IN MINNESOTA that winter Louise slept with a pair of knee socks under her pillow, and when she woke she pulled the socks on and got out of bed. She sat at an oak trestle table drinking coffee and listening to the wind that roared around the cabin.
She set her clock radio to begin playing at four in the morning. “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” would come on, or “Knock on Wood,” or “The Long and Winding Road.”
Getting dressed took a while. There were many layers, and with each one her motions became more cumbersome. She had always loved winter clothes. She loved boot socks, quilted underwear, cracked-leather mittens with fleece cuffs. They were dear to her, lifesavers.
She downed the last of her coffee with mittens on and went outside. The season lay like an ocean over everything. Branches snapped and cabins groaned. The Nova, kept in a quonset hut, always started—sometimes she had to open the hood first, take off the air filter, and spray ether into the carburetor.
She did Carol’s motor route and then went into town to deliver the papers of the girl who had mononucleosis. The windows were dark, the streets icy and hard. The north wind gusted over pools of street light. She might have been delivering newspapers to houses that had stood empty for a hundred years.
The rural people mailed their subscription fees to the newspaper, but in town you had to collect. Louise went door to door with a green zippered bag for the money. Some people would ask, “When is Alice coming back?” as if Louise had done something to her. Or they would get out the ticket she had given them the previous week, to make sure they weren’t being cheated. It occurred to Louise that people in your own area generally seem friendly, and people in other regions of the country do too; but that people in neighboring states seem cold and cruel.
The girl with mononucleosis was named Alice Mattie. After collecting, Louise took the money to her house. The Matties lived in a small house near a river, and their yard was like an ice-skating rink. Alice’s father worked for the highway department and her mother had a bad back, a very bad back. She usually lay in a lawn chair in the middle of the kitchen. She had a small face and would crane her neck to see what was going on. Alice was a thirteenyear-old with shimmering red hair. She was always playing Nintendo, and tried to get Louise to play, but Louise could not get to the higher levels.
One day, not long before Christmas, Alice gave her a present. Louise unwrapped the package and found an Advent calendar.
“You open a different door every day,” explained Mrs. Mattie from her lawn chair.
“I can’t wait to try it,” said Louise.
That night after supper Louise and Kenneth played backgammon in the kitchen of the main house. Kenneth talked to the dice. “Come on, six and three,” he would say. Louise did not know whether to hang back or hightail it out of Kenneth’s inner table. As she played, she ate Cheetos and absently wiped her fingers on the shoulders of her sweatshirt. Before she knew it, all the Cheetos were gone and Kenneth had only had a handful. She said good night to Kenneth and Carol and trudged up the hill to her own cabin. After taking her coat off and building a fire she went into the bathroom, and in the mirror saw the streaks of orange dust on her sweatshirt.
“What has become of me?” she said.
She turned the water on in the bathtub and sat on the toilet lid while steam climbed to the ceiling. She smoked a cigarette delicately, flicking ash into the sink. When the tub had filled, she undressed and got in. “Ahhh,” she said. She had slipped on the ice at the Matties’ and bruised her hip. After her bath she sat staring into the fire and drying her hair. Then she lay on the bed and looked at the Advent calendar. It was a manger scene. Mary had a ball of light behind her head, and the Wise Men looked impatient, as if they had somewhere else to go. She held the calendar in her right hand and slowly flexed her wrist several times. Then she threw the calendar across the room and into the fire, where it gave off a green light as it burned. She screened the fire and went to bed.
Ice fishing and hunting kept the camp going in the winter months. Louise would go up to the top of the hill and see the huts that dotted the lake. She could not understand why anyone who was not seriously hungry would ice fish. The men went into their freezing little booths at dawn and came out in midafternoon. Some of them drank a lot; Louise cleaned their cabins and had to carry the bottles out. The ice fishermen were not as sociable as the hunters, who had parties and laughed loudly deep into the night. When Louise lay awake listening to the faint sound of laughter through the frozen trees, she knew a hunter was out there.
She had developed a strange habit that often disturbed her sleep. She would wind up with her wrists crossed beneath her chest, sleeping like Dracula, only on her stomach. This position cut off her circulation so effectively that she would wake with a start, certain that some kind of stroke had rendered her hands forever useless. It took a good five minutes for feeling to return to the point where she could turn on a light or push herself up in bed, so she would lie on her back, panting and staring at her hands.
Johnny White showed up just before Christmas for a week of ice fishing. He seemed totally surprised to see her. Carol and Kenneth said that Johnny had been coming up here for years, first as a child with Jack and then on his own. He had an elaborate ice-fishing shack with a generator, a refrigerator, and a kerosene heater. Louise and Carol and Kenneth helped him drag the shack across the ice on a blustery crystalline morning when the temperature was about eleven degrees. One day Johnny showed Louise the ropes of ice fishing. It still seemed boring. They had some brandy, and Louise laughed at his campaign stories, and then Johnny asked her, “What are you doing up here?”
“People think Grafton is all there is,” said Louise. “It’s not. You can leave Grafton for a few months without the world ending.”
“You ought to go home,” said Johnny.
Louise had made small mistakes in her pregnancy, but she did not believe that these mistakes had killed the baby, or that because of them she deserved to lose the baby. It was surprising the number of people who seemed to think it would be a comfort to Louise to hear that if she had taken some simple step they had read in a magazine, she would have a living child today. People did not want to think that anything was precarious. Birth was supposed to be a given. Advertisements for baby toys and food and clothes kept coming in the mail after Iris died. The companies must have known that some of the promotions would reach people who had lost children. Tough, must have been their attitude.
There was a house on Alice’s route Louise could rest in. It was a big house with an enclosed porch where Louise would sit reading the front page of the newspaper. The paper seemed to specialize in explosions around the globe and odd stories about animals. So one day Louise was reading about a hawk in Florida who had flown off with a man’s portable telephone and figured out how to push the automatic redial button. The man’s mother was getting a lot of hangups in the middle of the night. “It’s a unique situation and we’re not happy,” said a spokesman. While Louise read this, the front door came slightly open. She stood and, feeling the heat from inside, entered the kitchen. She removed her wool hat and mittens and pushed back her hair. There was a stairway leading from the kitchen, and she went up. She opened one door and then another until she found a man and a woman asleep in their bed. The air was humid. Someone was snoring. A humidifier bubbled and steamed. Louise rested her hand on a dresser beside the door and found it slick with water. The woman rolled over and flopped her arm around the man. Louise decided the humidifier must be broken to put out this much water.
The following Saturday, while collecting, Louise found the couple home and sitting in their kitchen. She laughed out loud when she thought of asking if they’d got their humidifier fixed.
“What’s funny?” said the man.
“When is Alice coming back?”
“Soon, I hope.”
Later that day Louise dropped the collection at the Matties’, and Alice asked her to watch television. They sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of Alice’s room with cream sodas. The show that Alice wanted to see was not on. Instead an announcer said, “We interrupt our regularly scheduled program in order to bring you a holiday concert of the Applefield High School Chorus, under the direction of Warren Monson.”
The students came on right away, clearing their throats and straightening full-length robes of red and white. Louise and Alice could hear the baton of Warren Monson tapping a music stand.
“Do you know these kids?” said Louise.
“They’re older than me,” said Alice.
The girls’ voices were clear and strong, and the boys carried the bass and baritone parts earnestly, like lumber that had to be stacked. Together the voices seemed unbearably beautiful to Louise, and during “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” she began to cry. She leaned forward until her forehead and arms touched the carpet. God knows what Alice thought. But she said, “It’s all right, Louise. Don’t be upset. Oh, dear.”
Alice resumed her paper route on New Year’s Eve. Mrs. Mattie drove her around, wearing a back brace. Louise went along to see how they did.
Carol and Kenneth were going to a party that night, and Louise would be heading south in the Nova. She was going to catch a bus in Hollister and leave the car at the depot for the Kennedys to pick up on New Year’s Day.
She sat in a wicker chair in Carol’s bedroom while Carol tried on dresses for the party. Louise told her which ones she liked and didn’t like.
“I want to thank you for all your help around here these past months,” said Carol. “We are going to miss you so much.”
“I’ll be lost without my newspapers,” said Louise.
“I can’t believe it’s New Year’s.”
“Me neither.”
“Where does the time go?”
“Away.”
“Did you call Dan?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“I got him a shirt with horses on it.”
“Those are nice.”
“He won’t like it.”
“Don’t be surprised if things seem strange at first.”
“Probably.”
“Come July it will have been twenty-seven years we’ve run the camp,” said Carol. “And right after it opened I had a guy come up to me. ‘Carol,’ he said, ‘you know the trail from the cabins down to the water?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know it,’ and he said, ‘Why didn’t you cut it straighter? It meanders, Carol.’ See, he was an engineer, and everywhere he looked, he saw the straight lines that people could have made but failed to. And I said, ‘I thought that was straight,’ and he said, ‘Well, it isn’t.’ And I said, ‘You get your own camp and you can make the trails any way you want.’ “
Louise laughed. “You didn’t really think that trail was straight.”
“It used to be straighter than it is now,” said Carol.
Louise went back to the cabin for a last look around. The Nova was packed and running. She got in and drove to Hollister. It took about forty-five minutes. She parked the car and carried her things into the bus depot, where an old man was sweeping up. She sat expectantly on a wooden bench, but the place was empty except for the custodian.
“Where you going, Miss?” he said.
“Stone City,” she said. “There is a bus at six-twenty.”
“Not on New Year’s Eve, Miss,” said the man with the broom. “There are no buses on New Year’s Eve except the Prairieliner to Manitoba, which left at four-thirty.”
“Oh, fuck, you’ve got to be kidding,” said Louise. “They said there was a bus.”
“There was—the Prairieliner.”
Louise kicked her bag in despair. “When does one leave for Stone City?”
“Tomorrow morning at nine thirty-three,” said the man. “And I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here overnight. I’m sweeping up, and when I’m done I’m going to lock the doors.”
Louise picked up her shoulder bag and the box with Dan’s shirt in it and went out the door. The town square in Hollister was empty in the dying light except for some kids who were climbing a statue of a Greek goddess with wings and large breasts. As Louise watched, they put a party hat on her head and a cigarette in her mouth. Then the boys dropped expertly to the ground and scattered as a police car roared into the square with blue lights glinting off the darkened windows of the town. It took a moment before it registered with Louise that the side of the police car said “Grouse County.” And then she had the crazy misfiring thought that this was a coincidence—that Dan or one of the deputies had come all this way chasing a criminal or tracking a clue. And by that time Dan was out of the car. He hugged her, lifted her off her feet. “Let me take you home,” he said.