“Sorry to hear about your friend,” the super said when he answered the door. “She was a real beauty. Even in the newspaper you could see it. It’s too sad to think about. No one deserves to be treated like that, especially a woman so young.”
I nodded, blinking back the tears I had been fighting all day.
“I’ve come to give you back your key,” I said and held it out for him to take.
“I gave you a spare if I remember correctly,” he said.
My spare.
“I don’t have it.”
“Are you sure it isn’t up there?”
The only chance was that Jenny had given it back to me on that last speed-fueled day but I couldn’t quite remember everything that had happened. It had been my first time getting high since the day Sissy and Lucy died and much of the day had gotten away from me. The only memories I had were Jenny’s beautiful but bleeding face, talking at warp speed as she smiled at me from my bed and, of course, our three kisses.
“Pretty sure.”
“Pretty sure is not certain,” he said. “If you’d run up there and check again, it’d mean the world to me. These knees can’t climb three floors like they used to—it would take me half an hour to get to your room and back. If it isn’t up there, I’ll have to ask you to go make a copy. As you might imagine, a trip to the hardware store is much shorter for you than it is for me.”
He told me I could knock on his door when I was ready, then I climbed the stairs. The dusty smell, the creaky staircase that turned back on itself. The wind whipped the curtains in my room, I had left the window open in my hurry to leave for Michigan, and the breeze had blown the loose circulars and other papers onto the floor. Then, turning to my desk, I saw the last bag of speed, the one Jenny had asked me to keep, and my spare key sitting atop the notebook Jenny had been using on that last day we spent together.
Here is your key—I knew I would use it to come back for this once you were gone so I left it here. I don’t want to end up like my mother. I’ll get the key back from you when I see you. She had drawn an arrow from the word this to the bag of speed.
I picked up the drugs and took them to the hallway, into the bathroom, and dumped the last of it into the toilet. Once it flushed and the tank refilled, I threw the empty bag in and flushed again, making sure it was all gone before I returned to my room, restless. I paced back and forth for a moment, picking up the loose trash on the floor, and when there was nothing left to be done I sat on my bed and finally cried.
My whole body shuddered as grief passed through me. As in Russell’s car, sounds came out of me that I didn’t know I could make. The sadness I had been holding back since my father had died came out in a fit of convulsions. A great pressure hung in my muscles, as if my entire body was working to force something out, and instead of fighting against it I let it go, I let the convulsions take over. I rode the will of my muscles until they calmed on their own and I came out hyperventilating, shaking, sitting up on the edge of the bed to face my staring wall, now alive with the same old shadows. The people were all known to me: my father, my uncle, Mary, J squatting near Sisyphus and Lucifer, my mother and the Fisherman, Russell, and finally Jenny, blue eyes glowing out of the darkness, out of the shadow that had hung over me all this time.
My eyes dropped from the wall to my eight fingers splayed out before me, one of them ringed with the night sky. Nothing to do but move on.
* * *
The sheriff drove, I sat in the middle, and Kristina, asleep but belted in, bobbed her head with the motion of the moving van. We stopped at the light on the corner of Center and Old Main and, looking out Kristina’s window, I could see right into the Arlington where Karen stood before an older couple, smiling, taking their order, still there when we turned left. The old streets passed by, all the alphabetical trees, and soon we were on the bridge, where I took a glance in the sheriff’s rearview mirror to see Holm for the last time.
“You can’t wait to get out of here and forget all this, can you?” the sheriff asked.
“Can you blame me?” I asked, holding up my wounded hand.
We had spent the week after Jenny’s funeral packing up Kristina’s stuff, cleaning, painting, and that morning placed the FOR SALE sign out front as we left. Kristina hadn’t helped much. Most of the time she sat on the front steps smoking cigarettes while the sheriff and I did the heavy lifting. She hadn’t been too present since her return, but to wake up one morning to find you had lost two years of your life, your daughter, and your house would lead most people to deep introspection.
The sheriff turned left on the first county road out of town and pointed out a row of long temporary structures nestled under some trees and beyond that a large brick building in the midst of construction.
“There’s Holm Community College,” he said, “PBU, some people call it now, Pole Barn University, but it looks like the new building will be nice. Are you sure you want to move away? There’s plenty of room at my place for the three of us.”
This wasn’t the first time he had hinted at this. I laughed as if it was a joke, again, but he was afraid of what would happen once I left. To be alone with Kristina was something to fear, these new crushing losses on top of the others that had already sent her spiraling out of control. Plus the thousands of dollars of Kristina’s debt the sheriff took on by taking her into his home. Her house had been foreclosed on and she had huge credit card balances but, in spite of all this and how cold and angry she had been since her return, he was very much in love with her.
The sheriff’s house was two turns down the road from the college, a split-level sided in vinyl with a three-car garage that sat on an acre of grass lined with tall pines. He pulled the truck in backwards down the long drive and we both climbed out his side since Kristina didn’t stir when I shook her. While we were clearing a spot for her stuff in the garage, she climbed out of the cab and walked across the front lawn, stopped in the middle to lie on her back in the grass and stare at the sky. The sheriff and I watched with interest as she did this, but in the end he waved his hand at her as if to say She’ll be fine there, and we began walking boxes down the silver ramp.
It was difficult for me to understand why Kristina hadn’t moved in with the sheriff earlier, when Jenny was still alive, but such clarity only comes when looking back on things. Life isn’t easy while it’s happening and sometimes people can’t figure out how to say what they need so they choose to walk away. Then, instead of doing what we know is right, we let them go. I knew the sheriff and Kristina wanted to talk about this about as much as I wanted to talk about my mother, so I kept my mouth shut and stacked the boxes higher on my dolly, trying to get done faster. By the time the sun stood high in the sky, we had cleared the truck and Kristina was still in the grass. The sheriff slid the ramp back up into the truck and closed the door, then looked around at his place, now complete by means of Kristina’s presence.
“Well, I guess this is it for you,” he said, “next stop Minneapolis.”
He walked over to Kristina and sat down beside her. He said a few things, smiled, and then waved me over. We each got an arm under one of her shoulders and lifted, then carried her to the front door. The sheriff took over when we reached the threshold and Kristina jerked her arm away from me before she disappeared without saying good-bye. When the sheriff returned, he led me to his patrol car and let me in the passenger side.
“So,” the sheriff asked after he climbed in the driver’s seat, “is there anything else I should know about before you leave town?”
I thought of little Jennifer a few miles away, dancing around her house in a sundress, pointing with her tiny fingers, playing Intenno, and Chelsea tending to her brother in his vegetative state while she made drug deals in her kitchen, piling up the catering money for Leon.
“No,” I said, “that’s all I got. Jenny might have known more but if she did, she didn’t tell me.”
“Well, let me ask you one more question then,” he said, pulling
the car onto the highway. “How fast do you think this thing can go?”
When I said a hundred he flipped on the sirens and lights and showed me I was right, all the way to the county line.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to:
My teachers—Kay Pekel, Johan Christopherson, Kate Lynn Hibbard, Robert Gremore, Carolyn Whitson, Michele Wallace, H. Aram Veeser, Mikhal Dekel, Salar Abdoh, David Greetham, Emily Raboteau, J. Fred Reynolds, Geraldine Murphy, Linsey Abrams, Michael Klein, Fiona Maazel, Laurie Stone, Gordon Lish—and all my fellow students.
Another of my teachers, Mark Mirsky, my first real writing coach and an early champion of my work, who published two of my stories in his magazine, Fiction.
The City College of New York, especially the Division of Humanities and the Arts and the Department of English, and PSC-CUNY, who provided a grant so that I could study at The Center for Fiction.
Sue Deen, Carlton Deen, Abby Abernathy, Larry McMurtry, and the city of Archer City, Texas.
Laura Isaacman and Randy Rosenthal, who published a story of mine in their magazine, Tweed’s.
Adam Eaglin, who found my story in Tweed’s and encouraged me through three years of drafts before it all came together.
Ira Silverberg, who helped me find this book’s final form.
HOPE4, who is still out there somewhere, working nights and painting trains.
About the Author
© RHE DE VILLE
Raymond Strom was born in Hibbing, Minnesota. He moved often as a child, living in small towns across Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wisconsin before attending college in the Twin Cities. He received his MFA from the City College of New York, where he now works as an academic advisor. His writing has appeared in Fiction and Tweed’s Northern Lights is his first novel.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Raymond Strom
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Georges Borchardt, Inc., for permission to reprint a poem from Hotel Lautréamont by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1992, 2007 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. All rights reserved.
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition February 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Strom, Raymond, author.
Title: Northern lights / Raymond Strom.
Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, February 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032240 | ISBN 9781501190292 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501190315 (trade paper). Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Gay. Classification: LCC PS3619.T774 N67 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__lccn.loc.gov_2018032240&d=DwIFAg&c=jGUuvAdBXp_VqQ6t0yah2g&r=4pGeBDxULaxT2wXULFKqzz0AK5EqfqFLl-R98w8RarqkuD-ninvvCG0t1kE36ZhM&m=62fvpJCtRfUAfUvXx6MsAOfV2dhJU463x6jmhFixj2w&s=00_GHrGYpluRSmbADN7uX4oAEbk3t56z0yMMi_7J_eE&e=.
ISBN 978-1-5011-9029-2
ISBN 978-1-5011-9030-8 (ebook)
Northern Lights Page 23