Winter Loon
Susan Bernhard
CHAPTER 1
A HAWK BANKED in the gray daybreak, head hunched, eyes darting beneath a cross of wings. Nothing scampered or skittered along the ice, nothing meaty or gamy worth a closer look, nothing with any fight left. All that hawk could have seen was me as I was that morning, a boy only fifteen years old curled up tight as a fiddlehead, ear to the ice, alone on a frozen lake surrounded by remote miles of woods and farmland, a handful of houses sagging in the dark.
I remember watching the hawk disappear, wishing it would swoop down, pluck me up, carry me off in its talons. I cupped my hands over my nose and blew what little steam I had left into them. Pine trees crowded the distant edge of the lake. A black dog barked and bounded back and forth along the unruly shore. From where I lay, I couldn’t see the cabin, though in that frozen moment I worried about our cat, Elizabeth, and whether she’d escaped through the open door. I thought to get up, to crawl to safety, but couldn’t bring myself to leave. I let my eyes rest again on the craggy spot, dark as spilled ink and barely out of my reach, where the ice had given way and the hungry lake had swallowed my mother whole.
WE HAD BEEN LIVING IN a basement apartment beneath the laundromat in town where my mother worked folding clothes, making change, stocking the vending machine, picking lint out of dryers. When the pipes busted and flooded the place, she lost her job and we lost our home in the same night. The drafty cabin on Bright Lake wasn’t meant for winter, but we’d been there a week already in that cold heart of January, over ten years ago now.
My father told us the cabin would be temporary, that it beat sleeping in the car. That was a thing we’d done, the three of us sometimes, but more often just my mother and me. My father was something of a welder, I guess, though he seemed to have a hard time holding down a steady job. He worked summers with a traveling carnival or up on the pipeline in Alaska. Other times, he’d take off without explanation, though he’d always go out of his way to remind me that I was to take care of my mother while he was away. I came to resent that relinquishing of power. I had no more control over her than he did.
We arrived at the cabin with only what we needed or could easily rescue. Bedding, winter clothes stuffed into laundry baskets, bargain-bin cross-stitch and latch-hook kits that my mother kept in a plastic bucket, a pair of produce boxes my mother always used for packing. My dad grabbed the wooden crate he kept on a high shelf that held his favorite whittling knife and taxidermy supplies—needles, scissors, wire cutters, borax, cotton batting. He said he’d go back and salvage the rest later. I brought a pile of schoolbooks from the kitchen table, my favorite boots, and little else.
My mother and I watched from the car while my dad patted down the rotted windowsill for the key his friend promised was there. He slouched in the way tall people do, like he was trying to squeeze into a cramped space. When the key dropped into a snowbank, he leaned over from the shoulders like a vulture and plunged his hand over and over, cursing and kicking until he came up with it and held it high, a prize won.
“Oh goody,” my mother said. “Grab your things.”
The cabin was all but abandoned. White refrigerator, green oven, bare plank floors. A rocking chair by the stone fireplace, a ripped gold-colored couch with sunken cushions against the drafty wall, a table under the window with three mismatched chairs, a sorry-looking whitetail buck trophy hung next to a smallmouth bass, its skin-mounted fins brittle and broken. My father lowered his head sheepishly, like he’d betrayed a solemn blood oath. This was, after all, a hideout for men who left women and children behind. It was no one’s home. He defended the cabin against my mother’s scornful comments, said we’d have to make do unless she had a better idea. Four cots bunked in the single bedroom were stained with seeped blood and mystery fluids. My mother refused to sleep on them. To be fair, she never did sleep much no matter where we lived. She could curl up on a couch or catnap in front of a fire if we had one. I’d seen her take a pillow and blanket and go to sleep on the kitchen floor between table and cabinets against a radiator that would hiss and bang all night long. Mostly, she said, she wanted to close her eyes last.
My mother didn’t like the woods either, didn’t trust them. From the moment we stepped foot in the cabin, she was restless and sulky. No television, no neighbors, no jukeboxes or pool tables, no bars that would let a woman bring her child and park him in a corner booth with a pop and a coloring book while she caroused awhile. I’d outgrown that sort of tagging along by then and felt trapped, too, watching her pace the cabin, a panther planning her escape. Darkness settled her down. She would stare out the window at nothing. I caught her performing for her reflection, waning in the simmered light, releasing smoke from a straw-size hole at the corner of her mouth, stroking her own dark hair. Rather than bother turning her head, she would talk to us through that woman on the glass, like that figment was the real her. She’d hear a sound and make goggles of her hands to try to see into the night. Or she’d investigate from the open doorway, letting the built-up heat escape over the threshold, which drove my father crazy since she’d complain again about the cold once the door was closed.
My parents married young—she was seventeen and he was twenty-three. There was a baby, a girl called Daisy, who was born and died that same year. I came along soon after. When I was maybe three years old, my parents divorced. Over the years they’d claim it was the divorce that was the mistake, not the marriage. They reconciled and remarried. I was their ring bearer and remember fishing my mother’s own ring—the same one that had left a thin scar on the bridge of my father’s nose when she’d wrenched it from her finger and flung it at him a year before—out of my pants pocket, dropping nickels and gum wrappers in the process. My mother had giggled when I tried to put the ring on her finger instead of handing it to my father. “Guess I’m not needed here after all,” my father had said.