SECRETS, LIES—maybe those are the wrong words. What prevails between Ingrid and me might be better described as faithlessness. Not because we’ve withheld from or denied each other, but because we’ve believed our silence protected the other, or our children, or our ideas of ourselves.
Everything that happened with Pops and Anton and Bett and Sheb, though? That was unfaithfulness. It was disloyalty. Betrayal. And that night in Anton’s office at the bar, after I jotted those words in my notebook—after I jotted that all ski jumpers were liars, and that Pops was the best of them—I felt the shame pass over me like a stiff headwind. And what a complicated shame it was. I felt it because of who we were. And because my first impulse was to use Bett’s illness as fodder, and because my own complicity in our family mythology was so depraved, and so grave, I put the notebook back in my pocket and let myself cry. They were the first tears I’d shed for my kin since I was eighteen years old, when I walked out on them and into a city night rotten and without prospects.
What was worse is that even with the truth excoriating me (and in the shabbiness and tightness of that cinderblock room, no less) I wanted to get even with my brother. I wanted to punish him for being wiser than I was. I wanted to abandon Bett all over again, to hate her with a new and more righteous zeal. Instead of conjuring Pops’s gentle voice urging patience and forgiveness or consoling myself with the memory of my own wife and children, safe and adoring and loving at home in Duluth, as I should have, I listened instead to the kick drum and electric guitar of another song pounding through Boff’s and completed that minute’s metamorphosis from opportunist to sad sack to foe. And because I’m being honest, I felt, after Anton’s big reveal about Bett, as I stood and wiped my face with the sleeve of my shirt, that I had to hold serve against my brother. I had to match him grievance for grievance, secret for secret, wound for wound. With my bile churning, I pushed open the door into the bar, intent on vengeance. Thinking of it even now quickens my heart.
But as soon as I entered the barroom, I recoiled. The music was quieter than it had seemed coming through the walls. Or perhaps it was muted by the crowd. There were dozens of customers. Perhaps fifty people, many of them men as old as Sheb, elbows-up and chins-down on the bar. Phil Johnson was still there with a table set between a pull-tab booth and a vending machine across the room. He held a package of wrapped meat like a carnival barker, his audience of two younger men and one of the dancers apparently enthralled by his eccentricity.
The four-sided bar had two keeps. The first sucked on a toothpick as he limped from one beer cooler to the next. The other was an older woman with a microphone hung around her neck like an Olympic medal. A couple of televisions broadcast a west coast Timberwolves game. Along one side of the bar, two brass poles rose from the dancers’ stage. Up on that stage, a woman scrolled through something on her phone in one hand and held a drink with the other, sucking it down through a bouquet of straws. Another woman sauntered down the stairs at the near end of the stage, stuffing dollar bills into a sequined purse and asking the bartender to make her a vodka and soda. The music stopped suddenly at the same moment the bartender put the microphone to her throat and said, “Anton already ordered you one, hon,” and she held up a drink sitting on the end of the bar. Those words, spoken through her throat and amplified by the microphone, sounded like an automated voice on the telephone.
“Where is he?” the dancer asked, pulling the straps of a flimsy dress back over her slight shoulders.
Again, the bartender put the microphone to her throat and said, “Playing pool.” She nodded with the microphone across the room. I glanced where she pointed and saw a whole new part of the bar through an archway and down a few steps.
It smelled of cleaning solvent and pizza cooking in a toaster oven and perfume, which I soon realized was worn by one of the women from Sheb’s barge office, who tapped me on the elbow. “That’s Barb. She had her larynx removed a couple years ago. Cancer.”
“Barb,” I said stupidly.
“She—” Some country music melody came on, and with it the voices in the bar, which had quieted to whispers in the intermission between songs, rose again. The woman standing next to me leaned closer. “She’s worked here for more than twenty years.”
I nodded, and looked at my informant with a sideways glance.
“You forgot my name,” she said matter of factly. “It’s Kristi. Well, actually, it’s Missy but you have to call me Kristi here.” She loosened the fur collar around her neck. “Chloe’s not Chloe but Britt. Britney. Same rule though.”
Up on the stage, the dancer set down her drink and her phone and started to sashay.
Kristi said, “That’s Rose, but really Allison. She plays the worst music.”
“I’m getting quite an education.”
Now she unbuttoned her jacket altogether. “You’re not like your brother, then?”
“Like him how?”
She looked at me seriously for a long moment. “Never mind.”
“We’re more alike than either of us knows,” I said.
“He told us you were coming. Sorry about your dad, by the way. He was a real sweet man.”
“My dad? You knew him?”
“He’d come in sometimes during the afternoon and have a pizza with Anton. Just lunch though, nothing pervy. He wouldn’t even look at us.”
Now I turned to face her. “Really?”
“Really what? Yes, he came in sometimes. No, he was not a perv.”
“I’d be surprised to hear otherwise.”
“He was an exception. Look around this place.”
I did as told. The bar was full of men my age or older, most of their attention flitting between the drink in front of them and the dancer on the stage.
“A bunch of fucking creeps,” she said. “Believe me.”
“It’s not hard to imagine.”
“You should write a book about this place. Your brother could tell you stories.”
“I’m sure he could. If I got him drunk enough.”
“Anton doesn’t get drunk,” she said.
“Anything else I should know about him?”
She turned and looked toward the pool room. “Your brother’s a decent guy. He’s fun. He’s my boss.”
“Gotcha.”
“And I can tell you guys are, like, rivals or something.”
“Because of what he said about my coming here?”
“Because I can tell when men don’t understand each other.”
I must have looked surprised.
“You should go play pool with him. I’ll order some drinks. What do you want?”
“Sounds like he’d rather not play pool with me.”
“Don’t be stupid.” She stepped to the bar in two graceful strides. “Go. I’ll bring drinks.”
He was sitting on a barstool in the far corner of the room, his face tucked into his shoulder, his hands up at his nose, taking another blow. The other woman from Sheb’s barge office had her hand on his knee. There were three pool tables in the room, all spoken for, and another twenty patrons, including a streak of six or eight paunchy men in black leather vests emblazoned with the white tiger-claw patches of their motorcycle gang presiding over a pinball machine outside the men’s room. The faint antiseptic stink of the main barroom was more pronounced in here, even with the red door of the main entrance swinging open every few minutes for the smokers to step in or out.
Anton rubbed his nose and watched his opposition aim his cue at the seven ball. Chloe leaned in and whispered something and Anton’s gaze and smile rose at the same time, up over the guy taking aim and straight at me instead. That smile was so disarming. Anton had always been able to summon in me a big-brotherly instinct, one that offered help or sympathy or protection without knowing why. In that instant, from across the pool room, Anton shrugged his shoulders as if to say, What do I need? Like he was asking for all three.
We met on my side of the table, where he looked at me with yet another expression, one that suggested he’d be patient, maybe even that he understood he’d struck a blow he regretted. Before I said anything, Kristi appeared at my elbow, the waitress trailing her with a tray of drinks.
“Did you order all this?” he asked me.
“I did,” Kristi said. “I’ll pay.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Anton said, pulling from his pocket his roll of cash. He paid with a hundred-dollar bill and told her to keep the change.
He handed Chloe and Kristi a shot, then took one for me and one for himself and raised his glass. “To Pops,” he said, “and to my brother, who I love.”
“I love him, too!” Chloe slurred.
“For real, Chloe,” Anton said, then clinked my glass. To me he said, “Cheers.”
We drank our whiskey and set the glasses down.
“It’s my shot,” he said, cocking his head and examining the pool table. He bent over, aimed for the twelve ball, and missed. The guy playing against him (who I now understood was with the bikers) made three shots in a row, including the eight ball. Anton pulled the wad of cash out again and peeled off another hundred-dollar bill and paid his lost wager. “Easy come, easy go,” he said to me.
Kristi and Chloe huddled by the pinball machine, and Anton and I crossed back to the high top, where he picked up his bottle of beer and took a long pull.
“Are you and Chloe together?” I asked.
“Not really. I mean, we hang out, but she’s not exactly the kind of girl you’d bring home to Ma.”
“Does Angel know her?”
“Fuck no.”
“Does Chloe work here?”
“She used to.”
“You seeing anyone else?”
“Running this place means I have, like, fifty girlfriends.”
“Are you complaining?”
“It also means I have fifty kids. Most of them drive me out of my mind.”
Now Chloe walked out the red door, Kristi on her heels, lighting cigarettes before they hit the cold outside.
“You look at her any harder and you’re gonna have to confess to Ingrid,” Anton said.
“I mean, it’s like being in a strange country for me.”
“It’s your home country, brother. You can’t be a tourist here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This is where you grew up. Your people run this place. Sheb runs this whole end of town. I run this bar. That’s all I mean.”
I glanced toward the door again. “She said Pops used to come in and have lunch with you here.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t know why that surprises me.”
“Probably because you’re a sanctimonious prick.”
I looked around the pool room again. The guy who had just beat Anton was chalking his cue and waiting for the balls to be racked again. Behind him, through the arch into the main room, I thought I could sense the mood rising. People moved about, the general din quavering as the music was getting louder and the lights grew dimmer, even as they flashed more.
“He liked to come in and watch the Twins. Day games,” Anton said. “We’d have a pizza and a couple beers. The dancers would play songs he liked. I don’t know that he ever even peeked at a woman on stage.
“A lot of the guys who come in here are like that. Lonely. Middle-aged or even older. They just want a finger of whiskey and to sit in a dark bar. Most of the girls, they leave those guys alone. Their radar for who’s game and who’s not is supernatural. Pops, well, not only was he my old man, but he was the least game of anyone who ever stepped foot in here.” He paused, got a faraway look in his eyes, finished his beer, and continued. “This might be hard for you to believe, but he had some pride in me.”
I sat up to protest, but Anton put his hand up.
“You don’t have to get defensive about it. I’m just remembering him, all right?” He held the empty beer to the light. “He and Sheb have been running together their whole lives. He’s seen just about everything Sheb’s seen, and I think he kind of liked to be in the muck. For sure he lived vicariously through him. And through me, for that matter. It was hard to do that at the house, or in Sheb’s sleazy fucking office. But here?” he gestured at his domain. “Here he got a good dose of it. Like I said, he had some pride in me and this place.”
“I was going to say I know that’s true.”
Anton looked again at his empty beer bottle, set it on the table and took up mine instead. Without asking for permission, he took a drink. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”
The word was like a hammer blow, and we looked at each other, startled.
“Fuck,” he said. “When was the last time you talked to him?”
“We actually talked a lot. He’d call me at night, after Bett went to bed. Sometimes the calls would go on for hours.”
Anton smiled.
“Is Bett going to be all right?”
“Since when do you give a shit about Bett?”
“Come on, man. Who’s being judgmental now?”
“It’s a real question.”
It was my turn to take a pull off the beer. “I know how he took care of her, that’s why I ask. Who’s gonna do that now?”
“Ma will be all right. She’s as tough as oak bark.”
“She can shovel her own walk?”
“I’ll shovel her walk.”
“Tomorrow you will, but what about the hundred other snowy days?”
“Those, too, Jon.”
In a lull between songs, I looked into the main room. There was a shout, and another, and the bouncer sitting on the threshold between the two rooms stood and hurried in the direction of the pull-tab counter. Anton was quick to follow, leaving me alone at the table in the corner with the biker gang still shooting pool. I had no instinct to see what was happening, and the truth is I might have hailed an Uber and gone to get my car at Bett’s if Chloe and Kristi hadn’t come back just then. Chloe went straight for the women’s room, and Kristi sat at our table.
“It’s never gonna stop snowing,” she said as a shiver rippled through her shoulders. She loosened her fur collar. “What’s going on in there?”
“I don’t even care to know,” I said. “I was just about to leave.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
She appeared bashful, and picked up one of the empty shot glasses. “You want another drink?”
“I almost never drink this much,” I said.
“Me neither. And I’m not a coke head like Chloe, either. And I smoke only when I’m here.”
Anton ducked back into the pool room and tapped one of the guys in the biker gang on the shoulder. The two of them left again as quick as Anton had gotten his attention.
“Is there trouble?” I asked.
“Who knows?”
I leaned across the table and spoke softly. “What’s with the biker guys in the middle of winter?”
“They’re not actually bikers,” she said, “but some churchy group. The tiger on the back of their vests and jackets represents the wild beast that used to be inside them.”
“You’re joking?”
“Look closely. You can see the crown of thorns on the tiger’s head.”
One of the gang ambled around the table and bent over to take a shot, giving me a clear view of the patch on his shoulder. There were the same spread tiger claws but also the crown of thorns she’d mentioned, along with the word INRI woven into the design. After he took his shot, he walked back around the table for a follow-up.
“He’s a very strange man,” she whispered, so close I could smell the cigarette smoke on her hair. “His name is Lincoln Schmidt. Linc, everyone calls him. He used to be a pro bicycle racer, but he broke his hip and got addicted to something. Thirty years later, he found Jesus, and here he is playing nine-ball at Boff’s, drinking soda water and lime.”
“You know an awful lot about him,” I said.
“I’m a good listener,” she said. “And I’ve heard his story many times.”
I watched them take a couple more shots, trading misses and cussing each other out, and turned back to Kristi. “So, you work here? Or . . .”
“Yep.”
“And all that bullshit over at Sheb’s office?”
“Chloe asked Sheb if she could be one of the girls. I think she wanted to make your brother jealous.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“She’s sweet, but she’s got her problems.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How’d you end up at Sheb’s office?”
She looked away.
“I’m an asshole. Sorry.”
“It’s a fair question. I wonder myself.”
“It’s none of my business.”
She looked back at me, her expression exuding poise. “You’re right about that. But it’s no big deal.” She caught the waitress’s attention and flagged her over. “Hey, Kristen. What’s going on over there?”
“Some asshole getting grabby with Laquisha. He was thrown out the back door.”
“Was it that prick with the sunglasses?”
“Funny how they’re always the same motherfuckers. Anyway, you want a drink, baby?”
“Can I have a Maker’s?”
“Rocks? Water back?”
“Yep.” She tapped my hand. “What do you want?”
“I’ll have the same.”
We watched the waitress head back to the bar. When she disappeared around the corner, Kristi said, “I need the money.”
“I get it.”
“For the record, I’m not some whore. I don’t go for that. No way.”
“You said Chloe has her problems. What about you?” I said.
“I have a long list of them.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just making conversation. It’s been a long damn time since I talked to a woman in a bar.”
“Now I’m a woman in a bar?”
“See what I mean? I’m just a babbling idiot. You don’t have to babysit me.”
“My mom, she’s the main one. I spend most of my money taking care of her. She lives with me, too, which isn’t great. Plus, I’m trying to save for school. I have only three classes left.”
“What do you study? Where?”
“It’s super geeky. Promise you won’t laugh?”
“Why would I laugh?”
“I’m an accounting major. At the U.”
“How’s that geeky?”
“Credits and debits, profit and loss, ledgers and calculators, insolvency, bankruptcy.” She looked at me deadpan. “It’s not exactly strippers and cocaine.”
I must have blushed, because she was quick to add, “I mean, I actually wear tortoise shell glasses. I spend my free time at the library. I read your book, famous author guy.”
“I won’t hold that against you.”
“That I read your book?”
“That you called me famous author guy.”
“From Anton’s lips to my ears.” She glanced at me, then down at the empty shot glasses and beer bottles. “Cheesy. Sorry.” She moved all the empties to one side of the table. “What’s up with that, though? I mean the deflecting.”
“My brother and I don’t understand each other very well. He’s got an idea about what I do that’s far from reality. I guess it embarrasses me. And I guess I wish he respected me more.”
“Do you respect him?”
“I hardly even know him.”
This was an admission years in the making. But in that corner of his bar, with the religious bikers playing billiards and the naked women in the next room, and the next round of drinks on the way, I couldn’t stop talking. “But I definitely respect him. And of course I love him, even if he hates me.”
“I thought we covered this. Your brother doesn’t hate you.”
I wished the waitress would come back with our drinks, or that Anton would reemerge from whatever fracas he was dusting up, anything so we could change the subject. But nothing and no one came to rescue me, and we sat in the silence I couldn’t think how to break until Kristi said, “I know how fucked up families can be. My mom, despite the fact she couldn’t exist without the help I give her, resents me every day. Like, she relishes it.”
“Why?”
“There’s no answer to that question. Or at least not an easy one. It would take a whole novel to describe.” She smirked. “You have kids?”
“I do. Three of them. We’re all good.”
Now she looked away as though suddenly at a loss for words.
“I mean, I think we’re all good.”
Without raising her eyes to meet mine, she said, “I can’t imagine you’re not.”
“They’re about your age, I’d guess.”
Now she did look at me. “How old do you think I am?”
“What, twenty-two? Twenty-three?”
“Good guess.”
“Do you have kids? Is that an indelicate question?”
The waitress hurried down the steps, maneuvered around the pool players, and came to our table in the corner. “These are from Anton,” she said, taking the empties as she set the drinks down. “He’ll be back in a little bit.”
Kristi opened her purse and took out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to the waitress, who folded the bill and put it in her bra.
We clinked glasses and each took a sip before she said, “It’s not an indelicate question. I don’t have any kids.”
“Someday, maybe?”
For the first time since we’d begun talking, her expression changed. Her confidence and savvy faded, her gaze retreated. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible above the noise in the bar. “I’m getting too old to have kids.”
“At twenty-two?”
“I’m thirty-five.”
“No you’re not. You said . . .”
“I just let people guess. I never tell them the truth. Not here.”
“Why tell me the truth?”
“For the same reason I told you my real name.”
“What reason’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
I was embarrassed and flattered and feeling, suddenly, suspicious. Like I was in the middle of a game that was way beyond my ken. Like, maybe, Anton was toying with me, using one of his dancers to make a fool of me. I took my drink and leaned against the wall.
“I get nosy,” I said. “Professional hazard, I guess. Don’t mind me.”
Kristi leaned forward and sipped her drink, which was still sitting on the table. “You’re not nosy, and I don’t mind. I like talking to you. I haven’t talked to anyone in a long time.” She stirred a splash of water into her whiskey glass and took another sip. “Last summer I had an abortion. The baby would have been born around now. I think it was probably my last chance.”
I’m sure my eyes widened. Certainly, I felt a wave of tenderness for her.
“Now, whenever I think about wanting a baby, I feel like it would be a betrayal to the one I didn’t have.”
If I didn’t reach across the table to hold her hand it was only because of the thousand ways such a gesture might have been misunderstood. So instead I simply said I was sorry.
She nodded, and a few minutes later took her empty drink glass with her when she stood. “I’m gonna go smoke. Want to come?”
“No,” I said. “I think I’ll wait here for my brother.”
She buttoned the fur of her collar and took a cigarette from her bag and slung the bag over her shoulder. “It was my choice, you know? I made it for so many good reasons. But . . .”
I nodded.
“I can barely take care of me and my mom. What would I do with a baby?”
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t her job to take care of her mother, but what did I know? An image of Bett jumped through my mind, and I thought of how earnestly I’d abandoned her. But I also thought of how much she’d hurt me, and with that I was struggling in the brackish memories I hated so much. “I’m sure I couldn’t understand,” I said, as much to Kristi as to myself.
“I bet you could,” she said, and blew her bangs up off her face and shrugged. She then turned and went out the red door.
“Look, Jon,” Ingrid says.
The Gininwabiko lighthouse rises from sea smoke and Big Rock cliff across the bay. Ingrid’s pulling into the overlook and bringing the car to a stop. She leaves it in gear, but takes her hands from the wheel and puts one of them on the same shoulder she shook to wake me.
“It looks majestic, doesn’t it?” she says.
“It looks forlorn.”
“That’s not you talking.”
Of course I’m talking, but the sound of my voice is not convincing. I’m forlorn, not the lighthouse. I’m also still climbing from the fog of those half-decade-old memories.
“You always loved to drive by here,” she says, putting the car into park now.
“I still do.”
She leans her back against the door and looks at me instead of the lighthouse. “You made up the tragedy of this place. None of what you wrote in A Lesser Light actually happened.” She glances at the lighthouse again, but only for a moment. “It’s a tourist stop, not a gothic fortress.” Her voice is almost scolding.
“You try living there for two years with those unhappy people, and then let me know if any of it actually happened.”
I can see her contemplating the very swift turn this conversation has taken. I can see her wondering if what I’m saying is dream-struck Jon, someone she’s very much learned to live with over the past thirty-five years, or if it has something to do with my disease. This is a look I’ll have to get used to.
She shifts back so she’s sitting properly in the driver’s seat.
“Gothic fortress. That’s about right. Or maybe haunted fortress.”
“Honestly, Jon.”
Yes, I think. Honestly.
She puts the car back into gear, checks her blind spot, and pulls back onto the highway. She’s perturbed, and once she’s up to speed she turns the stereo on. I reach up and turn it off just as quickly.
“I thought of those grounds as I imagined Shakespeare thought of Elsinore.”
“Elsinore?”
“The castle in Hamlet. My favorite line in all his plays is uttered there. ‘Conscience does make cowards of us all,’ ” I say.
“Sometimes,” she says as we pass by another clear view of the lighthouse, “life is just before us. It doesn’t always require the powers of your imagination. It doesn’t always require a reference to Shakespeare. Or some other story. Sometimes,” and now she taps the steering wheel three times, “it’s just plain as day.”
The lighthouse disappears behind a stand of birch trees, all extra white in the snowy woods. “And sometimes,” I say, “it’s camouflaged and hidden, and we have to conjure it up in our minds if we want to see it.”
“You’re so clever.”
I’m feeling very much like I did that night at Boff’s, which is to say I’m ready for a fight. “Sometimes it’s easier to imagine other lives than your own. Sometimes it’s inevitable,” I say, and turn the stereo back on. We’ve passed the lighthouse, but the fog that rose from the waters beneath it has found its way up to the highway, which is now shrouded.
When my older daughter, Annika, was a sophomore in college, Ingrid went to visit her in Northfield. They billed it a mother/daughter weekend that would include a trip to the Twin Cities to see a production of Hamlet at the Guthrie Theater. Ingrid arranged outings like this all the time, and I of course thought nothing of it. I took advantage of those days and weekends when I was left alone with Clara and Ben to work around the house, and on this occasion I remember that I turned and planted the garden while Ben fished the St. Louis River all weekend and Clara sat on the couch reading a Louise Erdrich novel and sulking about the fact she hadn’t been included in the trip to the cities.
Cucumbers. That’s what I planted that weekend. For several years I cultivated them, always with the notion that I’d turn my crop into pickles. But each year (and there must have been a decade of them) we ended up with hundreds of cucumbers—and never one in a jar. That weekend, I turned the soil and planted the seedlings and watered them in the warm May sunlight.
At the time we might usually have been sitting down for dinner all together, I instead ordered a pizza for myself, opened a can of beer, and went into my office. I pulled from the top of the third shelf my copy of Hamlet and read through the soliloquies while I waited for the pizza to arrive. I remember sitting back in my desk chair after pondering them and there arising in me the thrilling, static energy that augured a new story. I never tried to divine its source, only welcomed it and was thankful and ever humble, lest it decide to abandon me. On that evening I waited for pizza, I reached into the desk drawer and took from it one of my unblemished notebooks and wrote down some hunches about A Lesser Light. The first thing I knew about that book is that it would be set against the Gininwabiko light.
That night, after pizza, after I drank a couple beers and walked the dog and went up to bed, I called Ingrid to say goodnight. I remember how she whispered, telling me Annika had fallen asleep almost as soon as they got back to the hotel. I remember when I asked about the play, she said it was fine, and that she was tired, too. She said they’d had dinner before the show and walked around Lake of the Isles afterward, and that the lilacs were in bloom and the entire city smelled of them. She said it was a lovely time. She asked me to tell her about my day. So I did: I told her about the fish Ben caught and the book Clara was reading and about the pizza I ate alone, Clara by then having gone out with a couple of her friends. And I told her about pulling my old exam copy of Hamlet from the shelf and reading the soliloquies, and how they inspired in me some jumbled thoughts about the book I’d write next. I told her I missed her. I told her I loved her. I told her goodnight.
If my recall on all these particular details seems strange, I assure you it’s not. Because what happened next is that Ingrid perjured herself against the vows of our marriage, to say nothing of our shared parenthood. I turned out the bedside lamp. I patted the dog’s head and pulled the blanket up against the late spring chill in the air. And I heard my phone alert me to a text message from Ingrid that read: She’s fine, I think. Maybe a little stunned and certainly a little achy, but she’ll be okay. She knows what’s happened, that’s the main thing.
When I texted her back to ask what she meant, Ingrid said it was a message meant for her sister, who’d asked about their cousin, who’d just left her husband. She texted back, Sorry about that. Goodnight, my love.
My suspicion fueled a mostly sleepless night. In fact, there were plenty of those in the week that followed, when I vacillated between wanting to confront Ingrid about what seemed unlikely or untrue, and my equally strong compulsion to trust that whatever had happened in Minneapolis—or wherever they might have been—was between mother and daughter, and my exclusion was for a good reason. And for all the years since I’ve sat on what I would soon learn was the truth: Annika and Ingrid never saw Hamlet, at least not that spring at the old Guthrie Theater. They didn’t have an early dinner at Sidney’s or take a walk around the lake after the show. They didn’t drive back to Northfield on Sunday after brunch. What they did instead was check in to the Marquette Hotel in downtown Minneapolis on Friday morning, drove next to the Planned Parenthood on Lake Street, saw Annika into the clinic where she had an abortion, then went back to the hotel and hunkered down for the next two days until it was time to bring our daughter back to St. Olaf College for the final two weeks of the semester.
I turn off the car stereo and look at Ingrid, who keeps her eyes peeled on the highway. When I don’t say anything for a beat too long, she glances back and says, “Honestly, Jon. If you expect me to track all your divergent thoughts, please know I can’t.”
“I’ve kept something from you for a long time now,” I say, almost before I realize the words are out of my mouth. “I know about Annika.”
“What do you know about her?”
“When you took her to the Cities to see Hamlet.”
She adjusts her grip on the wheel.
“I’m not telling you this because I’m angry or feel betrayed. In fact, in most ways I believe I’m the one who screwed up.”
“Tell me what you know about your daughter.”
“I’m talking about us. I’m talking about what we’ve kept from each other. Annika is long past her choice, and I respect that she made it, and didn’t feel the need to tell me.”
“And you wanted me to betray her confidence?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What do you want? An apology?”
“I’m the one apologizing, Ingrid. I’m telling you this because my keeping it a secret has made me less of a husband.”
She’s right to be suspicious. This sort of self-awareness hasn’t always been my strong suit. The slant of her head now resembles how it hung in Doctor Zheng’s office yesterday.
“What are you doing? Why are you talking like this?”
“I guess I’m trying to clear bandwidth. So that when I get to the dark side of this disease, I might still be able to locate some of my considerable happiness.”
Now she glances at me. “I’m not sure that’s how it works, Jon.”
She’ll say more soon, that much I know. I can tell by the expression on her face, which is somewhere between relieved and curious, but also because this particular transgression of mine is easy to forgive.
“I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time. I knew something wasn’t right when you sent a text intended for your sister to me instead. Do you remember?”
“I do.”
“But I want you to know I didn’t go snooping or anything like that. I didn’t mount some secret investigation.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Annika and Clara were talking. Right after she got home from school that summer.”
Her eyes arch. “I didn’t know they talked about it. I thought I was the only one who knew.”
“I imagine that was some load to bear.”
“Nothing like the one Annika herself has borne.”
“Does she ever talk about it anymore?”
Now her look tells me not to trespass, so I sit back in my seat and fix my eyes on the lane markers ticking by as fast as I can count them. I talked about it, often, with myself, in the particular way of mine. In fact, the burden of my wisdom was a regular conversation starter for me while I wrote A Lesser Light. It was also a part of the conversation I had with myself on my evening constitutionals with the dog all that summer. I like to believe that obsessing about it as I did was my way of worrying about Annika, and certainly that’s partly true. But it’s also true that it kindled in me some long repressed—or anyway secreted—part of my childhood, one that had smoldered and smoldered and found, after some twenty years, the oxygen it needed in the choice my daughter made.
“I believe I tried to capitalize on what she must have suffered,” I say. The admission is sudden and profound.
“In your book?” Ingrid asks.
“Yes.”
“I’d be surprised if that’s true. But if worrying about your daughter led you to realizations about your characters—good, fair realizations—I suspect even Annika would forgive you for that.”
“She’ll never need to know about it. This is just between us.”
“I’ve always thought our conversations were sacrosanct. I’ve always known I can trust you. I’ve always known that whatever you lifted from our real lives to include in your books has been considered and disguised, and that it’s only ever in the service of the work, and not some reflection on all of us.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“So you understand you have my permission.”
“Your permission?”
“To write one more book, Jon. To finish The Ski Jumpers.”
“That’s another thing I want to talk about.”
“You have time. That’s what Doctor Zheng said.”
“It’s not a question of time, sweetheart. And I know I have your permission, and that you’d like me to do it. But there are plenty of reasons I can’t. Or won’t.”
She looks out her window, at the cliffs rising up to a ridge of snow-covered pines. It’s beautiful, this landscape and shimmering lake and my own brilliant wife, taking time with me. I know as well as she does what she’ll say next, and when she doesn’t utter it, I answer her anyway. “It’s different because if I’ve needed to hide, there’s always been the fortress of fiction to get behind. There’d be no place to hide if I wrote The Ski Jumpers, and I’d end up hurting too many people. Myself most of all. I don’t want to do that. Not with what time I have left.”
With what time I have left. These words leave her breathless just as her eyes well with tears. I reach over and take her hand. We’re pulling into the little town of Otter Bay, halfway now to Misquah and Noah’s place, and she signals a turn for the gas station. She pulls into one of three parking spots and turns the car off and reaches for the door handle with her free hand. I’m still holding fast to her right.
“I need to use the ladies’ room.”
“Ingrid, look at me?”
It takes her a few long seconds to turn.
“I promise I’m not being coy, or spineless, or anything but practical and what I hope is kind.”
She feigns a smile, squeezes my hand back, and slides out the door. The cold air that blows into the car might as well be her exhalation. If this is how she’s received news of my crimeless admission, and my inability to stalk and trail one more book, how will she take my real and profounder confession?
I look down at my hands and imagine I hold in them the instrument of my despair, that cursed bowling pin. Should I open the door and toss it in the garbage dumpster sitting behind this gas station? Should I bury it in the snowbank plowed against the fence? Is it selfishness or foolishness to foist these stories on my unsuspecting wife? Is my memory true and right? Even when I had the full capacity of my wandering mind, I sometimes had trouble making heads or tails of my past. Now it’s like staring dizzily at the clear night sky, and trying not only to measure the distance among stars but also the godlike force of goodness I’ve always imagined existing in the space between my eyes and them. What I’ve always imagined to be something like heaven.
Am I too unwell already?
Am I a coward?