I MET INGRID ON A NOVEMBER NIGHT, in 1980, in the Lemon Drop Restaurant in Duluth’s east end. It had been snowing for three days solid, and I can still see the heavy condensation on the plate windows overlooking the parking lot. I’d eaten meatloaf and mashed potatoes and mushy peas and was drinking a cup of coffee with my scoop of ice cream when she came up and sat across the table from me.
“You look like how I imagine the eavesdropper in that Dickens story would.”
“What?”
“ ‘To Be Read at Dusk,’ you know? I’m in Victorian lit with you.”
My expression must have betrayed my confusion.
“Professor Benken’s class?”
Her confidence was startling, and beautiful, and before I’d said one meaningful word I already felt lifted up by her. “Of course,” I said.
“Have you finished David Copperfield yet?”
“I read it a couple years ago.”
“Are you not going to read it again? Haven’t you forgotten just about the whole thing?”
“I probably have. And probably should.”
“Of course you should!” She reached across the table and grabbed the bowl of ice cream and took a bite, then slid it back.
“Would you like one?” I said.
“No thanks.” She pulled a napkin from the dispenser and wiped her lip and smiled at me. “I’m Ingrid. You’re Jon. Mr. Serious Jon.”
I smiled back. “Not so serious. Just surprised to suddenly be having a conversation. I’ve been sitting alone here for an hour.”
She settled back in her seat. “What does someone think about for an hour sitting in this place?”
“Mostly I’ve been thinking about how winter’ll be different from now on.”
“Why’s that? Looks and feels like regular winter to me.”
“That part’s true, but it’s usually about this time of year I start getting geared up.”
“For what?”
“I used to be a ski jumper.”
“Used to be? Like back in the old days? You look a little young to have a past.”
“I don’t mean it like that. I had a bad crash earlier this year. Busted my leg pretty good.”
“Ouch!” she said.
“Compound fractures. Tibia and fibula. Those are the bones down in your shin.”
“I know what bones they are,” she said, a little defensive. “I’m a biology major. A good one.”
“I didn’t mean to insult you. Sorry,” I said.
She dismissed my apology with a wave of her hand. “Did you ever take the jump up at Chester Bowl?”
“I did. Many times. I love that hill.”
“I grew up right by it. We used to go and watch the tournaments. I bet I’ve seen you.”
“I bet you’re right.”
“Compound fractures,” she said, taking another bite of my ice cream. “That’s serious. And the reason you quit ski jumping?”
“I quit to come here.”
“To the Lemon Drop?”
“Very funny. To college. It was time to move on.”
Now she ran the spoon around the bottom of the bowl, sipped the slurry of melted ice cream and chocolate sauce from the spoon, and said, “Wait a minute. It was time? So you’re older?”
“I’m thirty years old, the oldest freshman at UMD.”
She sat back with a blank look on her face.
“Too old?”
A smile appeared slowly. “I get it,” she said. “How old are you really?”
“Twenty,” I said. “Going on thirty.”
She seemed relieved, and suddenly even more in control. She lifted a menu from behind the napkin dispenser and pretended to look it over.
“I’ll miss my Pops and brother this winter, that’s why I’m glum.”
This led us into another half-hour conversation. About families and friends and what we wanted from life. She had much better answers than I did, and was unabashed about them, too. Randomly she said, “Do you have a car?”
I nodded. I would’ve driven her anywhere.
“Does it do all right in the snow?”
“Heck yeah it does.”
“Waitress!” she hollered across the restaurant. “Please bring us the check.”
“What are you doing?”
“I want to go somewhere with you.”
I remember how already, in the first hour of knowing her, she’d stirred something more than plain desire in me. She was smart and confident and playful and, taken altogether, these qualities made her beautiful. A beauty that got lovelier out in the flurries.
We hopped in my Bronco and drove up the shore, past the mansions along London Road blanketed under the bounteous snow, more of which fell even as we made our way over Amity Creek and into the parking lot at Brighton Beach. She turned the radio on and asked me to turn the headlights off and she nestled into her seat.
“I can’t even believe I asked you to take me here. Please don’t get the wrong idea. Please don’t be a creep.”
“I’m not a creep. And I don’t have any ideas.” I looked out across the snowswept and rocky beach, the waves rising and settling like the curls of her hair.
“You know what we call this, right?”
“Call what?”
“The waves, the storms?”
“The gales of November.”
“Pretty good for a Minneapolis boy.”
“I’m not from here, but one of my best friends grew up on High Street. His dad worked on the ore boats. In fact, he survived the wreck of the Ragnarøk.”
“Seriously?”
“His name’s Noah Torr. Maybe you went to school with him?”
“I don’t know him, even if I’ve heard the name. Olaf was the dad, right?”
“He’s like an uncle to me.”
“No wonder you know about the gales of November.”
We watched the waves crash on the boulders and listened to the spray haze the windshield as the radio played. For hours we sat there, the conversation turning from families to school to books we’d read and loved and hated. She told me about her friends and life in the dorms and her majors, which were education and biology, and her favorite perch in the library, where she went almost every day to study.
Eventually, our talk turned back to the lake and the storm, which still sent my Bronco shuddering with each gust of wind. She described for me how the water in the lake resided there—some of it—for hundreds of years, and that all the molecules splashing into the darkness, borne by the gale, were the equivalent of but a paper-thin layer of the whole body, and that the oldest of the water in the inland sea must surely be left over from the ice that retreated to leave the basin for the lake in the first place. As I sat there, my body heavy in the seat of my truck, I believed I could feel something beyond the combers, something more like that old water howling up from the depths, godlike, to announce the seriousness of what was happening between us.
“Can you feel that?” she asked.
I swear she spoke those words just as I imagined the depths. I swear I could see through the darkness—out the windows, across the space between us on the bench seat—that her eyes and that night confirmed a trusting confluence that’s rarely been broken since. I swear.
“Imagine all the water out there,” she continued, “a thousand feet deep, more than that, even. Imagine how heavy it is. How permanent. How cold. How dark.” Another wave came ashore, leaving another scattering of water across the windshield.
“That makes me feel really calm,” I said. “Calmer than I’ve been in a long time.”
I could see the silhouette of her lips turn up. I can still remember the way she shifted toward me and tucked her feet up beneath her on the seat and rested her head on the headrest.
“It makes me feel restless beyond words to think of it.”
“Imagine how quiet it would be.”
“Do you like being alone?”
“I spend a lot of time alone. I don’t know how much I like it. I don’t mind it, I can say that much.”
“I hate being alone,” she said.
What I thought, as still another cold mist washed over the car, was that she didn’t have to worry about being alone anymore. Not if she didn’t want to be. Not if she liked me as much as I was obviously going to like her.
“Does the bottom of the lake still make you feel restless, Ingrid?” I say now.
She holds the steering wheel with both hands and glances over at me and gives a knowing shake of her head. “You’re playing some of our classic hits?”
“You have no idea how many times I’ve gone myself to those depths.”
She lifts a finger and points at the lake. The horizon has folded seamlessly under the low-slung clouds so it’s indistinguishable from the lake below. All of it mirrors Ingrid’s doubting eyes. “It still troubles me. Even more than it used to. Especially on a day like this.”
“What kind of day’s this?”
“Like the lake’s where we’re headed.”
“I’m sorry, love.”
“Me too.”
We pass over the Wood-of-the-Soul River with its steep cascades crusted by terraced ice and its main chute seething a fine vapor.
“Back at the lighthouse, what you told me about Annika, that’s what you needed to get off your chest?” she says.
“Maybe call it the beginning?”
“The beginning of what? Airing your dirty laundry?” She shoots a cold stare, and the car swerves. She jerks the steering wheel to center it on the road again, overcompensating and hitting the rumble strips before righting it altogether. “I wish you’d just talk to me. You haven’t said anything for thirty minutes, and all of a sudden you’re talking about a conversation we had forty years ago.”
“I don’t mean to be obtuse.”
“It’s like following a falling snowflake, Jon. I just can’t do it. If you want to tell me what’s on your mind, just say it.”
“You remember the night of Pops’s funeral. The snow and getting stuck down in Minneapolis for the night. My spending the night with Anton.”
“All night you caroused at that disgusting bar he runs. Yes, I remember.”
“Something happened that night that I never told you about.”
Her face flushes with anger and she grips the wheel fiercely. “Do you mean to tell me—”
“You’ve asked to hear,” I interrupt, “so let me tell.”
She casts a doubtful gaze at me but drives on resolutely.
“Anton told me about Bett that night. He said that when Pops went to prison, after he’d been away a couple months, Bett tried to commit suicide.”
“What?” Her voice now is changed.
“She took a bottle of sleeping pills. Almost died. Anton found her, and called Sheb, who came and took her to the hospital. She spent four days on a respirator before she recovered and went away.”
“How did you never know this?”
“No one ever told me.”
“Where were you? Why weren’t you at home?”
“I was at Noah’s when it happened. She sent me up here. For the long Thanksgiving weekend. To jump at Chester Bowl. When I got back, all Sheb told me was that she’d gone to the state hospital in St. Peter because she wasn’t well. That’s when he brought Anton and me to his school.”
“And even Anton never told you?”
“Not until the night of Pops’s funeral.”
“He would have been such a little boy then. When Bett did that. Was he keeping it a secret from you?”
“Anton kept pretty much everything a secret back then. That year he basically didn’t speak. I mean truly didn’t speak. He communicated by writing things down in a little notebook he kept.”
She drives in silence for a couple miles. “This is what you wanted to tell me?”
“His telling me set in motion a series of, what, confessions? Admissions?”
“Between you and your brother?”
“Yes.”
We pass over the Prudence River and the vacant campground on the lake side of the road. She slows for a curve and turns to me, tentatively, like she’s afraid to hear more but knows she must. She doesn’t speak.
“I was upset after he told me about Bett.”
“Because of what she’d done, or because he hadn’t told you before then?”
“Both, I think. But if I’m being honest, I was angrier that he’d never told me.”
“I’m not surprised. You never had any compassion for her. You never forgave her anything.”
I don’t respond. There’s no argument.
“Well, what happened after he told you?”
“We drank. We hung out at Boff’s.”
“With those women you told me about?” There’s a shift in her tone. Slight, but it’s there.
“Yes.”
“You got drunk with those women?”
I stare into the trees blurring past on the side of the road, willing the particulars of that night to come out of the forest of memory yet also stay back among the darkness of the pines.
“You’re awfully quiet,” she says.
“You know I was drinking with those women. They were with us for most of the night.”
Now it’s her turn to stare ahead.
“I wanted to get even with him. Something like that.”
“With Anton?”
“Because he had that secret. About Bett.”
“You divorced yourself from all of them. Such a long time ago you did.”
“I know that’s true. But I was devastated. About Pops. And it was like Anton had stretched the rupture between us even further.”
“I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure he told you in order to bring you closer together.”
She’s right. He was only doing what I hoped to accomplish myself. Clear the debris between us. I can see that now. “I think you’re right,” I say. “But that night, it felt like he wanted to push me farther away. And I was mad at myself, too. Then and now. That I’d let us grow so far apart. That I’d pushed them all from my life.”
“That part’s well-traveled ground, Jon.”
“So’s this highway, and still, here we are.” I don’t mean to sound defensive. And I’m not stalling. I should apologize.
“Would you just tell me whatever’s on your mind? So we can get on to the business of enjoying this day.”
“That’s fair.” I shift in the seat so my back’s against the car door and I’m looking at her profile. “You remember that Anton’s girlfriend was one of the women at the bar?”
She only glances at me, warily.
“Well, she had a friend. Missy was her name. And for a while that night, while Anton was tending the shop, I spent time talking with her.”
“Talking?”
“Yes, talking.”
“What else did you do with her?”
I’m in motion now. I don’t want to stop. “She told me about taking care of her mother and what she was studying in college—”
“Sounds like the two of you were bosom friends.”
“Ingrid, please.”
She’s driving now as if she were behind the wheel of a big rig, her hands up high on the wheel and her chin thrust forward. She looks, I just realize, like she’s ready to take a punch.
“Well?” she says.
“Missy, she told me about an abortion she had—”
“Why in the world would you be having this intimate a conversation with another woman?”
“That’s a fair question, but it’s not the point I’m getting at.” I shift back so I’m facing forward again. “It was right on the heels of Anton telling me about Bett taking the sleeping pills. My thoughts were corkscrewing, Ingrid. I was thinking about Annika and her abortion. But I was also thinking about Lena Lyng.”
“Bett’s sister? What about her?”
“When I was a kid, whenever she came up, Bett was quick to excoriate her. I mean, she hated her with gusto. Lena wasn’t even a topic we were allowed to talk about. We knew how Pops started out with her, and that she left him there in Minneapolis soon after they arrived, but mostly we were left to believe she was as good as dead.” I clench my eyes to the kaleidoscope of memories, of the stories true and untrue. “We discussed this as a family only once, when we went out for dinner the day Pops got out of prison.
“Lena left, Bett told us, because she was selfish and weak. Good riddance, that was the message. Bett also told us that Lena was pregnant when they left Chicago, and that she had an abortion before leaving Minneapolis. An elaborate story about taking a taxi to a farmhouse out in Anoka for the procedure, then going straight downtown to the Greyhound station and catching a bus back to Chicago.”
“I feel like I’ve heard this before,” Ingrid says, some of the edge off her voice.
“Probably you have. Probably I’ve mumbled through this story before. But it’s never been right. Never true.”
“I still don’t understand, Jon. What are you telling me?”
“It was all horseshit. Bett’s story was. I knew it. Pops knew it. Bett must have known it.”
“About Lena Lyng?”
“The only part of it that was true is that she took a bus back to Chicago.”
“How do you know this?”
“I know because some years later I met my half-sister. Her name was Helene. She showed up in Minneapolis with Andrus Patollo, and my whole life came undone.”
“You have a sister?”
“A half-sister.”
“How have I known you for almost forty years and never learned this?”
“Like I said at the beginning, I’ve made mistakes.”
I can as much as see her calculations and she starts to say something, twice, then stops and finally mutters, “Why would she lie about it? Did your father know?”
“Pops met her once. Or once that I know about, anyway.”
She shakes her head and sighs and I notice she’s driving eighty miles per hour.
“Slow down, honey?”
“I feel like you’ve hit me with a hammer,” she says. The temper in her voice is one of anger and frustration. She doesn’t employ it often. “And you’re just standing above me poised to whack me again.”
“No, love. No no no. I’m right here, and without a hammer. I’m doing my best.”
She’s going even faster now, the town of Misquah coming at us with alarming speed. We rip past the pole barn of a hardware store and its passing seems to draw her back into consciousness. She glances at the speedometer and flinches and stands on the brakes. We both slam against our seatbelts and the car nearly skids into the parking lot of The Landing. She pulls into a parking spot and turns off the ignition and steps outside. I step out, too, and fold my arms on the roof as she walks in a circle.
After a moment, she stops and assumes my same position above the driver’s side door. She takes off her sunglasses and closes her eyes. “Jon, did you sleep with that woman?”
“Did I sleep with a woman?”
“The night of your father’s funeral?”
“Of course not.”
Her eyes flash open, but they bring no relief to her uneasiness.
“Is that what you think I’m talking about? Is that what you think I have to tell you?” The fact that this has only just now occurred to me tells me all I need to know about how selfish I’ve been. I hurry around the car. “Oh, Jesus,” I say, turning her in my arms. “I promise you, no. Never.”
She buries her forehead in the collar of my coat.
“I’m so sorry. That you had to think that even for one minute.” I push her away, just far enough so that I can see her face, which is covered in tears. I wipe them away with my chapped thumbs. I hold her chin. “You are my great and only love, Ingrid. You are my whole stupid life.”
This elicits more tears, and she drops her head back on my shoulder.
“I have so much more to tell you. So much about that night and about my life. But I’ll only tell you if you want to hear. Okay?”
We stand here in the dirt parking lot of this gas station, a couple of old companions and lovers surprised by the resolve of time and its endless surprises. I can’t tell if she’s angry or merely stunned, and I can’t imagine the questions she’s forming in the very particular way of hers. But rather than asking any of them, she only says, “I want to hear everything, Jon. And I appreciate how hard it must have been to carry that around with you for all these years. I don’t understand why you never told me, or what it means that you didn’t, but I suppose you can get to that eventually.” She leans back so she can look at my face. “And I don’t know what else you have to say. But whatever it is, I’ll listen. I want to know. But right this second let’s go in The Landing and buy up their supply of bear claws to bring Noah, and let’s go have that visit before you tell me more about Helene. Can we do that?”
She lets go of me and walks past the pair of gas pumps and into The Landing. A few minutes later she comes out with a pastry box and two bottles of water. We get back in the car and head for Noah’s place.
If the highway slinking along the shore of the big water is the main artery of my life, the county road that slinks into the hills above Misquah is the vena cava to an epoch in it more enduring than any other. This was the road that delivered Anton and me from the school for boys and the most fiendish, corrupt chapter of Sheb’s life. It delivered us to a season of peace, and a season of a thousand jumps. More than anything, it delivered us to our brotherhood, one I thought incapable of splintering.
This morning, it’s merely delivering me back to us. To Ingrid and me. As we ascend the five-mile hill, lined now with ever deepening snow, the trees infringing on the asphalt shoulder, slick with ice and unplowed snow, Ingrid seems to be loosening with the knowledge that my admission was of a half-sister, and not a lover. I can see fewer of the crow’s feet around her eyes, her shoulders and hands are lax, her voice, when she points to a red fox bounding across the road ahead of us and says “Look, Jon,” is settled. It takes fifteen minutes of wending through the woods before we turn off on Lake Forsone Road, and those are the only words either of us utters.
The pavement is pocked and still half-covered with patches of snow and ice. It ascends sharply, and I wonder twice if the car is up for the job, but before long we’ve reached the plateau and drive along easily for another ten minutes. The trees above are so dense it’s as if we’ve entered another tunnel.
“Turn right here,” I remind her.
“I always forget.” She slows, signals her turn, and we’re now on a dirt road that’s completely covered by packed snow. The woods are all pine, and except for when we cross over a culvert near the public access, it’s like the car is cocooned.
“Slow down, love,” I say. Even though I’ve been here a hundred times, it’s not always easy to see the mailbox that announces Noah’s home. He’s redone it since the last time we visited. A new box that looks big enough to be a little free library stilted on cedar posts with a red metal flag of the old-fashioned kind to announce a pick-up. I take it as a good sign, given how down he’s been the past few months. Maybe this modest improvement is indication that he’s up and running again.
This notion finds some validation as Ingrid steers down the slope to his cabin. It’s better plowed than the county roads, and the canopy above is trimmed high and wide. The plowed snow on either side of us rises above my line of sight.
“It’s like driving down winter’s gullet,” I say.
“Imagine how deep the snow is in the woods.”
“And Noah all by himself up here to keep himself shoveled out. That’s no small job. I know.”
“It’s still strange for you? Coming back here?”
“It feels less like arriving at a place than in a dream. It always does. Until I see Noah, then it feels like a homecoming.”
She slows for the last big downhill curve. “Jon, did your sister—your half-sister—have anything to do with the winter you lived here?”
The cabin comes into view through the gaunt trees. There’s smoke rising from the chimney, and a garage built where the shed used to be. Ingrid parks beside it and turns the ignition off. Before we get out I take her hand and say, “She has everything to do with it.”
Noah’s helloing from the middle of the yard, his thumbs tucked under the suspenders he wears now like a kind of uniform. The isolate woodsman. Ingrid beats me to him, carrying the box of pastries in one arm and throwing the other around his waist. He’s wearing a pair of wool pants and only a handsome flannel shirt under his suspenders, and he untucks his thumbs to return her embrace. Noah’s a good six inches taller than I am, so a foot taller than Ingrid, and she appears a child in his long arms. He’s shaved his beard, so his sweet smile—even with all its inherent sadness—is larger than usual.
“At least one of you is excited to see me!” His voice is booming and kind and just to hear it brings me a relief that nothing else could. He’s been my best friend since we were teenagers, and he’s never once let me down.
“If you think I’m gonna come fawn all over you like that, forget about it,” I say.
He grabs Ingrid’s arm and hurries her to the door, opens it and makes a show of pushing her inside, then says, “I’ll lock you out here, old man. Your pretty wife and I will feast on whatever’s in this box.” He makes a show of shutting the screen door and shouts, “You better believe we will.”
It’s been many months since I visited Noah, and though not much has changed there is a tidiness to the place in winter that I admire. The yard is cut with paths through the snow. One from the house to the garage. Another to the woodpiles that sit beneath a lean-to in a new clearing beyond the drive. They’re damn near works of art, the woodpiles. Six feet tall and cylindrical, all of it birch. Two of them. It must be twenty cords. His old man had a thing for firewood, too. Some bone in the Torr body, I guess.
I crane my neck and look down to the lake. There’s a path through the snow in that direction, too, and under the deck that surrounds two sides of the cabin all his ice fishing gear is stored on a toboggan. If he’s still the same man I’ve always known, that sled gets pulled down to and across the lake just about every day.
One of his garage doors is open, and I can see his other life’s work sitting up on blocks. His father’s Suburban. Ever since he moved back here, Noah’s been at work on the restoration. He once admitted being thirty grand into it, and nowhere near completion. From the looks of things, he’s still not close.
I stare at the boughs high on the towering pines, some of them still holding snow, and so like spirited clouds with dark underbellies. This is one of my favorite places. And one of my most haunted.
Inside, Noah’s already putting the bear claws on a platter. He’ll eat two or three, to go with his uninterrupted coffee, and even at our late ages he’s lean enough to strap on a pair of jumping skis and take a ride on the family jump just down the lakeshore.
“Coffee’s brewing, Jon,” he says. “Sit down.”
“Where?” I say.
“It’s not that bad. Here . . .” He comes out from behind the counter and fills his arms with newspapers and magazines that were covering half the couch. He stuffs them into the tinderbox beside the pinging hot stove.
“It’s like you’ve discovered your own personal interior decorating style. Shambolic chic.”
He’s already back behind the counter, pairing napkins and plates, but he pauses at my dig. He looks at Ingrid, who’s leaning against the other side of the counter, and says, “He moves like a goddamned tortoise, but his tongue’s as sharp as a hatchet blade.” Now he turns to me. “Shambolic, we’re supposed to know what that means?”
“It means your place is a mess. You’re a hoarder now?”
Again he turns to Ingrid. “No hello, no how are you, no it’s good to see you. Is he really this old and batshit? Has he really forgotten all the rules of civilized society?”
“Society?” I say. “You’re a hermit.”
He puts the percolator on the stovetop and sparks a match to light the burner. Much has changed in here since I was a kid, and despite my ribbing it’s the sort of place that might appear in the Sunday Homes section of a newspaper. In the years after his father passed away, I spent many summer afternoons helping him shore up the place. We replaced the roof. We installed a bathroom and the small kitchen. We rebuilt the deck that surrounds two sides of the house. And we built a new dock.
He brings the platter of bear claws to the coffee table and he hugs me like he knows my fate. When he lets go, he holds my face in his hands and says, “It’s good to see you, you cranky bastard.”
“And you.”
“Sit down. Really,” he says. “The reason the place is such a mess is because I was going through some old files.” He picks up a stack of papers from beside the pastries and flips through them. What he’s looking for isn’t there, and when he sets them back down he pauses and says, “For you! Hold on.” And as quickly as that, he’s disappeared into what I know he calls the port bedroom. His bedroom. And his father’s before him.
There are two bedrooms. Doors on either side of the stove, neither much bigger than the beds that command them. When Anton and I hid out here, we slept on the floor in front of the stove, the bedrooms being impossibly cold back then, even with a stoked woodstove. Now there’s a plush rug in the center of the room, the walls closer all the way around than I remember, and I’m reminded of the mixed feelings that long-ago season inspired in me: that the possibilities for Anton and me seemed at once enormous and confined in this space. Or to the Torrs’ twenty acres on Lake Forsone.
“He seems well,” Ingrid says when finally I settle my eyes on her. “And he’s very happy to see you.”
“I am happy to see him,” Noah says, reemerging from the bedroom. “And you, too, sweetheart.” He sits on the couch and summons us over to sit on either side of him. He’s got a file folder half an inch thick and he opens it like it protects a last will and testament.
“So much ceremony,” I say. “What the hell is it.”
In answer, he only hands me a photograph. It’s of Anton and me, in the jumpsuits Olaf gave us that winter, our skis leaning against our outside shoulders, my left arm resting on his helmeted head. The jump is in the background, rising up with the lakeside trees.
“That’s you and your brother,” Ingrid says.
“There’s a whole host of things in here.” Noah taps the file. “I thought it might help you with the book you’re writing.” He pushes himself up from the couch and bolts into the kitchen to check on the coffee. “Speaking of which, I expect a starring role. You’ve gone long enough without writing the real heroes in your life.”
“Maybe you can talk some sense into him, Noah.” This is Ingrid again, turning to Noah, who is ready to fill three coffee cups.
“What sense?” he asks.
“Jon’s decided he’s done writing books.”
Noah sets the percolator down. “Is that true?” They’re the first sincere words he’s spoken since we arrived, and they settle on me like his father’s voice used to—all somber and serious.
“It is.”
“Tell him how foolish that is,” Ingrid says. “He needs to do something, the doctor said so—” A dread silence overcomes her. She’s let slip what I asked her not to, and though I’m certain it was an accident, it catches me off guard and I take a deep breath.
Noah looks between us. “What doctor?”
“Just a checkup,” I say. “You know, gotta keep the tip of the spear sharp.” I tap my noggin.
Noah pours the coffees but keeps glancing at me. He delivers a cup to Ingrid, and one to me, and sits in the chair across from us now. “So, why stop writing?”
“I guess I should say I’m not going to write the ski jumping book.” I take a sip of coffee and then raise my glass to him. “You always made the best cup.”
He deflects the compliment with a wave of his hand. “Why?”
I turn the picture of me and Anton around and say, “Because I’d rather remember these boys than the ones that book would force on me.”
“As if you’re capable of letting the past lay,” Noah says. “Or is it lie?”
“Let me guess, no pun intended?”
“I didn’t even know I made a pun.”
Ingrid says, “I wish you’d be serious even for just a minute.”
Noah straightens, like he’s been reprimanded. The scars from his father are deep. As are those from his marriage, which is now ten years finished. “What should we be serious about, Ingrid?” He’s earnest now, and she and I both know it.
“About Jon, that’s what. About his writing this book. About his taking care of himself.”
I take a bear claw from the plate, dunk it in my coffee, and take a bite. “I’m sick, Noah,” I say. It’s out before I can doubt myself. Practically of its own will.
“What kind of sick?”
I look at Ingrid, whose eyes are glassy and lips pursed, and then back at my friend. “I’ve got younger-onset Alzheimer’s. I found out yesterday.”
He sits back in his chair like he’s been stunned. To Ingrid he says, “Is this true?”
“Of course it’s true,” I say. “You think I’d joke?”
“It’s true,” Ingrid confirms.
He sets his coffee on the arm of his chair and leans forward, elbows on knees. “Tell me what this means?”
“It means I’m going to start losing my memory. It means I’m going to get even crankier. It means life is going to be hell for Ingrid.”
“You found out yesterday? How do you know it’s not a bad diagnosis? Does it make sense to get a second opinion?”
“It’s been months getting to the diagnosis. I don’t think it’s wrong. And it explains a lot about how I’ve been.”
“What do you mean, how you’ve been?”
I look down at the floor, ashamed.
Ingrid answers for me. “He’s been having a hard time with memory function. Even simple things. I don’t think the diagnosis is wrong either.”
Now Noah looks down at the floor, too. “Jesus Christ, I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I’m going to retire after the sabbatical. We’re going to get all our affairs in order so that things go as easily for Ingrid as they possibly can. You’re going to be seeing more of me in the next little while.”
“More of you?”
“Ingrid kicked me out. I’m moving back in.”
There’s a flash of pleasure on his face before he recognizes I’m joking. “I’m going to spend time with the people I love. While I can. In the flesh.” I take Ingrid’s hand and hold it and look her in the eye. “That sounds better to me than dredging up the past.”
When I look at Noah, he’s tearing up.
“He wasn’t going to tell you,” Ingrid says. “He hasn’t even told the kids yet.”
“I hope it’s okay,” I say, “that I did?”
“Goddamnit, Jon.” He pushes himself up and comes over to me and as much as lifts me from the couch. The hug he wraps me in reminds me of Pops, and if there weren’t so many tears already streaming, I’d let loose myself.
Instead I say, “What do you have in that folder?”