What the Fox Knows

Mara peeled the orange on her deck, the citrus mist rising like ghosts as she watched the fox emerge from the woods. It came every dusk now—a copper-colored female with a healed-over eye, moving with that particular, deliberate grace of creatures who've survived too much. Mara had started calling the fox her friend, which was exactly the kind of thing you did when you hadn't spoken to another human being in eleven days.

Her phone vibrated on the railing.

She knew who it was before looking. David. Her ex-best friend, her business partner, the man who'd chosen his girlfriend's innocence over Mara's truth three years ago. The man who'd cost Mara her reputation, her savings, nearly her practice.

The fox paused at the edge of the lawn, watching her with that gimlet eye.

Mara answered.

"I saw your mother at the grocery store," David said, without hello. "She looks tired."

"She's seventy, David. She's allowed."

"I'm getting married."

Mara's thumb pressed into the orange rind, juice running down her wrist like golden blood. "Congratulations."

"I want you there."

The fox sat down, began meticulously cleaning her front paw.

"Why?"

"Because despite what happened, despite what you did—" his voice caught, "you're still the person who held my hand through my father's funeral. You're still the one who talked me down from that ledge in graduate school. That matters."

"I didn't do anything, David. That was the whole problem."

"You protected yourself. You survived. I see that now."

The fox lifted her head, ears swiveled toward something in the darkness beyond Mara's view. Some small, dying sound.

"He knows," Mara said softly.

"What?"

"The fox. He knows what it's like to survive things that shouldn't be survivable. He knows some wounds don't heal right."

"She's a she, Mara. And foxes don't know anything."

The fox stood, shook out her coat, and slipped into the shadows.

"I'll come," Mara said. "But I won't forgive you."

"I'm not asking for that."

"Then what are you asking?"

"For the woman who once loved me enough to hold my hand while I fell apart. Just for a day."

Mara hung up, ate the orange segment by segment in the gathering dark, and wondered which of them was more foolish: she, for going, or David, for thinking any part of their friendship could be resurrected from the ashes.

The fox returned at dawn, carrying something dead in her teeth. Mara waved from the window. The fox paused, dipped her head once, in greeting or acknowledgment, and vanished into the trees.

Some things, Mara realized, could be fed without ever being tamed.