I remembered the hell I had lived in for all those years afterward. I knew Natalie was in that same hell now. I thought I could give her a way out, the way out I never had.
Claude DeMers was buried a hero. He was the man who flew out to that lake to try to save the two Americans. When I told her the real story, I knew it would have to stay between us. When your partner’s dead, you can’t be the one to stand up and defame him. You can’t point to his grave and say there lies a dirty cop. I knew that, but I figured what the hell. As long as she knew. Maybe she’d be able to sleep at night.
I had another reason to find her. I admit that. I sat in the dining room of that old farmhouse, watching what the antique light did to her green eyes, and how it picked up a faint hint of red in her hair. We talked and then we drank the champagne and made an awkward toast to the new year at midnight. She finally told me she wouldn’t mind if I stayed the night, just so she wouldn’t have to be alone.
“I don’t trust many people,” she said to me that night.
“But you trust me.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can tell,” I said. Although, of course, I couldn’t. I had no idea what she was thinking. In another five minutes, I could have been back in my truck, heading home.
“That would be a miracle,” she said. “I mean a real miracle.”
“I think it already is,” I said. “Look how we met. And now here we are.”
“I guess I should thank you for coming out here, Alex. It was a completely insane thing to do. But I’m glad you did.”
I didn’t say anything then. I drank some more champagne and so did she. She had a way of looking up from her glass, eyeing me carefully, not like she was shy but maybe just the opposite. Like she was sizing me up. She asked me what sports I played, because it was obvious I was an old athlete. I shook off the “old” business and told her about my baseball career, such as it was. She told me she was a hockey player, back when a woman who played in college had nowhere to go with it. No women’s hockey in the Olympics, just back to the frozen pond in the backyard. It surprised me a little. I would soon find out that the game of hockey fit her perfectly.
And then, for whatever reasons had brought me to this house, on this one cold night, after the grandfather clock at the top of her stairs chimed twelve times and the new year began, we stood up at the same time and met in the middle of the room. Because of the things that had happened to her, and to me. All these things we had in common. Hell, and maybe a little champagne on an empty stomach. It all came together in that minute after midnight. We kissed first, then she took me by the hand and led me upstairs.
We stopped in front of one room. Inside there was a canopy bed with white lace and stuffed animals all over it. “No,” she said and pulled me past yet another room, with a double bed made up neatly, with more white lace. I saw two portraits, one on each end table, but I couldn’t make out the faces in the dim light. “This one,” she said as she pulled me into the third room. She was strong and the way she was pulling me, it felt like she was angry at me, and maybe she was. Maybe that was part of it.
The room she pushed me into was different from the others. The light was on, the bed was unmade, and there were two suitcases opened up on the floor with clothes spilling out of them. She turned the light off. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, she struck a match and lit three candles. Then with her back to me she unpinned her hair and let it fall down onto her shoulders. She took her white shirt off and then reached behind and unhooked her bra. She kept her jeans on for the moment, turning around to face me in the candlelight. It’s always been shoulders for me, more than any other part of a woman, and hers were perfect. She had small breasts and her nipples stood out erect in the chilled air of this bedroom in the corner of this old, silent house. I took my shirt off as she watched me, and then she came close and kissed me again. I felt her skin against mine. Her hair smelled faintly of smoke and something sweet like cinnamon.
She pulled away and left the room. I stood there, not quite sure what to do. When she came back, her white panties glowed in the candlelight. She put something in my hand, a foil wrapper, and in the half second it took to register, she knocked me backward onto the bed.
“That’s two minutes for cross-checking,” I said.
“Shut up and take your pants off.” She climbed on top of me.
“I can’t. That’s another two minutes for interference.”
“Just shut up,” she said, and then she slapped me lightly across the mouth. It may have been a love tap, on her scale anyway, but it got my attention. “Okay, no more jokes,” I said. I rolled her over and kissed her hard. She bit my lip and dug her fingernails into my back. Then it got serious.
Somehow, we ended up on the cold wooden floor with the sheets tangled all around us. She grabbed my hair with both hands when she came, holding on so tight it would make my head hurt for the rest of the night. Afterward, she sat back against the side of the bed. She didn’t collapse on me, didn’t put her head on my shoulder. She just rolled away from me and sat there with her eyes closed. In the candlelight I could see the beads of sweat on her neck.
We sat like that for a long time, until she finally opened her eyes. “So talk to me,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. But then I had no idea what to say.
“Tell me more about yourself.”
I gave her the whole rundown. Growing up in the Detroit suburbs, my mother dying when I was eight years old. My old man getting up every morning to work for Ford Motors. Going to single-A ball right out of high school, four years in the minors without a call-up. Good hands behind the plate, but struck out too much. Went after too many bad pitches.
And then being a cop in Detroit for eight years. Getting married and living in that little brick house in Redford. I stopped when I got to the part about Franklin, my old partner.
“Can we move to the bed?” she said. “My ass is getting cold on this floor.”
We got up onto the bed, under the thick down comforter. She was finally close to me again. I could feel her soft skin and the heat from her body.
I told her about that summer night in Detroit. Tracking down the man who was harassing people at the hospital. His apartment with the aluminum foil all over the walls. Then the gun he pulled out from under the table, the gun he had found in the Dumpster. It was an Uzi, the gun of choice in Detroit in the mid-1980s.
“I watched my partner die,” I said. “He was on the floor next to me. I watched the lights go out in his eyes.”
“It doesn’t sound like you had any chance to stop it.”
“I’ve replayed it in my mind a thousand times,” I said. “Ten thousand times. I could have drawn on that guy. I could have at least tried.”
She shook her head. “No way. He already had the gun pointed at you.”
“He was spaced out, Natalie. I might have been able to beat him.”
“Just keep going. What happened next?”
I told her about my own injuries. Three bullets, one in the rotator cuff, the other nicking the top of the lung, the last one bouncing around like a pinball and ending up next to my heart. I showed her my scars. I told her that the last bullet, the one by my heart, was still there.
She touched my chest. “God,” she said.
I told her about the bad years after that. Leaving the force, my marriage breaking up. Then those cabins up north, the ones my father had built, in this little town called Paradise, on the shores of Lake Superior. How I had gone up there, thinking I’d sell them off, but then deciding to stick around for a while. Something about the place. The absolute solitude. The desolate beauty.
I went fast through the rest of the story. Getting talked into trying out the private eye thing, and the wonderful experiences that brought me. Getting my ass kicked, almost freezing to death, watching my father’s favorite cabin burn down. Right up to the recent business with Vinnie and his lost brother. She already knew that story. She was there.
/> “So how about you?” I finally said. “It’s your turn.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve got to sleep.” She got up, wrapping herself in the sheet and leaving me the comforter.
“Where are you going?”
“The other room. I can’t sleep with someone else in the bed.” She left the room, then poked her head back in. “Good night, Alex.”
“Good night,” I said. I thought about maybe leaving, just getting in the truck and driving back home. Instead I just stared at the strange ceiling for a while. One of the candles burned down to nothing, making it even darker. I fell asleep. That was the first night.
Having made our date at the hotel, all I could do was watch the snow fall and wonder how badly it would bury us. I tried to sleep, but the wind was whistling outside and making the windows rattle. I could hear a million tiny snowflakes being driven against the walls. At four in the morning, I got up and turned the outside light on. The snow was already up over the wheels of the truck.
“God damn,” I said. My breath fogged the window. “We’re gonna get buried.”
I knew what I had to do. I threw on some clothes and my coat and gloves. The snow stung my face as soon as I opened the door. I made my way to the truck, stepping through drifts that came to my knees. It was the last thing I wanted to do at that hour, but I knew I had to get out on the road to stay ahead of the snow. Once it got past a certain depth, I wouldn’t be able to plow it at all. This had happened exactly twice in the years I had lived up here. Both times, I had to wait for the county to send in excavators to dig me out. And a private access road with a few cabins was never at the top of their list.
I knocked most of the snow off the windshield, then climbed into the truck and started it up. The wheels spun a few times until they finally found some traction, thanks to a twelve-hundred-pound plow on the front and eight-hundred pounds of cinder block in the bed. I pushed my way out of my driveway and started up the road, through the snow-covered trees.
My windshield wipers were fighting a losing battle. During the night the snow had turned into the heavy wet stuff that sticks to everything as soon as it lands. I cranked the defroster as high as it would go and tried to stay on the road, which was nothing but a rumor anyway. When I had finally worked my way to the last cabin, I tried to turn the truck around, got stuck a few times, used every bad word I knew and made up some, then finally got it pointed the opposite way. I pounded my way back, past the rentals, then my cabin, then Vinnie’s, all the way to the main road.
The snow was mocking me. It was dancing in my headlights and covering up my tracks as soon as I could make them.
I turned around and went back in for more. At least I’d go down fighting.
We had breakfast that next day, the first day of the new year. We didn’t talk about what had happened the night before. She went back to her work, wrapping up dinner plates and putting them in a cardboard box. This was her mission in life, she said. She wanted to use this time to pack up the old house, and to finally sell it. She had been putting it off for so long.
Her hair was pinned up again. She had gray sweats on. Working clothes. I offered to help her. She said she needed to be alone for a while.
She came over by the door and gave me a quick kiss on the mouth. Then I left.
By the time I got home, there was a message waiting on my machine.
“Sorry I was a little weird this morning,” she said. There was a pause. “It’s been a long time for me, if you know what I mean. Give me a call in a couple of days, eh? If you feel like coming back out, I’ll make you dinner.”
That was it. I waited a couple of days. Three, to be exact. I tried not to think about her. It was one night. You were there and something happened and it was great and so what. You’ve got your own problems and she’s got hers.
When I finally called her, she apologized again, and asked me if I wanted to come back out for her beef stew.
“I think you should know,” I said. “My man Jackie does a beef stew that’ll knock you out.”
“So you’re saying you’ve got some high standards.”
“Yeah, but if you’ve got some Canadian beer in the house, you might win me over.”
“Molson Canadian,” she said. “A case in the fridge. Bottles, not cans.”
“I’m on my way.”
It was two and a half hours in the truck again, across the bridge and down the Queens Highway. Of course, up here that’s nothing. You drive two and a half hours to buy your groceries.
It was still light out when I got there. She was wearing the same gray sweats. She had a white handkerchief wrapped around her head.
“You shouldn’t have gotten all dressed up just for me,” I said.
She pulled me inside and kissed me hard. A minute later we were upstairs, in the same bedroom. We went slowly this time. She took the handkerchief off her head and shook her hair. I ran my hands up her rib cage, caressing the soft flesh beneath her breasts. She closed her eyes.
She grabbed my hands as she moved against me. She worked at it harder and harder, all the while biting her lower lip. She looked at me once and then closed her eyes again. A great shudder ran through her body. Then she collapsed against me and whispered in my ear. “Oh God,” she said. “What are you trying to do to me?”
We lay there without talking for a long time, as the sun went down and the light coming through the curtains changed the color in the room. It was the kind of light that usually makes you feel a little sad and tired, the light of a midwinter day that ends too quickly, with spring a long time away. But on this day it felt different.
“What’s this from?” I said, running my finger along her eyebrow. I hadn’t seen the scars on her face the first time, not in the dim light of New Year’s Eve.
“Hockey, what else? I caught a stick there. Fourteen stitches.”
“And here, too?” I touched the long line on her chin.
“I took a dive on the ice. Seventeen stitches.”
“Don’t they wear face guards up here?”
“In college you have to,” she said. “But not out on the lakes. Face guards are for pussies. And Americans.”
We rolled around a couple of times over that one. Then she got up and put her sweats back on. I couldn’t help thinking, what kind of woman invites a man over and doesn’t do anything to get fixed up? Maybe the kind who at the last moment was hoping nothing would happen between them? If that was it, her resolution lasted all of three seconds. Hell if I knew.
She served me her beef stew at the big dining room table, under the antique light with the five glowing lanterns. When she sat down across from me, I finally got her story. It’s funny how you can distill your whole life down to a few minutes, telling it like it had a plot and a theme and a moral at the end. Or at least what will pass for a moral for the time being, until your whole life story is done.
“This house,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “It was my grandparents’. But it was my house, too. I grew up here. My father…”
She looked down for a moment.
“He was killed when I was six years old. He was shot in a bar. Apparently he was trying to protect somebody. Some woman was getting roughed up and he stepped in to help her. Anyway, I only have a couple of memories of him. Good memories, I guess. Him holding me up in the air and swinging me around. One Christmas when he bought me this big rocking horse. I think it’s still in the attic.”
She looked at the ceiling again.
“And your mother?”
She looked me in the eye. “What about her?”
“I’m just asking. I’m sorry, go ahead.”
“My mother,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “She didn’t exactly get along with my grandparents. I guess it was kinda tough, living with your in-laws after your husband is dead, but she didn’t try real hard to make it work. We moved out once when I was like twelve years old, but, well…”
She stopped.
“What is it?” I sa
id.
“Alex, you’ve got to understand… Some things happened to me back then. I know it was a long time ago, but…”
I waited.
“Some things you don’t get over,” she said. “Maybe you get better at dealing with them. That’s all.”
“What happened?”
“My mother got remarried for a while. That’s when we moved out of here. My stepfather… Well, for now I’ll just say this, eh? He died a couple of years ago.”
“Natalie, did he-”
“He made a lot of money, too-after he left my mother for somebody else. He became some kind of real estate big shot or something. I don’t know exactly. All I know is that Albert DeMarco had a long and happy life. If there’s any kind of justice in that, somebody is going to have to explain it to me.”
My stomach started to burn. I wasn’t sure what to say.
“I finally ran away,” she said. “I came back here. My grandfather told Albert he’d have to kill him to take me away again.”
“So your mother… Is she still around?”
“Yeah, she is. Although, hell, when’s the last time I even talked to her? I think it was when she called me to tell me Albert had died. I think she actually thought I’d be happy enough to start forgiving her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “My grandparents were great, okay? They were the best. My grandfather, you should have seen him…” She smiled at the memory. “He was so strong. So kind. He’s been gone a long time now, but I still miss him.”
She took a hit off her beer bottle and then put it back down.
“Anyway, as great as they were, I was still kind of lonely growing up. I was such an awkward kid. And shy, especially after everything that had happened to me.”
I could see it in her. As beautiful as she was on that night, I could see that kid in her face. A tomboy with a slight overbite and big eyebrows.
“But I loved playing hockey. I used to play with all the boys, and I was faster than most of them. When I started playing girl’s hockey in high school and then in college, it was okay, but you could never really hit anybody. I led my women’s hockey team in penalty minutes- I guess that sums me up pretty well, eh?”
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