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First to come back were the coyotes, but they were no use to anyone. Heidi Painter read about them in the Post—HOWL ABOUT THAT, said the headline—and felt vindicated. "You see?" she said to her daughter Francine. "This is what I mean about staying out of the park at night." 

Francine, seated at the kitchen table, texting, did not look up. "It's not the early 90s anymore," she said. She brushed a coil of hair from her face and grimaced at her phone.

“That’s unfair,” said Heidi. This was a new tactic: perhaps to be heard by a teenager you needed to speak to her finely-honed sense of injustice. But Francine kept silent.

The coyotes were young males, said the Post. Their parents, needing room to mate again, would have kicked them out of the burrow, and so the young ones had come to the city to make it on their own. Heidi imagined sending Fran and Isaac away so that she and Scott could mate again, and she laughed, a short yip that echoed around the kitchen; Francine looked up in alarm, then went back to her phone.

Once upon a time (the late 90s) Heidi had leapt from her nest and landed in New York. She still considered it the boldest thing she’d ever done. And maybe it was unfair how a part of her held it against her own children that they would never make a leap like that – because after New York, where else was there to leap to?

You had to sympathize with the coyotes, anyway. Even for an adaptable species, they were out of their element. But, too, they brought a touch of glamour with them: something of the actual wild had appeared in Central Park, eyes glowing in the dark heart of a city whose nocturnal aspect she had nearly forgotten.

#

The bears, though, were a bit much. The bears turned up right there in Carl Schurz Park, where one or another of the Painters would go twice a day to exercise their narcoleptic sheepdog Lenny, letting him bound around the dog run until he flopped unconscious into the dirt.

Heidi learned about the bears on a Sunday afternoon in May, just three weeks after the coyotes had made the news. She’d been out back trying to untangle a mass of sharp-leaved vines that were strangling her cherry tree—American bittersweet, as best as she could tell, which now bore thousands of poisonous orange berries across her little garden. Back inside, searching for better garden shears, Heidi found Isaac in the kitchen playing a game on his phone, and beside him on the counter a copy of the Post with the headline GRIZZLY DISCOVERY. 

“The headline is misleading,” said Isaac. “They’re black bears.  Ursus americanus, not Ursus…arctos horribilis.” He sounded out the Latin carefully; it was clear he had just memorized the words.

Reading the article, Heidi felt little signals pulsing up from the nerves in her arms, collecting in the hairs at the nape of her neck. “I don’t want you taking Lenny to the dog run anymore,” she told Isaac.

“They aren’t really dangerous,” Isaac said. “They’re vegetarians.”

Francine entered the kitchen, dressed in gym clothes. “Who are vegetarians?” she asked.

“Black bears,” said Isaac.

“Why are you in gym clothes?” asked Heidi.

“There are black bears in Carl Schurz,” said Isaac.

“I’m going running,” said Francine. “What are bears doing in the park?”

“Waking up,” said Isaac. “It’s spring.”

“You run?” asked Heidi.

Francine shrugged. “I felt like it.”

“Mostly they eat shoots and nuts,” said Isaac. “But they also eat bees.”

“Bees aren’t vegetables,” said Francine.

“Maybe you should stick to York Avenue,” said Heidi. “On your run.”

“Mostly they’re vegetarians,” said Isaac.

Francine rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to be eaten by bears,” she said.

Heidi wished that Fran could content herself with circling the block. She worked from home partly because it afforded her, whenever she liked, the pleasure of turning up her own street. The silvery linden shade, the tree boxes guarded by laminated signs forbidding dog waste and litter, the linked townhomes with their lovingly pointed Jurassic sandstone and their long Italianate doors framed by wild acanthus leaf brackets, all one chain of affirmation: that worth continued to grow with time, that beauty was attentive to function, as fortune was to foresight, as tranquility was to the call of vigilance. But she knew better than to press the point with Francine.

Two weeks later, the bears were still there. Or, more precisely, they were back.  The Parks Department had tranquilized them and delivered them to the Catskills, but they were spotted again soon after, rooting around in the shrubs near the Esplanade. 

Late one evening, a few days after this sighting, Scott arrived home from work while Heidi was reading a novel on the sofa. “I saw Stan Lichtenstein,” he said as he pried off his shoes and settled in next to her. “He told me he’s in bear repellent now.”

Heidi put her novel on the coffee table. “He’s in what?”

“He’s in bear repellent. He’s developing a line for the urban market.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I think it’s brilliant. Stan’s got an entrepreneurial knack.”

Stan Lichtenstein had no particular knack at all, if you asked Heidi. He had lost his job in finance a few years before, and since then he had flitted from project to project while his wife paid the bills. For a while he’d been talking about a wind farm on Rikers Island. And Heidi remembered how once, at the end of a dinner party, he had drunkenly described a plan to put ads on subway rats. “You know how you stand there in the station,” Stan had said, gesturing, a smear of Bucheron on the elbow of his blazer, “and you just can’t stop staring at the damn rats?”

“What is bear repellent?” Heidi asked.

“Well, it’s just basically pepper spray. But with a picture of a bear on the package.”

“Isn’t pepper spray illegal?”

Scott pushed himself away from her and leaned back against the arm of the sofa. He needed a trim: the hairs at his temples were beginning to outpace the stragglers at the top of his head. There was a hole in one of his socks, at the ball of the foot. He was usually so careful to be rid of socks with holes. They reminded him of his own mortality.

The point, he said, was that you had to admire how Stan was getting mileage out of this whole bear thing. It wasn’t just Carl Schurz anymore. There were bears on the West Side, downtown, in Prospect Park. One had turned up inside a token booth at Queens Plaza. There was a market here, and Stan was taking advantage.

One key to a successful marriage, Heidi had determined, was the mutual suspension of disbelief. The labor of loving another, not just for now, but over the long term, involved a willingness to work at maintaining an unredeemed faith in one’s partner, to hear his aimless fantasies and complaints with the same respect you’d given him all those years ago, when he’d leaned into you at Bamonte’s and spoken with so much fervor about all that you both believed was yet to come.

Heidi chose to change the subject. “Did you know that our daughter has taken up jogging?”

Scott said nothing for a moment, and then he nodded. “Good for her,” he said. “Physical fitness.” And he lay back and closed his eyes and seemed to daydream for a while, and before very long he was snoring.

#

It was with the comeback of the beavers that things really began to change. They made a dramatic arrival: one morning in July the Harlem River was sent up over its banks by a massive dam which seemed to have been constructed overnight. The waters flooded Yankee Stadium and forced the cancellation of a doubleheader: DAM YANKEES, said the covers of both the Post and the Daily News.

The following Friday, Scott turned up in the kitchen only an hour after he had left for work. A line of poplars had sprung up along Second Avenue, fouling the traffic, and the motionless cars had been overtaken by an enormous herd of deer. Sitting in the idle taxi, watching chestnut-colored fur stream by, white tails flashing behind, Scott had come to a decision.

“Beaver pelts,” he said.

Hadn’t there been a time when she had thrilled at any unexpected chance to see him? Now she kept her eyes on her computer, half-listening, in the manner of an Isaac or a Fran. Scott complained about work for a while, and she heard him say “beaver pelts,” but it was only when he said “Stan Lichtenstein” that she turned to him with her attention undivided.

“You want to do what with Stan Lichtenstein?”

“We buy them off the trappers for a few bucks a unit, hire people to do the processing, and then we move the furs at a pretty good markup.”

“Processing?” asked Francine. She was sitting in a chair, applying polish to the toenails on a dirty foot. Isaac dangled from a stool, jiggling his leg. His toes nearly reached the floor. They hadn’t done that before.

“Skinning them,” said Isaac. “Right Dad? And then you soak them in vinegar.”

“Gross,” said Francine.

“Something like that,” said Scott. “But we’re just the middlemen.”

“Please go back,” said Heidi. “You want us to quit our jobs—”

“Vinegar and slaked lime,” said Isaac. He was reading from a website on his phone. “And alum. What’s that?”

“—and go into business with Stan Lichtenstein—”

“Selling furs to the European market.”

“The what market?”

“They make hats,” said Scott. “And coats.”

Francine leaned in to blow on her toes. “You’re going to make coats?” she asked.

“We’re just the middlemen,” Scott said again.

It had hit him in the cab: the law was not good business anymore. If the profit of law was found in the gap between behavior and expectations, what good was litigation now that no one could know what to expect? Now that all the laws were being unwound?

Heidi could not believe that they were talking about this. “How much of our life savings are you wanting to sink into this Stan Lichtenstein scheme?”

“Alum,” Isaac read. “Hydrated potassium aluminum sulfate.”

“It’s my scheme as much as his,” said Scott. “Our scheme, I mean. It could be. Yours and mine.” His eyes were wet, the way they’d used to get whenever he said something especially sincere. He’d always claimed to hate how they did that. Heidi hadn’t hated it.

“Times are changing,” said Scott. “We need to adapt.”

How was she supposed to react to a proposal like this one? What to do when the fervor returned?

“I thought Stan was in bear repellent,” Heidi said.

“FDA problems,” said Scott. “It’s hard to get people to understand that it isn’t like mosquito repellent. You’re not supposed to spray it on yourself.”

“People are stupid,” said Isaac.

“True,” said Francine. “People are.”

“But this is different,” said Scott. “This is better. I can almost guarantee you that this will not go wrong.”

The most comforting thing about faith, in truth, was that it was so rarely redeemed. As time ran away from you, as your children leapt from the bassinet to high school in an interval so small it could hardly have contained a season of the years you spent in college, your faith—in the world and in yourself and in your partner—expired slowly, over the whole long sweep of things. Having once been wound tight, it lost momentum by degrees, almost imperceptibly. It was the Great Slackening, the easing of a system of expectation whose logic otherwise carried you relentlessly toward a confrontation with your own unsatisfying obituary. It was a kind of happiness, Heidi thought. Why risk it for a reset?

“I’m not asking you to say yes,” said Scott. “Not yet. Just not no.”

The nakedness in his voice: she remembered it from Bamonte’s. She remembered the tickle of his words in her ear, the linguine she’d been too excited to finish. She thought that it wasn’t a matter of mechanics after all; it wasn’t a question of resetting or rewinding. She sensed that perhaps this risk wanted to be taken, that the risk was something animate and untamed but devoted to her, something that had stuck near to her for years, waiting for her to embrace it. She felt this notion in her scalp, radiating heat.

Her answer was not yes—not yet. But it was not no.

#

The American bittersweet disappeared. Or it didn’t disappear, so much as it was overwhelmed. The garden itself was absorbed into a thickening jungle that broke down the fences between the back lots; it grew up and over the brownstones and onto the sidewalks and into the streets. It was beyond cultivation: Heidi only sought to identify what she could. There was sweetflag, wild indigo, snake root, and jewel-weed; there was columbine and bearberry and maidenhair fern; there was wake robin and beach plum and Virginia creeper; there was white milkweed in supernova clusters orbited by butterflies. Maple saplings stretched toward adolescence. One morning, she found an orchid on her stoop.

It was a good year. The European market proved insatiable for beaver pelts, and Painter & Lichtenstein LLC, while highly leveraged, was moving units at a remarkable pace. Scott was as happy as she’d ever seen him, though she didn’t see much of him. He handled sales while Heidi managed operations. It was endless work: bargaining with the fractious multitudes of free-agent trappers, smoothing over labor troubles at the tannery, maintaining quality control, keeping up with ever-increasing shipping costs. Stan Lichtenstein’s role in the concern was never quite clear, but it didn’t matter much. For all the labor involved, there was no question that they had made the right move. Business boomed; the money rolled in; the Painters prospered.

There was little time to spend together as a family, but everyone seemed happy. Francine gave up jogging and took up watercolors and gave up watercolors and took up archery; a passel of girls from her school followed her dutifully into each new hobby. She said she wanted to apply to Sarah Lawrence. Isaac amassed a fortune in digital equipment of some sort and told his parents he was setting the human genome to music. Meanwhile, the Law Journal reported that what remained of Scott’s old firm had been swallowed up in a contentious merger which had involved one obstructionist partner being thrown, literally, to the wolves.

There were so many less fortunate families. Heidi saw them on the television: families less able to adapt to all the changes in the world. Families losing their homes and their livelihoods. Families falling apart. The Painters were fortunate enough to be able to help. They wrote a lot of checks. They were able to help because Scott had been right, and Heidi had been right to trust him.

It was Francine who first alerted them to the trouble.

They were eating in the dining room: the formal Sunday dinner Heidi had begun to insist upon once she realized that it was the only time the four of them were ever likely to be in the same room together. It was one year and five months from the day she had first read about the coyotes. Leaning over to pluck a candied pear from a serving tray with her fork, Francine said, “Doesn’t it seem like there are too many beavers?”

The question struck Heidi as absurd, and she laughed, and it felt good to be at the dining room table with her family, laughing, but she saw how Scott went pale and she began to understand.

“Do you think?” asked Scott.

Francine shrugged. “I don’t know. I just mean no matter how many you skin, there seem to be twice as many showing up every month.”

Isaac agreed. At West Point, he noted, the dam had to be blown up almost every other day now. Newburgh was near-unlivable with all the flooding.

This should be a funny conversation, thought Heidi. Too many beavers should be funny! “How can there be too many beavers?” she asked, but she could hear the panic in her own laughter.

Scott was silent.

“No, it’s good, I guess,” said Francine. “More for everybody. Kylie Johanssen’s family’s getting into beaver pelts now.”

“Are they?” asked Scott.

“Everybody’s getting into beaver pelts now,” said Francine.

It happened only days later. THE DAM BREAKS, reported the Post. BEAVER BUBBLE BURSTS, said the Daily News. How could they not have seen it coming? Or had they seen it coming but chosen to ignore it, and if so, how could they have ignored it? They had everything invested in beaver pelts, which now traded for pennies on the dollar against their previous price. They had followed their dreams, but so had everyone else, and now nobody’s dreams were worth anything.

Scott gathered the family in extraordinary session on a Thursday afternoon. “I’ve ruined us,” he said.

Heidi was prepared for this. “First of all,” she said, “we did this, together. And second, we’re never ruined. There’s always something else.” 

Scott’s voice was shrunken by despair. “What else?” he asked.

“For instance,” said Heidi, “the oysters have come back.”

#

Moving to Brooklyn was hardest for Francine. Scott was too traumatized to react much, at first, and Isaac handled the loss of his bedroom and his digital machinery with surprising equanimity—he invested his last cash in a ten-year-old hardbound encyclopedia set, and fell mutteringly into its volumes whenever he had an opportunity. For Heidi, the move was another adventure, a chance to explore new territory, to clear a new garden and grow corn and beans and squash, to affirm that her life hadn’t ended with her arrival on, or her departure from, the Upper East Side.

The world was now a procession of lasts: the last broadcast, the last flight, the last flicker of electricity, the last day of school forever. The lasts all ran in one direction, but only if you looked at them that way; if you looked at them another way, each last gave onto a next. The bank, for instance, had outlasted the last of the Painters’ savings, surviving long enough to take their brownstone away, but Heidi had the satisfaction of knowing that within a few years the new owners would find their asset pulled to pieces by the roots and vines that had already begun to invade its interior. Change, she found, was not necessarily a matter of blown expectations. Brooklyn wasn’t worse than the Upper East Side. It was just next.

But Francine struggled to adjust. Phoneless and adrift in an outer borough, crowded with her family into one of the oystermen’s shacks along the water’s edge in Bay Ridge, without hope of ever making it to Sarah Lawrence, she alternated between bouts of depression and acts of rebellion. She wished she had a normal family, she said, impervious to the argument that there were no normal families anymore, at least not by her definition. The worst point came when she managed to set fire to the rowboat that represented the only real capital the Painters had left; she claimed it was accidental, but this was plainly a lie. “That’s it for us,” Scott said, slumping into a chair beside the woodstove. “We’ll be wading around in the mud now.”

And that was what they did. Each morning at dawn, the four Painters put on their boots and picked up their rakes and squished through the muck combing bivalves into piles, and in the afternoons they gathered up the piles and Scott and Fran took most of them to market in a wheelbarrow while Heidi and Isaac shucked the rest and put them on ice with lemon wedges and sold them at the Painters Fine Oysters booth beneath the abandoned expressway on Third Avenue. At the sorting table, Francine would lay out her catch with sullen eyes, silent because her lips were cold, and because, Heidi presumed, she could not give expression to the mixture of anger and shame she felt. Scott, too, would offer his catch in silence, but it was an eager silence, a prayer for Heidi’s approval. Each oyster Scott and Francine contributed was a token of restitution, and it took some time for them to understand that what Heidi sought, what the family needed, was not restitution, but trust.

As they came to understand this, they began to change. Francine emerged from her silence and in time developed a genuine enthusiasm for oystering; Heidi was impressed by the alacrity with which she pushed through unpredictable currents, dodging urchins and anemones and often bringing in the biggest haul. One cold blue morning Heidi watched Francine, up to her knees in the brackish water, work open an oyster with her knife and pull out a tiny pearl, which she held in her blue fingers and examined rapturously, and Heidi thought that even with the mud on her face and in her hair she looked lovely; and Isaac said that the pearl was worthless, that these were Crassostrea virginica, not pearl oysters, but Francine only laughed and said she didn’t care, that it was a New York pearl, and it was perfect.

The oysters multiplied endlessly throughout the city’s waterways, spats making beds from Jamaica Bay to the Bronx, fueling the biggest oyster boom New York had seen in centuries. The Painters profited enough for a couple of years to afford a decent life in their cozy Bay Ridge hut, which seemed to smell permanently of wet sheepdog, but never really enough to get ahead. Which wasn’t to say that getting ahead meant anything anymore. All in all, Heidi thought, they were doing pretty well.

#

Heidi made this point to Scott one winter evening about two years after the oyster boom, as they sat, arms linked, beside their campfire. “All in all,” she said, “we’re doing pretty well.”

“We are,” said Scott. Wild gray hair at his temples; perfectly bald on top. But lean, in the way he’d been a very long time ago.

“Considering everything.”

“Considering everything,” said Scott.

They were in the Bronx—Heidi figured it for Morris Park—tracking a herd of mastodons. Dinner fires tended by the other families in their band lay smoke across the campsite; through the dusk and the haze they could see Isaac standing patiently atop a snow bank beside the slumped silhouette of Lenny.

“Do you remember when you proposed to me?” asked Heidi.

Scott nodded. “At Bamonte’s,” he said. “Over linguine.” He fed a yellowed copy of the Post into the fire, then reached to turn the rabbit. It occurred to Heidi that once they caught the mastodon they would need a bigger spit.

“I suppose it’s gone now,” she said.

“Bamonte’s? I suppose it is.”

“I have to say,” said Heidi, “I’m impressed with us.”

Scott tore a chunk of flesh from the rabbit and bit down to test it. “Mm,” he said in agreement. “Also, I was thinking.”

“I mean, here we are.”

“Here we are,” said Scott. “Also I was thinking we should do something for Isaac. Some sort of coming-of-age-type thing.”

“He’s already come of age,” said Heidi. “He’s seventeen.”

“I just mean, since college isn’t an option,” said Scott.

“We didn’t do anything for Fran.”

“But she has her own band now. I’m just thinking coming-of-age, leaving the nest, you know.”

“A ceremony?”

“Why not?”

“Drink the blood of a deer? Go on a spirit quest?” She was joking, but it didn’t mean she disagreed.

“I don’t know. Something like that.”

It was true that without some sort of intervention Isaac was unlikely to seek his own fortune any time soon. He was as uncomplaining as ever, but as his resources had dwindled he seemed to have retreated deeper into his own mind. He still carried a single mildewed volume of his old encyclopedia—Ma-Mn—and he dug into it so often that Heidi was sure he’d memorized it. But did that mean he was unhappy? Did that mean he needed to be pushed?  It wasn’t so clear.

“We can make it up as we go along,” said Scott.

“We can,” said Heidi.

She was looking forward to the spring. There would be strawberries and birdsong and wildflowers, and she could clear a new garden somewhere pleasant, and Francine and her band would come back from their winter caribou grounds in New Jersey, and they could have family dinners and talk about life and the world and whatever else. It would be nice.

A wind lifted the smoke from the campsite and carried the sound of laughter from the Lichtenstein tent, and Isaac came back with Lenny in tow, and Scott took the rabbit from the fire, and they ate.

#

Eventually the glaciers came back. A great wall of ice rolled down from the north, obliterating Sarah Lawrence and Newburgh and Morris Park and Queens Plaza and Carl Schurz and Bay Ridge, crushing New York City into gravel and sand, and sealing it away beneath a quarter mile of silence, which held for almost a thousand years. And then, inch by inch, the glaciers rolled away again, melting day by day and leaving each day new inches of bare earth behind them.