Winter Loon(96)

The shallow creek slalomed over rocks, raced us down the foothill until the gravel road turned to pavement and it disappeared into a culvert. My father was quiet.

“What did you and Mom fight about? That night at the lake. She wanted another baby, didn’t she? She wanted to. You wouldn’t.” What I remembered wasn’t that gentle, but I thought I had the gist of it.

His tongue rolled into his cheek and he let out a scornful snort. “You have a lot to learn about where babies come from. Any woman wants a baby can have a baby. Your mom didn’t want any more kids. What she wanted was to keep me where I was. You may as well know. I told her I was leaving her. I told her about Aveline and your sister. That set her off. She said you only would ever have the one sister.” He said it like he couldn’t bring himself to say her name.

“What really happened to Daisy?”

He pushed in the lighter, took a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, shook it until one slid free. He dropped the pack on the seat between us and lit the one in his mouth.

“I came in. Valerie was on the floor.” He shook his head violently, to scatter the recollection, it seemed. “She wouldn’t let her go. Hours she sat like that. Holding her against her pregnant belly.” He turned to me. “Against you.” He shrugged. “Crib death, they called it. Nothing we could do.”

“What about a funeral? I don’t even know where she’s buried.”

“Oh, she was dead set against a funeral. It was only her and me. Guy at the mortuary there in Wisconsin talked her into cremation. I was against that. I thought the baby deserved a proper burial. Should have stuck to my guns on that one.” He sucked on the cigarette until the embers flared out, then rolled down the window, dropped the butt into the cold. “Your mom wanted to keep Daisy with her.”

I had no memory of an urn, anything sacred my mother kept close. “So where is it, the container or whatever?”

Dug-up pain spread across his face. His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. He kept his eyes on the road. “I took some boxes to the dump. Kept the wrong one. When I realized what I’d done, I went back for it.” His hands were on his head, fingers in his hair, that familiar frustration of his. The truck pulled left into the oncoming lane. A car swerved and honked.

“Dad.”

Hands back on the wheel, he was still talking. “Time I got there—I picked through pounds of rubbish—everything inside was out. She’d packed it with the baby’s clothes. Little pink dresses, lambs and flowers on them, little things I’d seen her in, all crapped up and filthy. The top was off it. Thing was crushed.” His voice cracked. “Fucking tomatoes smiling at me. I tried to scoop her up . . .”

He went quiet again and I did, too. I suppose we were both picturing him hands and knees on a garbage heap, trying to rescue the spilled remains of a dead child.

“She said I did it on purpose. Why would I do it on purpose? Maybe those pictures are why. Maybe she knew something I didn’t. That’s when she divorced me. She took me back but she never let me forget.”

“Oh fuck,” I said. “The tomato box.” How wrecked and broken we were, all of us, a clattering boneyard of broken souls.



HE PULLED INTO THE TREE lot and bought the first one he saw—a blue spruce as big as a whale. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t hear it. Annaclaire flew out of the house when she saw us with the tree. My father manufactured a big smile for her. “Surprise!” he said.

“It’s perfect,” she squealed.

Mrs. Blue was less impressed. “It will never fit in this house. It’s too big,” she declared, pointing her finger at the ceiling like a politician.

“Help me get this in,” he said to me. “I want it up when Aveline gets home.”

I was still reeling from his confession. “Don’t you think we ought to wait for her?”

His face was empty, drained. “Do as I say.”

We righted it together, Mrs. Blue as our guide. He sent Annaclaire up the pull-down attic ladder to gather and lower the flame-shaped string lights and decorations. We had just finished winding the lights around the tree when Aveline came home from work. Annaclaire ran from the house, told her mother we had a surprise, insisted she close her eyes before coming in.

“Okay,” Annaclaire said. “Open.”

Aveline’s face dropped. “I thought we were going tonight. You all went without me.”

“Not all of us,” Mrs. Blue said. “Those two. I told them it was too big. But no one listens to me.”

“It’s okay, Mama. No one listens to me either.”

I wanted to defend myself but my father cut me off. “Thought we could use some father-son time. We cut it down ourselves.”

Aveline took her coat off and hung it on a hanger in the closet. “May I talk to you in the kitchen, please?”

“Looks like I’m in trouble,” he said, winking at me. That grin. Like when I was a kid. My mother would be angry and he would tease her to make her even more mad. Always with the same smirking look on his face like “Watch this.”

Mrs. Blue knitted while Annaclaire and I quietly replaced the burned-out bulbs, an ear to the argument in the other room. We heard Aveline’s voice, hushed but clear. It was not his decision to make. Yes, they were his children. No, it was not his house, too. No, that’s not how it was going to work. No, he could not. No. No.