by Karen Dionne
She’ll have to. Because this spring and summer, I am going to spend all my waking hours in the field and then some. I need to get as much work done as I can over the next six months, because while I won’t be able to confirm it until I can get to a drugstore, I am 99.9 percent certain that I am pregnant.
EIGHT
NOW
Rachel
I’ve been thinking a lot during this drive about what I’m going to say to my sister. Our relationship has always been complicated. Part of the reason is the nine-year age difference. But the bigger part, I think, is that we are just so different. We may share the same genetic material, but our DNA definitely came together in two distinct and disparate combinations. We don’t even look alike. Diana is the classic fair-skinned, blue-eyed blonde, while I’m your typical brown-haired, brown-eyed girl. Diana is tall, lithe, and beautiful as a model. As for me, let’s just say I’m not the kind of person anyone would notice in a crowded room, and leave it at that.
Despite our differences, we spent a lot of time together when we were growing up because we had no one else, though it was hard to find things to do that interested us both. A board game that was suitable for a thirteen-year-old can’t be played with a sister who’s only four. As a result, we often made up our own games. Many of the games we played were based on fairy tales, which—considering that we were two children living virtually alone in a vast and nearly impenetrable forest—was not a stretch. Acting out Hansel and Gretel was an obvious choice. We also liked Rapunzel and Red Riding Hood. Once when I was pretending to be Robin Hood and Diana was chasing me as the sheriff of Nottingham, I lost my grip on the rope swing that hung from the branch of a sturdy maple that extended over a deep ravine and broke my arm. Looking back, I can see that the games we played often had an element of danger to them, but that was what made them so exciting. I can honestly say that the times when I was alone with my sister were the only times that I felt truly alive.
Aside from fairy tales, the only other interest we have in common is our fondness for bears. During my early years at the hospital, whenever Diana and Charlotte would come to visit, we’d go to a fast-food restaurant, or to a movie if the Tahqua Land Theatre in Newberry was showing something G-rated. But after we went to Oswald’s Bear Ranch the summer that I was fourteen, there was never a question as to where we’d go. We’d bring along a bag of apples and take turns tossing them over the tall double chain-link fence. I liked feeding the yearlings best because they were more energetic than the adults and would stand up on their hind legs and beg. Once I had my picture taken with a cub.
I understand that a lot of people have mixed feelings about keeping wild animals in captivity, and I do, too. But Oswald’s is strictly rescue, no breeding. The cubs live in one enclosure, the yearlings in another, and the males and females each have their own. Naturally, I would have preferred to see the bears roaming free. But when an animal isn’t capable of living in the wild by itself for whatever reason, short of euthanizing it, which I am adamantly opposed to, what are you supposed to do? You’d be surprised how often a neglected or abused bear, or an orphaned cub, needs a home.
That the largest bear rescue facility in the entire United States was only ten miles from the hospital where I was incarcerated always seemed miraculous to me. I used to dream about going to work for Oswald’s, either as a paid employee or as a volunteer—I didn’t care which. I’d sell tickets, or stock the gift shop, or collect food scraps from the area’s restaurants and grocery stores and schools and hospitals as feed for the bears—I’d even clean the restrooms if that was what they wanted me to do as long as it meant that I could be around bears.
But as I got older, I realized that this was never going to happen. How could I do anything that would bring me pleasure knowing it was my fault my parents would never enjoy anything ever again? I lost my right to personal indulgence the moment I pulled that trigger.
Unless, of course, I didn’t.
Once again, my anger threatens to boil over. My therapist would say that anger is a negative emotion that needs to be eliminated or kept under control. But I know better. My anger fuels me, propels me, gives me the motivation to do what I have to do. Fifteen years. I repeat the words over and over in my head like a mantra.
“There’s a roadside park up ahead,” Trevor says. “Do you need to stop?”
“I wouldn’t mind a smoke.”
He turns in and parks. Ours is the only car. Later in the season this roadside park will be crowded with picnickers and tourists, but for now, it’s just us. My family had a picnic here once. We were on our way to Tahquamenon Falls and had been planning to eat when we got to the park, but we stopped here even though we were only an hour from home because my sister kept complaining that she was hungry.
I walk over to the picnic table where we sat that day and shake out a cigarette. Diana’s and my names are carved into the top. I remember my mother scolded my father for defacing the table, but I think she only did this because she was our mom and she thought she had to. There were plenty of other names cut into the tabletop, so what could it matter if our father added two more?
I brush away a winter’s worth of pine needles and run my fingers over the letters. We were sitting at this table eating our sandwiches and tossing potato chips to the chipmunks who came to beg when a man came up and asked if we’d seen his little girl. She was about my age and height, he said, only she had long blond hair instead of brown, and she was wearing pink leggings and a pink fleece jacket and pink mittens and a pink scarf.
We stashed our lunch in the car so the chipmunks couldn’t get to it (though I emptied the bag of chips beneath the table for them first) and joined the impromptu search party, which soon became a formal search and rescue when the Michigan State Police arrived after someone called 911. The girl was found eventually beneath a pile of brush at the bottom of a steep gully. Everyone assumed she had been running and didn’t see the drop-off and that was why she fell, though how she ended up almost completely covered in leaves and branches was a mystery.
Seeing her lying on the ground with her eyes open though she wasn’t moving made a big impression on me. Until then it had never occurred to me that someone my age could die, or that the woods might not be safe. Of course, I had no way of knowing then that in a few short weeks, my parents would also be dead—or that I too would be lost.
Trevor comes out of the bathrooms carrying two cans of Coke. He waves when he sees me. I raise my hand to let him know that I see him and that I’ll be there in a minute, then take a last drag on my cigarette and toss the butt on the sidewalk. A flock of sparrows scavenging along the walkway scatters and regroups. I could listen in on their conversation if I wanted to, but right now I’m more concerned with what’s going on inside my own head. I haven’t thought about that girl in years, yet I remember every detail of that day. I remember the dead girl’s father was wearing blue jeans and a red plaid shirt, that he had a salt-and-pepper beard, and that he was bald. I remember thinking that it looked like his hair had slid down off the top of his head and gotten caught by his chin. I remember my mother and father and sister were eating ham and cheese sandwiches while mine was peanut butter and jelly. I remember that Aunt Charlotte didn’t come with us even though I’d wanted her to because she had plans with the man I called “Uncle Max,” though he wasn’t really my uncle. I remember my mother telling me that I had to finish my apple before I could eat my brownie, so I ate three bites and dropped it on the ground on purpose. I remember I talked to the girl before she died. She had a jump rope and wanted me to take a turn. I remember she ran into the woods crying after I told her I didn’t want to. I remember her eyes were open when we found her, but she wasn’t looking at anything. I remember her pink scarf was gone.
And yet I remember nothing about the day my parents died. I asked my therapist once if she thought I was cursed like in a fairy tale because so many people I knew had died. “Do you thi
nk you’re cursed?” she’d asked, which I didn’t answer because by then I’d learned that answering a question like that only led to more and it wasn’t a subject I wanted to dissect. If I had, the answer would have been yes. I used to wonder how the girl’s family was dealing with her death. I hoped they were doing better than me.
Back at the car, Trevor hands me one of the Cokes. I appreciate the gesture because I don’t have any money. There was no need for cash at the hospital, and theft was a serious and constant problem. Diana and I have a joint bank account, but I don’t know how much is in it, and she’s the only one with an ATM card. To be honest, I’ve never paid much attention to the reports our financial advisors send over. I’m thinking that it’s time for me to get more involved.
Trevor finishes his Coke and tosses the empty in the back of the Jeep, and we hit the road. Two hours down, one hour to go. I stare out the window as the miles roll by. Trees, trees, and more trees, until at last, the landscape starts to look familiar. The trees are bigger than I remember, and the brush alongside the road is taller and denser, but call it instinct, or muscle memory, or just a gut feeling—somehow, I know we’re close.
“Slow down. We’re almost there. We’re looking for a big white pine. The entrance road is just past it.”
And then the tree is exactly as I remember, looming above us. Trevor turns where I point, and the Jeep takes the hill without breaking a sweat. My parents liked to tell a funny story about how they almost didn’t make it up this hill the first night they arrived at the lodge because they were driving a minivan and pulling a heavy trailer loaded with all their stuff. They were so afraid they were going to get stuck that the next day, when my father went to Marquette to return the rental trailer, he came back driving a four-wheel-drive Suburban. He always called the experience their “baptism by woods road,” and laughed when he said it, though I didn’t understand what he meant until I grew up.
We follow the road’s twists and curves, dodging potholes as big as duck ponds and staying away from the edges in the low places that look like solid ground but will suck your vehicle in up to its axles if you’re not careful. “My father taught me how to drive on roads like this,” Trevor says after I remark on his expertise. “All of my friends knew how to drive before we were old enough to get our licenses.”
I nod, thinking: My father never got the chance to teach me.
We stop when we come to the security gate. “What is this place? Fort Knox?” he asks, which happens to have been another of my father’s jokes. “I hope you remember the combination.”
“I do if they haven’t changed it.”
I get out and enter a combination of my and my sister’s birth dates and the gate swings open. Motion sensors close and lock the gate automatically behind us.
The road smooths out when we near the shore. The lake is just visible through the trees, a thin strip of silver sparkling in the afternoon sunlight. I roll down the window and drink in the long-forgotten smell of pine needles and rotting leaves. This lake belongs to me, as does every rock, every bush, every tree. Or more correctly, half of it does. Still, it’s amazing to think that this beautiful, pristine forest is mine, and I can do with it as I wish. Native peoples never bought into the idea of land ownership, but I can understand its appeal.
We rumble across a mossy wooden bridge that spans one of the feeder streams that empty into our lake, pass through a double row of pin oaks my great-great-grandfather planted to form a green tunnel in the summer worthy of a Southern plantation, and turn onto a hard-packed circular gravel driveway.
“Wow,” Trevor breathes when we come to a stop. He rolls down his window and sticks out his head and looks up. “I’ve heard about this place, but, just—wow.”
After fifteen years, even I’m impressed. My childhood home looks straight out of a fairy tale, a mist-shrouded castle, mysterious and otherworldly, and so at odds with its wilderness setting, it seems to have been designed and placed by a cosmic hand. People say you can’t go home again because all the things you remember from your childhood will seem diminished and small, but the hunting lodge my great-great-grandfather built is impressive by anyone’s standard: a massive two-story log cabin made of Oregon pine he had trucked in so he wouldn’t have to cut a single native tree, with wide fieldstone steps and stained-glass casement windows and a magnificently extravagant weathered green copper roof.
Inside there is a kitchen and a dining room and a library and a game room and a music room and a great room with a matched split-fieldstone fireplace at one end and a wide balcony at the other. Ten bedrooms, four big bathrooms that used to be bedrooms, three porches, a carriage house, a tennis court, and the old barn where my parents had their offices. Every inch sown with memories: the screened-in side porch where Diana and I used to play on rainy days, the sleeping porch above it where we would retreat to on hot summer nights. The Michigan basement under the back half of the lodge with its low ceiling and packed-dirt floor and scaling limestone block walls that we used to pretend was a dungeon, the oil-fired furnace in the middle with its big round belly and protruding arms our fire-breathing dragon.
The lodge where I grew up.
The lodge where my parents died.
My home.
“Where do you want me to park?” Trevor asks.
“Here in front is fine.” I could direct him around to the side and go in through the kitchen door, but I’m going to have to face what happened on the other side of this door sooner or later, and I choose sooner. If Diana and Charlotte have managed to figure out a way to live with the family tragedy, then so can I.
Still, just looking at the front door makes me ill. Charlotte says the oak parquet floor where my parents bled out has been torn out and replaced, but I don’t need to see the bloodstained boards to see myself holding the rifle, my parents’ ruined bodies, blood on my hands and on my clothes.
I am standing over my mother with the rifle.
The daughter did not fire the rifle.
Either I shot my mother with the Remington, or my father shot her with the Winchester. Both can’t be right. I have to know which is true. All I need to do is remember.
I take a deep breath, walk purposefully up the steps, and open the front door.
NINE
THEN
Jenny
Two weeks until Christmas, our second since we moved to the lodge, and I think I can honestly say that I’ve never been dreading the holiday more. I’m not a purist when it comes to holiday traditions by any stretch of the imagination; many is the winter I’ve wished we were jetting off to a Caribbean island instead of driving north to join Peter’s extended family for Christmas at the lodge yet again. But now that Peter and I are hosting the festivities instead of merely attending them, it’s fallen to us to get everything right.
We’ve spent the past two weeks doing nothing but decorating. It’s a good thing my and Peter’s research subjects are asleep. The chandeliers in the great room have been draped with fresh pine boughs that Peter cut in the surrounding woods. Considering that each of the three cast-iron and deer-antler chandeliers is eight feet in diameter and hangs sixteen feet above the floor, this decorating was no small feat. The stairway railings have been wrapped with more of the same, the hand-forged iron curtain rods above all the windows and doors festooned with swaths of cedar and red holly berries that Peter gathered from the boggy area down by the lake. I’ve popped enough corn to feed an army to make garlands for not one, not two, but three Christmas trees—one in the great room, another on the stairway landing, and a third outside in the yard—and strung miles of fresh cranberries we bought at the grocery store because we forgot to gather the wild cranberries from our bog and there was no way I was going out in a foot of snow and fifteen-degree weather to try to collect them. (Though if anyone asks, Peter and I are prepared to say that this is exactly what I did.) My fingers are so sore I can barely hold a needle. The li
nens in all ten bedrooms have been washed and pressed—Peter’s grandmother insists that the sheets and pillowcases be ironed—and the everyday coverlets exchanged for the red-and-green Christmas-themed quilts his great-grandmother made. All the furniture in the great room has been dusted, as has the taxidermy, to which Diana added a sprig of holly behind each of her favorites’ ears.
We went through this same routine last year, of course, but this year I’m doing everything with a two-month-old baby. Fortunately, my sister is coming this afternoon, because there’s still a ton of cleaning to do. The lodge was nowhere near spotless when we moved in, and it will never lose that musty old-cabin smell no matter how much we air it out, but now that we are living here full-time, I feel as though I should at least try to chip away at the decades-long accumulation of dirt.
I’m standing on a stepstool brushing down the fireplace mantel with a feather duster so I can set up the hand-carved olive-wood nativity scene that Peter’s grandfather brought back from Jerusalem when the front door opens. A chill sweeps the room. Peter comes in carrying an armload of firewood and drops it on the growing pile beside the hearth. Diana adds the two small pieces she’s carrying as well.
“You look whipped,” he says as he brushes himself off. Sawdust and wood chips rain down on the floor. “Why don’t you go upstairs and lay down until Charlotte gets here?”
“You don’t mind taking over?”
