It was Mullen who had a little R&R scheduled that week, a trip cut short—and yet the sunburned hands of a man who might have driven all the way to northern Wisconsin and back that day. He was always at the Ransey house, Russ had said. Always at the Ransey house to keep an eye on the Ranseys, to find himself in the path of a cute young babysitter. By the time they met in the secluded Sugar Creek Park that morning, a neighbor spotting the cruiser “patrolling” the area, Charity had already decided on breaking things off. She left her bag at home and burned his letter. She brought along Aidan—as a guarantee, maybe, to keep things civilized. Maybe she had threatened to tell his wife, to spill everything she’d learned about the ice cream business from being in the Ransey home. But she didn’t know how much Mullen himself had to lose, how much stake he had in that ice cream shack. I remembered Bea saying how “things” had fallen together. Charity’s murder was the first domino, after all, and nabbing Aidan away from a custody battle had been secondary. A crime of convenience, a cherry on top.
Russ was keeping his own thinking to himself, so I kept quiet, too, going along with whatever happened now, waiting for someone to push me toward a next move. But when his truck turned off Railroad Street onto the access road and found without any problem the parking lot of Riverdale Convalescence Center, I reached for the door handle.
“You going to jump?”
“I can’t go in there,” I said. How had he figured out where my dad was? How had he figured out I had a dad and what did it matter to him, anyway?
“I’m not getting you a bed,” he said.
“No, I—I just can’t.”
“With all the victories you’ve claimed today? I think you’ve got it in you for one more.”
Two wheelchairs and their hunched occupants sat out front, a woman in scrubs standing nearby.
“I don’t want to.”
Russ got out and came around to my side. He brought the folded wheelchair out from the back of his truck, popped it open, and opened my door.
“It’s not a mystery,” I said. “I already know.”
“You can solve cases before they’re even presented to you?”
“There is someone I very much don’t want to see in there.”
“What if you’re wrong?” he said.
“Take me back.”
“Can’t do it.” He held up his empty hands. “I checked you out just now. You are no longer a guest at Eagle River Memorial Hospital.”
I had the strangest sensation that I had left something there. Or—somewhere. But there was nothing. The clothes on my back, not even mine but bad castoffs from the hospital’s lost and found. Everything else left behind or dunked into Midnight Lake. Everything—
“I brought along the ashes,” he said.
“Take me—take me to Parks.”
He came to the door and held out his arm. “I would gladly do that, if that’s where I thought you needed to be. Please.”
I hadn’t known I could still have my mind changed for me. More of his hocus-pocus. Or did that even make any sense, now that I knew that the day I’d seen him moving Bea Ransey like a chess piece, Bea Ransey was the one who’d been leading the game? Maybe I gave people too much credit for always being on the make. Or not enough credit for wanting to do what was right.
“Fine,” I said.
I let him tuck me into the wheelchair and roll me past the elderly women in theirs. “Morning, ladies,” he said, taking off his uniform hat. His hair was red-gold in the sun.
“Running for office?” I said.
“Spreading my charm around,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s too much.”
Inside, the woman at the front desk nodded at him and stared at me. He rolled me up to the desk and took a pen from the counter. He looked at the pen and then at me.
“Sign away. I can’t see anything from down here.”
He searched my face. “Which name are we going by these days?”
“Anna. For now.”
He whisked me down a long, sterile hallway into a bright atrium. I’d never been to Riverdale, but it seemed like the hospital I’d just left. Clean. Bland, except for a palm tree growing in the middle of the atrium, its canopy crowding a large skylight.
“Even the old folks’ homes in Wisconsin have more trees than Parks,” I said.
“You don’t remember seeing any trees? Near a barn?”
I held on as we sped through the atrium and down another hallway. The chair stopped in front of a door. A door like all the other doors, except that my blood pumped so hard I wondered if I could pop the stitches in my scalp. “I really don’t think I can do this.”
“I’ll be right here.”
“I’m not sure how much I believe in forgiveness.”
He reached over me for the door handle. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”
The door swung open. Across the room, Joshua rose to his feet.
“Hi, Mom.”
I didn’t trust any of it. “Joshua?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Joshua?”
Russ rolled my chair to meet him. Joshua leaned awkwardly into me for a hug but I grabbed him and pulled him into my lap. My whole body shook.
“Mom, don’t hurt yourself.”
“I don’t hurt. Anymore.”
Russ backed away and closed the door.
I gasped for breath, taking in the smell of his neck, his hair. “I was so worried.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know how worried I was.”
“I’m sorry.”
I pushed him up, holding him by the shoulders so I could feast on the sight of him. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to know how much I love you.”
He shrugged.
He was still thirteen. I couldn’t expect him to be anything else.
But it wasn’t just that. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.
All this. All this, and I’m still going to lose him. Which boy would I bring home?
I said, “I’m sorry, too.”
He glanced at me, away.
“I messed up. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I wasn’t.”
He picked at the ugly shirt I wore. “So,” he said finally, “what now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do we—what do we do now?”
“I’m not sure.” And I wasn’t. The old fears had left me, but the weightlessness didn’t feel safe, either. “I’ve been a mess since you’ve been gone.”
He studied my face, the bandage around my head. “You look really bad.”
“That—I’ll have to explain.”
“Sheriff Keller told us about it.”
“Us?” For the first time, I tore my eyes from him and saw that there were beds in the room. One was empty, the sheets rumpled and slept in. Joshua was looking toward the other bed, which was not empty. I didn’t want to see the thin figure there, the way the sheet revealed the bony knee underneath.
“Oh, no.”
“Grandpa,” Joshua said.
“Is he—”
“He doesn’t talk,” Joshua said. “Or eat. Or look at you.”
“This is why? You ran away to see—”
He shrugged.
“You ran away from me, but you had nowhere to go.”
“Grandparents always like to see their grandkids.” He frowned at the figure in the bed. “That’s what I heard.”
I squeezed his shoulders. “Oh, Josh. All this? Just for—”
He loosened himself from me and stood up straight. “I didn’t know anything about him. Everything was such a big, dumb secret.”
“Couldn’t you have asked me?”
“You said he was dead.”
I glanced toward the bed. Wasn’t he? “I thought he was. I thought you came to find your—father.”
His shrug was small this time. “I tried.”
“But?”
“I think I saw him once,” he said. “He didn’t look—real.”
&n
bsp; “What did you do?”
He lifted a hand to his mouth and gnawed at a hangnail. He’d chewed his fingernails to nubs. “Nothing. He didn’t see me.”
No, he wouldn’t have. He was much too selfish to notice anyone else.
I gestured for Joshua to roll me closer to the bed. My father lay on his side, eyes staring past me. He was skin and bone, an empty shell.
“I think he can hear us,” Joshua said.
“I don’t think he can.” The old man didn’t so much as blink at the sound of my voice.
I felt self-consciousness creep over the scene. I wasn’t sure what I would say, even if he could hear me. I felt as though I’d said the things that needed to be said, in action, in my departure, in my absence. He’d spoken with gestures, and so had I.
I would never forgive him. He’d never given me a reason. But I wondered about those ashes in Keller’s truck, if I wouldn’t feel differently about them if I’d had a little more time to forgive my mother. I understood a little better now. She was scared. No one had ever taught her that she didn’t have to be. But she had somehow taught me, and that was a lot.
I pushed back a few inches. “Your . . . grandfather and I have already said everything to each other we need to. Can you understand that?”
Joshua turned to the prone figure on the bed. He nodded.
“Joshua, I’m so sorry. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. You haven’t even heard all the mistakes I’ve made yet. And—I can’t change them.”
The door opened a crack and Russ peeked in. “OK in there?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Joshua said, standing taller.
I reached for his hand to keep him close. He seemed so grown-up just now. I remembered Ray pawing at the photo I’d left him, his misery at the years already lost. I couldn’t change most of the mistakes I’d made. But there was one I could. Was Ray real? It wasn’t my call anymore. We would have to figure things out together, this kid and I. This young man.
Russ glanced apologetically toward the figure in the bed. “Got some papers for you to sign to release this—fugitive.”
He held out a handful of forms.
“Can’t we do this later?”
“Why’s everything have to be on your schedule, Ms. Winger?” Russ said. “I need you to sign—right below me.” He dropped them into my lap.
At the bottom of the top page, a signature. His signature. It was an unsteady hand, half print, half script. A nervous hand, this one, but I didn’t mind. He didn’t look away when I signed and gave the papers back. I said nothing. It wasn’t good business to give it away.
“I’m a fugitive?” Joshua shuffled his feet. “Will you arrest me?”
“Not this time,” Russ said. “Although I do have some ideas on how you can repay some of the trouble you’ve put my team to, chasing you up to the hinterlands.”
I pulled Joshua’s hand to me before he could chew his nails. “How did you get up here?”
“Hitchhiked,” Russ said. “He worked it all out in that chat room in his game. An eight-hour head start and the ride-share was a college kid going up to Canada, took him most of the way. We finally got a bead on him when a semi driver picked him up at a rest stop. We let him roll right into town.”
“You knew I was here?” Joshua said.
“Had a guy in the lot the whole time,” Russ said. I knew he meant Mullen, that he’d put his best man on the job and been let down a thousand times over. He’d had all that faith in other people and now he might have to see things the way I always had, with none. “I’m thinking about fifty hours of community service to run concurrently with any punishment you have coming from other quarters.”
Joshua’s eyes cut in my direction. “Am I grounded?”
“So grounded,” I said. “As soon as we get home.”
The word home had such a nice tone that I didn’t want to say anything else. It had power no mere word should have. Did I mean Parks? I didn’t mean Sweetheart Lake, but there were so many places we hadn’t been.
Russ watched me with feigned casual attention. That heavy look.
I’d said home as though I knew where that was. What I meant was that I could make one. I could find a way to be part of something. An image came to me: bright pink running shoes rushing out of the hospital. If I went back to Parks, maybe I could find a way to put all this relevant experience to use. I hoped I could.
Joshua must have felt a little of the same hope. He settled on the armrest of my wheelchair without my pulling him in and eased an arm around my shoulders. He touched his temple to mine, careful with my bandages, careful with me.
I closed my eyes and enjoyed the solid weight of him against me. I was going to tell him, anything he wanted to know. Minus a few details, maybe.
I might start by saying, “On the day I died. . .” And he would probably stop me, call me dramatic, call me out for the wording. He would have an opinion on things from now on. I would have to hear them all.
No, I would say. Listen: on the day I died, I dragged the new oars down to the lake. But I didn’t know it was the last day, and I didn’t know I would get another chance. I didn’t know you yet, but on the day I died, you saved me. You save me still.
On the first day of my new life, I bought sandals and pants at Theresa’s store, along with a bright Sweetheart Lake sweatshirt. Theresa tsked over the state of the back of my head and threw in an equally bright bucket hat. We hugged for a long time, making the kind of promises I had never made. But if I brought Joshua up for a trial visit with Ray next summer, some promises, at last, might be kept.
One last errand. Not a lake, I said, directing him out of town. The river. Downriver from Sweetheart, on its way to somewhere else.
At the water’s edge, I rolled up the pants and slipped out of the sandals. The water was freezing.
Someone should say something.
I glanced up. Russ stood at the top of the riverbank, waiting. Behind him, the sky was clear and bright. It had not been in my mother’s power to trust blue skies, but I could. And greener grass, and yellow rooms. I felt only the water and a warming trill of nerves and possibility—I could dwell here. Here, where I was both certain and uncertain, but most of all grateful.
I pulled the zipper bag open and bent, the current rushing around my knees as I dipped the bag into the clear water and let the river draw the ashes. A cloud caught under the surface, brief, and then was gone.
For a moment, real grief gripped me. I tried to think of each fleck of ash rushing away from Sweetheart Lake at last.
I stood and picked my way out of the water, across the rocks. Up on the road, Joshua waited in Russ’s truck, fully outfitted from the sporting goods store on Pine Street. Russ had put away his uniform and hat. For the ride home, he was wearing jeans and a gray Sweetheart Lake fleece with soft pockets. We would arrive back in Parks, festooned as tourists, lauded as heroes, a ragged family of hitchhikers and liars and whatever Russ turned out to be.
“Anna,” he called. He pointed further downriver, where a large bird pinwheeled high in the air. An eagle, maybe. I slid my wet feet into the sandals, hurrying. I was ready to find out: the eagle, the man, whatever came along. Ready, just this last time, to get on the road.
Acknowledgments
This book started as a short story about ten years ago and has lived many lives since, giving me many people to remember here.
Grateful thanks to my agent, Sharon Bowers of Miller Bowers & Griffin Literary Management, and my editor, Margaux Weisman, for making this book possible. Thanks also to the good people at William Morrow, including Jena Kamali, Serena Wang, and Owen Corrigan.
Special thanks to Terence Faherty for giving me the heads up I needed to see this project the right way, and Midwest Writers Workshop for, among many other things, introducing me to Terry.
Also special thanks to Christopher Coake, who read this book years ago when it was terrible and said nice things, anyway.
Thanks to my first readers Yvonne Strumecki,
James W. Ziskin, Lynne Raimondo, Kimberly Rader, Tricia David, Darian Ochs, Laurie Martin, James Burford, and Tiffany Rader and to Lauren Stacks Yamaoka, Kim Robbins Oclon, and Adam Morgan for enthusiasm about seeing the project to completion. Thanks to Lisa Stolley, Scott Blackwood, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Don Pollack, for early encouragement on this story and to Roosevelt University’s MFA program in creative writing for introducing most of these people into my life.
Thank you to Amy Clouse for her expertise in small-town sheriff’s offices. Mistakes made despite her good counsel are, of course, mine. Thanks to Tom Jones for the corn knowledge. Belated thanks to Rob Ramey for his high school principal help.
Special nod to the librarian at Chicago’s Edgebrook Public Library who put the book on handwriting analysis facing out on the shelf in 2007. I owe you one. Thanks to Michelle Dreshold for writing Sex, Lies, and Handwriting. To librarians in general and booksellers, too, much is owed.
My true gratitude goes to Dan Mayer and Jon Kurtz for giving me a beginning.
Special thanks, as always, to all my family and friends for how much they’ve put up with and for how much they participate in this alongside me. But the real hero here is my husband, Greg Day, whose support of this project has weathered its entire ten years.
I have struggled with how to acknowledge here the women who have faced domestic violence in real life, many of whom have not survived their abuse. They were much on my mind as I wrote this book. If you need help getting free of a bad situation, please call 1−800−799−SAFE (7233).
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