I imagine him pinned beneath a fallen tree or licking a bloody haunch in a neighbor’s barn. I envision thick clumps of sand-colored fur strewn about the fallow field beyond our driveway.
When I wrap my arms around Nate, he shrugs me off.
“Do you blame me?” I ask.
He looks at me and says, “I’m trying not to.”
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Lyrock is out there, somewhere, in the patchwork farms, forests, and long-abandoned strip mines that surround us. This is the territory of Nate’s boyhood. A place for throwing hatchets, making fires, and playing war games with the other children of pacifists. A place with sufficient thorns, ravines, and acidic ponds to make for thrilling nighttime missions.
We have chosen to spend our summers in this small community of Mennonite homesteaders because, for Nate, it is still home. His brother’s farm is a mile hike through the woods, and his sister’s family lives just up the hill—close enough that our 5-year-old niece and 2-year-old nephew sometimes show up, unaccompanied, to raid our candy drawer or invite me for a swim. A quarter mile up the lane, Nate’s parents inhabit the house he grew up in—a house his father built board by board, now flanked by mature fruit trees and lily ponds. Most evenings, we eat dinner with some or all of his family. Being here, I’ve learned to cook for and clean up after a hungry crowd of ten.
During these Ohio months, Nate works long days in his father’s blacksmith shop, crafting kitchen and hunting knives. I spend my time reading, writing, and roaming the trails that crisscross the wooded acres between homes. Learning the intricacies of this place—the names of the frogs that chirp at dusk, the secret patches where chanterelles spring from the forest floor, the faint paths made by deer—feels like a form of intimacy, like tracing the palm of my sometimes inscrutable husband.
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The morning after Lyrock disappears, Nate climbs out of bed soon after sunrise and pulls on his tattered work jeans. I dress, apply mosquito repellant, and follow him outside. We enter the strip of woods between our house and the cliff overlooking the highway. Beyond the weeds and brambles that border our yard, this stretch of forest feels surprisingly sparse, its floor carpeted with decaying leaves and intermittent ferns. Searching among columns of mature hardwoods, we duck beneath the webs of orb weavers, taking turns calling for Lyrock. At the foot of one tree, I stop to inspect the eerie white pipes of a ghost plant.
I should have listened to Nate last month, when I decided to start letting Lyrock outside. Our cat spent his first three years indoors, content enough to avoid the sirens, barking dogs, and raucous mobs of students in the Virginia college town where we live from August to May. But when we relocated to Ohio this summer, he began clawing the door and spraying the couch and carpet every time we went outside. I thought a limited diet of sunshine and fresh air would mellow him. Nate thought this place held too many dangers. Despite his hesitations, I let Lyrock out—at first under my supervision and then on his own, never for more than a few hours at a time. Just yesterday morning, I saw him reclining in the grass, gazing into the field beyond our gravel lane, breeze ruffling his mane.
While I zigzag through the woods, Nate walks fast along the ridgeline. He gets farther and farther ahead, and his calls grow faint. The distance between us worries me. If our fears come to pass—if Lyrock is dead or gone for good—what will that loss do to us? Losing a pet is a minor tragedy, but this already feels like a tear in the fabric of our marriage.
I’ve spent enough time in the land of grief to know that no one grieves the same way and that a loved one’s response to loss can be its own source of sorrow. Nate will undoubtedly withdraw from me. I’ve experienced it before, his feral response to pain, his desire to nurse his wounds in solitude and darkness. I am not like him. When I grieve, I crave human touch and words of reassurance. Learning to love each other has meant teaching ourselves to behave counterintuitively, to offer our partners the inverse of our desires. But until now, our losses have been individual affairs. This shared grief is something new.
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Three years ago, Nate followed me to Virginia, where I’d landed a professor gig. He took an adjunct teaching position that was bearable but uninspiring. Those first few months were especially hard, and I fretted over the disparity between the life Nate wanted and the one he’d settled for because of me. Then we found a fluffy, blond kitten with enormous paws and golden eyes, tumbling around a rescue display at Petco. And suddenly there was a new source of joy in our house. I didn’t worry about leaving Nate alone, because Lyrock was there. Nate taught him to fetch a toy lobster and to jump five feet in the air and tag his hand for a treat. I’d come home to stories of wild chases and to silly songs Nate composed about our cat. During arguments, Nate would diffuse tension by saying, “At least we both love Lyrock. That’s something.”
When sheets of rain force us inside, I sob at the kitchen table. Nate walks upstairs. At least we are united in our concern, I tell myself. Our family and neighbors think we are out of our minds. They’ve all given us the same spiel: “Cats disappear, and then they come back days, sometimes weeks, later.” We understand the subtext: Cats are just animals. It’s not like you’ve lost a child. Though they are right, Nate and I both feel stricken. We know that Lyrock isn’t like the semi-feral cats around here. He never strays far from the house—and before now, he’s never spent a night outdoors. The few times it stormed when he was outside, he arrived at the back door almost immediately—damp, panting, and yowling to be let indoors.
Nate and I feel the same sense of foreboding. Or maybe we don’t. Because tangled up in my worry for our cat is a deeper fear: that by losing Lyrock here, I’ve not only stolen from Nate the thing that makes Virginia endurable but also corrupted this place—the home he loves and longs for.
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We entertain out-of-town friends that morning and afternoon—forcing smiles, forcing food down our throats, trying to be gracious hosts despite our gnawing worry. As soon as they leave, we collapse on our bed.
“That was really hard for me,” Nate says, his eyes filling.
“I know—it was for me too,” I reply.
I recognize a defensive edge in my voice. All day, I’ve been apologizing to Nate. More than once, I’ve wailed into the ozone-laden air, “I’m sorry, Lyrock. I’m sorry.” Shouldn’t my repentance bring some measure of absolution? I feel desperate for mercy and comfort, and suspecting that Nate doubts my grief is more than I can bear.
Something stirs inside of me—that old anger I used as both sword and shield in my first marriage. It would be so easy, in this moment, to turn on each other, to strike at each other’s exposed underbellies. But I know how that story ends.
I take a deep breath and say to Nate, “Let’s be kind to each other, okay?”
“Okay,” he says, rolling toward me.
Then we hold each other and cry. We also puzzle over Lyrock’s disappearance. He couldn’t have been hit by a car or stolen—this is the middle of nowhere. Coyotes and bobcats don’t hunt during the day. Could a hawk have gotten him? Could he have run away? Nothing makes sense.
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Over the next couple of days, we redouble our efforts to find Lyrock or any sign of what happened to him. Between thunderstorms that dump inches of rain, turning gravel roads into rivers, we make wider and wider circles around the property. We walk along the highway and scour our neighbors’ barns and outbuildings, sweat-drenched in the sultry summer heat.
We’ve never spent so much time on this land together. Usually, I travel alone, though Nate’s father has been my tour guide on occasion—showing me a rare wild ginseng and the towering trunks of the largest poplars on the property. He was the one who taught me about the licorice-flavored clusters of sweet cicely that bloom along the trails in early summer. But now, it’s Nate who is pointing out the bullet-riddled mound of dirt at the end of his neighbor’s gun range and the remains of an old kiln built into the hillside. Even in the fog of worry, it is easy to see why he is pulled to this earth, these trees, these hills that roll into the winding Tuscarawas River. I feel their pull too.
Still, I’m not ready to give myself to this place, to make it my home in the yellow days of autumn and the long gray of winter and muddy churning of spring. The people who live here have chosen community over careers, reliance on the earth and each other over independence. Giving myself to this place would mean becoming dependent on Nate, his family, and their neighbors. There is goodness in that possibility, I know—the promise of roots and of deep connections to people and place. But I’ve worked hard to build an identity and prospects that my husband can’t yank out from under me. That’s what happened when my first husband left me, and I’ve vowed not to leave myself vulnerable again. If we made this place our life and the tether that binds me to Nate broke, I could lose everything—my marriage, our community, the ground beneath my feet. Though I long for the kind of belonging this place offers, having it means it could be taken from me. Right now, losing a cat feels hard enough.
While we search, we talk about Lyrock. Could he have eaten something poisonous? Could he have crawled into a hole or burrow and gotten stuck? If he is alive, we wonder if he’s managed to find anything to eat. Occasionally, he bats clumsy moths to the floor, but he’s failed to kill any of the mice that infest our rental, even when we shut him in the bathroom with one. At least he will have water to drink—that’s the one good thing about all the rain.
Our hope that we will find him alive or that he will return—sodden and covered in leaves, but whole—gradually gives way to the fear that we will find what is left of him—a carcass with its belly torn open, a flattened mass on the highway, or a few telltale tufts of fur. Or what if we never find him? Would not knowing what happened be worse than finding him dead?
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The third morning after Lyrock’s disappearance, we methodically crisscross the field near our house, searching for remains. Wading through tall grass and wildflowers, I spy wolf spiders, twin jewel beetles, a praying mantis, a differential grasshopper, and a rabbit—but no Lyrock. Seeking the scent of death, I find instead the lemony fragrance of wild roses and a rich dankness at the edge of the forest. When we finish, I head into town to buy spray bottles and tuna fish to make “chum trails” that might lead Lyrock home, if he is lost. Nate trudges west, wearing two pairs of pants to protect himself from thorns and carrying a freshly sharpened machete to hack through the underbrush.
When I return from the store, the house is empty. I stand in the kitchen, staring. Then, the screen door creaks, and I turn to see Nate’s face, flushed and sweat-streaked.
“I found his body,” he says.
I gasp. “No! No! No!”
“And it’s alive!” Nate proclaims, stepping inside. In his arms rests Lyrock, purring. My beloved cat is back, and so is Nate’s dark sense of humor.
Nate tells me he found him cowering beneath a briar thicket on a neighbor’s land—beyond the stream, about a half mile from our house. He responded to one of Nate’s calls with a meow. When Nate came closer, Lyrock emerged from his hideout and leapt into his arms.
“Maybe a dog chased him over there, and he couldn’t find his way back,” Nate suggests.
“I can’t believe you found him,” I say. “I really thought he was dead.”
“I know,” Nate replies. “I just couldn’t give up.”
We ponder the odds. Within a half-mile radius of our house, there are hundreds of acres of dense vegetation. It feels miraculous that Nate walked within 50 feet of Lyrock.
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That night, we pile into bed together. Lyrock, who is not typically a cuddler, lies between us, resting his chin on my shoulder. I bask in the joy and relief of our reunion. And there is this too: the reassurance that Nate and I were kind, as we promised to be. During our three-day ordeal, we listened and responded to each other’s suggestions. We did not blame or bicker or lash out. I managed not to spin my anxiety into anger. Nate remained affectionate, rather than retreating to his inner fortress. That we loved each other well gives me hope, though I recognize the need for caution. Our grief had barely hatched when it met its end. Who can say what kind of beast it might have grown into?
Still, I feel less afraid than I did before Lyrock disappeared—less afraid that I’ll destroy what I love, less afraid that my husband will abandon me, less afraid to let this place into my bones.
Outside, bats are diving for mosquitoes in the weak starlight. The crescent moon has already set, and the fireflies have concluded their nightly show. I listen to moths drumming the illumined panels of our bedroom windows, their wings beating back the dark.
Lucy Bryan is a writer, adventurer, and teacher who splits her time between Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and Ohio’s Appalachian Plateau. Her work has appeared in Earth Island Journal, The Other Journal, Quarterly West, and Nashville Review, among others. She is currently working on an essay collection that explores experiences of loss and discovery through the lens of place.