THE SUNRISE AND ITS REFLECTION off the lake has shattered the morning into an infinity of bright shards. Coupled with the new snow on the shoreline and in the trees on the hill, the blinding glare feels as much like a prophecy of my future as it does the natural condition of a northern morning in February. Ingrid’s steering our trusty Honda up the highway, and even though we’re only five minutes out of Duluth, it already seems like we’ve crossed into another world. I feel different. Calmer. Entirely less needful.
She’s humming along to her favorite Willie Nelson song. Her fingers tap out the beat, her sunglasses keep her eyes from telling me what’s on her mind. I can’t stop looking at her, and though she knows I’m staring, she’s going to wait for me to say something. To divulge my big secret. Her aloofness isn’t a taunt. Not by a long shot. Rather, she’s being patient. And she’ll give me a chance to reconsider all that I think I must tell her.
My silence since we pulled out of our driveway fifteen minutes ago is borne not by reticence, but resolve. I want to tell her my whole and unvarnished story. Finally. But as soon as I think of something to say, a different thought prevails, and I find myself doubtful. As soon as I look back, I feel an urge to look ahead, and neither inclination is right. As a novelist, I’ve confronted these indecisions often. To solve them, it’s always merely been a question of willing them asunder. That’s not an option now. Not with Ingrid. She comprehends me better than anyone ever read a book.
“How does he spend his time?” she finally asks. “All day, every day, alone in that small cabin.”
“He fishes. He’s a serene, almost philosophical fisherman. He’s made catching those lakers an art form. Dollars to donuts he sends us packing with a dozen frozen fillets.” What I don’t say—what I couldn’t even if I wanted—is that he goes out on his boat and communes with the loss in his life. It’s what Ingrid will be forced to do someday soon, the difference being she’ll have our kids to keep her company. “He likes ice fishing best.”
“Well, some company will do him good.”
“His company will do me good, too.”
She nods, knowing my every motivation, understanding what I want before I do myself. Stopping at Noah’s isn’t just a chance to see my old pal and what memories he’s culled for me, but a way to get one more glimpse of an important place in my life.
“How long has it been since we visited?” she asks.
“Must be at least two or three months?”
“More like fourteen or fifteen, I’d bet. Wasn’t it the Christmas before last?”
“That can’t be.” Though of course it can. What passed in an hour in my youth takes only an instant now. When she doesn’t reply, I add, “He was happy to hear we’re coming by, anyway.”
She smiles, and drives through a curve on the highway, and I watch the expression on her face turn into one of conviction. “You know, there’s still lots to look forward to. That feels worth saying.”
Whether it’s her words or the mist in the gorge or the rising, blinding sun, I change the subject by asking something I’ve been wondering. “Do you think anticipation is the opposite of memory?”
She lowers her sunglasses on the bridge of her nose and regards me for a suspicious second. “Are you thinking about your book or your visit to Doctor Zheng’s yesterday?”
I look again out at the lake. “It’s the opposite, but it functions the same. Right? I’m only puzzling.”
She tilts her head. Another of her best qualities is her intelligence, and her willingness to indulge my ham-fisted notions. She pauses the CD player. Takes off her sunglasses and sets them on the console beneath the clock. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so. Not quite. Maybe we reflect on them similarly, but to anticipate something is abstract. To remember something is concrete.”
As soon as she says it, I can see she regrets it. Or at least I can see she’s worried she’s offended me. She hasn’t—how could she?—and I reach over to touch her shoulder. “I guess I’m just lost in thought,” I say, and press PLAY. Willie starts crooning again.
What I don’t say is that it seems I haven’t much use for either anymore.
My anticipation of ski jumping as a boy is not unlike looking back at it as a man. My prospects began as soon as I could translate thoughts into words. From the time I was three or four years old, most weekends I rode over to Theodore Wirth Park with Pops and Bett in our rusted-out Crestline. Bett and I would go sledding on the fairway of the tenth hole while Pops with a group of thirty or forty guys took their rides on the ski jump that rose from the hill beside the golf course. It was, for him, by then a mere recreation, but I could see in his aspect a reprieve from his daily toil, something akin to what he’d later describe, variously, as his ascension into heaven or his cavorting with angels.
And I knew enough to be venerate, and to desire—indeed require—of my own fledgling life a similar devoutness. So, when he asked me, one Friday night in the winter of 1968, as he tucked me into bed, whether I’d like to start ski jumping the next morning, I felt as if I’d received a blessing not from my father but from on high. I felt as I imagine a prince does when he learns of the throne.
I expected we’d drive over to Wirth and that he’d enroll me in Selmer’s class, but we didn’t do that. Nor would we until half of that winter had passed. Instead, we drove downtown and parked in front of Warner’s Hardware on Sixth Street. They had a sporting goods section in the back of the store, basketball hoops and hockey sticks and baseball bats and gloves, of course, but also a rack of skis, against which Pops had me stand, sizing me up against their inventory. He picked a pair of wooden Northlands, and a box of bindings, and we went to check out. To this day I can recall the cost (forty-two dollars), which for us might as well have been a thousand. I can still recall blanching, and worrying that the price would cause Pops to reconsider, and that we’d walk back out to the downtown streets empty-handed, but he only looked at me and pinched the money from his billfold and, in the same motion, rested his hand on my cheek for a moment and said it was time to zip home and get the bindings mounted before the day got away from us.
And we did, finishing in time for lunch, which was cheese sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and stuffed in brown paper bags brought with us as we trekked the few blocks over to Fruen’s Mill. Pops carried his skis and I carried mine. I wouldn’t have been happier if I had a sack of gold slung over my shoulder. Pops explained, as we walked, that he was going to teach me the basics himself, and then eventually he’d enroll me in Selmer Dahlson’s school at Wirth Park. I don’t know if it was a point of pride that I should learn from him first, or if there was something associated with the cost of things, or if there was some other reason I’ve never taken the time to imagine. But whatever the case, those first Saturday mornings with Pops were a time ripe with laughter and wipeouts and the first feel of air under my feet.
He shoveled snow into a pile in the middle of a slope heading down toward Bassett’s Creek, formed it into a little bump, packed the snow above and below by sidestepping the hill with his skis, and then set tracks in the makeshift inrun. Before I could go off the jump, I had to learn how to steer and stop on my new Northlands. We did this by riding down the hill starting beneath the bump. I was a quick study, and within an hour on that first Saturday I took my maiden jump.
One late afternoon, after hours on the bump, the cuffs of my trousers soaking wet, my shoulders, too, from carrying the skis back up the hill all day, we sat on the bright side of the creek bank and looked up at the mill, three or four stories high, letting the late-day sun warm our faces. “Someday you’ll go off jumps much taller than that building, Johannes,” Pops said.
“Taller than the jump at Wirth?” I asked, nervous.
“Five times taller, if you stick with it.” He packed a little snowball and lobbed it at me. “How does that sound?”
Of course it sounded frightening, but I’d never let on. “I can do it. I bet I can even go off the jump at Wirth right now.”
“You’re steady, but I’m not sure about that.”
His answer came as an enormous relief, and I remember saying, “Well, I like jumping here with you anyway.”
“This is our hill, eh?” He tossed another snowball, and this time I fired back.
As we walked home, each of us with our skis slung over our shoulders, our mittens stuffed into our back pockets, Pops said, “Now that you have the feel for things, I think we should get you started with Selmer. He’s eager to get you into the fold.”
Selmer was, even then, something like a kindly uncle. I liked him immensely, and the prospect of joining his club, even if it meant I’d soon have to face the big slide just a couple miles up the parkway, was one I cottoned to immediately. “Can we go over there now?” I said.
He put his arm around me. “Next week, boyo.”
He used to say, Pops did, that a habit in ski jumping, good or bad, took only ten jumps to form. But to correct a fault took a hundred. Whatever faults lie in my memory of that first morning with Selmer are there not by dint of ten tellings, or even a hundred or thousand. But none of those tellings make what I remember less true.
It was the first morning I ever remember waking before my father, and I went to the kitchen thinking that the sooner we ate breakfast, the sooner we could get out to the jumps. I found the bacon and the eggs and I made toast and buttered it and mixed the orange juice and had the fire under the skillet before Pops came ambling in. He looked at his wristwatch and asked me what I was doing.
“Making breakfast,” I said.
He looked at his watch again, his eyes adjusting to the light. “It’s four o’clock in the morning, bud.” He came over and put his arm around me. “When did you learn how to do this?”
“I’ve seen you do it,” I said.
“You’re off to a good start.”
And so together we finished cooking the bacon and the eggs and we put jam on the toast and a half hour later he was explaining that the job of cooking and eating breakfast wasn’t done until the dishes were, so we stood side by side at the kitchen sink and scrubbed and dried the plates and pans. Only after he told me to go brush my teeth and dress in the clothes he’d laid out the night before did he make a pot of coffee and light up his first smoke. I could smell it even down the hall in the room I shared with toddler Anton.
When I came back to the kitchen, ready to go, Pops was still standing over the sink, holding his coffee cup, tipping his ash into the dirty dishwater. “All set?” he asked.
“I put on my long johns and wool socks and my turtleneck, just like you said.”
He checked his watch yet again. “Well, I guess we better practice some telemarks before we head over there. We’ve still got a few hours.”
He ushered me into the living room, and asked me to show him my best landing, just like we’d been practicing at Fruen’s Mill. I hopped up, and slid my left foot in front of my right, threw my arms up, and bent at the knees, my right nearly touching the carpeted floor. Pops walked around me, gently lifting my arms an inch, nudging my chin up just a hair, straightening my fingers.
“Keep your head up, that’s the important thing. Don’t look down at your skis but out at the horizon. You drop your head, everything will follow and you’ll end up crashed into a knot on the ground.”
I lifted my head even more.
“Good. How about another one?”
We repeated this exercise many times, until we’d crossed the living room from the couch to the big wooden television set and back again. Whether those practice landings took five minutes or an hour, I couldn’t say. Nor does it matter. But for years, some seven or eight of them, almost all our Saturday winter mornings mimicked this first. At home I learned from the best ski jumper we’d ever know, his patience unending, his commitment to our development the same.
At Wirth Park, though, I’d learn from Selmer Dahlson. What can I say about him that might convey how fine he was? He was the gentlest person I’ve ever known, and that includes my sweet wife and children. Over sixty years he spent his winters coaching hundreds, if not thousands, of kids. And not just any old recreational skiers (though there were plenty of them, too), but many national champions and Olympians. He never took credit, except to say that he instilled in his pupils a love of the sport and snowy winter days. I know all this not because I learned it then, but because aside from Pops, he taught me more about life than anyone, and before he died, soon after Pops did, I spent a long Saturday afternoon talking with him. When I asked him if he remembered my first day, he said yes, an answer that startled me. But then, he said, he remembered all his jumpers.
We arrived a half-hour before things got started, so Pops left the car idling in the parking lot and uncapped a thermos of hot chocolate. He poured the cap full and handed it to me and sat back and rested his eyes. I can still see the jump across the snow-covered fairway, rising from the trees into a morning shrouded with diamond dust. Because Pops had told me a hundred times about the different jumps in the world, I knew that the one before me was relatively small. What he called a thirty-meter, which made it a third the size of an Olympic jump. I’d come to know jumps like that in the years that followed, but on that morning, despite having seen it countless times and knowing well its true stature, the jump at Wirth looked enormous. Part of the reason must have been its imminence, my knowing that I would someday soon be expected to go off it. But I also like to think that the jump more generally represented what my life was going to look like from now on.
“When do I get to go off the big one?” I asked.
His brows arched, but he didn’t open his eyes. “It’ll be a little while.”
“I want to do it today.”
He smiled, sleepily. “You’d be the first seven-year-old kid to go off it on his first day.”
I looked up at the jump again. “I can do it.”
Now he opened his eyes and let his head loll over to look at me. “Someday, bud. I’m sure of that.” He put his head back and closed his eyes again. “But let’s take it one step at a time.”
After I finished the cocoa, after the half-hour passed and Pops hustled me across the parking lot and into the golf course clubhouse, the first of those steps took place in the locker room. Selmer was there waiting, and though he regularly joshed with me about why I wasn’t already in his fold, he treated me on that occasion like an unfamiliar recruit and Pops like someone who’d never seen a ski in his life.
The first exercise, after he explained fundamentals that were already ingrained in me, was to lean my hands against the lockers, jump, and land in a telemark. I remember it seemed strange—and elementary—that I should be asked to participate in such a remedial activity. But I did as instructed. Once, twice, six times, ten times, Selmer said, “Telemark, resume! Telemark, resume!” and with each effort he seemed more and more pleased.
“Good. Yes,” he said. “Now Jon, I want you to climb up here.” He patted the bench on which I’d sat to lace up my boots. “We’re going to practice jumping from here and landing in a telemark.”
When I hesitated, he patted the bench again. “The reason we’re practicing so many landings is because it’s the most important part of the jump. In order to go up and take another, you have to end the last one safe and sound. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Today we’ll go to the ravine and practice on a hill back there. The jump is only about a foot high, less even than this bench.”
He must have intuited my fear, because he came and stood in front of me and offered both of his hands. For the love of life, I can still see the weather in his eyes. I can still see, beneath the winter wind and snow, the kindness I’ve already mentioned. But also a resolve I knew I’d have to learn. In that instant I hadn’t learned it yet, because Pops had always had it for me. So I turned from Selmer’s encouraging gaze to my father, who leaned against a wall of lockers across the room smoking a cigarette, and I said, “I can’t do it!”
Pops pinched off his smoke and put it in the pocket of his flannel shirt and said, “What do you mean you can’t do it? Of course you can do it.” He took a step toward us, but Selmer raised a hand to stop him, then turned to look at me.
“Someday,” Selmer said, “you’ll be standing atop a big jump. It’ll be windy and icy and you can bet your last candy bar you’ll be scared. You’ll have rights to be. But now’s not one of those times.” He lowered his hands to his hips, thought for a moment, and continued. “I bet you sleep on a bed, eh?”
I nodded.
“I bet you and your little brother goof off and play together sometimes?”
I nodded again.
“I bet sometimes you climb up on your bed while you’re goofing around, and I bet you jump off it, too.” Now he didn’t even wait for me to nod. “That’s all this is. Like jumping off your bed, but with purpose. We’ll know more about your balance and courage after you do, so you can see why it’s important.” He put his hands up. “Grab hold of me if you need to.”
It’s not too much to say that even still I can feel my feet hitting that concrete floor. I can feel the bend in my knees. I can feel my arms thrown wide and my neck taut as I stuck my chin out. And I can remember my smile as sure as any of it, like it was the first telemark I ever put down, not the thousandth.
Selmer stood back and put his hands on his hips. “You land like that on the hill, and you’ll be a champion someday. Try that again.”
I count it as my first accomplishment, and remember it like my best jumps—leaps of 350 feet and more. The rest of that first day is blurry. If I thought that being on skis was a birthright, it turns out I was wrong. I remember the sensation when I first clipped my Northlands back in the ravine, and of moving around like a newborn foal, tips crossing, knees knocking, and elbows digging into the packed snow, as if I hadn’t been steady as an old Birkebeiner for weeks already. But Selmer was patient, and he helped me up every time. He got me focused on the hill in front of me. He encouraged me to laugh. By the end of that day, I took my first ride off the bump he’d built in the ravine on what I’d later learn was the seventeenth fairway, and though I have little recollection of the leap itself, I know my conversion was then complete.
Anton, a few years later, would require no conversion at all. Nor did he need any pep talks or cajoling. He never hesitated, not under Pops’s instruction and not under Selmer’s. From the first jump he took, until the last I ever saw, he performed audaciously. Fearless and even sometimes reckless, true, but also as if he were chosen. As if he required that sport to fully walk among us. He’d been a quiet, unassuming toddler. Sullen and irascible and envious of me and the time I spent with Pops at the jumps. But as soon as he joined our Saturday morning crew, as soon as his Tuesday and Thursday nights were beholden to the shadowy and ill-tempered lights lining the landing hill, he became a boy reborn. Those days and nights ushered in the golden age of our childhood.
Anton was five years old the first morning Pops brought him to Selmer’s class, and as soon as he slid his boots into bindings, his ascendancy was preordained. By then, my rides came on the thirty-meter jump, and Selmer had cleared a lane of trees from the hillside adjacent to the big slide for a new ten-meter, so I got to watch Anton’s progress one jump at a time. As quickly as he learned, Pops and Selmer designated him a special case, and when Anton vowed he would be the first five-year-old to ride the big hill, they smirked and shrugged but didn’t rule out the possibility.
That season—the winter of 1970–71—began after a Thanksgiving weekend blizzard, and by the end of January Anton’s prophecy seemed likely. He was already outclassing kids twice his age on the ten-meter. He was strong and steady and his telemark landing, less than two months into his career, was legendary. Selmer’s theory ran that the sooner a kid went off the big hill, the sooner they’d be hooked forever. In this he was rarely mistaken. I’d gone off it as an eight-year-old (only after plenty of convincing) and as soon as I’d felt the rush of it, you’d have had to break my legs or my skis to keep me away. But the thought of Anton flying off the thirty-meter, at three-and-a-half feet tall and thirty-five pounds, gave even the ever-uncautious Selmer pause.
Anton, despite his diminutiveness, would not be overawed. Every Saturday afternoon, once we’d returned home and had our lunch and found ourselves parked around the kitchen table with Pops nursing a beer and Anton and I our chocolate milks, the day would turn to evening while we replayed the morning just passed. Anton insisted on his readiness. He’d perform his nigh-perfect inrun and telemark positions on the kitchen floor, and beseech Pops to let him go off the thirty-meter. When Pops balked, Anton would grow even more emphatic and confident.
For weeks they bantered about it, and for weeks Anton went to bed without the satisfaction of Pops’s word. But that changed on the first Tuesday night in February. Every other week, Selmer arranged a club competition on both hills. In those days, thirty jumpers would have showed up for each hill—kids as young as Anton, men older even than Pops—and challenged each other for club rankings. Selmer would set up a registration table in the great room on the second floor of the clubhouse. At six o’clock, we’d show up at Wirth and head for the jumps while Pops went in to sign us up for the competition. That night, when he came back out to the jumps, he handed us our bibs.
Anton took his and slid it over his sweater.
“Uh, oh, doofus,” I said. It was snowing—it was always snowing—and the jumps were haloed in the falling snow glittering in the tower lights.
“What?” he said.
“You’re number fifty-one.”
“So?”
I checked that Pops’s attention had turned to one of the other dads. “That’s the first jumper on the big hill, shit for brains,” I whispered.
The realization came down on him like snow on the treetops. His face twisted into a wicked smile that wavered between braggadocious and beknighted. “That means—”
“It means it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Come on.”
It had been my intention to usher him to the top. To be his wingman. But before he could follow me, Pops asked for a word with him, waving me on ahead.
So I trudged up the jump, nervous for my brother and, if I’m being honest, certain a new dawn was upon our family. By the time I reached the top of the jump, Anton had reached the bottom, and rather than stepping into my bindings I decided to wait for him.
From the top, one could see the downtown Minneapolis skyline lit up. Even on that snowy night, it presided over the horizon, a strobing and distant shine filtered by the snow. I loved that view of the city, felt more akin with where I lived because I got to see it so often. Off the back of the scaffold, the oak and elm trees rose to the height of the jump, cocooning it in the clack of bare branches and stubborn, papery leaves still clinging to the boughs. And us jumpers, we were a bunch of birds up there.
Three, four, five jumpers went as I waited, the snow shooting up behind them like the wake of a speedboat. When I looked down the stairs, I saw Dave Dove, one of the other dads who had been shoveling the steps clear of snow, carrying Anton’s skis. When they reached the top, Dave set Anton’s skis down and said, “You owe me a six-pack, Anton,” to which Anton guffawed and said, “Okay, Mr. Dove!”
Dave pulled a smoke out of his shirt pocket and lit it up and leaned against the railing at the top of the stairs. “I’m going to stay up here and watch,” he said. “Get your little ass in line.”
“You want to go before me, or after?” I asked.
“Before,” he said, setting his skis down as the answer escaped his mouth.
“You want any advice?” I offered.
He only shook his head.
The few jumpers ahead of us took their turns and finally Anton stood ready. By then, Pops and Selmer had both made it to the knoll, peering up through the night and the snow. It would become—that collection and placement of us all—the very definition of my childhood, but on that night it seemed as much a coronation as a Tuesday night at the jumps. Like now, finally, what had begun in Chicago some sixteen years earlier and been continued that day I was too afraid to jump off the locker room bench without Selmer’s encouragement, like all of that had finally found its purpose.
Anton raised his hand and shouted, “Clear?”
Pops looked down the landing hill, then back up at the top of the jump, and dropped his hand.
Go, I thought, but before the thought was finished Anton kicked into the tracks. Surely what followed him down the inrun was the snow blown up out of the tracks and not some celestial contrail of stardust and heavenly spirit. What attended his leap was not the ringing of bells but only my own lips pierced in a whistle. Dave Dove flicked his cigarette over the railing and winked at me as he slung the shovel over his shoulder. “Hot damn,” he said. “Maybe I should buy him a six-pack.”
If I close my eyes tight enough, I can still see that little boy piercing the air off the takeoff, can still see his hands clutching his sides, not flailing around like most kids on their first rides, can still see the snow kicking up off the top of the landing hill as he stuck his telemark. And I can still see Pops and Selmer, nodding their heads—in what? Admiration? Astonishment? Of course, both of those. But also something more, something special. They believed it then, and they weren’t wrong. Anton would become, ten years later, fifteen years later, the very best jumper ever to come out of that program, never mind the Olympians and national champions on the same shortlist of contenders for that honor.
But on that first night, Anton’s leap was merely the beginning of five perfect years. Hundreds of days and nights. Thousands of jumps, almost all of them in each other’s company, with Pops standing on the knoll, a witness to it all. At the end of each season, in some American Legion or another, the trophies lined a table under the dais, like the heads of so many ski jumpers atop the jump at Wirth. They were our awards for the season past—for the Saturdays and Tuesday night competitions, the Golden Skis and Silver Skis and Evergreen, and the memorial tournaments for the previous club greats—and Anton won more of them than anyone. Pops built shelves in his bedroom, but by the time Anton turned ten, those shelves nearly rent from the wall, so full were they.
We were on our way, Pops always said. And he wasn’t wrong. But more than that, the three of us were as happy as we’d ever be together.
We were less happy in the few years before Anton began his reign. On the Saturday I began my career at Wirth, a seven-year-old afraid of his own shadow, after we said grace at dinner, Pops replayed for all of us what had transpired that day. He recounted the entire morning and reserved special attention to my crying and insisting I couldn’t jump from the bench. But he was teasing and sweet and delighted in a way I’d not seen him before. He’d often tell me, later in life during those nighttime phone calls, that for all he had accomplished in the sport himself, it was the joy and success of his sons that delivered his greatest prize. I still believe him.
If he viewed that night as though I were a prince ascending my throne, as I did myself, Bett must have seen it as a kind of palace coup. Probably I’ve conflated what happened that season into a single evening, but as sure as I began the day at Selmer’s program, she began, that night, what would be a lifelong withdrawal. And as sure as I cried that I couldn’t fall off the locker room bench into a telemark landing earlier that morning, she spent that evening around the kitchen table in stoic, befuddling silence, eventually making her way into the darkness of her bedroom with only the quiet and door between us, weeping herself to sleep.
There were plenty of nights like that that season, and to this day I don’t understand what happened. Though it’s true she’d never been especially kindly or affectionate, we’d always depended on her the way children should. She got us ready for church on Sundays, she made sure I got home from school each afternoon and to bed each night before she left for her shift at North Memorial hospital, where she was an admissions clerk. She’d take me to Glenwood Lake to swim on hot summer days and to see the Christmas show at Dayton’s each December. But aside from the kiss she gave my forehead each night as she tucked me into bed, I don’t recall a single instance of affection from her, and never once in my childhood did she tell me she loved me. In fact, she never said it at all. If, as Pops always insisted, that love was implied in her devotion, then that season she abandoned even the pretense, at least with me.
How does a child know they’re unloved? How might I describe my mother’s evanescence? Those tearful nights behind her bedroom door accumulated with shocking speed. By the time ABC started broadcasting the Olympics that February, we hardly ever saw her except when she came out to refill her coffee cup or from our bedroom window as she backed the car out of the driveway, on her way to the hospital. Anton, only two years old that winter, was already asking Pops questions. But with Bett he seemed able to recognize, or could at least intuit, that she needed his silence to survive the worst of her spells. While Pops and I watched Peggy Fleming or Jean-Claude Killy or, on the best night, the local ski jumpers John Balfanz and Jay Martin in Grenoble, France, on the TV, Anton went into the maw of our parents’ bedroom and somehow consoled Bett enough, until he fell asleep, that she was able to limp off to work each night.
And each night, before Pops put me to bed, he’d go in and fetch my sleeping brother. He’d carry Anton down the hallway and lay him in the bed next to mine and make sure he was tucked in and still sleeping before coming back to the living room, where we’d watch the ten o’clock news, just the two of us, me under his arm like I’d freeze to death without him. He wouldn’t talk about Bett, but I knew his affection was as much an acknowledgment of her lack as it was his own tenderness. As often as not, he’d carry me to bed next, and in the morning wake me and feed me oatmeal and orange juice and, when Bett got home from her shift, her eyes sunken and blank, her touch the cold my father’s embrace protected me from the night before, he’d bundle me up and set me in the Radio Flyer sleigh and pull me to John Hay Elementary School, where he was a custodian. When we got there, he’d crank up the furnaces and set me to sleep on a cot he’d arranged between two asbestos-covered boilers, and I’d doze for an hour while he made his rounds before the students arrived.
Those hours were then, as they remain now, dreamlike. The snow on the walk, the vapors in the boiler room, Bett’s lingering rejection, my own exhaustion—all of it compelled in me a wistfulness that to this day I can’t quite shake.
Ingrid would say it’s this very quality of heart that has pulled me from the bed early each morning for the past twenty years to write my books. She would say it’s the same quality that has made me a fine father. She’s no doubt at least partly right. Back in the winter of 1968, I learned not only to ski jump but to care for and worry about my brother, to revere my father and his tenderness, to dread Bett and her dark moods. These lessons were hard won and have reverberated in my life in every way, not least artistically. But more than any of these, the most enduring fact of that year is that I learned to long for something better, something happier.
“It’s a far view across the lake. But is it that long?”
I look at Ingrid, blink away the cobwebs in my eyes.
“I haven’t seen that gaze in a long time. Are you all right?” she asks.
She’s taken the scenic route to Two Harbors and we’re almost there, tunneling through the dense evergreens on either side of the road.
I blink again. “Was I sleeping?”
“Dreaming, maybe. Working, maybe. But not sleeping.”
How is it possible she knows me this well? I smile.
“Well, which was it?”
“What’s the difference?” I smile again, and she reaches for my hand and gives it a squeeze.
“Do you think you’ll try again, Jon? With The Ski Jumpers?”
“Funny you mention it. I was just thinking about it.”
“Thinking about the book or about some old trouble you and Noah got into?”
“I must have told you about the day I started? At Wirth Park?”
“How you wouldn’t jump off the chair? Only fifty times.”
We pass the car dealership and merge with the expressway that also connects Duluth and Two Harbors. There’s more snow up here than in the city, and all the gas stations and fast food places have piles of it plowed into mounds surrounding the parking lots. Everything is sharp and dazzling, even under the dull sky. Ingrid pulls up to the stoplight on the west end of town.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she says.
Now I reach over and take her hand, and as soon as the warmth of her skin courses through my fingers and into my blood I remember something long forgotten. I may even be thinking about it for the first time in my life.
“Do you know that that same year, when I was seven, Bett returned to Chicago for a few days?”
“I thought she hardly left the house, much less the neighborhood, never mind the city.”
“All of that’s true. But I’m certain of it. We took her to the Greyhound station. I can see her waving goodbye from the bus window. I can see the hat she wore.” I take my hand from Ingrid’s and press my thumbs to my eyes. “In fact, I can see the Christmas wreaths hanging from lampposts on the street. It must have been sometime around the holidays.”
“Do you remember why she went?”
I sigh.
“Did it have something to do with her sister?”
“It must have. That was the winter everything changed. I mean really changed.”
She glances at me and then grips the steering wheel more firmly as she passes through town. “Is this all part of what you wanted to talk to me about?” If she had been teasing about it before we left, I now sense apprehension in her voice.
“No,” I say, but then close my eyes and look back again. “Well, not exactly.”
“Have you been thinking of Bett?”
“Only sort of. I was thinking about when I started ski jumping. That whole winter. And how she changed. Pops, too. I only just now remembered her going to Chicago.” Again I press my thumbs against my eyes. “Do you think I could be mistaken? Is it already happening?”
“No, Jon. Doctor Zheng said it would come on gradually.”
“What if she’s mistaken?”
“I don’t think she is.”
“Or maybe I’ve been wired all wrong my whole goddamned life. Maybe that’s the problem.”
Ingrid pulls onto the shoulder of the highway just after the last stoplight in town. She puts the car into park and takes her sunglasses off and sets them on the dash. She swivels to face me and takes my hand. “It’s okay, sweetheart. We all forget things. Or misremember them. You know that. It’s no sign at all. It’s just regular life.”
It sounds like pleading. Not to me or even for me, but for a sense of normalcy that we won’t have much longer.
“You’re right,” I say, then clear my throat and say it again, my gaze fixed on the lake.
Now she cups my chin and turns my head to face her, demanding my attention. “I’m right here, Jon. And I will be. No matter what.”
“I know that.”
“I’ll help you remember. I’ll help you keep track.”
I lift my chin from her soft hand and turn back to the lake. “This is why I want to tell you things. In case I forget them. For when I do.”
“I’m listening.”
“I can’t even imagine where to begin. There’s so much to say.”
“What about Bett? What about that year she went back to Chicago?”
“Bett. Yes. I can start with her.” I wipe a tear from my eye. “In order to understand Bett, you need to understand about Lena. And me and Anton the night of Pops’s funeral.”
She nods. “It’s about an hour to Misquah.”
“Okay,” I say.
She puts her sunglasses back on, shifts the car in gear, looks over her shoulder, and pulls back onto the highway. She drives for another five minutes before she says, “I understand your stories rarely go in a straight line. And I think I understand how whatever’s on your mind is gnawing at you. But we’ve never kept things from each other.”
As we speed into the tunnel at Zhooniyaa Cliff, she risks a glance in my direction.
“You’re right, love. About my stories. Both the ones I write and the ones we’ve lived together. I’m not great with chronology. But you’re wrong about keeping things from each other. We’re both guilty of that.”
I’ve kept my eyes on the road in front of us, but when we get to the end of the tunnel I risk a look at her.
“I guess this is what you meant by secrets?” she says.