THE HOMESTEAD INN WAS A TWO-STORY MOTEL AT THE INTERSECTION of Second Avenue North and Highway 2. A driver could follow the highway west all the way to Seattle, or east to Lake Huron if they wanted. In Wolf Point it was mostly local traffic, though, and Erin watched the cars go by from the window of her room.
She stood up from her chair and stretched. She had not slept well. From the sagging mattress to the faded sea-green carpet, the place was a stark reminder that she was home but not all the way home. During her drive north from Colorado, she’d anticipated spending her nights in her old bedroom in her father’s house on the farm. It wasn’t far from here, a few miles from the inn, but it was inaccessible now, cordoned off with police tape and occupied by a team of investigators. What would it be like to be there now, she wondered, looking out through her bedroom window as the men moved across her father’s yard? She leaned forward and pressed her fingertips against the glass. She could almost see them gathered in huddled groups, pointing to the place where the ground was open beneath them.
(“We found something . . . down there in the mud.”)
Erin closed her eyes, but she could see it anyway: the pale luster of bone peeking up from the muck.
She put on her jacket and grabbed the keys to the Chevy off the nightstand. The truck was one of only three vehicles in the parking lot. A light frost had settled on the exterior, and the driver’s-side door groaned loudly when she opened it, a sound she heard so often that she no longer heard it at all. She had walked Diesel two hours ago, her muscles stiff from a fitful night on the mattress. It had been dark then, a good forty-five minutes before the November sun crested the horizon. There was sunlight now, though, and it glistened off a thin layer of ice on the windshield.
She stepped aside as Diesel jumped into the truck’s cab, then climbed in herself so she could start the engine. There was a trick to starting the Chevy on cold mornings like this one. She kissed the key twice, said a short prayer, inserted it into the ignition, and listened to the engine turn over for a few seconds before pressing down on the accelerator. It was more of a good-luck ritual than anything grounded in the physics of automobile mechanics, and like all good-luck rituals it worked only about fifty percent of the time.
The engine sputtered twice and came to life.
“Good girl,” Erin said, and leaned over to open the glove compartment. There was an ice scraper inside, and she used it to clear the glass before setting off for the hospital.
From its exterior, Trinity Hospital appeared unchanged from the day before. Erin had hoped the same officer would be stationed outside her father’s room, but the face was different this time and she introduced herself again as the daughter of David Reece. The man nodded, asked for identification, and studied her Colorado driver’s license with a bit of skepticism before writing her name down on a small pad of paper he retrieved from the front shirt pocket of his uniform.
A different nurse was in the room as well. Her name was Donna, and Erin asked if there had been any changes in her father’s condition from the night before.
“Not since seven A.M., when I started my shift,” she said, “and the night nurse told me your father had an uneventful evening.”
“Has Dr. Houseman been by to see him this morning?”
“Yes. He stopped by shortly after change of shift.”
Erin nodded. Her father was lying on his back, his eyes closed, as if he was sleeping. The ventilator made soft shushing noises that coincided with the slight rise and fall of his chest. Someone had tucked a pillow under his left forearm.
“His breathing is easier this morning,” Donna said. “I’ll be moving his extremities through passive range of motion. It helps to keep the muscles loose and the joints lubricated. Normally a physical therapist would do that sort of thing, but Wolf Point doesn’t have any physical therapists so . . .”
“It falls on you.”
“That’s right,” she said. “We’ve got to make do with what we have.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
Donna was silent for a moment, hesitant.
“I won’t get in your way,” Erin assured her. “It’s just that . . . I’d like to put myself to use if I can.”
The nurse shrugged. “A little help is always appreciated.” She moved to the opposite side of the bed. “We’ll start with the legs, one leg at a time. I’ll do this one and you can do the other.”
Erin followed the nurse’s directions as they progressed from one extremity to the next. Her father’s limbs were heavier than she expected, like sacks of grain that needed to be rotated.
“What’s he in for?” Donna asked, and Erin looked up at her, surprised by the question.
“What do you mean?”
The nurse shrugged. “It says ‘pneumonia’ in the chart. Most people with pneumonia don’t end up on a ventilator.”
“He was septic,” Erin said. “The infection spread to his bloodstream.”
Donna nodded. “It happens sometimes, mostly with the elderly or people with a suppressed immune system.”
“They found something,” Erin said, “a growth in his lung that needs to be biopsied.”
“Yes, I heard about that. He wasn’t a smoker?”
“No.”
“And there’s no family history of lung cancer?”
“Not that I know of.”
“It’s strange,” she said as she lifted David’s left arm, gently raising it above his head. “It’s hard to know what to think about that.”
“Sometimes bad things happen to good people.”
“Yes,” she said, and looked over at Erin. “Sometimes bad things happen to all kinds of people.”
Erin placed her hands on the rail of the hospital bed. “There’s a police officer stationed outside the room. I know how that must look.”
Donna flexed David’s arm at the elbow, paused for a moment, then brought it back to its original position.
“You’ve probably heard some rumors,” Erin said. “News about my father seems to have traveled faster than a fire in high wind.”
Donna shook her head. “No, ma’am, I haven’t. I do my best not to listen to rumors. As for the police officer stationed in the hallway, if your father has done something wrong, then God will be his judge, not me.” She returned David’s arm to its resting place on the pillow. “You lost your mother,” she said. “You were just a kid back then, but . . . I remember.”
Erin sat down in the chair next to her father’s bed. She could feel her throat tighten, the old pain rising to the surface.
“For all these years you’ve wondered what happened to her,” the nurse said. “It’s hard to get closure on a thing like that. It’s hard to put it to rest.” She walked around to the other side of the bed. Gently she lifted David’s right arm, her fingers folded around his wrist and elbow. “My Jimmy went missing. Did you know that? He was six years old when it happened.”
Erin looked up at her. She put a hand to her lips. She hadn’t recognized her. The woman was older now, her hair graying at the roots.
“For a long time I prayed for a miracle,” Donna said. “I asked God to bring my boy back to me.” She looked down at the bed. “I was desperate. I was willing to do anything.”
“You’re . . . Donna Raffey. I’m sorry, I . . . I didn’t . . .”
“The last name’s different now. I got divorced and remarried. These days I’m Donna Kensington.” Her eyes focused on the wall for a few seconds before clearing. “But Raffey, yes. I guess I’m that woman, too.”
“I’m so sorry,” Erin said. “I was older than Jimmy. I didn’t know him well. I think I only saw you once, at the funeral.”
“It was a memorial service,” she said, “not a funeral. I guess it doesn’t matter. We treated them like they were dead, Jimmy and all the others.”
Erin swallowed. It had been a long time since she’d thought about that day. Her parents had taken her to the service. She’d worn a dark blue dress because she didn’t have one that was black. Erin had felt self-conscious about it, telling her mother that she wanted to remain in the car. “Why do I have to be here anyway?” she’d asked. “I barely knew Jimmy Raffey.” Helen Reece had turned in her seat and looked at her. “We aren’t here for Jimmy,” she said. “We’re here for the people he left behind.”
“I didn’t give up on him,” Donna said, and Erin jumped at the sound of her voice. “I prayed to God for a miracle. ‘Bring him home to me,’ I pleaded. ‘Bring him back to Wolf Point where he belongs.’”
Erin took a breath. It rustled in her chest like the wings of a bird before it settled.
“It’s a funny thing about miracles,” Donna said. “When they do happen, it’s never the way we expect.” She moved David’s arm through its range of motion, flexing and extending the joints as if the act itself brought her comfort. “My Jimmy never did make it back to me. It was the Lord’s will that I would never see him again.” She returned David’s arm to his side. The hospital gown had slid down at his shoulder, and she adjusted it, smoothing out the fabric where it had gathered in the middle.
Donna stepped away from the bed. “Something was buried in the earth for a long time, and now it’s not. When you think about it, that’s a kind of miracle, don’t you think?” The corners of her mouth turned downward, a brief current of sadness that was there and then gone in the space of a second. “All those unanswered questions. All that we lost and never found. We’ve been trapped in the past for too long, Erin. Maybe finally we can be free.”
“It won’t bring them back,” Erin told her, but the nurse just smiled and shook her head.
“I don’t expect it to,” she said. “It’ll bring us back. It’s enough, isn’t it?”