Northern Lights

by Raymond Strom

  “This is the last of it,” she said, shaking the three baggies she had gotten from Svenson. “After tomorrow I won’t have anywhere to get it, but we only need one to give the sheriff with the pictures. You know what would help? If you did a little so there would be less for me.”

  I didn’t want to do any speed—it had been three weeks—but I didn’t want her to end up with it so I chopped myself a long line and sucked it up my nose. That much less for Jenny. My regret was instant but short-lived. Soon I felt a smile breaking on my face and an optimism growing inside me. Svenson was going down.

  “So how did you do it?”

  “It was easy,” she said. “He walked right into it when he gave me this.”

  She held her left hand out to me and I pulled it close to inspect the ring. Cold and smooth, it was made of glass—white speckles in a field of black—and it reminded me of the night of the camping trip Jenny and I had spent with Mary and J.

  “What a dick!” she said. “I mean, who gives a girl a glass ring?”

  “It’s nice,” I said, not sure why I was defending Svenson’s choice of jewelry.

  “I like it,” she said. “I’d buy it myself, but what does it mean coming from him? Diamonds last forever, gold and silver are pretty solid, but glass? The first time you bang it, it breaks. That’s some metaphor. How long is he planning on keeping me around?”

  “How long are you planning to stay with him?”

  “But what if it were serious?” she said. “Who is careful enough to wear a glass ring and not break it? I guess if anyone could do it, you could, but it’d be like carrying an egg around all day.”

  I took the ring off her finger and slid it onto the middle finger of my right hand—a perfect fit—then took it off and placed it back in her palm.

  “So he gave me this, then I told him I wanted to get high. I waited for him to break it all out before I told him he stank and needed a wash. He left the door open as he showered and said the nastiest shit to me as I took pictures of his drugs, his safe, his desk. It’s all there.”

  Jenny took the ring from her palm and slipped it back on her finger.

  “You don’t need to wear that here,” I said.

  “I should probably get used to it,” she said. “Part of the game. I wouldn’t want him to sneak up on me later today and catch me not wearing it.”

  “Well, I don’t like it,” I said.

  “You’re funny,” she said, looking up at me with an odd smile.

  “So he came out of the shower and didn’t suspect a thing?”

  “He’s an idiot,” she said. “I have a feeling he had something else on his mind.”

  I didn’t want to know what she meant by that, didn’t want to know how far Jenny went to preserve the illusion she described, so I turned to the window where the sun made its way toward high noon and the passing low clouds took turns darkening the day in shifts.

  The notebooks came out and we each took a pen, scratching out doodles and nonsense as Jenny made her way through her constant medley of old songs and conspiracy theories but in a much better mood than usual, her thoughts for the first time I could remember turning to the future, the possibility of our reuniting in Minneapolis.

  “Surely I’ll get into the U of M,” she said, “and my mom’s broke so I’ll get full financial aid and scholarships just like you.”

  Everything she said became a certainty and as she went on I listened, high and happy, her voice floating above us, calling out all her dreams now that Svenson was out of the way, now that the sheriff was sure to ride in and take her mother away. But as I began coming down, a nagging feeling developed. I wanted those pictures turned in before I left. I looked again at the new ring on Jenny’s finger and felt we weren’t safe. Not yet. We had to get those pictures to the sheriff.

  “You’re paranoid,” Jenny said when I shared my worry.

  “I could change my ticket,” I said. “We could both sleep it off and turn it all in together. I have all month—I could go to Michigan at any time.”

  “I got this,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  “It’s hard for me not to worry about you, Jenny.”

  “You should worry about getting ready to see your mother,” she said.

  This was true. We had let the day get away from us, a frenetic blur of twitching and bodily tingles as the sun moved across the sky, throwing long shadows across my room. While I packed everything I owned except for the clothes I was wearing into my backpack, Jenny capped her needle and scraped the loose powder back into the baggie. We hardly put a dent in the pile of drugs and I was about to say something when she beat me to it.

  “This,” she said, holding the other bag of speed, “I do not need to take with me. I know it will end up in my nose or wherever, so can I leave it here?”

  “Please do,” I said, happy to hear this coming from Jenny.

  She set the bag down on my desk and turned my way, eyes wide.

  “What?” I said. “What is it?”

  Jenny yanked my backpack from my hands, throwing it on the floor near the door, then moved into the space where it had been. She guided one of my hands to the small of her back, then took the other in both of hers, and running her thumbs over my knuckles, traced the bones beneath my skin.

  “When we first met I made some assumptions about you,” she said, “but lately I’ve been wondering if I was wrong.”

  “Such as?”

  “You’re so jealous about this ring thing,” she said. “And were you and Chelsea kissing when I came downstairs?”

  “She was about to kiss me,” I said, “but no, we weren’t.”

  “Good,” she said, then she put her soft hands on my cheeks, and touched her lips to mine, once, twice, three times. The first, second, third, and only times I’ve kissed a girl. She pulled me down onto the bed and we lay there face-to-face, arms under and around each other, our bodies huddling together to get as close as possible. She touched her nose to my cheek and softly moved it up my face but, though it felt good to hold her close, there wasn’t the same urgency as with Russell and this was clear to Jenny right away.

  “No?” she asked. “Nothing?”

  I shook my head. “S-s-sorry,” I said.

  “You are who you are, Shane,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that—no need to apologize for being yourself.”

  “It doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” I said.

  “If you still want to be around me and you don’t want this,” she said, “then that’s true.”

  We didn’t have much to say after that. Sitting side by side on the edge of my bed, Jenny’s head on my shoulder, we stared at the wall together for a time as the afternoon sun gave way to evening. I tried to describe the people I had seen over the months I had spent staring, the work they did and the colosseum where they gathered, and then Jenny told me what she saw, a complexity of wires and cables on which all of the world’s information was contained, ideas flashing along cables at the speed of light, a network that connected every single person on the planet.

  “You see the past,” she said. “And I see the future.”

  The sun had made its way west and the pinks and purples faded out of the sunset to tell us that the time had come. Jenny picked up a bottle of sleep aid and tapped six out onto my hand, the old remedy handed down by J. I took the pills and lay on my bed and Jenny sat on my desk chair, watched me as I fell asleep.

  “Call me when you get back,” she said in the last moments before I went out. “No, call me when you’re there. Wait, you’ll be busy, but I know how to find the number. I’ll call you.”

  My eyes closed, the sleeping pills having shut off my body but not yet my mind, and Jenny shuffled around my room for a while. I felt her lips press against my forehead and then, after I heard the door click shut, I fell into a perfect, dark silence.

  Twelve

  I got up before daybreak, grabbed my backpack without even flipping on the lights, and made my way over to the
Pump ’N Munch where my bus idled near the car wash. The sun rose over sod farms but I was back asleep before we hit Minneapolis and didn’t wake up until we were deep into Wisconsin. We passed through Madison and, after hours of rolling plains, my mind too frazzled to think about anything but the scenery, came Chicago, where I met my transfer.

  Raindrops tapped and clung to the windows as we rounded the south shore of Lake Michigan and then, after a few more hours on a highway that ran along the sandy sometimes rocky shoreline, a sign: SOUTH HAVEN. Lakeside mansions with long piers, lights green or red flashing at the end, then a sheet metal pyramid with smokestacks that reached the sky, the coal plant. Steam rose to meet the rain clouds. Beyond, the lake was red, a cloudy puddle of fresh water and clay. Even, light rains stirred the bottom. Along the shoreline white herons on long legs stalked prey among people, pasty white, stretched out on towels trying to catch what few rays were coming through the occasional showers.

  The bus kneeled with a hydraulic whoosh and let me off at a Gas-N-Go on the main road. Friday afternoon traffic crawled in both directions. A phone book hung on a chain from a payphone near the door, so I looked up Frank Jorgenson and went inside to ask the attendant for directions. Then I wandered through the short stretch of downtown vacancies, most of the stores papered over and for sale like the downtown row in Holm. A bicycle shop, a bakery, live bait. All the other storefronts empty.

  My heart pounded as I walked the streets of South Haven, nerves on edge as I prepared to see my mother for the first time in almost nine years. I still had no idea what I would say to her and when I tried to think of something I was distracted by the people of South Haven. A woman digging at a patch of dirt near her house, children playing touch football in a front yard. I wandered on, wondering why my mother would leave Grand Marais or Holm for a place like this, until I came to her street. The world blurred before me when I saw my mother’s house. Three stories on a wide lawn with a porch along the front and a garage around the side, all beige with brown trim, it looked to me like a gingerbread house, and in a small heart-shaped garden on the front lawn, lilies and irises bloomed. Unsure if my misty eyes were from happiness, sadness, or some odd mix of both, I stepped up onto the porch and pressed the doorbell, my heart quaking in my chest. I hadn’t been this nervous since the last time I had come knocking at her door.

  The door opened a crack and a single brown eye peeked through.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  The door swung open and there she was: my mother at thirty-four, twice my age. She had grown a bit thicker since I had last seen her, maybe from the baby, but aside from a few strands of gray, her hair still matched her eyes and she still had the same timid smile that I’d come to recognize as my own. She wore a navy-blue dress with red polka dots and her neck was wrapped three times with a string of what looked like pearls. On her way out the door—ten minutes later and I might have missed her.

  “Shane! Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.” She said it with a nice high tone that dropped as it progressed, and I was nine years old again, knowing that my mother didn’t want to see me. “What are you doing here?”

  I pulled open the screen door and my mother stepped back, maintained a distance—she made no move to hug me; rather, she showed me to the living room. It had a high ceiling and big windows that looked out onto the front yard. A soft brown couch took up much of the room and a matching chair sat to the side. A framed print hung on the wall, a woman splayed out in a field of long grass looking toward the horizon where an old farmhouse and barn stood.

  “Well, have a seat.”

  My mother sat on the chair, plucked a piece of lint from her dress, then crossed her arms and met my eyes in a way that didn’t make me feel too welcome. I set down my backpack and flopped onto the couch as near to where I had come in as possible.

  “So you live here with Frank?” I asked when I could no longer stand the silence.

  “How do you know Frank?” she asked.

  “I don’t.”

  “Yeah, this is Frank’s house,” she said. “How did you even get here?”

  “The bus.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  A flood of sadness welled up inside me until my throat grew closed and my nose ran. “Dad’s dead,” I choked out. I wiped my face on the sleeve of my flannel shirt and looked up to see that my mother was now looking out the window with great concentration. She stood and walked past me to get a closer look at whatever she saw. “I wanted to see you again before you were too.”

  Sinking deep into the couch, I told her back about my trip to find her using the Christmas card, how the money she had sent me all those years ago had gotten me this far, and how I had tracked her down while living in her old apartment in Holm. She listened to me but didn’t look my way—of course, I had come unannounced so she may have had other things on her mind—and she didn’t make a single movement when I broke down telling my story, merely waited for me to get through the checklist of things I had to say to her before she could go back to her life.

  “You’ll be staying here, I guess,” she said when I finished. “Let me show you your room. Bring your bag.”

  I picked up my backpack and followed her through the dining room, past an old wooden table that seated six, and into the kitchen to the staircase. Three doors stood closed on the second floor but my mother only showed me the spare room, empty except for an old bed and a nightstand.

  “Settle in,” she said.

  So this was it. Another dusty room in a small midwestern town. Stale, but at least there was light. I stepped to the window and between the peaked roofs of a couple houses and a few treetops I could make out Lake Michigan in the distance. A single sunbeam broke through the clouds to leave a trail of glitter on the water.

  As I descended the stairs, I heard her pick up the phone. I froze in place and, a few clicks of the buttons later, she spoke.

  “No, no, I don’t know where he’s going . . . couple days, he said . . . well, I’ll bring him down there for now.”

  She hung up the phone and stood there a moment. The next step I took made a loud creak and my mother spun with her hand on her heart.

  “Oh my God, Shane,” she gasped. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  She started laughing then, in the throaty way I remembered from my childhood, and I joined her it was so infectious. She leaned back against the counter and wiped her hand across her forehead as if the squeaky step had been a close call with death. Our laughter faded, but it eased me into feeling a little more at home. My mother picked up a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and lit it with an unsteady match.

  “I bought a restaurant, Shane,” she said after a couple puffs built a wall of smoke between us. “I was struggling there for a while but I think this place is finally it. This weekend is the grand opening. We’ve been serving dinner for a few weeks already to work out the kinks, but here it comes. Tonight’s the last practice night, tomorrow is the first official. It’s nice that you’ve come—you can help out.”

  My expression betrayed me then. The smile dropped off my mother’s face and she looked at the floor.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to talk to you anymore, what to say. Is that something you’d want to do? If you came to see me, that’s where I have to be.”

  “Well,” I said, “let’s see this place then.”

  “Great,” she said and she was back on top. My mother stubbed out her cigarette, led me through the back door, and into the garage where a black jeep was parked. She pressed a button on her key ring that made the lights flash, the horn honk, and the doors unlock with a loud click. I climbed in and buckled my safety belt.

  “Nice truck,” I said. “Is it new?”

  “It is,” she said. “We had a little money left over from the restaurant loan.”

  She backed out onto the road and tiny raindrops speckled the windshield. We passed back the way I had come and, while I watched the scenery pass, my mo
ther kept looking my way as she drove. When I turned to her she flicked on the windshield wipers and pointed.

  “Look at that,” she said.

  “They work very well,” I said and she smiled, looking back at the road.

  The wipers kept a steady rhythm and as we pulled onto the lake road my eyes were drawn out over the reddish water to the small whitecaps whipped up by the wind.

  “Burrrr,” my mother said, and when I didn’t look her way she said it again. “Burrrrr, it’s cold!”

  “It is cold today,” I said and when I met her eyes she shook her body in an exaggerated shiver.

  The restaurant ran long and narrow along the lakeshore, with tall windows looking out at the water and a gravel parking lot out front. We parked among the few cars near the door and my mother left the keys in the ignition. Inside, a red-faced man with curly dark hair stood behind the bar talking to two women. He wore blue jeans and a shirt buttoned halfway up, chest hair sprouting. His hands were palm down on the bar, one in front of each woman. He said something I couldn’t hear and slapped his hands down on the bar before he turned and came over to us. He leaned over and kissed my mother on the mouth.

  “You must be Frank,” I said.

  The man set a tumbler in front of me and poured some brandy.

  “Frank’s long gone,” my mother said.

  The man nudged the glass toward me. My mother nodded her head and I picked up my drink.

  “You can call me the Fisherman,” the man said and lifted his hand to be shaken. I reached at an awkward angle. He gripped my fingers and shook them.

  “What kind of handshake is that?”

  My mother laughed. The Fisherman reached out and took a clump of my hair in his hand.

  “What the fuck is this now?”

  The Fisherman took a couple steps away, put his elbow on the bar, and then his face in his palm. “Jesus,” he said. One of the ladies called him over and he turned to talk to her.

  “He’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” my mother whispered.

  I asked her about Frank but she didn’t answer. Instead, she watched the Fisherman with eyes like slits, nothing that resembled trust. He talked to the ladies while he made two more drinks, brandy in tumblers, not the drinks in stemmed glasses like the ones in front of them. He put a cherry in one and a splash of water in the other. He said something and laughed into the air above him as he carried the drinks our way.