by Gian Sardar
In her hand she holds a copy of the report on Claire from the night she disappeared, a physical reminder of purpose, and now and then she glances at it: two shots heard by the neighbor, one bullet found, valuables missing. But what Abby keeps seeing is the “neighbor’s” statement. Her grandmother. The officer remarked she was “tearful and distraught,” and that she broke down as she described what looked like a man in the driveway dragging something. It was too dark to tell much, and the neighbor became “terrified and hid in the kitchen.” Her best friend, taken.
“I never gave her credit,” Abby says. “I remember my mom telling me once that when she was little she had strep throat, and my grandmother cried like she was dying. For days. We always thought she was just dramatic, wanting attention. Bit of a train wreck. But I never bothered to wonder why. I don’t even think my mom knew, that she witnessed it.”
“I’m sure. Why scare the kids? The officer noted her husband and children were out of town.”
“She was alone, seeing that. I can’t imagine.”
The road dips into a town, a white church on cinder blocks, a man on its steps, leaned back and staring at the sky. When her phone rings she silences it without looking, but he tells her she should answer. “We’ll be in the car for a while, go ahead.”
Hannah. Abby slides it to answer and says her friend’s name aloud, just so Aidan knows.
“Abby,” Hannah says in return. “What are you doing?”
“I’m with my friend Aidan. We’re heading up north to Morrow Lake. The house I didn’t get. Eleanor Hadley.”
There’s a momentary silence and Abby can almost see Hannah calculating time differences and intentions. She rests her head on the glass of the window, watching clumps of prairie grass streak by. One tree by the road is bare of all its leaves, white arms that appear chilled in the late afternoon. As they pass it, she turns to watch it go.
“Right,” Hannah at last says. “I know that involves spending the night. But I also know he’s right next to you. So this will be a conversation for tomorrow. A long conversation. For now, I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“Pregnant. As in with child. As in about to become beastly.”
“Holy crap. Do you know if it’s a girl or a boy?” Beside her, she sees Aidan smile. Robert, she thinks. She should be having this moment—learning that her best friend is pregnant—with Robert. Robert, who knows Hannah, who would feel the magnitude of the moment. For the first time she feels as though she’s split from her life, is traveling along a rupture that snakes into a new direction. Tonight, she thinks, she’ll call and tell him the news.
“Right now it’s a bit tadpole-ish—so no. And I don’t want to know. Which means Ben doesn’t get to know. So you’ll have to start thinking of names. For both.”
“I’m going to be an aunt.”
“You’re going to be free babysitting, so brace yourself. And I’m emailing you the ultrasound photo. It’s a thing pregnant women do.”
“You have a sister?” Aidan asks when she hangs up.
As Abby checks her mail, she explains who Hannah is, how she keeps moving forward, marriage, house, and now baby, while Abby stands still. “Here it is.” She waits for it to load and then shows him her phone, a fuzzy black-and-white picture with numbers on the side. “I see nothing.”
Aidan pulls to the side of the road and puts the car in park. For a moment Abby thinks he’s stopped to look at the picture. “Look up,” he says. “Just look up.”
Above them is a sunset that seems to rage, ripping through clouds, blazing so bright at the horizon it seems impossible the world still exists. Below, tips of trees are black, lost to the show, content to let the sky steal the glory. Then Abby sees, up ahead, a little green sign with white letters: MORROW LAKE.
“It’s there,” she says.
“I know. You ready? Or you want to do this in the morning?”
The turnoff is a dirt road, the forest thick on either side. If they get lost it will only be a matter of time till the woods lose to blackness, the road bursting only in increments from their headlights. But that sunset. “I want to see the water in this light,” she says, and so Aidan puts the car in drive, and they pull onto the dirt road.
—
Water glows from between trees, little slices of brilliance. The houses are actually cabins, small and simple, each one painted a different masculine and bold color, combining to conjure a dark Scottish plaid or a Ralph Lauren paint collection: hunter green, navy blue, rich brick red. Some cabins are more neglected than others, though right away Abby can tell that most are lived in; thriving plants in pots by a door, a towel over a wooden railing, the recent trail of a canoe in the dirt, the canoe itself leaning against a birch tree.
When they find Eleanor’s place, they park along the narrow drive, careful not to shine their headlights through her window. First they want to see the lake, and so they cut through the woods, steps shattering sticks and crushing leaves. The air is thick and humid, and when Abby pauses to look up, she sees red pines that seem to stretch forever, aged arms lifted to a darkening sky.
And then there it is, the water burnished gold and red, fading to the darkest purple at the edge, unbroken but for scatterings of shadowed black reeds. The only sound is the rhythmic kiss of waves against the shore. She wants to say something, a comment on the beauty of the lake, but knows her voice would splinter the moment, something Aidan must feel too as he quietly places his hand on the small of her back.
The lights are on in the house, and Aidan has already seen a silhouette in one room, moving to the next. A television’s blaring, a comedy, canned laughter through open windows. He looks to Abby before knocking, and then they wait.
The woman who answers the door is in her midforties with wide-set blue eyes. She’s still laughing at something and doesn’t bother to tuck away her smile when she sees them—a woman clearly unaccustomed to danger. “Car died?” she asks, her voice higher than Aidan had expected. “Heard you pull up a while ago.”
“We’re looking for Eleanor Hadley,” he says, and too late hears, as she must, that the request sounded like a cop. Her smile is gone.
“Why?”
Abby steps in. “I’m Abby Walters. My grandmother used to own this cabin, way back when, and sold it to Eleanor. We just wanted to ask her about my grandmother, and a friend of theirs, Claire Ballantine?”
The woman nods, immediately softened. “Sure. I know Eleanor.”
“Is she here?”
“No, honey, we rent from her. She’s in a home.”
“Do you know where?” Aidan asks.
“A few hours from here. We send her her mail when it comes in. She’s not been the best about updating forms and such.”
A few hours. The trip will end without finding her, without answers. Abby’s disappointment is a marked shift in energy, he can feel it next to him, an absence that makes him aware of the power of her happiness. The woman must sense this as well, as she glances over her shoulder, then swings wide the door. “Come in. I’ll get the address. So your car’s fine, then?”
Back on the road, the woods are pitch-black on either side and they’ve been driving for a while before Abby realizes she’s not afraid. This darkness—a world of shadows and dirt roads and blind curves, some trees dead and skeletal in the night—is normally a prescription for fear, and yet all she’s been thinking about is the woman who answered the door. “That never would’ve happened in L.A.,” she says. “No one would answer the door like that.”
“Maybe she saw us outside. Knew we were okay.”
“Or maybe her husband was hiding in the other room with a shotgun.”
“I’m sorry Eleanor wasn’t there.”
She nods as they pass an area cleared of trees, teeming with ferns like black spines. “I took it for granted she would be.”
“We
can try again. She’s actually closer to Minneapolis.”
“All this way, and on your day off.”
“Where I’m from, you drive just to drive. This has been nice.”
Aidan’s phone rings through the speakers, the name Harris on the car’s readout. Almost hesitantly, he hits Answer.
“Nothing bad, don’t worry. This speakerphone?”
“Yes, it is,” Aidan says.
“Right, I won’t say anything embarrassing. Well, I will if I can think of something. Give me a sec.”
In a beat Abby understands this means Harris knows they’re together, which means Aidan’s spoken of her. As a friend? As more?
Harris, apparently unable to think of anything embarrassing, continues. “Just wanted to let you know the second victim in Marshall, she remembered smoke. So smoking is something to look at—former smokers, too, because he could’ve quit. Lila McCale here doesn’t recall smoke, but she’s a smoker herself. Wouldn’t have noticed. I got through to a couple neighbors who didn’t find any butts, but there are a couple with good vantage points I didn’t reach.”
Neighbors. Cigarette butts. Now Abby turns to Aidan, who stares straight ahead.
“Good,” Aidan says. “All quiet then?”
“Quiet. Sure. Tomorrow’s my day off, that’s all I keep telling myself. Bye, Abby.”
Aidan hits End. Then looks to her. “I didn’t want to worry you. That’s why I didn’t say anything—I was just checking. You heard him, though, nothing’s been found in neighboring properties. And I asked, Brittany’s sister is smoking again. I’m sure that was it. This is just me being paranoid because it’s you.”
A smile, no hiding it. The comment pushes back her nerves.
After a while, a figure looms from the dark, a Paul Bunyan statue. Hugely tall, wide straight shoulders. Lights illuminate him, tilting his shadow toward the trees, making it appear as if he’s just emerged from the thicket. “I don’t get the fascination,” Abby says. “And I’ve never understood why his ox is blue.”
“You’ve been away from Minnesota too long. We’re getting close. I think Paul’s the welcoming committee.”
And sure enough, less than a mile away is the motel, small and basic; two stories, a long balcony that spans the width, green doors with black numbers, and a pool with dark clusters of what she hopes are leaves. A small diner is attached to the far end, with shiny orange booths and a waitress who leans back against the counter, eyes on a TV in the corner of the room.
The woman who checks them in assigns them rooms next to each other and tells them about pay-per-view and the breakfast in the lobby. But now all Abby can think of are the dreams, surely to be invigorated by the setting. “Can I get some coffee? Like five servings’ worth?” She glances at Aidan. “Sleep will not be my friend tonight.”
Casually the woman’s eyes graze their ring fingers. One corner of her mouth lifts, as if she’s seen everything and already knows how the night will go. “Eight, nine,” she says as she hands over the room keys, her voice lifting at the end, as if what she’s said is just the beginning.
24
Then
ONLY ONCE has Eva been to Minneapolis, when she was ten years old. Her mother was selling the silverware she kept hidden in the basement, a wedding gift from a cousin who’d done well. Won’t get anything for it in Luven, Margaret had said, piling them onto the bus with a dark burlap bag filled with a few pillows—as a disguise—and the mahogany chest of silver. People here use utensils. Not silverware.
On the bus to Minneapolis Eva tries not to think about her mother, but over and over again sees her walking out the door into the bright morning. It’s so he leaves you alone. And he has. For almost ten years.
Now she remembers when they’d arrived in the city, all those years ago, Margaret had looked toward the tallest of all the buildings, a tower that pierced the sky, the very top with the name Foshay spelled in soaring, serious letters. “They had a gala not too long ago,” she said. “When the building was done being built. Celebrities, fireworks. Mr. Foshay went all out. Then six weeks later was the crash and he lost it all, even his tower. He got indicted for mail fraud and received fifteen years in Leavenworth.” She’d shaken her head. “Imagine having a building like that with your name on it and not being able to see it.”
Eva wonders now how her mother had known this. She never saw her read society columns, has really never seen her read anything except a few books now and then. And why did it take her that long to sell the silverware? They’d needed the money from the day her father died, and before even that, Eva would venture to guess. Had she wanted a different life? Eva can’t think about that. She can’t think about her mother at all, not with her heart already so restless with loss.
The Northland Greyhound Bus Depot is a corner building with not one corner to be found. Rather, it’s curved, and the rounded entrance sits diagonal to the intersection with a long awning that spans the length like the brim of a hat. Clusters of people stand alongside the building, eyes on watches or papers or shoes. When Eva steps onto the sidewalk, the sun’s lower, the light becoming hesitant. Immediately she’s hit with excitement—this is Minneapolis, William’s city—but also with a pace-slowing insecurity. This is not her world. Her life is Rochester, a joke in the face of this, and Luven, not even worth the breath it would take to be said by any of these people, not that these people even know it exists. That corner of the state would be blank in their minds, just a space where farmers grow things they never stop to consider. Rice, wheat, corn. Nothing exciting. One of her cousins lost his wheat to Hessian flies, and his daughter found him hanging in the barn. Whole lives are built on ingredients, Eva knows.
Is budget a concern? the woman sitting next to her on the bus had asked when Eva mentioned she had no place to stay. The woman’s hands were folded to cover the frayed cuffs of her sleeves, and when she asked the question, she was looking at Eva’s train case, scuffed, a corner peeling. Without waiting for an answer, the woman told her about a lady she knew in the lake district who rented rooms by the night. Affordable, she said almost as an afterthought, as if it didn’t matter, though clearly they both knew it did.
Now Eva has two addresses, both scrawled quickly on a piece of paper she holds in her hand. One is the place to stay for the night, and the other is the address of Mr. William S. Ballantine, found in the bus depot’s phone book. She takes a streetcar to Lake Calhoun and finds the little Victorian house first. The owner is gracious, talking freely as she leads Eva through a narrow hall lined with portraits. “Now where’s home?” she asks. “Is it far?”
“I’m from Rochester,” Eva says, and then keeps going. “Our house—my house with my husband—is similar to this, a little Victorian. It’s right by the lake and there’s a forest off our back porch. I may need more than one night. I don’t know yet.”
Maybe the owner sees the hope on Eva’s face, despite the absence of a ring on her finger, but her smile is encouraging. “That’s quite all right. And I might mention, my scones were written up in the Tribune, from a little contest. Be sure to stop in the kitchen before you start your day.”
Soon Lake Calhoun is to her left. White triangles of sailboats glide on sunset-filled water. To her right is Lake of the Isles; smaller, more like the lakes she’s known, with what look like islands in the middle, crowded with trees. Three people are in a canoe that seems barely above water, their movements methodical, practiced and smooth. Separating the two lakes is a lagoon lined with weeping willows. Such beautiful, romantic trees. If she lived here, she’d picnic beneath them. Every Sunday. With fruit in a basket, everything peeled and sliced and seeded.
What surprises her is how quickly she nears his house. So easy, everything’s just come together, as if it were meant to happen.
The only thing that’s not so easy is staying on the other side of the street, among trees, when more than anything Eva wa
nts to get up close to these houses, the likes of which she’s seen only in magazines or in films. Never would she have guessed this. At the most, even when she realized he came from money, her mind conjured a larger two-story house with a long drive, perhaps manicured hedges and a fountain. But these houses, they’ve got pillars and marble and gates.
Suddenly there it is, the number from the address she’d written down. She searches for a street sign nearby, double-checking, then triple-checking, actually hoping she’s on the wrong block, in front of the wrong place, because this is not a house, it’s a mansion of stones with a castle-like tower and a sloping, manicured green lawn. The fact that he grew up here, that he was a child running through that door, a kid looking through these grand windows, that now he’s a man who calls this his home—all of it loosens the ground on which she stands. What does it mean, that she can’t comprehend his life?
She leans into the tree, watching the house, the bark rough under her fingertips. So many rooms that must remain empty. So many places you could be, that are yours and no one else’s.
And then she sees it, there in the driveway, just a bit to the left of the house and well beyond the wrought-iron gate: his Cadillac. Gleaming. Soft yellow. It literally hurts her, not only because it’s beautiful and she could only dream of riding in such a car, but because she can see him in it, the sun on his face, happy. The way he talks about it, his voice lifts. And yet she was never a part of that happiness. Could never be. All she ever had, she sees now, was a small part of him, even if he claimed otherwise. A tiny, neglected corner, one not even missed by his wife.