Winter Loon(89)

She was crying now, her whole body shaking. “He told me you were dead. I thought you and your mom were dead. The way he was acting—withdrawn, angry, even—I thought it was grief. He said he felt awful he wasn’t there to save you. All our plans got put on hold. And now here you are and the whole thing stinks to high heaven. He made it up, didn’t he? Your mom, where is she? You said you’ve been living with your grandparents. Where is she?”

So that was the story he’d crafted. He’d tried it out on Topeka first. It was easier to have a dead son than a sad son with a long memory. “That part’s true. He wasn’t there. The lake. My mom did break through. She drowned, not me. I never went in.” My hand rested on the pouch under my shirt, and I wished Jolene was with me. Was it a double life or half a life? Twice as much or never quite enough? “Promises, promises,” my mother had said, more than once. His word was worth nothing. Not to me, not to my mother, not to Aveline.

I told her about Bright Lake, them fighting, him storming off. I even told her about my mother trying to pull me in with her and how I’d selfishly gotten away. Each word sobbed out of me, lumpy and thick. “Did you know they had another baby? Her name was Daisy.” Aveline’s brow furrowed and she shook her head. Sickness formed behind my teeth, squeezed at my throat. “She died in her crib before I was ever born.” I falsified the story about my grandparents, allowing Gip’s death to be an accident and Ruby’s to be overwhelming grief. I couldn’t tell Aveline about what Gip had done to my mother or my growing fear of what my father might have done if he’d discovered Daisy was not his after all.

Aveline put her hand to her mouth as the body count rose.

“I don’t know what losing Daisy meant to her. But I know my mom loved me something fierce. I don’t think she could lose another child. I think she’d just as soon I was dead right there with her.”





CHAPTER 26

THREE DAYS I ate breakfast and lunch at the Cozy Cup, and dinner with my father’s other family. Three nights I stayed in the rustic motel. I called Jolene collect from the phone in the lobby. Troy accepted the call but told me I had to make it fast, five minutes tops, or I’d run up their phone bill. Jolene got on the line and I pictured her in the kitchen, the long phone cord kinked over her elbow, the receiver tilted so Troy could hear, then relay to Mona about my father’s whereabouts and this woman Aveline, about the girl Annaclaire, who I was falling for madly, and Mrs. Blue, who was by turns fascinated by me and angry at me when she mistook me for my missing father. When Troy got off the phone, I told Jolene the quieter things about how much I missed her, that I would see her soon. I had a hard time finding the right words when she wasn’t in front of me. By the time I got comfortable talking, it was time to hang up. It gutted me to realize how much distance I’d put in between us. Worse, I scared myself when I realized it would probably be less painful after a while not to call at all. My father had done that to us and to Aveline. He was never much for a long goodbye.

The next day, the day before Thanksgiving, the frizzy redhead drew me a map and I drove into the canyon to the trailhead near Burden Creek and its piddly falls. Snow was due to fall that night, and I wondered how deep it might get in the cold shadows of the mountain. I climbed a rocky outcrop on all fours, more animal than human, until I came to a spot where I could stand upright and see the town in the valley below. I circled a spot on the postcard I’d taken from my pocket. I’m here, I wrote, waiting for my dad to show up. I miss you like crazy. Tell Troy I’m keeping my hands out of my pockets.

Aveline asked if I would meet Annaclaire’s bus since it would be early for the holiday and Mrs. Blue would still be at the senior center. I let myself in to the empty house. A woman’s house. Even Elizabeth seemed to have an extra, more feminine sashay as she moved from one sun spot to the next. I wandered through, thinking about the first day I was alone at Gip and Ruby’s and how different this house was from that one. There were no signs of men anywhere. Not in the flowery living room or kitchen, not in the bathroom with its lace-lined towels. And not in the back bedrooms. The doors were open and I looked from one to the next. I stood in the doorway of Mrs. Blue’s bedroom. The bedspread was threadbare with faded blue flowers and yellow stripes that probably shimmered when the cover was new. There was a wooden dresser with bottles on top and a mirror speckled black where the glass had failed. The room smelled like Mrs. Blue, the dusty fragrance like dried roses that made me think of time passing. I turned away from the thought and found myself looking into Aveline’s bedroom.

The bedspread was the sherbet color of sunset or a salmon rising, and the bed was covered with different shapes and sizes of white pillows. There was a white dresser and matching side table. On the wall in the corner was a bulletin board with a collage of photos. I listened for sounds from the front door—the twist of a knob or the slamming of a car door—then stepped in for a closer look.

One picture overlapped the next, each showing happy people, smiling, their arms around each other. Pictures of Aveline as a girl, dressed in Sunday clothes in one, running through sprinklers in a swimsuit in the next. Aveline and her dead brother sandwiched between her mom and dad. Then lots of Annaclaire. There was one picture of Aveline and my father. He was standing behind her with his arms wrapped around her waist. She was leaning back against him, her head on his chest, her weight back against him. There were no other boys or men. Just my father. Six years and no other man had come into her life for long enough that she would add him to her pin board.