Winter Loon(64)

“Chains won’t help with that,” he said. “Guess we’re hoofing it.”

We picked our way down based on where the trees weren’t instead of where the road was. When the cabin came into full view, it seemed smaller, more ragged than I’d remembered. Had it shrunk or had I grown? One window was broken. Snapped pine branches lay across the roof like thatching.

I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked in. The shock of seeing it again wrung my insides.

“Well?”

“There ought to be a key around the side. Hold on,” I said. I rummaged for the key like my father had but came up empty-handed.

“Hey,” Lester yelled.

“I can’t find it.”

“It’s not locked, dumbass.”

I stood there with my hands in the shallow snow and dug a little more for a key I didn’t need. I stood up slowly and walked into the past.

Nothing with color remained. Not the red ticking-striped mattresses, not the torn calico cushion on the chair my mother had used. The couch was gone. No amber bottles were on the counter, no red-labeled cans, no hunting pictures on the wall. A shadow was all that was left of the trophy buck that had stared down at me from over the fireplace. Someone had cleared the place out.

“Homey,” Lester said, flashing the dumb grin again, slapping my back. “Glad we brought sleeping bags.” He closed the door and walked past me to the fireplace. He pulled a flashlight out of his bag and stuck his head up to check the flue. “Looks good,” he said. “Let’s get some wood.”

I nodded like I’d go with him, but I couldn’t seem to move.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just . . . Give me a minute, will you?”

“Sure, man. Sure. How about I’ll get the wood. You . . .” He patted my arm once and left me.

I could barely allow myself farther inside. Some ghost had led me there, some remnant, an echo or ripple. Ruby had grabbed my arm, Jolene had held my hand. But it was another woman’s touch I was thinking about. And just like that, the past seeped out of the logs and chinks, wormed its way out of the floorboards, and descended from the rafters. The door creaked and color flowed back in. Valerie kicked the threshold, cursing the cheap boots she wore that kept her feet neither warm nor dry. She dropped a single bag on the wood floor. Behind her, a boy shorter than I was now, thinner, stomped his feet and rubbed his bare hands together. Mattresses and wool blankets appeared on the cots. The windowpane became unbroken. There was my father, on his knees, blowing on bits of paper to get the fire started. I could see that night unfolding, this time as an outsider, watching my mother sit alone at the missing table, using what Ruby had told me to put words in her mouth and thoughts in her head.

Busted boughs and pine cones and critter sounds tapped on the roof.

“How can anyone stand being out here? Feels like there are eyes everywhere.” Her own eyes darted around the room like she was dodging people on a crowded street.

She stood up to get the bag she’d brought in, then stopped. She seemed to watch her fire-baked shadow as it bent at the knees and climbed the log walls. She stretched her arms slowly, sending long shadow fingers crawling along the ceiling and over the barely realized image of my former self as if she might scoop that boy up and sweep him into the dark rafters.

I watched her from the safety of time. I could almost see the wheels turning, her mind racing. Could she have known or feared her life was nearly over? Was she recalling that lost child? I tried to picture my mother as a teenage girl, pregnant, afraid of so many things. How had she even told my father about that first pregnancy? What strength had she mustered to tell him after all that had happened to her? When he asked her if it was his, she would have burst with a raging anger I’d seen plenty. She would have said yes in a way that left no doubt, whether she believed it to be true or not. And before he could say otherwise, she would have told him she was keeping it and did he want to be a family with them or not.

The cabin was cold, but sweat glistened on Valerie’s forehead. She cocked her head up into the rafters as if something might be dangling there, dripping on her. She touched her hair, put her hand to her face, and sniffed it. She let out a cry and jumped up, patting herself all over like a woman caught on fire.

Lester’s voice called out from the woods, coming in through the broken window. Valerie and Moss and the boy stopped what they were doing. They locked eyes with me before disintegrating into the abandoned cabin. The embers snuffed and disappeared into the stirred-up dust. Rusted cot springs were exposed again with the mattresses gone. Scat littered the floor. The cabin returned to disrepair.

Lester poked his head through the door. “Hey, I found some wood. Come give me a hand.”

I got up from my seat against the wall, brushed myself off, looked around the empty cabin. “Here I come.”

I stepped out onto the porch. My breath clouded up in front of me and I bundled my coat against the cold. The lake was iced over, though open water rippled in spots. Ice would come in early this winter and stay late, they’d said on the radio. Won’t be long now, I thought. A light came on in a house on the far shore. Was that house occupied last winter? Could I have made it there and back to my mother in time to save her? I conjured a different boy, happy and young, with his mother calmly walking past me, swinging hands held between them. They smiled like neighbors passing on the sidewalk and went about the business of crossing the ice. I watched until they made it safely to that light. Somewhere in the distance, a hawk screeched. A shiver rose in me, and I remembered a time my mother told me I had to put a coat on even though I didn’t want to, even though I thought I’d be fine without it. “You’ll catch your death of cold,” she’d said, as if our death is a thing that belongs to us. Death, out there waiting for us to slip up, to drive too fast, to swallow too many pills, smoke too many cigarettes, to pick the wrong lover, or to forget to wear a coat on a cold day.