THE AFTERNOON WAS SUNNY. Ice hung from the trees, shining, and then fell from their branches suddenly in great heaps. Claire sat near the window in the back of Len’s Lookout, gazing at the balsam fir and blue spruce, the Norwegian pines and the poplars, with her coat still on, her scarf still wound around her neck, not knowing that she was looking at balsam fir and blue spruce, Norwegian pines and poplars. Not knowing anything. Not even that she didn’t know.
She was twenty, tall, with blue eyes and dark blond hair that went to her shoulders and another, longer rope of hair that was streaked electric blue and was woven into a thin braid with dull silver bells embroidered into it. Despite this, she looked like a farm girl—a big farm girl, her boyfriend, David, had said once, grabbing onto her naked hips, meaning it nicely—though she did not want to look like this and didn’t believe herself to look like this. Her fingernails were painted black, her toes a glimmering, morose green. The flesh on the right side of her nose was pierced and bejeweled with a fake sapphire stud. She twirled it in its tender hole and sipped her drink. Her brother sat across from her and sipped his drink too, looking out at the trees. Neither of them spoke for long stretches of time, feeling alone and yet together, enclosed in the crowd of the bar as they had been when they were children and waited here for the same reason they did now: for their mother to get off of work.
Claire sucked the last of her drink through her red straw until it made a hollow rasping sound and then she set her glass down. “Any more booze in your little stash?” she asked, stabbing her ice with the straw. Joshua had discreetly added tequila to the orange juice their mother brought them from a tiny bottle he had in his coat pocket.
He shook his head and took the plastic monkey that clung to the edge of her glass and put its tail in his mouth, letting the rest of it dangle. So delicate it was, Claire noticed, a sculpture more lovely than glass. For years they’d collected these monkeys in every color, and also the mermaids and the sharp miniature swords and the paper parasols that stretched open, taut and graceful, at the end of toothpicks. Now Claire wondered what had happened to them, this collection—their collections, his and hers—that they’d begged and bribed and battled to build.
“I should get up and help Mom,” she said, without moving. She knew what to do. As a teenager, she’d worked here.
The place was packed, a Friday during ice season. People they didn’t know occupied most of the tables, their glossy snowmobile helmets tucked beneath their chairs, their SUVs crammed every which way in the parking lot. People from Minneapolis and St. Paul—“the Cities”—and the suburbs. City apes, the locals called them, not necessarily meaning harm.
“Mom seems perfectly fine to me,” Claire said, unwinding her scarf.
They both looked at her charging smoothly across the room, clutching the necks of three beer bottles in one hand and two plates of food in the other.
“Who said she wasn’t?” Joshua asked.
“She did. The tone of her voice did. I told you. She sounded like someone died.”
“And she said we need to talk?”
Claire nodded, sucking on an ice cube. She had to wait for it to melt before she could speak, her eyes watering from trying to keep the ice from touching her teeth.
“I already told you what I think,” Joshua said, with the monkey still in his mouth. “It could totally still happen, you know.”
Now Teresa stood near the small opening at the bar where the cherries and limes and lemons and olives were kept in a compartmentalized bin. She carefully set drinks on her tray one at a time, the strings of her green apron in a sturdy knot at the back of her waist. When she turned she saw them watching her and smiled and held up one hand to signal that she was almost done and then disappeared into the throngs of people, away from them.
“Trust me,” Claire said. “It’s not that. Her tubes are tied.” She looked out the window again. There was a canoe there that Len and Mardell used as a trough to feed bears in the summertime, buried now, a hump of snow. “As in fallopian tubes,” she continued, switching her eyes back to Joshua.
“I think I know what fucking tubes are.”
“I’m just telling you.”
“How stupid do you think I am?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. She’d convinced him to eat dog food once, assuring him that the hard pellets were a new kind of snack mix. She took the book of matches that sat in the empty ashtray between them and lit one and watched it burn and then blew it out the moment before the flame scorched her fingers.
“Don’t fight with me, Josh. Not now,” she said, gravely, though she didn’t feel that things were grave. She felt mildly elated, as if something exciting were about to happen. Driving up from Minneapolis she’d felt just the opposite. Filled with dread for four hours, imagining what could possibly be wrong, playing over and over in her head the words that her mother had spoken to her on the phone the night before when she’d called and commanded her to come home first thing in the morning, parsing them to bits in an effort to determine where exactly the danger lay. Bruce had cut off the end of his thumb with his table saw once. Another time, he’d fallen from a roof and crushed three vertebrae and banged his head so hard that he’d forgotten who Claire and Joshua were for almost a month, remembering Teresa only dimly. Claire knew that these things happened. She’d felt gripped by the enormity of it as she drove north, the vents of her Cutlass Supreme blasting hot air onto her face with the force of a desert wind. The fan had broken to the extent that it was either off entirely or on full blast and so she went from hot to cold and back and forth again, freezing and then roasting, never getting it right. She imagined Bruce unconscious in a bed with his limbs suspended from a ceiling contraption like the time when he’d broken his back. He wasn’t her father, or anybody’s father, but she loved him as one, and as she drove she imagined the things that she would say about him at his funeral, and she had cried so hard thinking about it that she thought she would have to pull over to the side of the road. But she gathered herself and blew her nose into a gob of napkins from Taco Bell that she’d found crammed into the crease of the seat. She turned on the radio and felt calmed and refreshed for having wept. She remembered, from this new, more reasonable vantage point, how the phone call that told her of Bruce’s accident had been much like the one from her mother yesterday: bossy and eerie and horrifically vague, but immediately identifiable as life-changing, although Bruce’s accident had not ultimately changed his life, once he was able to identify them as his family. Now he just had a bad back. And from the accident with the table saw, a shortened thumb with a new pink tip that was as shiny and smooth as the skin of a bell pepper.
By the time that Claire had turned into their driveway, she’d worked herself up into a high state of anxiety again. Their house sat on top of a hill deep in the woods, a mile from the nearest neighbor. Bruce and Teresa had slowly built the house themselves, with weary, sporadic help from Claire and Joshua when they were too young to be of any use. Claire walked through the front door with her heart racing for fear of what she would find, but once she was inside she saw Joshua sitting barefoot on the couch in sweatpants, methodically eating a giant bowl of a hideous concoction he loved composed of apple sauce, sliced bananas, wheat germ, walnuts, a ground-up chocolate bar, and milk, as if nothing was happening at all. She’d been enraged at the sight of him, at the realization that her mother was at work and so was Bruce. That nothing was the matter after all. She insisted they drive to the Lookout, to see their mother.
“So why does Mom have to talk, then?” Joshua asked.
Claire held her braid in front of her, examining it, fingering the bells, then looked up. Her face was as white and unmarked as a new bar of soap. “Don’t say that word anymore, okay? It’s freaking me out.”
“What word?”
“Talk. If we have to talk, fine, let’s talk. I don’t know why I’m sitting here watching Mom run around if we have to talk so badly. We can talk on the phone, you know.” She sat back in her chair, one arm stretched out on the table. “I know precisely what’s fucking going on. It’s just some ploy to get me to come home. It’s Mom wanting attention.”
She considered getting into her car and driving back to Minneapolis, to her apartment, which she shared with David in the bottom half of a house. He would be happy and surprised to see her, wanting to know what had been wrong, why her mother had needed her to come. Just to fuck with me, she’d say, and they’d laugh, and he’d make his Turkish coffee for her, and they’d stay up into the wee hours listening to reggae.
Leonard—the owner of Len’s Lookout—appeared with a plate of French fries in his hand. A few cascaded onto their table when he stopped suddenly in front of them. “Hey, kiddos. Your mom’s almost done. I thought you’d like a snack.” He set the plate down between them and then kissed the top of Claire’s head. Leonard wore cowboy boots no matter what the weather and a gold-colored watch that strained against the flesh of his fat wrist. His skin was sickly yellow in some places, a damp pink in others. Joshua and Claire considered him to be something like an uncle, and his wife, Mardell, an aunt, though they were closer in age to their grandparents.
“I hear Mardell’s going to Butte,” Claire said.
“Butte?” asked Joshua.
“Off to see her baby sister,” he called to them, already returning to his place behind the bar. He had a passion for James Michener novels, which he lined up on a rickety shelf in the office behind the kitchen and read over and over again. As a girl, Claire would go into his office on the Saturdays when she came to the bar with her mother. There was a desk with an adding machine with a long tape that curled out of it and a statue of a naked lady with her dress around her ankles and, above it, the hide of an Angus cow nailed to the wall. Throughout her adolescence, Claire had read all the James Michener books one by one as she sat on a stool at the bar waiting for her mother to get off from work. In between the Michener books, she’d read books she’d checked out of the mobile library when it came to town. Optimistic instructional manuals about how to be a cheerleader and how to prevent pimples and how to determine when it was the right time to lose your virginity. She read novels about girls her age who’d run away from home and turned into prostitutes, or other girls who got to rent ponies for the summer, or who were going mad and were sent to therapists in New York City and then recovered fully by the time school started back up. Joshua always sat beside her while she read, spinning himself as fast as he could on his stool until it began to make a rumbling sound like the seat was going to break off and his mother told him to stop. He set his plastic cowboys and Indians out on the bar or his G.I. Joes and he made them fight viciously with one another, buzzing to himself, or making sounds as if he were blowing things up.
Men sat next to them at the bar. The same ones usually, the same ones who were there now. Mac Hanson, Tom Hiitennen, the Svedson cousins. “Your brain’s going to melt from all that reading,” Mac would say to Claire, his eyes loose and red and wet as a hound dog’s. He’d get her to tell him the story of her book and then he’d discredit it jovially. “All those people think they got troubles. What they need is a good kick in the arse or an honest day’s work.” He held a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger a few inches from his mouth, his elbows resting heavily on the bar. “Just ask this guy,” he’d say, jabbing a finger into his own chest, stewing while Claire returned to her book. “He’ll tell you a few stories.”
Other men came to talk to Claire as she got older. Men who’d happened in from other places, or men who rarely came to Len’s Lookout, but got drunk when they did. They touched her hair. They tried to see what color her eyes were and then they said that she was in trouble because blue-eyed women were the worst kind when it came to men. They told her what they thought she’d look like when she was eighteen. They said they’d like to see her then. They warned her not to get fat, and then pinched her sides to test if she already was. Her mother would appear then, asking the men about their wives and kids if she knew them, the weather if she didn’t. She spoke in a different voice when she worked at the Lookout, higher-pitched and smooth, and in another voice on her radio show, deep and somber and satisfied, and in an entirely different voice at home.
“It’s hitting me,” said Claire, gazing out the window. The sun had disappeared now, the sky clouding over. She turned back to Joshua and silently watched him squeeze a mound of mustard onto a napkin. “This thing about Mom being pregnant. You could be right. They can untie your tubes these days and maybe that’s what she did.” Joshua ate the fries two at a time, dipping them into the mustard. “And for the record, I think it’s ludicrous. I think it’s rather late in the game for her to be having a baby. I mean, what happened to college?”
“I’m going to Vo Tech,” he said.
“Not you. Mom.” She picked up an unusually long fry and dragged it contemplatively through the lake of mustard.
“She’s going to college?”
“Hello, Joshua? You’re the one who lives with her. What else has she talked about for the last year? Going to college once you graduate. Did you think she was planning to be a waitress all her life?”
“She’s a painter.”
Claire stared at him with disgust, then looked away. Her hand went to her necklace, a stone that protected her from everything. “I’m talking about what she wants to have for a job. For money. Or maybe she wants to actually study painting. Did that ever occur to you?”
Joshua didn’t answer. Their mother stood across the room before a table of people. She held a metal pitcher of water, her hip cocked to one side and her elbow resting on it, to help her hold the water. Claire couldn’t hear her mother from this distance, but she knew what she was saying. All the things they were out of. Tell them what they can’t have first, her mother had advised her when she trained Claire to be a waitress. That way they won’t have time to be disappointed.
Joshua took a pack of cigarettes from his coat and shook one out and then lit it up.
“Since when do you smoke?” she asked.
“Since when is what I do your business?”
“Fine. Die then,” she hissed, and then, more coolly, “It’s not that I care. It’s that Mom will see you and she’ll care.” She looked around the room, hoping their mother would see. On the walls there were enlarged black and white photographs taken decades before and set in rough wooden frames. Men who stooped down to grasp the antlers of deer they’d shot, or stood on the corpses of coyotes and wolves stacked like logs, or who held pipes and the halters of shimmering horses or the dull posts of fences.
Joshua took a long, intentional drag and then held the cigarette with his hand resting on his lap under the table. “I hate when you come home,” he said quietly, not looking at her.
“Thank you,” she said in a shrill voice. “I hate it too.” She stood up and put her coat on with exaggerated dignity, and took her scarf and mittens and purse from the table.
“Where are you going?”
“Away,” she said, half-thinking she meant it. Before Joshua could say anything, she walked out of the bar. In the parking lot, she remembered that she couldn’t drive back to Minneapolis even if she wanted to. Joshua had driven them to the Lookout in his truck. It had begun to snow, the flakes falling in lazy swirls, already collecting in her hair. She took a long time winding the scarf around her neck and assumed the posture of someone who was content to be taking a stroll.
She stopped at the edge of the lot, where a hard heap of snow sat, pushed there by the plow. Behind her she could hear someone coming out of the bar. If it was Joshua, she would not speak to him. Her back became very erect in preparation for this, but then she heard a squeal and she turned and saw a boy gathering handfuls of snow and throwing it at another boy and then that boy crouching behind a car and scooping up his own snow to throw back.
She gazed up at a window above the bar. The curtain that covered it was the same curtain that had hung there when they had lived in the apartment. It was from the same fabric as a dress she used to wear, powder blue, with the smallest of red cherries scattered in a loose pattern all over it. Her mother had made the dress first, then the curtains with what was left over. She walked through the snow toward the two small buildings behind the bar. One they referred to as the shed, the other the bathhouse. Leonard and Mardell kept the mower and the rakes and shovels and a broken pinball machine they’d meant to get fixed for several years in the shed. The bathhouse had a sauna, toilet, and shower, which they had used when they lived in the apartment above the bar. She and Joshua had worn a path around it, chasing each other. When the snow was gone you could still see its trail. She sat down on the bench behind the bathhouse facing the woods and the canoe that Leonard and Mardell used for a bear trough and the blackened barrel they used to burn the garbage in. If Joshua looked out the window now, he would see her. The canoe had not been there when they lived in the apartment. It had been added later, to attract the bears, which attracted customers. In the summertime Leonard and Mardell placed a wooden sign out front that said SEE LIVE BEARS HERE! and then filled the canoe with leftover food and grease from the fryer. People sat inside the Lookout along the big picture windows and watched the bears from their tables. But when Claire and Joshua were kids, they would come and sit on the bench outside, even though there was nothing between them and the bears except for a clump of weeds on a small mound of dirt that had formed when the parking lot had been graded.
If the bears looked directly at them, they ran and screamed, though they knew that this was exactly the wrong thing to do. The bears ran too, frightened by the sound, lumbering away like agile old women, back to the trees. They’d turn and look for a while, swaying their thick heads from side to side, then slowly return to the trough to eat, moving with an indolent grace. They made a grunting sound as they ate, the same sound over and over, righteous and dignified. The black of them was a dark so dark that it took on a quality of light and contained colors other than itself, of blue and violet and green. The bears made Claire think of God, though she’d had no religious schooling. She’d been to church only a few times—confused and irritated, not knowing when to stand up or sit down or how to find the songs in the book or what she was supposed to say when certain things were said to her—but God is what she felt. She felt the same when she looked at fields of goldenrod or alfalfa, or pieces of the sky, or trees, not every tree, but particular trees, trees small and alone, new and fragile, or ancient trees, grand oaks that would kill you if they fell.
She stood up and walked through the parking lot, thinking she’d go back inside, but then continued walking past the bar and out onto the road, toward home. Her footsteps made a trail in the new snow. The wind was stronger on the road, and she bowed her head against it, pushing her chin into the scarf, instinctively looking for things in the ditch as she and Joshua had done when they’d gone out on their expeditions as kids. Over the years they’d found a collection of unmatched shoes, oil-covered T-shirts, cracked pens, and burned-out lighters. Once they found a ten-dollar bill. Once they found a Foghat tape, which Bruce and their mother still listened to from time to time. Once, mysteriously, they found a Canada goose, recently dead, and Joshua picked it up by its feet and spelled out his name and then her name in the gravel with the blood that ran in a steady stream from its beak.
She stopped walking and considered turning back when she saw her mother’s car approaching and then pulling off onto the shoulder.
“Hey, jelly bean,” Teresa said when Claire got in.
“Where’s your truck?” Claire asked Joshua, in the back seat, but he didn’t answer, his headphones blasting.
“The battery died—he left the lights on,” Teresa explained.
Claire buckled her seat belt, and her mother pulled back out onto the road.
“Can you please tell me what’s going on?” She noticed that her mother had applied a fresh coat of lipstick—frosted pink—as if she were on her way to work instead of coming home from it, and this seemed like something of a hint. “Is it that you’re pregnant? Josh thinks that you’re pregnant. I told him that’s impossible. It’s impossible, right?”
“Claire.”
“Mom.”
The snowflakes landed on the windshield and then melted instantly. Teresa turned the wipers up to the highest speed. “I suppose the roads’ll get bad now,” she said. “They say it’s going to snow six inches and then get cold.”
“What about going to college? What happened to that?” Claire asked.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake.” She looked at Joshua in the rearview mirror, though he could not hear her. “You’re both being silly. We’ll talk when we get home. Until then, you’re going to have to relax.”
“I am relaxed,” Claire said, trying to make her voice sound relaxed. She sat quietly for a while, staring at the road ahead of them, and then took off her mittens and got a tissue from her purse. “It’s just that I think I have the right to know,” she said, dabbing at her nose with the tissue. “I think driving two hundred miles like a maniac to get here gives me the right.”
“I didn’t tell you to drive like a maniac.”
They passed the Simpson farm. Becka stood with a shovel in front of the house and waved.
“Honk the horn, Mom. There’s Becka.”
They were silent then, riding home. Trees streamed past, their trunks encrusted with snow, and behind them, not visible from the road, flowed the river, the Mississippi. Claire could feel everything they passed without having to see it, every weed and rock, every patch of bog and tree; even if it were dark she would feel them, so familiar they were to her. She watched herself in the cracked side mirror, remembering how she used to make faces at herself when she drove for long days with her mother, when she was in junior high school and her mother had worked for a short time as a Mary Kay lady. They’d driven all over Coltrap County, holding parties and trying to convince people to buy Mary Kay makeup. Teresa had a folding table that she’d cover with a pink cloth and a cardboard Mary Kay stand-up display. When the women at the party were ready, Teresa would have Claire sit in a chair in the center of the group and make her up, explaining what she was doing while she worked with gentle, emphatic strokes. Claire felt glamorous and important, though she pretended just the opposite, carrying herself as if she were submitting to something not quite distasteful, but approaching that. “Beauty is a few simple steps away,” her mother would say when she’d finished applying the makeup, the roomful of women all beaming at Claire. Her mother didn’t believe, though, that it was beautifying. Afterward, when they’d left the party and were back in the car, she would push herself up on the seat to look at herself in the rearview mirror and wipe away what she could with a tissue and the cold cream that she kept in her purse. Then she’d hold a clean tissue up to Claire and say, “Here. Get that junk off your face.”
“So how’ve you been?” Teresa asked. “How’s David?”
“Okay.”
“How’s school?”
“Fine.”
They saw a deer standing at the edge of the woods in the ditch. Teresa let her foot off the gas and they coasted past him.
“How are things with you?” asked Claire. She turned to her mother, who looked tired but pretty, her hair pulled into a braid the color of toast. “Have you lost weight?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Teresa said, and touched her face with one of her gloved hands. “Do I look like I have?”
“A little. It looks nice, Mom.”
Claire turned on the radio. Only one station came in, KAXE, out of Grand Rapids, where her mother had her show. Now it was the classical music hour, an explosion of flutes and violas and violins.
“Bruce is making dinner,” Teresa said loudly. “He’s making his mac and cheese.”
Claire switched the radio off. “Just tell me one thing. Is there even a reason that you had me come home?” She stared at Teresa, who concentrated on the road. “Because if there isn’t, I am going to be pissed.” She sat quietly, waiting for her mother to say something, but when she didn’t she added, “For your information, I have a life and I can’t be told to come home whenever you feel like I should.”
“I know you have a life,” Teresa said.
“I’m not a child anymore, you know.”
“You’re not a child, but you’re my child. You always will be. Both you and Josh.”
“That has nothing to do with what we’re talking about,” Claire said. She turned to Joshua behind her. “Did she tell you what was wrong?”
He stared at her for several moments and then clicked his CD player off.
“Did she tell you?” she asked him again.
“Are you pregnant, Mom?” Joshua asked, astonished.
“Claire! Stop, okay?” Teresa looked in the rearview mirror. “I’m not pregnant.” And then she said, her voice quiet, “I have some news. That’s all.”
“News?”
“What kind of news?” Joshua asked, but Teresa didn’t answer.
“Why are you torturing us like this?” Claire asked.
Their mother slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road and then put it in park but left the windshield wipers going.
Joshua asked, “Did something happen to Bruce?” He pushed his headphones off and let them hang around his neck.
“Bruce is fine.” She turned the ignition off and removed her gloves. “Everyone’s fine. It’s just …” She hesitated for several moments, then continued, as if talking not to them, but to herself. “It’s okay.”
“What’s okay?” Joshua asked savagely.
“Tell us!” demanded Claire, the tears rising in her eyes, more angry than sad, more frightened than angry. She believed that when her mother spoke again it would be like the moment in a fairy tale when a spell is broken and whatever had been horrible moments before was suddenly lifted and everyone was released from damnation.
But her mother didn’t speak. She put her hands on the steering wheel, as if she were going to start the car and drive away. The three of them gazed silently out the windshield for several moments, at the carcass of a dead raccoon, flattened on the road, fine tufts of its fur blowing in the wind.
“What is it, Mom?” Claire whispered gently, as if trying to persuade a child.
The engine began to tick—for several moments there was no other sound—and then it stopped ticking and, aside from the wind, it was silent altogether.
Teresa turned in her seat so she could see both of them and smiled. “My babies,” she crooned suddenly, and reached out to touch them.
Claire didn’t have time to think about it, what she did the moment she felt the weight of her mother’s hand. How she shifted, delicately, away.