Northern Light

by Deb Davies

  “What about what I did? Aren’t I guilty of something?” Laurel said.

  “Not to my mind,” Arnie said.

  Black Pearl ran into the kitchen and jumped on Arnie’s shoulders, sniffing at his eye patch. Colby, fat and fascinated, followed him into the room.

  “Off! Off!” Arnie waved his arms.

  Black Pearl jumped down and rubbed against Claire’s ankles, spreading black hair on her antibiotic cream. Then he smacked Colby and turned, belly up, on the floor.

  “He and Colby will miss each other,” Jen said.

  “He may stay here,” Claire said. “He loves being a barn cat—Orra to rub against in the barn, Colby to pester, mice to chase, and straw to roll in.”

  “Are you going to stay here” Jen asked. “As in, here on the North Branch?”

  “I don’t think I can,” Claire said. “George and Ann. Ann burning. Police excavating my cellar. It’s a lot to process. You should take videos of the way you redesigned my house. Get them up on YouTube. I’ll take the quilt Zoe gave me wherever I go, Jen.”

  “Back to your condominium in Grand Rapids,” Jen predicted.

  “I might sell the place in Grand Rapids. I’ve been looking at condo associations on the Main Branch, closer to Grayling. I might be somewhere else during summer, when tubes and canoes go by. Sanjay will rent or buy my house here. He and Zoe love each other passionately, but they can’t seem to spend nights together. He likes rooms warm; she likes them cold. He likes to read before bed; she hates even computer light. He likes to go down for a snack at midnight, but then she hogs the bed, according to him, and strenuously resists his attempts to repossess it. She says she wakes up with crumbs of his food in the blankets. He could sleep at my house and be at Zoe’s in time for breakfast. And he says he’ll put in a hot tub where the fire pit was.”

  Charles asked, “Do they like the same breakfast food?”

  “They both like eggs Benedict, orange juice, and granola. They differ on kippers, though. Zoe likes them,” Claire said.

  “Can my mom’s ashes be buried in a Catholic cemetery? It’s what she would have wanted.” Tansy rubbed her eyes.

  “Father Cleary will know,” Charles predicted. “I would guess Ann had a will and left everything to you. So, offer Father Cleary a bequest, and I think he will bury your mother wherever you want her. Where was Patsy buried? Do we know?”

  “Medal of Mary,” Tansy answered. “Monty, too, though he was Presbyterian.”

  “If there’s room nearby one or both of them, ask if Ann can be buried there,” Laurel said, then voiced second thoughts. “Unless you mind, Claire?”

  Claire looked at her. “Why would I care? I’m not going to be buried in Medal of Mary’s graveyard. Being with Father Cleary at the wake was hard enough.”

  Jen and Tansy walked out together.

  “You could stay here, with the Marshes,” Jen said to Tansy. “I’ve never known kinder, less judgmental people.”

  “I’m going to go back to Best to Be,” Tansy said. “I do like my job. I’ve been thinking. One reason I feel safe there is probably because Patsy, who was older than my mother, took care of me when I was young.”

  “What happens to Everything Michigan?”

  “Someone from Chicago buys it? I haven’t decided for sure yet, but I can’t picture going back there. Every item of food I ordered or sold, I’d picture my mother. I can’t imagine there will be a time when I don’t think of her.”

  Jen looked at her. “Some people get better as they get older.”

  “Some people don’t,” Tansy told her. “But I am going to try.”

  “I’m going to stay at the Marshes for a while,” Jen said. “I walked out on their horse track today, and it was level. Right now, I can handle up to a 5 percent grade, but anything uneven or hillier hurts my ankle. I talked to Barbara about staying. She said I could feed and help take care of some of the animals. Sanjay says he’ll help find homes for stray kittens.”

  “Pearl would like having you around,” Tansy said. She sounded wistful.

  “I might take classes online from Parsons School of Design.”

  “Come over and walk at Best to Be when it’s raining,” Tansy said. “There are carpeted halls and handrails, and ramps you can use instead of stairs.”

  “Thank you,” Jen said warmly. “That would help. I hurt in cold, wet weather.”

  “There’s a little snack bar there, besides the restaurant. You could stop and get coffee or a cup of soup if you’re tired.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you then,” Tansy told her. “And sometime, maybe in the spring, you, Dannie, Elaine, and I could see another movie.”

  “I’ll ask Arnie what will be playing,” Jen said.

  I wanted to stay up until I saw you,” Arnie said to Laurel. He had gone back to his bedroom, but was lying on top of the comforter.

  Laurel froze in the doorway. She was still wearing blue jeans and a plain white blouse, but sported Arnie’s citrine ring on her right hand.

  “I called Neddie.” He sat up halfway and leaned toward her.

  “She must be relieved. A garbled version of our story made the Detroit papers.”

  “Charles called her once he knew I wasn’t taking the low road to Scotland and told her to wait to see me until I was recovering.”

  “So she’ll be here soon,” Laurel said. “With Sawyer.”

  “She wasn’t sure how to tell me, but she and the man she’s been seeing want to get married. Sawyer likes him,” Arnie said, “and she has insurance now.”

  Laurel sat next to him on the bed.

  “When I’m better, I thought you and I might meet them in Ann Arbor,” said Arnie. “Maybe see Sawyer in a soccer game? And sometime, if Jen moves back to New York, you and I could take a train to see her and check out the movie museum. That is, if you want to.”

  “I’d love to,” Laurel said. “I’ve been thinking. There are a couple of community colleges and four-year schools near Grayling. I don’t really want to keep running into Bethanie. I could retire early, take a smaller pension, and maybe teach part-time. I love working with students, but teaching writing is burn-out work, and that’s what the college board wants now—each of us working in our own specialty. I’d like to teach a literature class again or a reading class. Not that those are easy.”

  “I bet you could find places to teach here. But it gets colder in Grayling than you’re used to,” Arnie warned her. At the same time, he took the citrine off her right hand and with a bit of a struggle, slid it on a finger of her left hand.

  “We’ll buy comforters,” Laurel said. She lay next to him, careful not to crowd his ribs. “I can watch Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and you can read Michael Connelly novels.”

  “Or,” he said, “I could peruse The Collected Works of Justice Holmes.” He was rewarded when she sat up in the bed and stared at him. Arnie said, “I’d feel better if we were married. I know marriage doesn’t statistically matter. I know a lot of married people cheat. But I’d like some kind of everyone-knows-it commitment.”

  “Um…are you Catholic?” Laurel asked.

  “I’m Go See Our Local Judge,” Arnie said.

  A wave of affection swept over Laurel.

  “I’ve lost weight, so I shouldn’t squash you,” Arnie continued. “Hospital food.”

  “Good,” Laurel said. “I’ll start eating more.”

  AT ABOUT THE same time Laurel was promising a change in diet, Charles was sharing a similar conversation with Claire.

  “What do you think, long term?” he asked. They had a space heater in the room, so she wouldn’t need covers. She was wearing the kind of slip she had worn the night Ann Campbell tried to burn her alive. He’d pulled the sheet up to his chin and was wearing only his glasses.

  He touched her lips with his fingers. Her cracked lips hurt, and she moved his hand away.

  “I’d like to see your stream again.”

  “Ah. Pic
ture us beatific—you in a caftan and me splendidly nude. You strip, and we skinny-dip.”

  She didn’t find it easy to meet Charles’s eyes. The skin on her face felt stretched when she smiled, and the corners of her mouth were peeling. It helped to remember he was black-and-blue from his chin to his toes, with one large bruise across his abdomen shaped, as he said, like an enormous pickle. So she shouldn’t have felt self-conscious, but she did.

  She’d said she’d been too out of it to remember Ann’s smoldering hatred, but, in fact, she remembered most of that night. She remembered Ann’s threats, and sweating with terror, wondering if scar tissue could be reconstructed.

  “Claire, look at me. I should be ashamed to face you. I didn’t know Laurel or you well enough to blather about animal aspects. Annie Dillard says you can’t know something’s reality unless you love it, or have spent the time and energy to be knowledgeable about it. I’d like to know and love you. But you and Laurel—both of you complex human beings—saved each other, while I did a snipe dive and ended on my butt.”

  She did look at him. “You could have gotten free and left me when you first got out of the basement. You could have hitchhiked on down the road. You distracted her—Ann. You and Laurel kept her mouthing off until Tansy showed up.”

  Charles pulled himself together and managed to look indignant. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he told her. “I’d have to be gormless to think I could replace you. It took me twenty years after Lane to find another woman I loved. Do you think at my advanced age I can afford to waste decades? And what if, with my magnetic charm, I attract another romance writer? Do you want to see me shuffle into the future, an aging, heartbroken man wearing pointy-toed shoes?”

  “I’m sorry about your cabin and your work,” Claire said. “That’s your pure passion.”

  He took his glasses off and looked at her. He did look older—not just the scrapes and the bruises and the cuts, but the bruise-like circles under his eyes that had come from not sleeping. The skin there looked thinner, too, almost translucent.

  “I want to go on learning, not to nest on what I’ve learned, like it’s a pile of—a pile of—I don’t know.”

  “Fungus sticks?”

  “Claire, I’m trying to say I won’t leave you to follow Arctic terns. You are my pure passion. We can trundle about during the day and learn together, and at night, we can learn each other’s love.”

  “How about Oscar? If we trundle around together, will I see Oscar?”

  “Ed says Oscar flew off with a gang of young ravens. He may have flown north. Ravens can find good hunting even in the Arctic. But he’ll most likely be back here, cruising this area, and to be honest, he’d recognize you with or without me. He might even say hello.”

  Claire struggled to sit up. “He’d be more likely to recognize me if you were with me.”

  “I suppose,” Charles said. “If I forgive you for suggesting I could have run away, we could winter on the Main Branch. We’d see the river swing out wide under snow-laden white cedars. We could watch the northern night sky when light from the Aurora Borealis shimmers like emerald rivers. We could regale each other over micro-brews at Spike’s Keg ‘O’ Nails.”

  She lay back in the bed. “It’ll be nice to drink again,” Claire said. “The doctor said blah, blah, blah, burns and the immune system; stay hydrated. Blah, blah don’t drink for two months, blah, blah. Blah.”

  “We’ll celebrate by chilling champagne in snow or wrapping up in a quilt and having Irish coffee the way it ought to be made—with cognac in plain white cups. Or hot chocolate, made with squares of baking chocolate and cream. We’d need vanilla beans.”

  “Many choices,” she mused. “I could do fundraising parties for Trout Unlimited.”

  “Or install a wall for rock climbing,” he suggested, frowning at his scarred hands.

  “A revised heaven.” Claire looked thoughtful.

  “What happened to your old one?”

  “George and Ann Campbell are in the brick house I thought I’d move into,” she said. “Maybe she was the gold-brown marten you thought of. She cared so desperately that twice in her life, she tore other lives apart. Maybe he loved her but was afraid to lose the life he and I had—the life he’d planned for, the life he’d built over time. He wasn’t so physically passionate by the time he’d moved ‘home.’ At least not with me. He’d moved to the place he remembered and found he had friends, status, and two compensations of aging—money and stability. I still feel sorry for Ann. She ended up bringing him custards after she’d waited a lifetime for him. She’s stuck with George now, and the brick house, but she can’t have the black cat.”

  “Claire?” Charles sounded worried. “What, ah, shape is Ann in, in that view of an afterlife?”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever know that for sure.”

  He wondered if he’d awakened her most traumatic memories, which would surely be those of the fire.

  “I’m going to miss Laurel!” Claire wailed. “I hate it that she’s leaving. How can she go back and see David at work every day? We’ve barely had a chance to reminisce.” She’d taken pain pills, and her voice was drowsy.

  “Have Laurel come visit,” Charles said. “Have her move in, if you want. I like Laurel. We’ll find out what her plans are. You can ask her when you both wake up.”

  “This last time she came,” Claire said, “her visit went all wrong. She might not want to come back here, Charles. Awful things happened.”

  Charles smoothed her hair back. He said, “Some bad things did happen.”

  “And yet,” she said, “some good things happened too.”

  After she fell asleep, he slid out of bed and cracked open a window. Barbara had tacked a branch of drying sweet fern to the window frame, and the breeze blowing into their room smelled of balsam trees.

  To old friends and new friends,” Charles proposed, raising his glass. The blast of wind and snow outside Claire’s condominium swirled through the pine trees by the Au Sable, scoured the window glass with bits of ice and spruce needles, and tried to push the river current back.

  Claire and Laurel sat together on a gold sofa.

  “To spring,” Claire added to the toast. “Warmer weather must be coming.”

  “Good insurance,” Arnie suggested.

  “Healing,” Laurel said.

  They clinked glasses and each drank at least a few swallows of champagne. Arnie left most of his drink. Claire eyed it but reached for an orange slice dipped in dark chocolate. Food rested on an antique immigrant’s chest she and Charles had found at a community garage sale under a pile of frayed cotton rugs. The letters on it read, “Christian Braun, uber Liverpool nacht New York.” The boards on the top had separated, leaving a few wide cracks, but it still made a good serving table for drinks and desserts, in this case, from Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. There were—besides the oranges in chocolate—figs and a plate of strangely addictive white and dark chocolate covered marshmallows.

  Nine months had passed since Ann died in flames. Arnie had lost weight; Laurel had gained weight. Claire’s skin no longer sported multiple pox-like silver scars. Charles had a bum knee, but got cortisone injections.

  Arnie had been off work with full pay. He’d tried to return to work but still had some problems with loss of balance. He was now on half pay. By the end of the summer, if he didn’t meet department standards, he’d have decisions to make.

  Laurel and Arnie would be the first of Claire and Charles’s friends to spend the night. They’d had Reuben sandwiches, also from Zingerman’s, which made for an easy supper, and had planned to put on boots and coats and snow pants and walk down to the river’s edge. The wind whipping up had convinced them discretion was the better part of valor, so they put on night clothes instead and moved to softer chairs.

  Charles, wearing sweatpants, long-sleeved thermal underwear, and heavy wool socks, had stretched out on the floor, where he could eye a stack of oversized books. Arnie, seated in the rocker wher
e he could lean his head back, was nattily attired in the maroon pajamas and matching robe he’d bought for Sawyer and Nellie’s visit. New, black wool slippers completed the outfit. His hair had grown out and pretty much covered the scar, so that when Laurel looked at him, she was tempted to say, “Who are you, and what have you done with my husband?”

  Claire had changed into a long, straight, hooded red robe that she’d chosen because it could cover her hair, and Laurel was wearing a pair of ankle-high, cream-colored slippers and pajamas printed with black cats. They shared the couch, bodies turned sideways and feet meeting in the middle, so they could eye Charles and Arnie or look out at the boughs of wind-tossed cedar trees and snow clouds swallowing stars.

  Laurel had just gotten back from visiting Jen in New York. Neddie and Sawyer had visited Arnie in Grayling, since his driving was limited to checking in at work and getting to and from physical therapy. Charles and Claire had overseen the reconstruction of his cabin that fall, but as the weather had gotten colder, they’d spent more and more time at the condominium she’d bought on the Main Branch. He’d joined her, lugging in piles of books, by the time Christmas came. The rooms were sparsely furnished, with a small cherry table and four oak chairs in the living room, along with the couch, the immigrant’s chest, and a red plaid platform rocker.

  The two bedrooms had queen-sized beds, with flannel sheets that were lightweight but held warmth and piles of quilts, and pillows, and wool blankets. The pine dressers in each bedroom were new and serviceable. The lined drapes, like those in the rest of the house, were white, and when they were open, they showcased the snow. The silk quilt Zoe had given them hung above the bed Claire slept in. Usually Charles slept there with her, but there were nights when his knee hurt, and he slept in the platform rocker, or he read in the chair, or looked at the stars.

  “I like the cat pajamas,” Claire said to Laurel.

  “Thanks. Sawyer got them for me after we took him to see Pearl.”