A mistake, leaving so much behind, leaving the spot that Joshua knew to return to. By the time I had driven through town and past the courthouse, seen the disk of light from the lamp against the closed blinds of the sheriff’s office, passed the neon of the Dairy Bar, and took the exit north, I had begun to believe that every move I made from here on out would be the wrong one.
The road was dark even lit by the half-moon, uncluttered by other drivers. I drove just a little fast. To keep my mind where it needed to be, I began to note every county marker I passed, every sign to towns I wouldn’t be visiting. I was in the lull between one city and the next, just fast-food billboards and the occasional cluster of lights. But this was the way: north, only north and toward every mistake I had ever made.
“WHERE YOU HEADED?”
I looked up from the cup of tea, still full and long gone cold, and found the source of the question through bleary eyes. The waitress, swinging a coffeepot from her wide hip as though it were an appendage. She wore a stained uniform and broken-down sneakers. How many hours did this woman spend awake when everyone else was asleep?
I was in a truck stop in the middle of the night on the bypass around Chicago, and no one was here because it was where he wanted to be. I didn’t want to be here, either. After several hours of the gray ribbon of the interstate, my sleepless night had caught up with me. I was hoping a little pick-me-up would get me through the city and through the night.
“Home,” I said.
“Ah, yeah? Where you from, sugar?” She slid into the other side of my booth and set the coffeepot down on a napkin. “You don’t mind, do you? I don’t have enough to keep me busy, but every time I look like I got nothing to do, those dudes”—she jerked her head over her shoulder at a couple of truckers, the only other customers—“decide they need to hear the pies again.”
Earlier the truckers had been arguing amiably about who’d seen the worst pile-up in their careers. As far as I was concerned, they’d tied. I had been trying to shut them out. I had a lot of miles left to cover. Dark miles on bare, two-lane state roads.
They were doughy men of that age just shy of old. “They’re lonely.”
“Everybody who comes in comes lonely. They were each one lonelier an hour ago.”
“They didn’t come in together?”
“They found true old-fart love right here at the Quick-Stop, honey. Love to hear themselves talk, I mean,” she said. Her nametag said Mary Jo. “What’re you going to do when you get home?”
“Pick up my son,” I said. “He’s—visiting his father.”
“I hate those visits. You drop them off as well raised as they’re liable to get, and then you pick them up and they’re an inch taller and full of shit. It takes six weeks to scrub the taint off them. You just got the one?”
I nodded.
“My boys, when they go down to visit their dad and his mom and dad and his brother and that guy’s little band of assholes, they come back sounding like they’ve been to jerk camp. Be lucky you only got the one. He can’t gang up on you.”
The truckers exploded into laughter. I looked over at them but Mary Jo wasn’t bothered.
“When they sit separate, they all want to talk to me.” She fluttered her hand in the direction of the other booth. “They sit together, and they’re just little boys. They’re all the same.”
I lifted the tea to my mouth to keep from having to answer. I’d met plenty of men to prove Mary Jo’s theory, but I couldn’t believe it applied to all men. What about Joshua? As much as the last few days had staggered me, I wouldn’t believe it. I hadn’t kept him from every danger, but I had to think that he was still—possible. Joshua was still a possibility.
“Mary Jo,” said one of the truckers. “Can we hear the pie list again?”
The waitress let her head dip. “They don’t want any pie. I’ll bring you some more hot water, hon. And a new tea bag. That looks awful.”
I needed to get back on the road. My phone said it was almost three in the morning. The phone got service here, so I could tell I had no messages, no texts, no news. But I stayed, watching Mary Jo refill the truckers’ coffee cups and recite from memory what the men wanted to hear. I stayed and waited for the hot water and new tea bag I didn’t really want, not knowing why I stayed but knowing that it was universal. Everybody who comes in comes lonely.
Blueberry, rhubarb, Dutch apple, cherry, and when Mary Jo brought me a slice without asking which flavor, I picked up my fork and took huge, gulping bites as though it had been months, had been forever, since I’d tasted anything so sweet.
I WOKE ANGRY, my head at an odd angle and my shoulder wedged against the steering wheel. A car horn blared. I jerked upright and the horn cut out, the silence left behind strange. I was parked in a rest area I barely remembered stopping for, and the horn had been my own.
I crawled out of the truck and stretched. After the truck stop, I had lasted only another couple of hours before my lack of sleep had caught up with me. I had a lot of miles left to cover, twisting roads better attacked in daylight. Now my neck was stiff and my head cried out for caffeine and aspirin. Two other cars were parked at the other end of the lot, a few tractor-trailers at ease in their area. I rubbed at my face and arms, walking quickly to the restrooms past the raised-fist map of my home state.
A few minutes later, I was hurrying back to the truck, guzzling a Coke and shoving a candy bar in my pocket when I realized I’d attracted someone’s attention. A police officer peered into the passenger window of the SUV.
“Good morning,” I said. I’d found aspirin in the vending machine and had all the hope in the world that relief would kick in any second. I could still be in Sweetheart Lake by noon. “There a problem?”
He straightened and held me in his gaze. “Report of a vagrant.”
“Is he in my car?”
“Can I ask where you’re traveling, ma’am?”
I supposed no was the wrong answer. “Just on vacation.”
“No particular destination, then?”
Something about his tone struck me as off-tune. I glanced toward the other cars in the lot, hoping someone else was awake. I couldn’t end up a televised true crime mystery, not after all this effort. “Visiting relatives. I haven’t seen any vagrant, but I haven’t been here that long.”
“Not too long? Not several hours, and honking your horn for the last two minutes?”
I turned my head to look at the other two cars more closely. One was an open-bed truck marked but unreadable—Department of Transportation, probably. The other was dark, unmarked. “Am I the vagrant?”
The trooper walked around the back of my car, made a show of checking the license plates against a notepad he pulled out of his pocket. I imagined his handwriting: short, squat blocks of letters marching across the page. “Not if you get in your car and get moving.”
“That was the plan,” I said. He didn’t move. I took another sip of my cola.
“Are you Anna Winger?”
A dribble of cola went down my windpipe. I choked, nodding my head. My hand reached toward him. Joshua, oh, God. Joshua. “Is it—my son?”
The trooper stared off toward the ramp back to the highway as though the answer he had to give troubled him. I began to shiver. I’d been riding the right lane all the way, looking for anyone hitchhiking. At overpasses, I slowed and searched the dark reaches, and once I’d seen a pair of shoes up high in the underbelly of a viaduct. It was dark, the road blank, but I stopped and rolled down the window. When no one answered, I turned on the blinkers, got out. But just a few feet closer to the shoes, I could tell that no one was wearing them. The shoes were lined up, left behind, the sort of thing I had to discard before I started assigning meaning.
The trooper sighed and finally looked me in the eye. “Not sure. Got a message, says you’re to call in. Parks County, Indiana?”
“You mean the sheriff? Sheriff Russell Keller. How—?”
“Reported you missing.”
“ATL on your plates. Attempt to Locate. You’re free to go, but I got to call it in.”
I was caught between anger and astonishment. Some sort of alert on my vehicle? Was that even legal? Was that even—ethical? What the—was this the game now? When I left his jurisdiction, I had to check out? As if Ray weren’t enough, now I had to flee someone who could have me trailed by proxy across state lines, while he was serving the community, handing out handshakes and medallions?
“He would go to a lot of trouble to keep tabs on me.”
“Ma’am?”
“What am I supposed to do?” I said.
“You’re to call this number.” He ripped a half sheet from his notepad and walked it to me.
Up close the trooper seemed a lot younger than I’d taken him for. He was freshly shaven and the collar of his shirt didn’t quite fit. I glanced down at the paper in his hand and could read the digits there, just as squat and thick as I’d predicted. I should tell the kiddie cop a few things about himself, shake his faith a bit. But that would take time I didn’t have. I dug the keys out of my pocket.
“Ma’am? Please take this.”
“What does it matter? I’m not missing. I may never be missing again.” They were wasting my time. “Besides, I know that number if I need it.”
I DROVE FOR hours before the road finally split and veered into pines. I rolled down the windows, breathing deeply, taking them in. In all the places I’d been since, I hadn’t found anywhere that smelled just this way. Maybe I’d chosen all those prairie towns to make sure we’d never settle in, that we’d never find it hard to leave again.
I was getting close, and nervous. An hour or so still before I reached Sweetheart, I drove into a little town that seemed familiar. This old house with the big rock outside and all the flowerpots. That little church.
A new gas station stood where something else used to be. I pulled in, filled the tank. Inside the station, I bought a bottle of aspirin and another cola and tried not to look too closely at the guy at the register. I was close enough to Sweetheart now that I might start to recognize faces. Or they might start to recognize me.
Outside, I held the door for a woman coming in. She paused. “Riverview High?”
I looked up. I’d gone to Riverview, but not with this woman, surely. She was older by at least twenty-five years, her eyes sinking deep into round cheeks.
“Mrs. Brightman.” Just saying the name made me want to throw up, but I wasn’t sure why. Not yet. These were deeply buried associations rising to the surface. I reached out and held the rim of the nearby trash bin and brought the cool soda can to my forehead.
“That’s right! And you are—now let me look at you a second. I have a good memory for Riverview kids.” The woman studied me, murmuring under her breath, until at last I saw the past rush up and grip her, and the woman’s eyes widened. “Oh. I should have—you’re the Winger girl, aren’t you? I—hadn’t—” She tried to start over. “How are you, dear?”
We were on the same terms at last. Mrs. Brightman, the Riverview High school nurse, remembered me now. I let myself remember Mrs. Brightman, her medicinal green smock, the little white closet of a nursing station, and the rough sheets on the cot. Mrs. Brightman’s cool hands taking my temperature, her cool voice as she asked if there was any reason I was there, a test I wasn’t ready for perhaps. A voice that never strayed, never pried. Not even when it should have.
How am I? Would everyone always use that tone of voice on me?
“We see quite a few from Riverview,” Mrs. Brightman was prattling. “My husband, Richard? He taught at the elementary in Rhinelander for years and years, but now we’ve both retired. Don’t get into Sweetheart that much. Are you in town to visit—family?”
“You could say that.” And she would, I knew. “I need to go, as a matter of fact.”
“Won’t keep you.” Mrs. Brightman looked me up and down, and said, “Well, you turned out just fine, didn’t you?”
I launched myself off the sidewalk, across the parking lot, and into my truck. But then I couldn’t start it. I pressed my shaking hands to my thighs. I found the control for the windows and rolled them all down.
I was still sitting there when Mrs. Brightman emerged from the station with a half gallon of milk. She walked past my window to her car and noticed me watching her. “It was so good to see you,” she said. “Leeanna Winger, I’ve just remembered. An old lady’s mind. Be thankful for your youth.”
“Mrs. Brightman, my youth was a horror show.”
The nurse dropped her keys. Her eyes weren’t hiding in her cheeks now.
“If I turned out fine, it is my own doing,” I said. “If I turned out fine, it is despite Riverview High, despite my teachers, and despite you.”
“Leeanna—”
“I don’t go by that name anymore,” I said. “That girl is dead, just like you predicted. A lost cause.”
“I never thought that.” The nurse raised her chin, as though her pride were at stake. It was. It most certainly was, and I meant to drive away with it.
“Why didn’t you help me?” I said.
The milk jug dipped heavily in her arms.
“Why didn’t anyone help me?” I said.
The woman’s eyes would no longer meet mine. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “It was a different time . . . a different—things are different now.”
I searched for something smug and cutting to say. The only thing I could think of was one of Margaret’s. “That is bull and I know bull when I see it.” If I ever saw Margaret again, I’d have to tell her. But if I got the chance to tell the story, I’d have to embellish a bit, because it didn’t feel good at all to say it. Not when it was true, and not when saying it couldn’t change a thing.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The town rolled into view, and it was like any other town I had passed on the trip.
Life went on. In Sweetheart Lake, the town I’d fled thirteen years ago, groceries were being bought and sold, kids were sitting in classrooms, and their parents were over in Rhinelander or St. Germain showing real estate or selling hardware. It was the off-season, so when the road veered from the highway, and I passed the first signs of town—the Stag, open only for dinner now, the road toward Theresa’s grandfather’s cabin on Midnight Lake, and at last the little market that sold eight kinds of jerky and wooden bears that the artists carved with chainsaws and axes right there in the parking lot—the place seemed just as I’d left it. Quiet, and willing to let me leave. I could turn around now, and nobody would ever know. No one would ever care.
At first what I noticed was how much I remembered. The forest station. My heart gave a little leap at the visage of Smokey the Bear and his fire safety sign. The risk of forest fires was HIGH. That little frame house next door had been turned into a café. I drove so slowly, a truck behind me pulled around on a double yellow, just to be rid of me, and I nodded, yes, yes, this was all what I had expected. The same gas station on the left. The same curve, and the main street stretched to the horizon.
Among the T-shirt shops and knickknack stores, the same stores I’d browsed in my youth, I parked and got out, legs stiff. The same store where Theresa and I went to get I Heart Sweetheart Lake T-shirts to wear to Senior Day at school, a joke that not everyone understood. That’s not funny, the other kids said uncertainly. Was it that T-shirt shop, or had it been so long that the places I remembered had as many cat’s lives as I had, closing and reopening, closing and reopening so that I couldn’t tell the difference now? Could anyone tell the difference?
Still there: the famous fudge store, where the tourists pressed their greasy hands to the glass to watch local kids making the candy every summer. The bookstore with its half-timber façade.
So much the same, but I could see what had changed, too. The town had a sort of grit to it that I didn’t remember. Another real estate office
with a for-lease sign in its own window. A family restaurant closed for the season or maybe forever. The old bank had been turned into a gift shop that specialized in dog figurines, dog mugs, kitchen towels with dogs on them.
A white-haired couple, late-season tourists wearing high socks and bright new tennis shoes, stepped away from the dog store window and into my path. The woman and I, face-to-face, did the awkward lurch people do when they are just trying to get by, the woman laughing after the second dodge failed. “May I have this dance?” the man said. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t there. I was already around the corner, aghast at how much had changed, how much for the worse the town had fared in the decade-plus I’d been gone.
“Excuse us,” said a woman’s low voice. I stood back and let the woman pass. On her shoulder, a little boy lay his head. He stared back at me, his thumb in his mouth.
My breath caught in my throat. The boy reminded me of Joshua. But he looked nothing like Joshua, now or when he was that age. Trick of the light, trick of the mind—for just a moment I’d known him. Would every mother’s son remind me of my own, until he was back with me?
I watched the woman and the boy until they turned a corner, and then I went back to my tour. The town had expanded. Streets had been rerouted and buildings torn down to make room for a couple of fast-food places and a shiny yellow convenience store. In the distance, the pink neon of the Dairy Bar. At least that was still intact.
The town I remembered was here, and not here. I could see both at the same time, the ghost and the actual.
I thought I might cry or throw up, but I couldn’t tell which. I’d expected the town to be the same, but not this much the same, and I’d expected it to be changed, but not this changed. I had no right to say that Sweetheart Lake had been better before, that the old bank was more useful than a dog souvenir shop. I didn’t get a vote. But I felt the changes in a deep place in my gut that I hadn’t known would be there. My grief made no sense, except that I knew it wasn’t just the buildings torn down, the changing of the T-shirt shop guard.
The Day I Died Page 22
