July 1945
Liv
Liv was hungry. Not a new feeling by any means, but walking through town, she caught a whiff of Miller’s Bakery, where something hot and cinnamony drifted from the windows. Her stomach knotted with longing, but instead of moving closer, she crossed the street and averted her gaze.
Her mother would cook boiled cabbage again for dinner, and even those servings would be meager, barely enough to satisfy a single person, let alone a family. Of course, Liv’s two older brothers had left home several years earlier, so the mouths were less than they’d once been.
A white flower drifted in front of Liv’s face. She reached out and caught it in her palm. It was an apple blossom with a pale pink center. As she tilted her head to seek the source of the flower, a dozen more rained down, blotting the sky with white petals.
Beyond them, she saw a man sitting on the parapet of the building that housed the hardware store. His legs dangled over the side, and he grinned down at her.
It was Stephen Kaiser. The boy who’d rescued her from the river.
Liv laughed and turned down the alley beside the building. A steel ladder clung to the brick, and she climbed it, finding Stephen at the top. He didn’t turn when she approached.
“I thought the world had gone mad, and it was raining flowers,” Liv told him.
The roof was hot. It seeped through her thin shoes.
Stephen sat on the raised brick ledge. He patted the space beside him.
Sitting on the hot brick, she noticed a Hollywood bar in his hand. He popped a piece of the chocolate bar into his mouth, and Liv experienced a desire so rapid and overwhelming, she almost snatched the candy and ran for the ladder.
“Are you rich?” she breathed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten chocolate.
He looked up at her with those pale, snow-blue eyes. Without answering, he broke off a hunk and handed it to her.
Liv lifted it to her nose, inhaled the sweetness, and then placed the whole piece on her tongue. She should have saved it, taken a tiny bite and squirreled the rest away. She hadn’t eaten sweets in ages. Sugar was rationed, but here stood Stephen Kaiser eating chocolate with not a care in the world.
“Thank you,” she said as she swallowed the last traces of the smooth chocolate. It lingered in the back of her throat, and she wished the taste would last, but it didn’t.
“Where’s your pigtailed sidekick?” Stephen asked, taking another bite of the candy bar.
“She spends her days with her Grandma Kit, my stepdad’s mom, or she goes to the little schoolhouse for summer lessons,” Liv told him, leaning over and watching people amble down the sidewalk below. “How come you’re up here?” she asked.
“I rarely come into town,” he admitted. “When I do, it all seems so small. I hate standing on the street surrounded by buildings. Up here, I can see the whole world. Or more of it, anyway.” He held his arms out wide.
Liv gazed across the town. She could see the little schoolhouse Arlene attended. The bigger school where she spent her days ducking into classrooms and avoiding eye contact with the other students.
From the rooftop, the town looked small and drab.
“Not much to look at, is it?” he asked.
“I moved here from Kalkaska last year,” she murmured. “I miss my friends, not that I had very many, but the ones I did. I miss them, and I miss George. I miss fishing in the lake and going out on the boats. This place won’t ever be my home.”
“Is George your boyfriend?”
“Eww, no. He’s my… uncle.” She hadn’t told the lie in such a long time, it seemed to stick on the back of her tongue.
“I’ve always lived here,” Stephen muttered, bringing his heel down hard against the side of the building. A bit of brick flaked off and rained down to the sidewalk. “And yet I’ve never lived here at all.”
Liv tried to see herself in the town that stretched out before them, but knew she didn’t fit. Her family was still poor in Kalkaska, but they had a community around them. George lived in the Stoneroot Forest not far from their little house. He regularly brought Liv fresh meat and food foraged from the Stoneroot Forest. They didn’t eat like the wealthy, but they always ate and they never had to beg.
After her mother married Roy, their family shifted. Liv’s stepfather resented the charity from George. He didn’t know the truth of Liv’s birth father. He, like many others, had been told a story of an old family friend, but he sensed a deeper connection between his wife and the man who lived in the forest.
When he insisted the family move further north to the hometown of his own mother, Liv’s mother complied. The adjustment was hard. They now occupied a small shack in the most derelict part of town. Both Roy and her mother worked six days a week just to stay in clothes and food.
Liv thought of the tally-lists in each of the shops. The little scratches that marked how many loafs of bread her family had eaten, how many cans of beans they’d taken without payment.
No, Liv would never be a part of her new town.
“What now?” Stephen asked. “Shall we rob a bank? Search for buried treasure? I mean, you’ve got a second chance at life. I think I should jump on that wagon and ride with you.”
Liv widened her eyes, gazing at the boy who was revealing himself to be the most unlikely friend in this strange town. He wore shined loafers and a striped t-shirt tucked into stiff khaki shorts. His black hair was combed away from his forehead. Everything about him told a story of privilege, and yet he seemed interested in her. He wanted to be her friend.
Liv cocked her head, licked her finger and held it up before shaking her hand.
“The wind’s not right for a bank robbery. Fancy a walk in the woods?” she asked.
He cocked his head, seemed to mull it over.
“Yes. My last walk in the woods ended strangely indeed. I got to jump into a frigid river and rescue not one, but two damsels in distress.”
* * *
“Your sister said you used nettles to heal your mother’s hands. How?” he asked.
He jumped up and grabbed the thick bough of an oak tree, swinging back and forth.
“Do you really want to know?” she asked, feeling her usual discomfort.
The modern world scoffed at George’s beliefs. He told her to disregard the opinions of others. Easy enough for him. He lived in a cabin deep in the Stoneroot Forest. Liv was a seventeen-year-old attending high school. It was hard enough being poor without adding a penchant for plant healing and other forest magic.
Stephen dropped with a thud.
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t. I took an anthropology class last year, and we studied Native American tribes that used peyote. It’s a cactus they consumed in religious rituals. Some tribes called it the divine messenger. Ever heard of it?”
Liv nodded.
George had taught her all about hallucinogenic plants. In Norway, his people had consumed certain fungi during their spiritual rituals, but he had never introduced them to Liv.
“The nettles stimulate blood flow. My mom has arthritis. It’s not the most pleasant remedy, but it works.”
“How about this?” He peeled a layer of white bark off a large birch tree.
“We can use birch bark on open wounds to encourage healing. Or make it into a tea for a liver tonic. It has a lot of healing properties.”
Liv brushed her fingers over a leafy plant poking from the rocky embankment of the river.
“Mugwort,” she said. “Induces sweating, soothes the rash from a poison oak, and creates prophetic dreams.”
Stephen stopped, peering closer at the plant.
“Prophetic dreams? How?” He ripped a handful from the ground.
“Well, now you’re likely to have nightmares.”
“Why?”
“Because those plants are alive, Stephen. Intention is everything in magic. When you take a plant, communicate with it first. Get permission. And then cut gently. If possible, leave the roots so more can grow.”
Stephen dropped the handful of mugwort.
“Might‘a been nice if you told me that first,” he muttered.
She laughed and bent close to another sprig of mugwort.
“You didn’t exactly give me time,” she retorted.
She touched the leaves, allowed her fingers to trail over the stalk and rest on the soil. Warmth seeped into her palm. After a moment, she dug into the dirt and, leaving the roots intact, pulled a stem of the plant from the ground. She wrapped it loosely in cloth and handed it to Stephen.
“Do I eat it?” he asked.
She smiled.
“I’d go for a satchel under your pillow, unless you’re dealing with some digestive issues.”
“Thanks,” he said. “You know, since I met you, the woods have changed. They seem… alive now.”
She smiled and stood, brushing dirt from the seat of her shorts.
“They are alive.”
Chapter 3
September 1965
Mack
“I need a few days to think, is all. That’s what men do at the cabin; they think.”
Tina snorted and glanced up from her breakfast, a half grapefruit and a cup of green tea. Same breakfast every morning. The most god-awful, not to mention meager, breakfast that Mack had ever seen in his life.
After their first night in bed, he’d tried to make her pancakes for breakfast, and she looked at him like he’d offered to serve up the back leg of his dog, Misty. Apparently, pancakes belonged on the side of Tina’s food book labelled BAD in large red letters.
“And here I thought you men sat down there looking at girlie magazines and chugging beer,” she quipped, poking at her grapefruit with a fork. She lifted a tiny pink chunk to her mouth.
Mack frowned. Sure, they did that too, but he wasn’t about to tell Tina that.
“Well, don’t think too long, Mackey. I’m not exactly hard pressed for a date,” she added.
He gritted his teeth, bit back ‘the name’s Mack,’ and offered her a one-handed salute.
She twitched her long red fingernails in a half-wave, and he tried not to think of them digging into his shoulders as she cried out in bed. At the heart of things, Tina in bed was the reason he’d ignored the good, long think that had been coming for six months. Ever since the first night he took her home.
He’d met her just weeks shy of the one-year anniversary of his divorce, during a drunken night of bowling. She waited tables on the restaurant side of Marv’s Bowling Alley.
As he walked by, Tina dropped her pen on the worn patch of red carpet that ran the line between the rows of tables.
Mack, oblivious that Tina had intentionally dropped her pen, flung himself to the ground to save the poor waitress with the tiny yellow skirt the effort of bending over to retrieve it.
He’d bedded her that night, shutting himself in the bathroom after the deed to stifle the cries bubbling in his gut. He was a big man, not the kind you’d expect to cry, but he blubbered like a baby that night.
“Pull it together, you dipshit,” he’d whispered into the smoky glass mirror above his sink. A mirror his former wife Diane had bought at an estate sale. Diane used to leave him lipstick notes on the glass when she snuck out early for work.
Despite a year’s passage since his divorce, and a handful of one-night stands, Mack still felt sick to his stomach every time he made it with another woman.
He missed his wife — ex-wife, he silently chastised himself.
“Did ya fall in?” Tina had called from the bed, and when he went out, he found her propped on her side, naked and ready for seconds.
Sex muddled a man’s mind, probably more than anything else - especially if you added booze.
He fell into a Tina addiction and didn’t come up for air for two months. Rather than return to his big Diane-less farmhouse, he moved into Tina’s little Cape Cod on Harper Road, stuffing his duffel bag in the sliver of space he found not crammed with dresses in her walk-in closet.
For a while, he believed he’d moved on. But disillusion, like alcohol, was a creeper. And disillusion wore no more beautiful mask than lust.
The lust wrapped him in shimmery gauze. It set up a quaint little apartment in his brain, replete with satin sheets and lace underwear.
Then one morning, he looked over, and the gauze had faded. It looked more like a tatter of burlap full of holes and prickly spots. That beautiful apartment had grown dark, and a little ugly.
He wanted to move out, but the shimmery lust-turned-burlap-sack was hiding something nasty, something slobbering and flashing its pointed fangs.
The only way to escape was to kill it, and the death would be a slow one.
There’d be harsh words, more like screams, broken dishes, possibly a keyed pickup truck. He dreaded the confrontation.
Despite his size and girth, Mack was a peaceful man. He didn’t want a scene with Tina. He wanted to slip out of their dark little dream as if he’d never been there at all.
But he knew better.
* * *
“Tina let you out without a leash? Or did you jump over the fence again, you bad dog, you?” Mack’s friend David asked when he opened his front door.
“Very funny,” Mack told him. “I’m here for the fish, baby, nothing but the fish.”
“Ah, damn,” David grumbled, hanging his head. “I meant to call you. I’m out for the cabin. My sister’s planned a fortieth wedding anniversary for my parents, and she’s guilted me into hosting.”
“Here?” Mack pulled a face, but as he gazed around David’s living room, he realized it looked clean. The usual stack of magazines that littered the coffee table were nowhere in sight. The beer can pyramid had been wiped from the top of the bookshelf and replaced with sturdy paperbacks butted by two Abraham Lincoln bookends. Even the ever-growing pile of laundry outside the utility room had vanished.
David, a self-proclaimed bachelor for life who cleaned for the first date only, had succumbed to his sister’s badgering.
Having grown up down the street from David and Nancy, Mack knew she was a worthy opponent. Nancy never lost an argument, and she used all that God gave her to get her way, whether that be tears or fingernails.
“Why isn’t Nancy hosting? I thought her and Leon bought one of those Victorian monsters downtown?” Mack asked.
David nodded.
“They did and promptly unleashed a gang of construction guys who are tearing up floors and walls as we speak. They’re staying in an apartment until spring, when hopefully, the house will meet my sister’s highfalutin standards.”
“Wow, poor Leon. Can you imagine five months in an apartment with Nancy? She probably vacuums over his feet when he’s watching TV,” Mack sympathized.
David laughed and cocked an eyebrow.
“You think she lets Leon watch TV?”
Mack shook his head in commiserate misery, thinking of his own better half, who at that moment was likely sifting through her closet for a hot dress to wear out with her girlfriends that night.
When Mack returned on Monday - if he returned - he’d likely find a scattering of men’s phone numbers displayed on her bedside table.
Tina liked her men angry, possessive, and ready to fight for her. Mack could only imagine her perpetual disappointment at his unwillingness to take the bait. In truth, he hoped she’d call one of those guys, and he’d come home with a cooler of fish to find his bags packed on her front porch.
Mack grabbed a beer from David’s refrigerator and plopped on the couch.
“If you put your feet on that table, my sister will drive down to the Stoneroot Forest to chew your ass.”
Mack kicked off his shoes and hoisted his socked, size-fifteen feet onto the table.
“Now she’ll never know.”
David grabbed a beer and listened as Mack detailed Tina’s latest series of hints about buying a ring. David surprised them both by carrying their cans to the waste basket after they finished.
“What?”
David demanded as he dropped them in. “If you had a sister with a handgun, you’d probably bury your cans in the back yard to avoid her wrath.”
“I do that anyway. Full ones, so I can send my friends on beer treasure hunts in the summer.”
David grinned.
“That’s not half bad. Think Nancy would go for that as an anniversary party game?”
Mack chuckled and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees.
“Absolutely. I’m sure Nancy would love nothing more than crawling around on her knees for warm beer. It will remind her of college.”
David guffawed. “My God, if she had a sense of humor, I’d suggest it.” David’s laughter trailed off, and he looked at Mack seriously. “You’re coming back, right? I don’t want my best friend to become a hermit in the Stoneroot Forest to avoid telling Tina you guys aren’t headed for the altar.”
“Ugh,” Mack groaned, and leaned back on the couch, banging his head against the cushions a few times. “How did I get here?”
David sat down.
“You didn’t. Your hard-on did. Unfortunately, he’s not very good at breaking up either.”
Mack looked down at his pants.
“Little bastard,” he muttered.
“Damn, now you’re insulting him too. I don’t blame ya, though. If I woke up next to Tina, I’d have half a mind to whack mine right off.”
Mack snorted and flipped him the finger.
David held up his hands.
“Don’t get me wrong. She’s a fox, but the rabid kind that most men can tell a mile off the fur ain’t worth the bite.”
Mack glared at him.
“How about some friendly advice, then?”
David’s mouth dropped open. “Mack, how long have I been single? That’d be like a prostitute giving advice to a priest.”
“Thanks,” Mack grumbled.
“Okay, you want my advice? Go home, enjoy one last ride, and when she heads out on the town, pack your bag, leave her a note and some cash to buy a new dress, and hit the road.”
“And then what? Ride off into the sunset? We live in the same damn town. I’ll see her at bowling league, I’ll run into her at Frank’s market. Shit, she buys her gas the same place as me.”
Dead Stream Curse: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 2
