Winter Loon(88)

“It was all bigger than me. I was a stupid, restless girl and I fell hard for him. I sure hope Annaclaire will have better sense than I did.”

I’m sure I blushed thinking all sorts of thoughts about what Aveline was capable of doing after hours on a carnival ride. “So when was this?” I asked. “I’m trying to think where we were. I did spend a summer with him, but this must have been after.”

“Summer of 1971. I can’t believe it’s been that long.”

I did some math, tried to recall the summer by calculating my own age. “I remember. They’d gotten in a fight, he and my mother,” I said. “We moved into a tiny apartment. She said we didn’t need room for him anymore. I remember because she had a broken arm and was trying to pack boxes with that cast. She hit him with it when he touched her things. So what happened when the carnival pulled out?” I asked. Did he stay here and live in this house? I wondered. Had he showered here, changed the sprinklers, repaired the fence, while my mother and I barely scraped by?

“I was saying I felt like I was leaving part of myself behind at the top of the ride? Well, I felt like I caught up with me, being with him. I left my job, my friends. I got in the truck with Moss and Elizabeth when the carnival pulled out. I believed everything he told me. I didn’t mind the carnival at night, all the twinkling lights and music, but during the day I was bored as Elizabeth, batting at them little birds that went nowhere. I worried about what I’d gotten myself into.

“I was so young and I think maybe I got in over my head. Plus, I missed my folks. I knew I hadn’t been fair to them. He begged me not to, told me he loved me. I cried and cried, but I caught a Greyhound and left.

“Got back here. No job. No Moss. My daddy was still alive. Then I found out I was pregnant. They did the best they could for me, but I felt like a real fuckup. I didn’t know what to do. I was a terrible Catholic, but there was no way I would do anything other than have the baby.”

Listening to her talk about that pregnancy, about telling her mom and dad who cried with her, who were afraid for her and her baby and what kind of life they would have, I couldn’t help but think about my mother, about Daisy, about Ruby and Gip.

“So I tracked him down. Told him over the phone I was pregnant. That’s when he told me about you and your mom, the family he already had. Broke my heart. Broke it.” She stopped talking, wiped her eyes, though no tears were there. “He said he couldn’t leave her, couldn’t leave you.”

He did, though, I thought. Over and over he left.

“Fast-forward three years. The carnival comes back to town and there’s Moss. I hadn’t heard from him, hadn’t seen him since that phone call, and he shows up. My daddy had passed. Stroke. It was just us three girls here in the house. And he shows up on the porch. Blurts out to Annaclaire that he’s her daddy. She falls for him. And I fall for him all over again. Like the idiot I am. He tells me he’s getting a divorce. He was talking about the four of us—me, Annaclaire, him, and you—like we were a family. But he tells me I have to be patient. And I was. I took him in dribs and drabs. Welcomed him here whenever he came. I thought I was doing it for Annaclaire. I don’t know who I was doing it for.

“He was here last Christmastime with presents. He told me he’d be back in the spring, back for good. I have to tell you, I’m scared now to hear your side of this.”

I thought about a Christmas tree covered in lights with packages wrapped in bright paper underneath it. Did it sit in the living room near the piano? Did Mrs. Blue play Christmas carols while Aveline and my father sang along? “I’m trying to imagine him here with you,” I said. “At Christmas. We waited for him, but he didn’t show up. Finally decided we’d get the tree without him. The two of us drug it back on our own. When we got it home, we realized we’d broken the top pretty bad. It was the stupidest-looking tree, but we decorated it anyway. My mother laid the angel down on top like she was sleeping. When my dad saw it, he burst out laughing. We all did.” I didn’t tell Aveline, but that last Christmas morning, I found my parents passed out on the living room floor of that laundromat apartment. They were naked under a thin blanket, clothes down to the underwear strewn around them, that lousy tree, half the lights burned out, still plugged in though the sun was already up.

I tried to imagine my father taking me away from my mother, the scene it would have caused. The screaming and crying. Maybe I didn’t have to imagine it at all. Maybe that was what the fight was about that night at Bright Lake. “So you think the plan was that he would take me away from her and leave her all alone?” I thought then about Daisy, the other child she’d lost.

“He told stories. He said he wanted to get you away from her.”

“Well, he sure as hell did that. Then he left me.”

She shook her head, gestured with her hands like she was trying to catch the answers swirling around her. Her voice ratcheted up a gear. “I hadn’t had a single phone call from him in months. Then in March, right before Annaclaire’s birthday, he shows up. He was a wreck. He told me about an accident on a lake.” She tried to steady her voice, her breathing. “Oh my God, I’m so mad. This is why I need you to tell me what happened. Your dad told me that you and your mom . . . that she broke through a frozen lake and you’d drowned trying to save her.”