Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  Decker said nothing.

  Then she moved the basin to the nightstand while she raised him under the shoulders with one arm, holding open the clean shirt with the other. He slipped into it and they buttoned it together in silence. She worked slowly and carefully, watching her hands do something she had only ever done for herself. At last, she told him she was going to talk to him all night, which, she added, was about eight hours longer than she’d ever had to talk to any man. “By dawn,” she finished, “I’ll probably be naming all my grade school teachers.”

  He wet his lips. “You should save your best material for last.”

  “How do you know my grade school teachers aren’t my best material?”

  Decker’s laugh was dry and lifeless, and he winced as he tried to change position. “Val, if Martin comes, the rifle’s under the bed and a box of shells is in my underwear drawer.”

  She felt sacked. “Then I guess I’ll use them.” While he gave her a three-sentence crash course on how to load, aim, and fire a rifle, she realized it had become an imperative of her life never to have to use the information. When he was spent, his hand flopping uselessly on the thin coverlet, Val crawled into bed next to him and covered them both. The cool night air was still filling the cottage. She sat up straight, hugging her knees, her head tucked into her chest.

  His hand found her right heel and squeezed it once. “Thank you.”

  She turned and looked at him, stricken that in his mind she was doing anything at all that required his thanks. She took the handkerchief from the nightstand and wet it in what was left of the water in the tin cup. Then she wiped off his face. Her hand was moving along his jaw when he spoke.

  “It must have been the vomit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He managed to open one eye and look at her, nearly smiling. “I think I must have won you over with the vomit.”

  “Vomit will do it every time,” she said, pushing back his hair with her fingers, hearing his words, must have won you over. She felt touched that it seemed to matter to him. That it was something he cared to do. Val settled back with a glance at her watch. 11:10. For the first hour she told him about her work at Fir Na Tine—the cheesy politics, the author stories. Then she told him about what it had been like being in college at Rutgers, classes harder than hell, occasional malnutrition, frequent cigarettes, and weekend booze. Then the radical boyfriend who slid in and out of her life even after college ended, looking for something to be radical about, until he wandered into Pakistan on an expired visa and that was the last anyone ever knew.

  These things she told Decker as the room got colder and he asked questions like what kind of glasses did her Yeats and Eliot professor wear and what brand did Val smoke and what was the color of the boyfriend’s hair and whether he was the first. The first. She pulled the coverlet closer and looked past the rocking chair in the far corner of Decker’s bedroom, past the walls of rough-hewn wood and silence and years—and because she was cold and weary she told him a story she had never told anyone, not even her best friend Adrian—maybe because Decker was loopy with codeine and wouldn’t remember.

  She told him how late on Election Night in her second year she and an acquaintance who looked like a gremlin and whose name may have been Corey—they had worked together on the Gore campaign—went back to his place for what he called losers’ drinks. He shared a house with a roommate, an Agriculture student she only met for the first time that night. On her third shot of tequila poured by Corey she thought he was hoping that maybe getting laid would take the edge off his Election Night grief.

  But Val, still a virgin, who had already spent a year and a half turning down his betters, was not so drunk she was about to give it all up to some transparent worm with a well-stocked bar, no matter how he voted. But she was there until morning brought sobriety, since no one was offering to take her back to the dorm, and she figured on sleeping it off by herself while she could still find a place to do it. Only by the time she made her way upstairs with the hopeful gremlin whose name really may have been Coley trailing her, a fourth tequila had sucked out her brain and ripped off her legs and she launched herself onto a bed before she passed out.

  In the morning, she discovered it was the Ag student roommate’s room, his bed, his random experience, and her clothes were heaped on the floor. At least, she thought in a way that flattened her worse than the hangover, he didn’t seem bad-looking or mean, where he stood zipping up his jeans and checking for his wallet. He smiled at her with distraction. She got dressed quickly and when she decided she was going to feel like an asshole in any event, asked him whether she was still a virgin. “Oh, were you?” he asked, and that concluded their conversation. For all time.

  She left the room looking for a place—away from there—to vomit up her own stupidity, when the gremlin named Corey or Coley roared up to her, having apparently waited for some time. He said he was never going to talk to her again, and in the confusion at the front door he added something about her fucking someone who voted for Bush. What she felt like saying was at least it wasn’t you, but she didn’t, and she left, barely upright in the glare, never even knowing the name of the Ag student. Two blocks from where it happened she thought maybe a crime had been committed, something even worse than her own powerful stupidity, but when you’ve been stupid you’ve stoked the crime yourself, and half a block later she finally threw up on someone’s tree lawn, right next to what was left of their hardy mums.

  She looked at Decker, who was watching her. So much for codeine. Suddenly restless, Val felt her eyes dart away from his face. She needed something from the kitchen—or the boat, or anywhere at all—and started to move, until his hand pressed her hip back into place. “Don’t run off.” She looked away from him. He pressed her again. “Not any part of you.”

  He told her that his first time was with Caroline Selkirk. He was sixteen and she was an experienced nineteen, on the couch in the staff lounge after camp had ended. One minute they were sweeping the floor together—he worked the broom and she held the dustpan—and the next she had her hand between his legs, and what followed was like getting swept down a wash by a flash flood. His clothes sprang off his body, which seemed capable of having a life independent of his brain. What he most remembers—and this was no reflection on the estimable Caroline—was the precise moment her father, Trey Selkirk, walked in on them, where they lay curled and spent on the couch.

  Caroline had pulled a tatty green and gold afghan over them, and he was still trying to catch his breath and figure out what the hell had just happened. The thing called sex, he was reflecting, was some kind of cross between naked rodeo and death by dismemberment. He’ll never forget: the screen door slammed and Caroline froze; Trey Selkirk passed them to get the AM/FM radio from the table, raising one eyebrow. Then, as the screen door slammed behind her father, Decker heard himself explain, croaking, that they were just sweeping, sir.

  Val laughed.

  Over the next few summers, before the campers came and again after they left, he and Caroline Selkirk marked the season with what she called their annual vernal rite. Others came, for both of them; still he loved her back then with the same kind of awe you feel when a moose comes out into the open or your paycheck holds more than you were expecting. It ended, finally, when she hooked up with Peter Hathaway, the summer Decker was twenty.

  Val watched him close his eyes.

  His was the better story. It had passion and afghans. Hers was nothing more than inebriation and randomness. His had lasting friendship. Hers had names forgotten and names never known. Suddenly, wincing, he pulled himself up straighter, and half turned to Val. “There’s a box on the kitchen table, Val,” he said, his voice still loopy, but he spoke each word with great care.

  “I’ll get it,” she told him, sliding off the bed and flicking on the little penlight. Her hearing felt acute, like it was an early warning system, waiti
ng for the first appearance of Martin Kelleher’s boat. Would she recognize the sound of his motor? No. Would Wade? Possibly. As she made her way to Decker’s kitchen, she felt surprised that her dread about Martin Kelleher didn’t weigh her down, didn’t pull her closer to the floor she’d bleed out on if he found her.

  Dread had always seemed like chain mail, something that encased you, making it harder to move a limb. Instead, all she felt was light, like everything with weight was just floating away from her, and all she was, in what could well be those hours before a terrible end, was a set of infinitely thin dragonfly wings. Was she too light to shoulder Decker’s rifle, if she had to? Was she too insubstantial to pull the trigger?

  She swung the light around the kitchen. There on the square wood table with a ’60s green metal top was a box. Val’s breath caught in her throat. It was the missing box, the box that should have been next to Caroline’s and Hope’s there in the boathouse. Why did it surprise her to find it here at Wade Decker’s cottage? Leslie had lived here too. Only…judging by what she recalled of the lack of dust in the rectangular patch left by the missing box, Decker must have taken it away pretty recently. And, if it was here on his kitchen table, rather than stored in a closet, he must have been going through it recently too.

  And now all the others—Hope’s, Caroline’s, Trey’s basket—had burned up in the fire set by Kelleher. Were the firefighters still there? Had they saved the rest of the camp? Of all the things stored in that boathouse, Leslie Decker’s metal memory box was the only thing left. Val turned the flashlight on the old battered box where the name Leslie Dungannon Selkirk had been etched a long time ago. Instead of a nail, what looked like a stick pin held the latch in place.

  Lifting it carefully, for reasons she couldn’t even describe—maybe out of some care for a dead woman’s belongings—she carried it back to the bedroom. Out on the moonlit lake, still no sound of Kelleher’s motor. The thought that he could be approaching by canoe was suddenly terrifying. No early warning. No warning at all. What if—what if he set fire to the cottage, and she and Wade were trapped? How could she get him out? She had barely been able to get him in.

  Val found Decker propped up on the pillows, as vertical as he could get himself, what with a tender collarbone. First she set down the box close enough so he could reach it, and then she settled herself next to him. “Thanks,” he said, without touching the box, so softly she could hardly hear him.

  In the dim light from the hurricane lamp, she could see how pale he was. For a minute he looked away, and then he started shaking his head, lost in whatever thoughts made it all the way through the pain or the effects of the painkiller. Still, he didn’t touch the box. Val finally asked, “Is there something you want from this box?”

  When he turned to look at her, he widened his eyes, like he wanted her to understand something, even though he couldn’t explain it. She waited. He pressed his lips together, then said, “I want you to see something.” Then he lifted his chin at her. “Go ahead and open it, Val.”

  She gently tugged the covers up higher on Decker and then opened the Army surplus box that had been his wife’s. Shining the light inside, she could see it was a jumble of odd objects. First she pulled out a handful of little wobbly dolls—Weebles, maybe? And then a flat silver Ankh cross on a heavy chain. And a spiral notebook. A purple flash drive that looked rather new, wrapped in a white piece of paper labeled MY FOOLPROOF PLAN TO SAVE OUR BELOVED CAMP. And a worn brown leather billfold containing two ten dollar bills and an Ontario temporary driver’s ID issued to a Jeremy Nolan from Toronto. And a camera that looked maybe twenty years old. And a ragged square from an afghan that had been cut and slashed, pinned with a corner ripped from a camp brochure. Val set all the objects on the bed and looked wordlessly at Decker.

  “It’s the notebook, Val. Read up to the place where she gets the camera. That’s where I left off.”

  Carefully, Val placed all the other objects back inside the metal box, the smiling painted faces of the inscrutable Weebles staring up at her. She set the box on the floor and opened the cheap drugstore notebook, flipping through the pages, taking in the alternating entries in hot pink and peacock blue ink. A childish scrawl. Half the notebook was still unused, as if the writer had lost interest, and the few entries spanned only half a dozen years. At the moment Val started to read, she remembered Decker’s words, back on the porch of a boathouse that no longer existed: I have known her alive and I have known her dead, and I don’t know which is worse.

  This, then, was Leslie Selkirk Decker. This, on the page.

  At the sound of a distant motor, Val fumbled the notebook, left it open on the coverlet, and darted to the window. “I hear it,” said Decker, with no anxiety. Val squinted into the dark. There, out in the widest part of Lightning Bay, was a set of night running lights. The sound of the motor was the kind of low thrum you could almost mistake for the wind kicking up. About two seconds away from pulling the rifle out from under the bed, Val could tell that whoever was out there at night was traveling away from the bay, away from Decker’s island. Not Martin Kelleher…

  When she picked up the notebook, her hands were cold and shaking slightly. So she read while, beside her, Wade Decker waited. At least his breathing was less ragged. And over the pages of peacock blue and hot pink entries, Val understood. She didn’t know how any of what Leslie Selkirk was had led to her murder, but at least she understood that the woman hurled through a second-story window was dangerous. Just how dangerous was the question. When she reached the line about screwing Wade Decker and thinks nobody knows, Val stopped reading and looked Decker straight in the eye. In the low light, he looked exposed. She leaned over the side of the bed and thrust her hand into the Army surplus box. In a second she was laying the slashed piece of ratty afghan next to him on the bed, her fingers holding up the pinned scrap:

  the fucking bitch

  and I do mean fucking

  and I do mean bitch

  “From your annual vernal rite with Caroline?”

  He nodded, then winced.

  “Does Caroline know what Leslie did to it?”

  “No.”

  “What are all the other things in the box, Wade?”

  “I don’t know.” Then with some spirit, he said, “But the wallet…”

  “Jeremy Nolan.”

  “A popular camper.” His hand plucked at the coverlet.

  “The cross?”

  “Marcus Cadotte. Kay’s boy. I remember seeing it when we played tetherball.”

  “The camera? The flash drive?” Two saved objects, many years apart.

  “I don’t know. I only just started going through the stuff,” he explained, with a heavy wave sideways, maybe in his mind seeing the box topple clear out of existence. Then he tried for a wry smile. “Not the sort of thing you can rush.”

  Her fingers turned over a Weeble fading with age. “How—” Her voice sounded high and faraway, and she couldn’t find a diplomatic way of asking the question. “How did you end up with her?” In that moment, she couldn’t even say the name. “I mean, after—”

  His smile was slight. “Caroline?”

  “After Caroline.”

  Decker squinted into the corners of the bedroom. “I think that was exactly the problem for Leslie. Everywhere she looked, she came after Caroline. She couldn’t run fast enough, even though she won races. She couldn’t get the Selkirk name on the front pages of enough papers, even though she managed some headlines. She couldn’t be anointed to run Trey’s precious camp, not when there was the exceptional Caroline. Everywhere she looked, there was Caroline.” Decker pushed himself higher on the pillows while Val stayed very still. He went on: “Caroline Selkirk was exactly the girl Leslie Selkirk wanted to be. And then there I was. She was beautiful, and I was stupid. She was a firebrand, and I kept right on being stupid. The day we got married, Leslie told me, ‘Caroline got
you first. But I’ve got you last.’”

  Val felt shocked. All she could do was stare at his fingers as he picked at the coverlet. “And at that moment I saw it all. I was the biggest race she could win. And all I heard from anyone who knew us both was how very lucky I was to land—they actually said ‘land’—that beautiful activist Leslie Selkirk.” Rubbing his eyes, he said behind his hands, “For a while there were loud fights, and louder sex, but nothing got to her. Finally, she drifted into affairs—I’m guessing Martin Kelleher was one of them—and I drifted into indifference. You can see,” he widened his eyes at Val, “what a good suspect I made when she was killed.”

  “Why did you stay?”

  “Because I was stupid.” His voice came fast. “Because I was ashamed. Because I kept thinking I had to be wrong. Because, if I wasn’t, if I wasn’t wrong—it started to feel like some crazy kind of sacred obligation to everyone else to keep an eye on her.”

  Val took a breath. “Someone else saw it differently.”

  “Yes,” he said finally. “Someone with less patience and, really, more at stake. That’s how I see it.”

  She nodded slowly. “Well, Wade,” she said, “the Virginia Reel seems like a long time ago.”

  He looked away. “That’s what Leslie does.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She takes every pleasurable thing and flings it so far away you can never remember how it felt.” When he tried to turn toward his nightstand, she could tell he was reaching for a box of cigars, so she climbed over him, slipped one between his lips, and lighted it. One shaking hand came up to hold it.