I don’t care how many times he grabbed the shovel.”
“I know. It’s craziness.” Claire’s fingers slid up and down the stem of the wine glass. I noticed how pale her skin was now that the rosy glow on her cheeks from the frosty outdoors had disappeared. Her eyes were tired and haunted. “He won’t talk to me about what happened.” She bit her lip. “We’ve had a hard day. We’re both tired, and we had words this morning. Please know it’s nothing, Maja. I stand behind Jonas a hundred per cent.”
“I know that, Claire,” I said. “We’ll get through this. Truth has a way of coming out.”
I took a long drink of wine, looking away and pretending not to notice the tear that was sliding down Claire’s cheek.
“We’ve...we’ve drifted apart,” she said, and at first I thought she meant me and her. I opened my mouth to reassure her that time had not changed us, but she spoke again before I did. “He needs constant reassurance, and the down times...it’s been hard. Jonas has so many secrets, and I’m not a saint. How could I be?” Her voice lowered and tailed away. She seemed to want me to understand something that I was beyond comprehending. It was a shock to know that she and Jonas were in difficulty—a shock, but perhaps, not unexpected. I stared into her grey eyes, wide with torment and another emotion that looked a lot like fear.
“Jonas loves you,” I said by way of benediction. “Love will get you through the worst.”
“Will it, Maja? Will it really?”
“Yes,” I said, but I turned my eyes away from hers to settle on the flames dancing up from the crackling pine logs in the cast iron grate.
The next morning I woke early. I tried falling back to sleep, but too many thoughts were clamouring for attention. After a restless hour, I rose and dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a red fleece pullover before making my way into the kitchen. Claire had set up the coffee maker the night before with instructions to turn it on if I got up first. After two cups and a bowl of cereal and blueberries, I was ready to face the day and went in search of my boots and coat.
The rest of the household was still asleep when I stepped outside into a bitterly cold day. Sometime during the night, a north wind had blown away the cloud cover, and a high pressure system had pushed its way in. Already the sky was turning from black to midnight blue and frosted orange as the sun slipped over the tree line. Every so often weak, silvery sunshine glistened through the trees, casting slender lines of brightness in the snow. I’d gratefully accepted Claire’s offer of her parka the night before and nestled into its fur-lined warmth. The coat fit well even though I was not as tall or slender as her.
I was relieved when my car started after two tries. I let it idle while I cleaned off the roof and windshields with a snow scraper. As I worked, my breath came in moist, white puffs as though I were chain smoking. With the plummeting temperature, the car should have been plugged in overnight, but it hadn’t come with a block heater. It seemed negligent in this country, but the man who’d given me the keys hadn’t had many to choose from in his lot. This particular car had just been driven up from Florida by a businessman. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to see Jonas, I’d have taken a taxi to a rental place in town, but I was too anxious to spend the extra hour driving into Duluth. The rental guy had assured me that the car would start no problem, but his confidence wasn’t much help with the frigid temperatures in Northern Minnesota.
The drive to Dad’s house took all of fifteen minutes. If the roads hadn’t been slick with ice, I’d have made it in ten. The route took me to the outskirts of the village, the road hugging the shoreline and winding slowly north. My car’s tires valiantly gripped the road as I crept at a turtle’s speed up a steep hill and deeper into the woods. Luckily, the plow had been around early and the road was passable. Only a few houses dotted this back road, small homes with smoke pouring out of the chimneys and wood stoves the main source of heat. If I opened the window and leaned out, the smell of wood smoke and pine would fill my nostrils like a love note from the past. There was a time when I knew every family along this road, and might still, if the town held true to form. Most of the older people in Duved Cove lived their entire lives in the same house, and their children married locally and moved into homes nearby. My generation was the first to go farther afield, to university then to towns and cities with better jobs.
Duved Cove had been a fishing village in the 1800s and a logging centre in the early 1900s. The mill was still operating, but on a much smaller scale than in its heyday. My father hadn’t liked working with his hands and had broken with tradition by becoming a cop, a profession Grandpa Larson had viewed with a jaundiced eye, but even he had to admit that Dad would have made a poor logger. As it turned out, Dad wasn’t much of a cop either. The year after I’d left for Bemidji State University to work on a chemistry degree, my father was implicated in a coverup of some sort and quietly dismissed from his duties. If he hadn’t had such a good reputation, and if all the higher ups in the chain of command hadn’t liked him so much, they might have made a harsher example of him for the benefit of the younger officers on the force. As it was, rumours of the dismissal were punishment enough in such a tight-knit community. Dad never told us the full story, and we knew not to press him for details. His dismissal was quiet enough that he was able to get a job as a customs officer at the Pigeon River crossing about an hour’s drive from our house. It was a job he’d held until Friday.
My father remained in the house where I’d grown up even after my mother died. He owned a good twenty acres of land that had never been developed—land handed down from my great-grandfather, along with our house on the north-east corner. The house I’d loved as a child, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by woods and rock that led to the rocky shoreline of Superior. The house where my father had found my mother hanging from an attic rafter one cold October morning.
I slowed the car and fought to keep the memory from surfacing. My hands had been clutching the wheel, and I tried to flex my fingers. If I allowed myself to think about the horror of that day, I would never be able to make this journey—one I’d been unable to make when my father had been alive. I’d visited my brother twice, the last time when Gunnar was six, but I’d never made the trip to my parents’ house, even though Jonas believed it would help me to heal.
“I have nothing to heal from,” I’d said angrily, and Jonas had watched me with veiled eyes. I’d tried to appear unaffected. “I just have no reason to go back there. I’m over it.”
The last mile was almost too painful to bear, the big rock where I used to meet my best friend Katherine Lingstrom so we could walk to school together, the crooked tree Jonas and I had climbed, the path into the woods that led down to a sand beach where Billy and I had lain in the shadow of the woods. I took each landmark in with starved eyes. This was the part of me I’d shut away since my mother’s death.
I could see her in my mind’s eye, walking down the road, a cattail in her hand, twirling back to smile at me and tell me to hurry up. If I pretended time had stood still, if I believed hard enough...her hair had been white blonde like mine, and falling almost to her waist. She worn it braided, but the days she’d let it loose had seemed a gift. She had a smile and blue eyes that had warmed me always, even when she was trying to contain me. Back then, I’d been a carefree and careless child, rushing headlong into every situation. My disregard for rules had gotten me into trouble with my father over and over again. I’d rebelled against his harsh, unyielding nature that turned monstrous when he drank. My mother had been powerless to protect me, to protect herself from his anger. I’d loved my shy, tormented mother with my whole being, and when she’d killed herself, she’d killed any part of me that could forgive my father. And yet part of me needed to with childish desperation.
I
