Winter Loon(6)

“You got big since we seen you last.” She looked over her shoulder at my father. “Sheriff said you weren’t there even. Just the two of them. That right?”

“I was in town.”

Ruby was looking in my direction but her eyes wouldn’t focus, not on me, not on anything. “Why on earth you go out there middle of the night like that?” It was like my mother had appeared on the opposite side of the bed, and that’s who Ruby was talking to. I closed my eyes and could almost feel my mother’s hand, her long fingers on my hair, feel her lifting the cover to climb in next to me.

“You seen her go in?” Ruby asked.

I nodded.

“But you couldn’t pull her out, big kid like you?”

The weight of her submerged body pulled on my wrist, my elbow, my shoulder socket, all the spots that connect bone to bone. “No, ma’am.”

“Leave him be,” my father said. “He’s had enough.”

“I will talk to my grandson if I goddamned well feel like it. I don’t need your permission.”

“Lower your voice,” Gip said.

“Don’t you start in on me now.”

Late-day sunlight filtered in through windowpanes crusted white and smeared with fingerprints. The three of them bickered and blamed. I thought about the full white moon, its surface the face of a banished man, who my mother said could see everything. Who was watching over for her now?

“Don’t you care at all? They left her out there, you know. She’s all by herself.” I sat up, heartache doubling me over. “She hates to be alone.”

Ruby hung her head. “Ah, Val,” she said, her face contorted and wrung. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard in the way a person might bite down on a stick to be tough. Her mouth sloped open and a knee-deep cry collapsed out of her.

Gip stared as if he feared her sorrow might be contagious.

“What?” she asked him. “I’m not allowed to cry over our dead daughter? She drowned, Gip. Dead and gone. She’s not coming back this time.” Ruby let go of the clench she had on my hand and banged the bed rail. “And you,” she said, turning on my father, rage folding over grief. “This is all your goddamned fault. Fat lot of good you are. Sheriff told us you were in the drunk tank. I warned her. I told her, ‘Nothing good ever gonna come of Moss Ballot.’ It was always one thing after another with you. And now look.” Ruby cocked her head back and raised her brows, like she was satisfied she’d been right all along.

“What sort of man takes his family out to live in the woods like that, winter and all?” Gip said. “You should have known the ice wasn’t safe.”

“For shit sake. She did whatever she pleased. Probably did it on purpose. Anyway, Wes was the one was there. Not me.” He slapped his bare palm against the doorframe, then spun in a slow circle, his hands woven together on top of his head, elbows bent around his ears.

“Calm down,” Gip said. “No one’s accusing you of anything. You pull yourself together now. For the boy.”

“Good luck with that,” Ruby mumbled.

“Fuck you, Ruby,” my father said.

They continued like that until the nurse kicked them out, to save me from what she must have thought was an unusual situation brought on by worry and despair. She couldn’t know this was common. This was the way my people talked to each other. Ruby pitched a fit, complaining that they’d only just gotten there.

“And you’re about to leave,” the nurse countered. “The doctor will meet you in the lounge and you all can figure out when our patient here can go home. And you,” she said, pointing to my father. “Sheriff’s out there and wants to talk.”

Ruby picked her purse up off the floor and settled it into the crook of her arm. “We’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Get some sleep now, Wes,” Gip said, like it was possible to ever sleep right again.

My father turned to leave with them. “Dad,” I said. “What about Elizabeth? We left the door open.”

“Ah shit,” he said. “I’ll go find her.” He stepped up to my bedside and leaned in, one hand in his pocket, one on the pillow next to my head. “Sorry I wasn’t there,” he whispered. “I am.”

The sheriff came in not long after that to check on me one last time. His hat was off, his coat unzipped, his big belly poked out over his stumpy legs. When I was little, maybe five or six, I found a nest full of baby mice, hairless and pink, no bigger than gumdrops. Elizabeth was barely past kitten then but already a good mouser. She’d killed the mother and left it on the doorstep. I’d wanted to help those mice by stomping them right there, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it even though I knew they didn’t stand a chance. Instead, I tucked them under a leaf and hoped it might be enough shelter from harm. The sheriff, he looked at me the way I suppose I’d looked at those baby mice. He made a show of tucking in my covers, blinked his wide bird eyes, nodded, and walked out.



THE HOSPITAL CORRIDOR WAS DIM at night and hallway traffic limited to nurses and orderlies who came and went, sometimes loitering at the desk to talk.

My eyelids were drape heavy. That one thing my father said was stuck to me, digging in under my skin. He said maybe she did it on purpose. With each thick blink, I drifted back to Bright Lake. Shuffled in with my hospital room, lit blue from the parking lot lights, I saw a firelit cabin, my mother sipping bourbon from a jelly jar, eyelashes brushing her black veil of bangs each time she tipped the glass. Between the muffled beeping of alarms and monitors in other rooms, I heard my parents arguing, lightning and thunder. White blankets and sterile walls became the ice twisting along the serpentine lakeshore. With hushed voices of the staff, my father’s voice, his hand on my shoulder.