Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

Decker swung himself into the plane and immediately filled the space. When he reached for his seat belt, she reached for hers like she knew what she was doing and they spent a companionable five seconds strapping themselves in and adjusting their belts. He flipped switches, checked gauges, and pressed buttons, all of which looked disturbingly fake.

  To take her mind off the toy plane, she tuned into the thrum of the engine and watched the propeller speed up to a haze. Val jerked back as he leaned across her and checked the silver door latch. She felt a sudden wild black anger at Peter Hathaway, this Decker person, and all men everywhere who make half-baked arrangements they think are just fine.

  He smiled. “Your first time up?”

  “Well, actually,” she said, “yes.”

  “You’ll like it.” She was relieved to see him put on a headset. At least now he wouldn’t be able to hear her whimper. They backed away from the dock and floated an easy turn westward, then picked up speed as they taxied around a small island housing a brown cottage with a proud white flagpole flying a Canadian flag. When the plane cleared the island, the lake opened up before them like an endless corridor of water flanked by pine forest and rocky shore. She could see for what must have been a few miles, until the distant mainland disappeared into summer whiteness.

  An errand.

  He was right: she was doing an errand. Like picking up the dry cleaning—but someone else’s, not even her own. It was one of those times when she had to shore up her ego with a self-inventory. She was a senior editor with a perfectly respectable 401K. She owned an apartment with twelve-foot ceilings and wainscoting to die for in a co-op building off Second Avenue. She was thirty-four years old and—according to her Aunt Greta—still reasonably attractive, although her wardrobe could use some work. Yet here she was proposing to get airborne with a stranger who, from the looks of him, had probably done most of his flying inside his own head.

  So, 401K aside, what she was doing was just another in a long line of errands for Peter Hathaway that started two years ago, when, at the age of forty-two, he took to wearing unbleached cotton tunics and pajama pants that made him look like a serf. He had his hair cut short, grew a trim Van Dyke beard, and pierced an earlobe. In two places. The effect was one of concentrated decadence that she found disturbing. He also developed what she considered an abnormal interest in space junk.

  Peter, whose family owned a cottage on this lake, knew Charles Cable from thirty summers of fishing for pickerel in all the same places and protesting illegal access roads. When he got word that Cable, whose breakout book, The Nebula Covenant, stayed on the Times bestseller list for thirty-two weeks, was working on a thriller called The Asteroid Mandate, it tickled the space junk gland in Peter’s brain. But when he learned Charles Cable had inexplicably fired his agent, he sent Val north with a contract.

  Partly she went as a self-inflicted penance for the debacle over the author of Downy, a sensitive novel about an old man’s friendship with a young girl, when, just a week from the book’s publication, his name showed up on the National Sex Offender Registry as a sex offender in her midtown neighborhood. For weeks thereafter, blame was liberally flung around the Fir Na Tine offices like rose petals from a toddling flower girl. It didn’t escape Val’s notice that anytime Peter Hathaway muttered about a failure of due diligence, his eyes always settled on her. It didn’t help matters that the sex offender down the street was now actually suing the company for breach of contract.

  But the real problem was what she and Peter Hathaway had discovered with horror nearly a year ago, sometime well after Peter left his wife Tish, after a four-week courtship and a three-week marriage. He moved to a loft in Tribeca with nothing but a laptop, a lamp, and a futon. Here, one night, he’d hand-rolled sushi for the two of them and Val uncorked a bottle of Barbaresco so they could bicker happily about Fir Na Tine’s latest acquisition, a novel by a writer who had invented a new language. They were both reasonably sure this writer wasn’t turning up on any embarrassing registries and that she hadn’t stolen whole pages of Finnegan’s Wake.

  So, out came the Barbaresco. And after the third helping of tekka maki, without another word they found themselves setting aside their clothing with the same powerful ease that had characterized their working relationship. The sex that followed contained sensations she thought only laboratory rats got to enjoy. Their second time together they dispensed with the sushi, drank the wine, and set about determining whether what had happened on the futon was really as good as they thought. The third time they dispensed with everything, including the futon.

  Wade Decker lifted the plane off the water, so light and easy, Val couldn’t feel the precise moment they left the lake and took on the sky. Cottages were dropping away. Decker reached under his seat and pulled out a worn map he handed to her. “We’re flying down the East Arm of the lake,” he said.

  The air was unresisting, the sun poised and golden. She watched clouds gather and drift and shift from pink to gray near the horizon. There was no need to talk. He had seen it all many times. She had never seen it. There was no word bridge possible between those two degrees of experience.

  “How high are we?”

  “Twelve thousand feet.”

  Val turned her head just enough to check him out. When Peter had sensed in a phone call that Charles Cable could be persuaded to sign, he called his Canadian friend Wade Decker and asked if he could get Val to the writer’s cabin in the wilderness. This Decker person was happy to oblige. According to Peter, his pal Decker had been married to the beautiful Leslie Selkirk, who died unexpectedly a couple of years ago, and he owned a cottage on the lake, and maybe another property in Toronto, where he lived. Peter wasn’t sure.

  Men had an appalling lack of curiosity about each other.

  As Val and Decker moved through the beautiful blankness of the air, he pointed out the shadow of the plane on the water. Ahead of them the lake was opening up, and what she could see in every direction, all the way to the horizon, was that it was really a system of lakes, shapely and silver in the late afternoon light, separated by dense green islands and mainland.

  She settled into the silence, listening to the steady thrum of the engine, shooting a quick look at the pilot. If they went into a nosedive, she could at least focus on his heaven-loving great legs. Take the edge right off the whole death experience. By dinnertime two days from now she’d be landing at LaGuardia. By bedtime, she’d be fed and showered, telling herself one more time that there was nothing better on the face of this Earth than sleeping alone.

  2

  Caroline Selkirk leaned the extension ladder against the front of the boathouse and climbed up with a paintbrush and a quart of brown paint. The sun stiffened her back, let her see in the cracks between the boards, let her pretend whole microscopic civilizations were thriving in there out of sight. The sun even brought out the faint old pungent smell of the cedar. Near the top of the boathouse was a stringy cobweb, and next to it a white beetle-like casing, like a scarab, that a dragonfly had crawled out of, unfolding its wet, new wings.

  The metal handle of the paint can dug into her palm, and whoever used the brush last hadn’t cleaned it well, so it was hard, but maybe not too hard. She dipped the brush into the brown paint that had been leftover from some other job around the camp and pushed the unbending bristles into the C of Camp Sajo. Her whole life suddenly seemed to teeter on just how fast she could touch up the letters in the Camp Sajo sign, with its three-foot-high letters that her father, Trey Selkirk, had carved into planks of red pine when he had inherited the camp from other Selkirks all those years ago.

  It was ten o’clock and she had waved goodbye to the last of her few campers, but not before she had heard a couple of parents whispering how rundown the place was looking. So what would that mean? Five fewer campers next summer? Could she afford to lose even one more?

  Suddenly she saw it all—or at least all the things she
had overlooked because, without the money to change them, for her they had ceased to exist. The Camp Sajo sign over the boathouse. The buckling steps to the lodge. The camper cabins that went unused because Sajo’s numbers had been dropping for the last ten years, after Trey died. Even her lovely handyman Luke couldn’t keep up with the work.

  What she saw—what she always saw—was the Camp Sajo of 1993, when she was eighteen. Twelve wilderness acres, a fleet of two dozen yellow fiberglass canoes, two hundred and fifty campers from a dozen different countries, a bustling waterfront program, breathless romances, campfires, camp songs, camp cheers, the clatter of voices and dishes at mealtimes—and her father.

  A cowboy-booted, crazy embroidery hippie-shirted man, her father, with his never-ending windburn and kind green eyes. It was Trey Selkirk who became the face of Ontario youth camping because he wasn’t just a guy with an inherited hobby camp and a soft spot for kids—he was a mountaineer, and a competitive sailor, and he played one hell of a blues harmonica. For a kid to spend a month at “Chez Trey,” as Sajo was called in those glory days, was to come into the presence of a man who figured in all the best books about northern adventure.

  She still had the camp—here on what was called Selkirk Peninsula because her Selkirk ancestors had come to the region one wagon ahead of the mapmakers—but the canoe fleet had shrunk to ten (eight she’d trust), and the campers to twenty-five. The SARS scare of ’03 had hit them hard, her cook Kay would remind her. And the microburst of ’07 had hit them harder, the lovely Luke would remind her. And don’t forget how youth camps go in cycles, her friend Martin would scoff, always seeking the big picture, the big vague picture, reducing all her efforts to some vast inevitability.

  But what had hit them hardest, Caroline knew as she dabbed brown paint into the faded letter A, was her sister Leslie. The dead Leslie. Because it takes a special kind of parent who’s willing to send a child to a place where one of the camp owners herself met such a bloody and mysterious end.

  The West Arm of the lake, Decker told Val as he brought the plane around and headed into the wind for a landing, had the trickiest shoals, which is why boat traffic was low and cottage values were high. Val threw on her sunglasses so he couldn’t tell her eyes were squeezed shut, and she concentrated on not stiffening herself into a complete plank while he continued the goddamn geography lesson.

  This part of the lake had several large secluded islands with maybe no more than a dozen cottages, well hidden from view, that had been in their families for three generations. Decker’s plane plonked down almost imperceptibly and skittered across the water. The Hathaway cottage, on an island at the beginning of the arm, was built sometime between the two World Wars. Desmond Hathaway, who had been camping and renting on the lake since he was in his early twenties, bought it from the original owners when Peter was ten.

  Farther down the arm was Selkirk Peninsula and what was left of Camp Sajo, where Decker had worked for several summers, owned by the Selkirk family. Over the last thirty years, summer camps suffered a long dry spell, and many folded. Trey Selkirk, who brought his wife and two daughters up from Peterborough every summer to help with the camp, fought to keep the camp open, selling off two sizeable islands close to the peninsula to Martin Kelleher, an American businessman from Philadelphia.

  The sale bought him some time, but not much, and he started looking into leasing the mineral rights to Selkirk Peninsula to a Sudbury copper mining company. When the early drilling didn’t turn up enough copper to make a damn tea kettle, as Trey put it, the miners closed up shop—and so, nearly, did Camp Sajo, although the Selkirks managed to hang on to the property. The daughters, Leslie and Caroline, inherited it, finally, but it’s Caroline who keeps opening it up summer after summer for the handful of campers they still get.

  “Why?” Val called to Decker as he scrambled out to secure the plane. “What happened to Leslie?” She clung to the wing strut as she let herself slide onto the dock, the closest she had ever come to feeling like a paper doll, a flat, flapping, falling over thing.

  “Well, I guess you could say I happened to Leslie,” Decker said, coming around to help her. “We got married seven years ago.”

  So the Selkirks’ Leslie was Decker’s wife. Val ran shaking fingers through her hair, trying to stay in the conversation. “And Peter tells me—”

  “Right.” Decker lifted her bag, shooting Val a look she couldn’t read. “She died,” he said, almost oratorically, the way she imagined Galileo sounded when he announced the Earth was not flat. As Decker turned on his heel and headed up to the Hathaway cottage, she found herself wondering whether his wife had met her end through some terrible accident, some crazy Northwoods misadventure—death by black bear, death by hypothermia…

  Val pressed her sleeve against the foam at the corners of her mouth and looked around. If death in this godforsaken place could happen to Leslie Decker, who presumably had some wilderness skills, then what were her own chances? The cottage where Decker was depositing her was in a cove where the lake water looked green, cold, and deep. The front of the Hathaway island was an expanse of exposed gray rock. Where the rock leveled out, the cottage stood, back from the water by maybe twenty yards. There were several islands nearby, but only one had a small cottage, which looked uninhabited, judging by the dull red shutters snapped in place over the windows.

  She could tell from the contrast between the tan and yellow boards under her feet that the dock had been recently repaired in four places. Maybe Peter’s freeloading nieces weren’t so useless after all, although she had a hard time picturing girls named Muffy and Lana wielding hammers and chainsaws.

  Val picked up her briefcase—Decker must have taken up her overnight bag—just as a white boat with blue bumpers sped by out in the channel. The man at the helm raised his hand at her. She waved back, grimly happy that she’d be back home in Manhattan before she’d ever have to wave at anyone in this watery nightmare place ever again, and headed up to the cottage. It had rough-cut cedar shingles the brown of rich, wet soil, a dull green roof, a fieldstone chimney, and casement windows that had been cranked open.

  She hated it already.

  Decker held open the door.

  She stopped on the threshold. “Who fixed the dock?”

  He looked her in the eye. “I did.”

  “Why you?”

  “It needed it,” he said, “and I had the time.”

  “Is that what you do?” She went past him into the cool darkness of the Hathaway cottage, half looking for a futon.

  “Am I a Northwoods handyman, is that what you want to know?” Decker smiled. “I live in Toronto,” he said, letting the screen door close quietly behind them, “where I manage a commercial building downtown.”

  “Oh. Right.” So far, nothing this man did was anything she knew how to talk about. Flying planes, managing properties, getting married.

  “This is where I spend my summers.” He nodded toward a small hall. “Bedrooms are this way,” he said, and she started after him.

  Decker stood aside for her to go into the bigger of the two bedrooms. It was an L.L. Bean kind of place, with a white Hudson Bay blanket smoothed over a sleigh bed that would have cost her a month’s pay. There was a green braided rug over the plank flooring, a single highboy dresser against an empty wall, and a low Shaker rocker. A light breeze rippled the edges of the sheer curtains. For sure this Down East look had preceded Peter Hathaway’s libertine shepherd monk days.

  Decker stood in the doorway, looking at her like he wasn’t quite sure she was level or plumb. “So you work for Peter,” he said in an appraising way.

  Well, that was the fact of it, but it didn’t make her like it any better. “We’re colleagues,” she answered with a primness she couldn’t help.

  “Which is why,” he said slowly, crossing his golden arms, “you’re doing his errands in a place that terrifies you.”

 
; “It’s more—complicated than that.”

  Decker cocked his head at her. “Ah.” Got it in one. To his credit, Val saw he didn’t look her over.

  When she caught him eyeing his watch, Val offered him a beer. He tried not to smile—“You’ll be fine, you know,” he told her—but he was kind, thirsty, or just plain damn Canadian enough to take her up. She opened her hands as if to say it couldn’t matter less. No words were necessary. Decker’s finger flicked at his Nosekote like he’d just discovered it. On the far wall were some polished wooden pegs for clothes—Val pulled two things out of her bag and hung them up—and an old framed map of the lake. She grunted at it.

  Where he lived, Decker told her, steering her by the shoulder over to the framed map, “just so you know,” was in Lightning Bay. By boat, half an hour from here. Suddenly it felt far to Val, considering this loose-limbed Canadian pilot was the only soul she knew here and nightfall had all the appeal of a colonoscopy.

  He ambled back into the main room to show her how to work the marine band radio. The Hathaway call sign was Knickerbocker, his own was Aero, and the kid who mans the station always sounds like he’s transmitting from behind enemy lines, so don’t mind him, he works for room and board.

  They stood with their bottles lifted, silent for a minute, and Val considered barring the door while he answered every frantic question she could think of about the propane, the gas lights, the motorboat, the shoals, and whether the Blue Jays had a shot at the Series sometime this decade. Then she finally felt the beer seep all the way to her feet, shorting out every nerve along the way, and she knew Decker was right, she’d be just fine.

  Especially if she could keep him there through the next round. While Decker twirled his nearly empty bottle in one hand over his crossed arms, she spoke up. “When can I see Charles Cable?”

  “And get back to Toronto.”

  “Right.”