Leaving the Mercedes idling, I got out, returned to the garage. There it was: the child-size, spring green, motorized VW bug my parents had bought for Evan, the Christmas after he’d turned three. He’d been so excited that he’d stumbled getting in, falling against the frame. Later, when we managed to coax him out, we discovered that he’d given himself a bloody lip. No matter. Every day, for the rest of our visit—and for every visit after that—he’d practically lived in that car, my father and mother walking beside him as he drove it up and down the street, one hundred times, two hundred times. Meanwhile, Rex and I sat beside the pool, shaking our heads, repeating words like excess, overindulgence. Children around the world were starving. What had my parents spent on that damn thing?
I pulled back the sheet, peered in the window. In the passenger’s seat sat a small, stuffed zebra that Evan had named—for reasons unknown—Louise. Jeez, Louise, Rex had called her. I touched Louise’s plush, soft fur, but I did not pick her up. Instead I tugged the sheet back into place, exactly as it had been. I’d always assumed that my mother, in her systematic pragmatism, would have given the VW away: to a church, to a children’s charity, to Goodwill.
That she hadn’t, affected me more, comforted me more, than anything she’d ever said.
The language we speak shapes the world we see. In college, fulfilling the same humanities requirement that had sentenced me, earlier, to a semester with the Greeks, I’d rediscovered a quotation I’d first learned as a senior at Harbor High. “It has been documented by linguists,” Mr. Grumbach told us—had, indeed, told generations of honors students—“that the Eskimo, in his native tongue, has a thousand names for snow.”
Mr. Grumbach paused for us to take that in as we doodled, bored, in our notebooks. Outside our window, it was overcast, cloudy. Gray. Foggy. Thick as pea soup. Later it would sleet, an icy, stinging rain that would cover the roads and trees, the same rain that seemed to be falling in Madison when, several years later, I learned that Mr. Grumbach’s thousand words had been something of an exaggeration. “Dozens of words,” my professor explained. She’d lived among the Inuit in the 1950s; the language of her particular hosts was spoken, she said, not written. Still, she wrote the words as best she could, phonetically, on the board. One of them meant something like hard-crust-top-wet-below. Seeing it written down that way, I could hear how it had squeaked beneath my short, pink boots on the day that Toby, then seventeen, had walked me out to the snow fence at the edge of our long driveway. I was seven years old, my breath sweet with hot chocolate. We spent the afternoon tunneling into the five-foot drifts like moles. By the end of the day, we’d hollowed out a series of rooms, connected by a single, narrow tunnel, through which Toby chased me, back and forth, growling like a bear. When we crawled back out, it was already dark. The moon was out. It was snowing again, small, precise flakes that clung to the sleeves of our coats without melting as we trudged back up the driveway toward the warmth and light of the house.
Emerging from a Holiday Express in Ohio, my ankle aching from the unaccustomed cold, I stared out at the flat, frozen fields and remembered, again, the different kinds of snow: dry, wet, packable, powdery, drifting, blowing, biting. The layering of clothing. The plastic bags I slipped over Evan’s socks to ease his foot into its boot and, later, to keep his foot dry when the seams soaked through. The icicles hanging down from the roof. Stalactites—or was it stalagmites? Teeth! Evan shouted, pointing at the ragged line above our porch, and Rex lifted him up, helped him snap one off to suck. Walking along the lakefront, looking at the crystalline formations of ice. Driving around after dark to see the Christmas lights, inflatable Santas and snowmen, stars perched high upon silo tops. Reindeer constructed from bales of hay, glo-stick horns, white cloth tails. In the morning, wild turkeys like blackened stumps, scattered in clumps at the edge of the road. Afternoons, they waited for us to appear with leftover toast scraps, vegetable trimmings, handfuls of birdseed meant for the feeder.
“We could shoot them,” Evan said one day, and I’d turned to him, astonished.
“What?”
“Shoot them,” he’d explained, patiently. “With a gun.”
He was five at the time, and I riffled through a mental Rolodex of friends, acquaintances, influences. “Who has been talking about shooting things?” I said, and he said, in his clear, boyish soprano, “Mom. You have to shoot things to eat them.”
He was staring at me. Challenging me. We kept no guns in the house, not even toys. I said, “I guess I just prefer that other people shoot them for me, that’s all.”
He smiled then, eager, relieved. “I’ll shoot them for you,” he said.
The highway sliding beneath me. The land lying down, scrolling past. I’d come nearly two thousand miles, alone. Passage-making. Single-handing. Taking advantage of the good-weather window: ice blue skies, starry nights. Field after field, wave after wave, dividing itself, repeating itself. Hickory trees, chestnut trees, rough-coated birch with their ice-laden boughs. On a service road, a gorilla-size snowman smiling toward the horizon. At a gas station, a dreamy-eyed child, chewing on one mittened thumb. The mittens I’d crocheted for Evan, connected by a chain-stitched string. Sissy mittens, Rex had called them. Sorry, hon, but it’s true.
“Are they really sissy mittens?” I’d asked Evan, and he’d said, kindly, generously, “It’s okay, Mom. You didn’t know.”
Homemade decorations at a truck stop diner: egg crate sections and yogurt tops, pipe cleaners, candy canes, glue. Stringing long chains of cranberries, popcorn, looping tinsel over the tree. Painting wooden clothespins into red-vested soldiers, topped by a tuft of cotton-wool hair. Mom, look at this one. Mom, look at me. The language we speak shapes the world we see. Words like cut geodes, crystals of memory, spark and flame. How many names, the professor had asked, do we have for cold weather? How many names for sunshine? For automobiles? For a redwood tree? How many names for abstractions such as sorrow, fortitude, hope? What does this tell us as a culture, as a people, about what we value most?
Six hours to Milwaukee. Four hours. Three. It is early afternoon. It’s the day before Christmas Eve. And yet, when I finally reach the downtown, I find myself passing exit after exit, accelerating north to Fox Harbor. Flying along I-43 until city gives way to suburb, until suburb gives way to farmland, the pale glimmer of the lake to the east like a clear, benevolent eye. I am no longer driving so much as being driven, every muscle in my body leaning, longing. Old Dixie exit to County C. West on C toward the Point Road. In the distance, the husk of the one-room schoolhouse, the blinking yellow light above the intersection. But as I pull up onto the shoulder, what I find is absolutely unlike what I’d dreamed. Pain shoots through my ankle as I step down into the gulley, slipping and sliding in my thin boat shoes, closing the last fifty feet between my body and the spot where, I’m beginning to understand, my life will always be tethered, connected, no matter how long the leash I might choose, no matter how far I might go. Strange to think that this should be a comfort. Strange to think that Evan’s body sleeps behind St. Clare’s, while it’s here that I sense his presence, feel him to this day.
He was with us. He was real.
I kneel on the frozen ground.
His cross stands proud and straight as a heron. Clusters of plastic flowers faded, yes, but neatly arranged. Of course, the parents of Evan’s friends would have tended it, passing it each day, pulling over for a minute or two after dropping the kids off at school. Of course, what I’d seen that night, on the path, was a manifestation of my own guilt: for surviving the accident, yes, but even more so, for surviving my own grief. Even now, at the back of my mind, a dark voice still whispers it is wrong of me to laugh, to love, to step, even briefly, from shadow into light. What kind of mother outlives her child? What kind of mother wouldn’t die, too? Sometimes, I still wonder if things might have been easier, had I found myself marked permanently, been physically changed in some way. So that each time I looked in a mirror, each time I reached
for the crutch or the cane, there’d be an alignment between what I felt within, the way I appeared without.
A car approaches on the Point Road, slows, vanishes into the thickening gloom, and I stand up again, my ankle grown stiff, batting frost from the hem of my mother’s coat. I am ready, now, to fall into her arms, to let my father treat me to a good dinner and wine. I am ready for a night at the Pfister Hotel, the oversize chairs, the plush feather beds. I am ready to permit myself, at last, the possibility of comfort and care. My child is dead. My husband is adrift. My home is occupied by a stranger, whose permission I must ask in order to retrieve my clothes. My brother is getting married to a woman who, frankly, I knew best as the sunny-eyed child she was that long-ago summer, chattering in Dan Kolb’s lap as Cindy Ann and I washed and waxed and scrubbed, trying to remove a stain that had already marked us, claimed us, would never quite come clean.
“You should have told me about Dan Kolb,” Toby had said at the Cup and Cruller that morning, and he’d said it again, a few days later, aboard the Michigan Jack. It was the end of April, and the smelt were still running. The decks were covered in fish slime, and I was hosing them down, readying the Jack for its next charter trip in an hour.
“She made me promise,” I said, spraying the mess toward the scuppers.
“I could have done something to help.”
“What, shoot him?”
“Not funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.” I had to raise my voice to be heard above the water.
“Did you talk to her about it? After he died, I mean?”
I shrugged. In fact, I had tried, and more than once, but each time, Cindy Ann had overpowered me with small talk. One night, a month or so after Dan Kolb’s funeral, I’d gone down to the DC at closing time, ordered fries and a Coke. Cindy Ann was working, of course. She was always working.
“What are you doing afterward?” I said, nibbling on a fry.
“Going home, I guess.”
“Want to walk down to the lake?”
She laughed. “Meggie. It’s fucking freezing out.”
“So?”
“Besides, I have to get home. But thanks.”
“How’s your mom?” I asked.
“She’s fine. How’s yours? Your mom and dad, I mean.”
“Fine,” I said. “Listen—”
“How’s Toby?” she said, landing hard on his name. To my surprise, I saw her neck flush dark against the mustard-colored uniform.
The deck of the Jack was glistening, clean. I shut off the hose, drained it, coiled it up for next time.
“I asked her out once, you know,” Toby said. “Right after the two of you stopped hanging out.”
“You asked Cindy Ann out?” I said. “Like, on a date?”
He was counting life jackets, stuffing them into a large, mesh bag. “Why not?” He cinched the bag, stuffed it into the gap above the cabin rafters. “That night, on your birthday, where she drove you home? We had a great conversation. Just talking, you know, in her mother’s car.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Politics,” he said, dumping ice from the coolers. “Travel. Places we wanted to go.”
“So what did she say?” I said. “I mean, when you asked her.”
Toby stepped up onto the dock. “She said that I disgusted her, if you really want to know.” He laughed, but it was an angry sound, resonant with hurt. “She actually called me a pervert.”
“She probably thought I’d told you,” I said. “She probably thought that was why you’d asked.”
Toby froze. “That’s sick,” he said.
I stepped up beside him without saying anything. At that moment, we both understood that it was true. And I thought, Everything she does, everywhere she goes, this is how she will look at the world. This is the lens through which she’ll see. This is what she’ll struggle against, always.
How many words do we have for regret? How many words for failure? How many words for the dark gap between what might have been, what almost was, what happened in the end?
“What did you say to me?” Cindy Ann said.
Carlton unlocked the van. “I asked if you were feeling okay. You’ve been looking a bit under the weather.”
“I’m fine.”
Cindy Ann stepped up onto the running board, climbed all the way to the back. The others piled in after her, kicking the salt from their boots, breath forming curlicues in the cold, December air. A few of the women looked at her, cutting their eyes toward the driver’s seat, but Cindy Ann just shrugged, stared out the window at the flat, gray shape of the public works building. For almost eleven months, she’d been sitting up front with Carlton, the two of them talking quietly while, behind them, the others bantered, talked, teased. Most recently, Joey Schlegel was their target: a handsome high school senior, the only male on Community since September. Joey had stolen a car and left it parked on the railroad tracks, though, of course, he claimed it was one of his friends, it wasn’t his fault, he’d been totally screwed. By now, Cindy Ann knew the whole story, the way she knew the stories of all the others, what they’d done. Falsifying documents, passing bad checks, vandalism, child neglect, animal abuse. People came and people went, some for a few months, some for just a weekend. She was the only one who’d been there almost a year, the only one among them who had actually killed somebody. “Road Rage,” they called her, behind her back, then not behind her back, which was how she’d ended up riding in front with Carlton in the first place.
But she couldn’t risk Carlton smelling her breath, not now, not with only a few more weeks of this bullshit to go. Besides, what had seemed like kindness—the way he’d say hello to her, after Sunday mass; the way he always remembered to ask about Mum; the way that, lately, he’d held the van when she found herself running a few minutes late—was probably just the usual stuff. He’d heard things about her, figured he could fuck her. He’d turn out to be a pervert, just like the rest. Why else hadn’t he married again, his wife dead ten years, his own kids already off on their own? Cindy Ann lowered herself in the seat. Pervert, she thought to herself. Skank. Reprobate. The same names that the girls called each other at home, in seriousness or jest, she never really knew.
What she did know was that she could not have imagined calling her own sisters by those names. No, she’d always looked out for Becca and Mallory, gotten them fed and dressed for school, bought them books and clothing out of the money she earned at DC. Even now, her own life going to shit, she gave Becca cash whenever she asked—no questions, no IOUs. Even now, she was trying her best to protect Mallory from Toby Hauskindler, calling her, e-mailing her, even showing up at Mallory’s apartment over the mill, the way she’d done last night.
“Oh, Cee, don’t do this, please,” Mallory said, before Cindy Ann had had a chance to say a thing. Sitting at the back of the public works van, Cindy Ann closed her eyes. She could see Mallory as she’d stood in the doorway, shivering in a pair of worn slippers, a flannel shirt, paint-spattered jeans. In the background, she heard a man’s sleepy voice—it had been a little later than she’d realized—and then Mallory had turned her head, spoken into the sudden, angry glare of the kitchen light:
She isn’t like this, not really.
“Pervert!” Cindy Ann had shouted, enraged, into the center of that brightness. After the wedding, as soon as the bank foreclosed, she and the girls would be moving into Toby’s old apartment across the landing, Toby’s suggestion, he was even paying the rent to hold the place for them. Trying to get his hands on the girls, did he think Cindy Ann couldn’t see it? Why else would he be doing this? Besides, wasn’t it his fault she’d let down her guard, let the Van Dorns’ detective catch her drinking in the first place? Giving them shelter was the least he could do for them, under the circumstances. She wasn’t beholden to him, or to anyone. She didn’t owe him a goddamn thing.
“You’ll regret this!” Cindy Ann had screamed, and Mallory had said, “Just let us take you ho
me, okay?”
They were all perverts, Cindy Ann thought as the van pulled off the highway onto the shoulder, bouncing hard over the frost heaves until it shuddered to a stop at the edge of the fields. Toby, Carlton, the repo men who seemed to be arriving every day, even Joey Schlegel with his baby-faced grin, his tangle of curls which Pamela Ulrich (shoplifting, petty theft) had just finished braiding into two, neat pigtails.
“You a virgin, still, Joey?” Pamela asked as Carlton opened the sliding door, and Joey said, without missing a beat, “You bet I am, Pammie. Just like you.”
Shouts of laughter as they stepped down into the cold, lemon-colored light tinting the gloom. Cindy Ann took an orange work vest from the pile, a trash sack, a grab-stick, turning away from Carlton before he had a chance to speak. The men passing in their cars were perverts, too, slowing to ogle them as they spread into rows, the hoarfrost making the grass feel like cardboard beneath their feet. A feeling that was not quite hunger burned just below Cindy Ann’s breastbone, and she thought about a story she’d heard on the news, some woman posing as a hitchhiker, riding around the country. Whenever a pervert stopped to pick her up, she stabbed him, robbed him, left him by the road. Reaching the stick toward a plastic bag, Cindy Ann thought about that woman, now on death row, and wondered if she ever regretted what she’d done. Maybe, after the girls were grown, Cindy Ann would do the same thing. Or maybe she’d just drive out to her mother’s farm one afternoon, take a walk back to the old veal pens, shoot herself just like Dan had done.
A plastic lid. A paper cup. A half-frozen can of beer. Crows rose from a hawthorn bush, a black, beating cloud of wings, and Pamela jumped and said, “God damn, them fuckers give me the creeps.” Across the intersection stood the husk of the one-room schoolhouse, crumbling walls of yellow brick, and Cindy Ann glanced at it, noted it, and then stopped, realizing where they were. Just over a year had passed since the accident. Alone, she always drove the other way into town; the few times she’d passed by with Carlton and the crew, she’d kept her gaze fixed on her hands. Life goes on, Mum always said. She still said it now when Cindy Ann stopped by to wash her hair, to sit with her in the Garden Room, to have lunch in the cafeteria. Or else she’d say, The love of my life. These days, there was little else she said. She had no idea that Cindy Ann hadn’t paid her resident fees in months, that Cindy Ann had lapsed on her mortgage payments, that creditors were calling Cindy Ann around the clock. She hadn’t a clue that, by the end of the year, they’d be moving her over to the county facility, while Cindy Ann and the girls would be moving to the mill. There was no money left for Mrs. Railsbeck. No money for the girls’ music lessons. No money for Lauren’s braces, for Amy’s college tuition. No money, even, for the gym membership, though, at least, that was paid through the year.
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