History of Wolves(29)
It was six hours on the road to the Twin Cities, and the whole way I kept telling myself that I liked the Kawasaki, that I loved the speed. But I thought it would be more like driving the ATV, and I had to clench the handgrips at all times to keep from swerving from my lane. It was exhausting being a biker I realized. So in Saint Paul, I sold the bike to another mechanic, one with a pierced tongue and a pierced navel, which I found out about later because I started sleeping with him after I used the bike money to rent an apartment in Minneapolis. That felt good, taking the mechanic home to the studio apartment I shared with a roommate I found through a Starbucks posting. I liked sneaking him in, fucking him quickly and quietly on my futon bed, seeing nothing in the dark, getting rid of him by morning. By morning, by seven, my roommate was always up doing stretches, doing yoga before job interviews, improving herself.
Once during this period, I woke up to her singing as she opened the curtains, and in my groggy state I called her Patra. “Morning, Patra,” I said, surprising myself. As if Patra were not a proper name, but a feeling I’d once had—a lost feeling come back, something not unlike happiness. My roommate, Ann, who was from a Manitoba wheat farm, studiously ignored this eccentricity along with all my other oddities, my snuck-in boyfriend and empty closet. She’d recently gotten a tattoo of a heart on her ankle, the most aggressive rebellion she could think of against her Lutheran parents, and she sat on our carpet, still humming as she cleaned her infected ankle with a folded baby wipe. Only after she finished this task did she set the wipe in the trash and look over at me again: “Good morning, Linda.”
As if we hadn’t gone through these same pleasantries five minutes before, as if she could, with discipline, deal with my distressing peculiarities the way you dealt with an unfortunate accent or a child chewing her nails.
“Good morning, Patra,” I said, to freak her out, to mess with her a little.
Not long after I turned thirty-seven last fall, it occurred to me that I could probably look up Patra online. I don’t know why this came to me after so many years, but once it did I spent several hours tracking her down. She’d changed her last name so she wasn’t easy to find, but eventually I remembered that she’d been called Cleo before I knew her. I found a Cleo McCarthy who might have been Patra, though there was so little about her available. Aside from all the old articles about the trial, which I didn’t read, there was a current address in Tucson and a recipe submitted to a baking website for popcorn balls. A little too sticky, one reviewer said. Dissatisfied, I poked around the University of Chicago website for a while and eventually, finding nothing more, I decided to look up Tameka instead. I looked up Tameka and saw her life like she’d left it there for me to find, every step laid out in the kind of narrative detail you rarely find on the Internet. Tameka Luna Trevor graduated from Perpich Arts High School in Saint Paul, went to Wesleyan, became a probate attorney, married a pediatrician from Doctors Without Borders named Wayne. She had athletic twin daughters, photographed playing basketball in the Wesleyan alumni magazine. She bought a ranch house in Edina, Minnesota, an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, which was the home of the Hornets. Her house, pictured in realty shots before she bought it, was flanked by a man-made pond.
We’d know each other’s thoughts just by being in the world together, she’d once said to me.
I was back here in Loose River when I thought to look her up. I had been taking care of my mother for years, had already subdivided the property to pay off debts. By then, Tameka had long since left our world. Or I had. I couldn’t imagine even one of her thoughts.
On the Tuesday after Memorial Day, I arrived a few minutes early at Patra’s house. The weekend’s rain had subsided. All the out-of-towners had cleared out for the week, and the minute they were gone the temperature had shot up to eighty. That plus the rain brought out the first mosquitoes. They descended in any patch of shade. As I made my way down the highway after school, I tried to stay in the middle of the road, in the sun, to avoid them. I slapped at them as they floated in their doddering newborn way from the woods. I was wiping blood from the back of my hand when I spotted Patra at the end of her driveway.
She waved. She was wearing her U of C sweatshirt and her husband’s big boots, untied.
“Hey,” I greeted her, smiling.
She came across the gravel, eyebrows up, as if in prearrangement of some agreement she wanted me to make with her. “Thanks so much again for your help this weekend.”
“Sure,” I said.
Then we just stood there. I could see mosquitoes threading their way to us from the woods, and I wondered why Patra was out here on the road by herself, if she’d come to intercept me. I hoisted my backpack higher on my shoulder. “Um, I was thinking maybe Paul and I could try swimming today,” I told her. “It might be warm enough.”
“Oh, that would be wonderful. Yes. Thank you.” Her most functional smile flashed into place. “But, actually. That’s what I wanted to say. I think we’ll be okay for a couple of days.”
Without me, she meant.
I glanced at the house behind her with its pulled shades, its closed door, its sealed-log fa?ade. All the good windows were on the other side, the direction that faced the lake. And all weekend, those windows had been black with sunlight (the days were getting long now), except for an hour or two in the evenings when Patra and the husband ate in dim lamplight. I hadn’t seen any of them out on the deck for days. I wondered if they’d driven somewhere together—to the Forest Service Nature Center, or to Bearfin to return the rental car, or to the diner in town for a piece of chocolate mousse pie. I wondered if they’d gone as far as Whitewood, where there was a playground with two slides. A minigolf course. A movie theater.