A COUPLE OF MILES THIS SIDE OF GUNFLINT, Ingrid pulls the car into the False Harbor Bay overlook. Even from fifty feet up on a mound of ancient granite, I can feel the lake pounding the cliff face. The wind is straight out of the east, rising, hurrying the gloaming and bringing the water in quickening waves each more furious than the last. In the distance, up the snowbound shoreline, following the gray fringe of the trees between the water’s edge and the highway, I can see the silhouette of town against the coming evening. The streetlights hum amber. The village buildings draw their shapes against the darkness of the hills above. I look at my watch. Sunset’s not for another half-hour, but the weather’s bringing the gloom like it’s a duststorm.
Ingrid has not said one word since we pulled out of Noah’s drive. Under normal circumstances, I’d be able to divine her mood. This, of course, is one of the benefits—if not also a hazard—of spending so many years together. That we don’t always need to tell each other what’s on our mind has spared us many disagreements and led to just as many moments of intimacy.
Her gaze is off in the distance now, willing, I imagine, the wind to deliver her something to say. But what more is there? My mind is clearer than it’s been in as long as I can remember, and if Ingrid’s is less so then I merely have to wait for her questions. In the meantime, I’ll listen to my own silent calm. It’s been a long time since I heard it.
After some minutes—enough that a bank of lowering clouds let loose its snow a mile out to sea—she turns to me and says, “This girl, your half-sister . . .”
“Helene.”
“Yes, Helene, what became of her?”
“I don’t know.”
“How’s that possible?”
Her incredulity is warranted. Over the many years since our first and only meeting, I’ve often found myself casting a quizzical look off into a distance just like this one, not quite thinking of anything, and after a while I’ll realize it’s Helene on my mind. I tell this to Ingrid, who seems as unsatisfied as I usually am after such reflection.
“How’s it possible you never knew before that day? Did your father?”
“Bett knew, but Pops didn’t. Not before that moment. He never heard from her again. Or so he claimed.”
“I just don’t understand, Jon. How could Bett know, but not your father?”
“Bett stayed in some contact with her sister. I guess it was their secret.”
“That’s incomprehensible to me. That’s reprehensible.”
“To me, too. But then again, we’re talking about Bett. The way Pops described it, for as much as he loved her—Bett, I mean—he always felt, even until the end, that he didn’t quite know all of her. He said it was like she’d locked the cellar door, and he’d never gotten down there.”
“I can’t imagine.”
I reach for her hand and hold it. “I’m sure I’ve told you they spent some months apart after he got out of prison? Separated, I guess. The first night of that separation, which was soon after I moved into that room in Dinkytown, he actually came to stay with me. I thought it was cool, having him there for a night. Like our own private camp.” I think back to that singular night, and our weird joviality, but the memory is as fleeting as the night itself was. “Later he spent a month living at Sheb’s place.”
Ingrid smiles, but I can tell her mood is shifting. From cloudy-minded to something entirely more focused. The look of sadness creeping up on her is as unmistakable as the weather’s purpose in the coming dark. I’d say something to quell it, but I know she prefers to sort it out on her own, and so we settle into another spell of quiet.
This is the sort of situation that makes me wish I were writing The Ski Jumpers. I’ve always been most intrigued by the moments on which life hinges. This is true in fact and in fiction, and though anyone passing by us on the highway, if they glanced into our car, would see a couple of folks watching the lake churn, I know what’s happening between us is something much closer to a great reckoning than it is a simple pause. In an hour or tomorrow morning or in a week, Ingrid will know it, too. But for now, she’s overcome. I see it as plainly as I do the galloping waves. We’re still holding hands, and I lift hers with mine and kiss it softly.
She starts to cry. Soft and slow-moving tears from the corner of each of her beautiful eyes. I only kiss her hand again.
“What will I do, Jon? What will we do?” She speaks softly, but there’s no mistaking the urgency in her voice.
“You’ll love me. You’ll help me until you can’t. Which is just exactly what I’d do for you.”
“And after that?” She’s holding my hand so tightly now it almost hurts.
“After that we’ll do what we’ve always done, or what you’ve always done: figure it out.”
She pulls her hand away. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I know I’ll figure out how to take care of you. I’ll figure out how to take care of myself, too. I can do all that.” She turns to look at me, reaches up and brushes my wispy hair over my ear. “What I don’t know how to do is live without your love, Jon. You’ll be alive on this earth and unable to give it to me.”
“That’s not true, sweetheart.”
“You don’t get to choose. You can’t just will it so. Your mind—your sweet, tender mind—will do whatever it wants.”
Of all the worries yesterday’s diagnosis put into motion, none have snowballed like my concern for Ingrid. My love and devotion for her, like hers for me, is the wellspring of our lives. Our years of marriage are proof. And if it had been her diagnosis yesterday, the most unsettling prospect to come of it would be my fear of losing her love. It’s been as much a part of my life as the blood coursing through my body.
When I say “You’ll have to do the loving for both of us, Ingrid,” I wish I could take it back as soon as I’ve said it. I don’t mean to lay another burden on her. How could she possibly bear twice the weight?
She closes her eyes against the view. “I’m so scared. I’m afraid of being alone. I’m afraid of how lonely I’ll be.”
Since yesterday morning, I’ve seen her loneliness a hundred times. It looks like a cold cup of coffee, lost to a morning taking care of me; or a long night wiping piss off my legs; or Ingrid cutting up a peach like she used to for the kids and spooning it into my slack mouth; it looks like wanting a kiss goodnight, or to make love in the morning, eyes too tired to open; it looks like wanting to dance after a glass of Friday night wine. All of which is to say that it doesn’t look good. Not for her and not for me. We both know this.
Of course, I don’t tell Ingrid about these thoughts. Instead I start humming a favorite song by Jason Isbell.
“How many nights did we sit over our cribbage board listening to that sweet man sing?” she says.
“We were singing, too, love.”
I can as much as see her think That’s another thing we won’t be doing anymore. But she doesn’t say anything. Only forces a half-smile before she stretches across the distance between us and kisses me like we’re nineteen years old again.
I’m so surprised that I forget to breathe, and after half a minute I have to sit back to take in a lungful of air. It’s like I’m breathing in the wind off the surging lake. Ingrid takes a deep breath, too, and looks out at that same lake. She sighs. “We’ve been married for more than half my life, Jon. And all that time you kept today’s news from me.”
I understand she’s asking for an explanation, and not about Helene. We’ve said all there is to say about her.
“I don’t know why I never told you before. I was a coward—”
“I can well imagine why you never told me, Jon. It doesn’t even seem that mysterious. Who wouldn’t want to keep it a secret?” She’s terse. Maybe even angry. She shakes her head and grips the steering wheel so I can see her knuckles whiten.
“What is it?”
“I can also imagine believing everything would be better if I knew what you did to that horrible man.” Now she swivels to face me. “But I don’t know if that’s why you told me. I don’t know if you’ve done this to appease your own guilty conscience or if you believe it’s better for us if I know. Maybe”—she pauses for a moment—“you’re thinking only of yourself. And giving me another load to bear.”
“No,” I say, but in answer to what I’m not even sure.
“This man I’ve loved for so long, now you tell me he’s a killer?”
“I told you because—”
“Oh, I know why you think you’ve told me. I do, Jon. But I’m not sure how it makes my life better. I don’t think it does.”
I feel—momentarily, and no doubt because that episode has just come back to life for me—something like I did all those years ago, standing above the dead body of Andrus Patollo in the basement of the bingo hall. Back then I had Pops to step in and not only clean up my mess but absolve me of my actions. There’s no one to help me now, and I feel a panic rising in me.
“I’m sorry, Ingrid,” I say, my voice now faint. “I’m so sorry.”
She doesn’t answer me. Only touches up her hair in the rearview mirror and says, “Let’s go see our daughters.”
I’m out of words—finally—and helpless as the child I was back then.
But before she starts to drive, she says, “I’m not going to think about this again until I can make sense of it. I’m going to try to enjoy our evening and think you should, too.” She puts the car in gear. “But I’m also going to say that I think you should have just written your last book, Jon. I really do. You could’ve put today’s admission in it and spared me the onus.” She’s exhausted. That much I can tell. But she’s also forgiving, and when she adds, “Let your daughter surprise you,” I understand she’s already moving on.
We’re driving past the ranger station and the edge-of-town campgrounds and cottages and then down the long hill into Gunflint, the lights below pulling us along like an undertow. I have that feeling I sometimes get after failing a morning at my desk. Like my story has lost its equilibrium. Except now it’s not some fiction, but my life. As if by telling Ingrid about Patollo I’ve made it true again—or for the first time—and now I’ll need to finally face my own trial.
Of course, the only jury I’ll ever have to endure is driving our car right now. Someday she’ll ask me more about it. But not now, and that’s fine. If we were back home in Duluth, now’s the time I’d kiss her on her forehead and shuffle into my office and open one of my notebooks and make believe I live in another world, one where the puzzlement and melancholy weren’t my own.
Instead I reach across the space between us and tuck a loose strand of hair behind Ingrid’s ear. “I’m sorry.”
“Later,” she says, glancing at me for a heartbeat.
“I don’t mean about what I just told you, though I’m sorry for that, too.”
Now she reaches over to me. She grabs hold of my hand. “I’d rather not, Jon. Not now.”
“Okay.”
How unlucky I am, to never have believed in God. To have instead put my faith in the lies Pops told me over that old kitchen table, or over the telephone late at night? To have instead written my faith in the novels I’ve penned? How much easier would it have been to simply pray? To send into the universe wailing orisons and wait for their reply?
Ingrid turns into the parking lot of Hivernants Brewing. The lot’s full of big pickups and snowmobiles, but she manages a spot in front of the thrift store next door and turns the car off.
“I’m going to get a growler for the weekend. Do you want to come in?” she says.
I take my seatbelt off and open the door and together we walk across the parking lot, which is like a blistered minefield of potholes and ice. But inside the bustle and warmth are delicious, as is the yeasty smell of the beer tanks in a room behind the bar. That room is also flooded with people, and I can see a woman whose face I recognize standing behind a music stand with a microphone, addressing her audience.
The taproom is crowded. Skiers and snowmobilers up from the Twin Cities or down from Thunder Bay. A band is setting up on a small stage, a standup bass and three-piece drum kit and acoustic guitar. The musicians stand next to their instruments and wipe their brows with back-pocket handkerchiefs. There’s a roaring fire in the enormous hearth and, taken all together, it feels like a perfect place to be.
At the bar, Ingrid gets the attention of the keep and asks for a growler of the Devil’s Maw IPA. Then she remembers I don’t like those hoppy beers, and she orders a half-growler of the Burnt Wood Lager, too.
As she pays, I ask the bartender what’s happening in the room behind him. He glances over his shoulder like he’s surprised to see a hundred people sitting on folding chairs. “That’s Greta Eide,” he says. “She’s an author. Some sort of celebration for a book she wrote.”
I thank him and drift over to the double glass doors that separate the fermentation vessels and the brewhouse from the taproom. The usher at the door opens it a crack to ask me if I’d like to come in. I shake my head, and watch Greta through the glass.
I actually know her. When A Lesser Light came out, Greta interviewed me for a feature that ran in the Strib. She wrote a kind and thorough article, talking not only to my editor in New York but also to several of my students. She looks different now. Older and younger at the same time. I watch her for a few minutes before she glances in my direction. A wave of recognition crosses her face, and she smiles. I smile back, and tap on the glass and ask the usher if I can buy a book from the pile stacked on the table. It’s called Water Sky, and the cover is a photograph of ice-choked water with the sun shining above.
“After the reading,” she whispers, and lets the door close the inch it was open.
Ingrid comes up behind me and peeks over my shoulder. “What’s this?” she asks, and before I can answer she adds, “I read a review of this in last Sunday’s paper. You know her.”
“Well, I’ve met her.”
“Let’s get a copy.”
“After the reading, that’s what I was told.”
As though she has not heard, Ingrid hands me the jugs of beer and opens the door just enough to slide through. She steps to the table and takes two copies from the stack and removes her wallet and then her credit card and offers it to another woman sitting behind the table. The transaction takes less than thirty seconds, and as Ingrid returns to the taproom Greta Eide looks over and smiles again.
I raise a pitiful hand and smile back, resolving to track down her email and send a note of congratulations.
“Two copies?” I ask as we thread our way through the still-gathering crowd.
“One for us, and one for Clara and Delia.”
“You are the bearer of gifts, it seems.”
“Shouldn’t we bring our daughter things?” She opens her car door and turns to put the books in the backseat. I set the beer beside them.
“You’re right,” I say.
We turn on Third and head up the hill through town, past the Art Colony and the First Congregational Church, then another block west and back north again. This is the street that connects with the Burnt Wood Trail, which makes a looping curve before the two mile straightaway up the hill. The darkness assembling in the trees is gorgeous and haunting and before we turn on the Old Toboggan Road it’s spilling onto the trail, too.
“I’m glad we beat the dark,” Ingrid says. “Remember at Christmas? That deer you hit right about here?”
“I think about that poor buck limping through these woods.”
“The look he gave you.”
“I bet he hasn’t lasted the winter. Not on three legs. Not with all the wolves gallivanting about.”
“Always the wolves,” she says, as though these are the first words to some song we’re wont to break into.
“Always the wolves,” I echo back, as though I’m late with my harmony.
The driveway into Clara and Delia’s place is well groomed. They bought a plow they can easily attach to the front of their pickup and which they keep in an outbuilding during the half of the year it’s not needed. Like their thousand-square-foot garden and the solar panels on the roof of their house, the plow is a righteous nod to their independence and self-sufficiency, to say nothing of their almost remarkable capabilities. There’s more evidence of this in the woodpiles, which, like Noah’s, are readied for Armageddon.
Ingrid parks under the quavering light above their studio, and for the last time today we step out of our car. It’s not been ten minutes since we walked out of the brewery, but the looming woods make it seem a hundred miles ago. I reach into the back of the Honda and grab the books and beer and our suitcase, and we head across the gravel to their front door, which is framed by elaborate scrollwork hand-carved by Delia from a white pine that toppled in the wind a few years ago. Before we even have a chance to knock, the door swings open and here’s my daughter, her sweater buttoned up, her dog at heel and ready and regal. There’s not a creature in these woods that would challenge Dolly, named for the country music singer both Clara and Delia love—and that includes the aforementioned wolves.
But never mind the wolves. What’s better medicine than a daughter’s voice?
“Hi, Daddy,” she says, sweeter than any prayer ever muttered. And better than any story.
“Hello, Clara Belle,” I say.
Ingrid merely hugs her greeting.
“How was the drive?” Delia asks, stepping around the corner with a dishrag in her hand and an apron slung over her shoulders and tied at her belly.
Dolly barks and wedges herself between the four of us so the rest of the hugs need wait until we get out of the entry.
“It was lovely,” I say when it’s my turn to kiss Delia’s cheek. “Ingrid always steers a straight course.”
“No one talks like that anymore, Dad,” Clara says, as though I’ve just spoken in Old English.
“Maybe not where you’re from,” I say.
Delia makes a sweeping gesture with her hands, inviting us in and taking our coats as we slide them off. “We’re making moose stew and boule bread for dinner, hope that sounds good?”
“If it tastes half as good as it smells, we’ll be in culinary heaven,” Ingrid says. “And we brought this.” She offers the beer.
“And this,” I say, stepping back to the entryway and the books I set down while I took off my coat. “The author of this book lives right down in town. On the cove.”
“Of course,” Clara says. “She comes to the brewery all the time. Delia sees her at the restaurant, too.” She lowers her voice so Delia can’t hear from the kitchen, where she’s gone to pour glasses of beer. “Her husband’s gorgeous!”
“I heard that!” Delia teases.
Clara shrugs and winks at Ingrid.
“She wrote a story about your father when his last book came out,” Ingrid says.
“I remember that,” Clara says in her expressive way. Like the memory of that Strib feature is something she ponders with some regularity.
“Well, I don’t,” I say. “Let’s talk about anything else. Maybe even Greta Eide’s book?” I hand one to Clara.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“It was your mother’s idea.”
“Thanks, Mom,” she says in the direction of the kitchen, where Ingrid has gone to help with the beers. She soon brings a pint glass capped with foamy head to me in the great room, then says, on her way back to the kitchen, “It’s been such a long time since I read a book that I loved. Maybe this will be it.”
“It’s supposed to be good. And sexy. Did you see the review last weekend? I heard her on WTIP earlier this week, too. She seems like a smart woman.”
“I always say be careful of those assumptions,” I say, and risk a look at Ingrid standing beside our daughter-in-law over a Dutch oven full of aromatic stew. She returns my glance but doesn’t offer any retort.
“What’s up with that?” Clara whispers.
“With what?”
“That look you just gave Mom.”
I look at her again, standing at the big cast iron range with Delia, and remember the trying day we’ve had. Instead of replaying it for our daughter, I only admit that her mother wants me to write another book and that I’m not up to it.
“Are you all right, Dad?” she asks.
“I’m fine,” I say, then turn back to Clara and finally relax. There’s nothing to do for the rest of the weekend but be happy and content. “How are you? What’s the report from Gunflint?”
She sits back in the cushy couch and tucks her legs beneath her, settling in for what will surely be the first of many happy conversations this weekend. “We’re so good, Dad.” She takes a long look across the great room. “And so happy you’re here.” Across the room Delia turns toward the refrigerator, and Clara takes the opportunity to lean forward and whisper, “You have to tell her you like the stew no matter what. She’s been working on this recipe since she got the moose last fall.”
“Did I hear about that?”
“Out in Wyoming? With her dad and brother?”
“Of course,” I say, shaking my head like an agreeable old man. But the fact is I don’t remember Delia going moose hunting in Wyoming. Or anywhere else. I do recall she’s an avid outdoorswoman, and that she and Clara love to fish the lakes and rivers up here. Especially the steelhead run on the Burnt Wood River in springtime.
“Anyway,” Clara says, sitting back again but still speaking softly, “you should compliment her.”
“I’m sure I’ll have good reason to.”
And it does smell delicious. Meaty and like cardamom and onion. Their home is lovelier than ever. From where I sit, I can see the mass of Lake Superior beyond the lights of town. It meets the horizon in the uneasy darkness.
“The lake’s been tumultuous lately,” she says. “There’s no ice at all. Too much wave action.”
“Same thing down our way,” I say, and recognize as I do that I sound, perhaps for the first time, like a doddering old man.
“Are you okay, Dad?”
“Why do you ask?”
She cocks her head and gives me a good once-over, her expression a duplicate of her mother. “You seem sad.”
“I’m the opposite of that, kiddo. I couldn’t be happier.”
She settles even further into the couch. Wraps an afghan around her shoulders.
“Tell me about sabbatical?” she says.
Ingrid and Delia stroll in, each carrying a pint of beer. Delia raises her glass and says “Skol!” I raise mine in return.
“Your father’s going to retire after sabbatical,” Ingrid says.
“Really? That’s wonderful! Think of all the time you’ll have to write.”
Ingrid and I exchange glances. I know she’s asking me if now’s the time to tell her, and before I send my own answering glance, Clara says, “What’s going on with you two? You’re acting weird. Is everything all right?”
“It is,” I say. “We just haven’t talked much about what we’ll do. It’s a new development.”
“I heard some pretty big stories on the way up here,” Ingrid says, looking past me and on to Clara. “But nothing’s going on. Your father has a lot on his mind.”
“Starting with wondering how you two are doing,” I say. “Delia, Clara was just telling me about your trip to Wyoming last fall.”
Delia looks at me, then quickly at Clara and Ingrid. With those glances, it’s clear to me I’ve just embarrassed myself. Ingrid as much as announces my plight by getting up and coming to sit beside me, putting her hand on my hair and brushing it behind my ear.
Delia’s voice softens and she says, “We were up in the Bighorns. My dad and my brother and me. My dad’s business partner has a place just outside Sheridan, and they’ve been hunting there since I was a girl. Last year they let me come along, and what do you know? I bagged a big old bull.”
“We’ve still got a hundred pounds of moose meat in the deep freeze. And that’s after eating it every day since she got back,” Clara says.
“Not every day,” Delia says. “But you’ve made your point. Tomorrow night we’ll order pizza.” She takes a long gulp of her beer and adds, “I’m sure it’s ready. Should we go ahead and eat?”
Some dread has come over us, and we move to the kitchen to scoop our bowls of stew like a band of pilgrims moving not toward a feast but rather into the famine of a long winter. I’m the pox. I know this. And as they grab their bowls and spoons and as Clara ladles, her eyes misty through the steam rising from the Dutch oven, I say, “Rather than moping and dodging, I’m just going to tell you what’s going on.”
I sit on one of the bar stools under the countertop, set my glass of beer in front of me, and speak without looking up from it. I tell Clara and Delia about yesterday’s diagnosis. I tell them about sitting in Doctor Zheng’s office and how I’ve been getting more forgetful and irritable. I tell them I’m all right, really, and that I was going to wait until Annika got here tomorrow, but I didn’t want to ruin our evening.
“Ruin our evening?” Clara says.
I look up from my beer. She’s leaning on the counter, searching for the punchline that’s not coming.
“I wish you wouldn’t have told them yet, Jon.”
I turn to Ingrid.
“You said you were going to wait.”
The pall I’ve cast over the room is as rich as the stew’s aroma, and I don’t know how I’ve caused it. “I told you because I didn’t want everyone wondering what was wrong. I wanted us to enjoy our dinner and play a few games of euchre and be happy. That wasn’t going to happen with all the suspicion in the air.” If my voice sounds half as pleading as it feels, I’ve never been so pathetic. Judging by the wounded look on my daughter’s face, I’m mistaken about everything. Both Ingrid and Delia are silent now, staring at their bowls as I, only moments ago, stared at my beer.
Clara sighs. Twice, three times, then starts to cry. She wipes her cheeks as she walks down the hallway to her bedroom. I look at Ingrid, who finally looks back, but only for a moment before she sets her stew on the table. She comes over and gets my bowl and brings it across the room, too. She motions for me to come sit by her, and when Clara returns, the three of us are seated at their sturdy table.
She’s holding what appears to be a frame. Hugging it, really, with arms folded around it and to her chest. Her tears are steady now, but she’s not weeping. These are the stoic tears she made famous as a teenager, those days that suddenly seem a lifetime ago. I know enough to wait, which I do for as long as it takes her to gather herself. She moves her hands to the opposite edges of the frame and holds it out in front of her and studies whatever’s there for a long time. In the silence of the room I hear the bubble of the stew ten feet away on the stovetop.
By the time Clara turns the frame around so I can see what’s inside it, her tears have stopped. “This is the surprise we wanted to give you,” she says, taking a couple steps toward me.
I take my glasses out of my shirt pocket and hurry them on and look at what’s before me: a portrait of Clara sitting in the leather chair in their living room, the dog lying at her feet, her legs crossed and her hands folded over the little paunch of her belly.
“This is your work, Del?” I say.
She nods.
There’s a warmth to the painting, which is not in Delia’s usual monochromatic and almost menacing style but rather is full of light and something like hope. I study it a long time, smiling at the way all the light—from the window, from the sconce on the wall, from the dog’s upturned eyes, from her own eyes—seems to gather on her lap.
“It’s beautiful,” I say. “Both the subject and the painting itself.”
Clara hands it to me. “It’s for you.”
“It’s too beautiful for me.”
“Don’t you get it, Dad?”
I glance at Ingrid, who’s crying now, too. “I don’t.”
Clara leans over and touches my cheek like a parent might her child, then lowers her hand to her belly in the painting. She takes my hand and stands tall and puts my fingers on her real-life belly.
Again, I glance at Ingrid, who’s now smiling through her tears. To Clara I say, “You mean?”
She nods and I set the painting on the table and stand and hold her.
“My goodness,” I whisper into her ear. “My goodness.” What I don’t say, for all the obvious reasons, is that where one life ends, another begins. But the thought of her news gives me enormous courage. So much that I begin to laugh. I laugh until I start hiccupping and when I finally get ahold of myself everyone else is laughing, too. Laughing and crying and talking and listening and hugging and holding hands around the table.
By the time I learn it’s a little boy, and that he’ll be born in August, and that his name is already Erik Johannes, we’ve finished our moose stew and the loaf of homemade bread, and our beer’s been replaced with coffee, and the homemade toffee Delia usually makes at Christmastime is only crumbs on the dessert platter.
All’s forgiven. All’s right again.
Clara was the only one of my own children who took to ski jumping, and only for three winters. We spent those seasons at Chester Bowl, she and I, jumping on the bunny and rabbit ears with a group of five or ten other kids, and though she had fun she was as likely to build snowmen or play along the creek’s edge as she was to take a morning of jumping seriously, and at the age of nine she decided to try cross country skiing instead. Her senior year of high school she was a state high school champ.
She had scholarship offers to go to college at places like New Hampshire and Middlebury and Northern Michigan, but she decided to stay in Duluth and go to St. Scholastica. Her reasons, as I remember them, were mostly vague and unconvincing. But what father wouldn’t want his daughter so close by? She lived with us until she was twenty years old, when she met Delia and got an apartment downtown. Moving up here to Gunflint is the most daring thing she’s ever done. At least that’s how she describes it.
We’re walking along the Old Toboggan Road, Clara and I, with her dog heeling beside her on the dirt road. This track is mostly cocooned by the forest around it, but occasionally it opens to the long view, down the hill, and you can see across the lake to the horizon. I reckon from up here it’s a fifty-mile view. For all the day’s bluster, the clouds are scuttling toward that horizon now, leaving a palette of star-speckled sky so bright even the brilliant moon can’t dim it.
“Are you scared, Dad?” So far, excepting a few pleasantries about the moose stew and the cold night, we’ve walked mostly in silence, something we’ve always been good at. “Because I am. For you and me both.”
“You don’t have anything to be afraid of, sweetheart. You’re healthy and strong and as happy as I’ve seen you.”
“Well, you’re not.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re the worst liar I’ve ever met.”
“Actually, I’m one of the best.” I mean to sound teasing, but instead it comes out like a threat, and she takes a sideways step across the road. The dog moves in lockstep with her.
After another minute of silence, she says, “What’s it mean?”
“My sickness? Well, likely it’ll come on slowly. It’ll take a while before I’m debilitated. But I’m already forgetful. You saw that earlier.”
“But you’ve always been forgetful.”
“Not like I’ll become. In fact, hold on a minute.” I take her by the shoulders and frame her in the break in the trees, with the lake and sky behind her. I step backward halfway across the road and ask her to look up at the moon, which she does. I notice the dog looks where she does.
“This is weird, Dad.”
“Shush,” I say, and to keep it not weird I resist the temptation to kneel on the spot. “Just let me look at the woman you’ve become. Let this be the memory I take with me.”
I haven’t intended to be so melodramatic, but the fact is seeing my girl, and learning she’s pregnant, has made me especially nostalgic, and I want desperately to hold this night in some reserve.
The dog turns her snout over her other shoulder. She moves to face the direction we’ve just walked from, the road behind us curving into a dense thicket of aspen and pine.
“What is it, girl?” Clara asks.
Now the moon makes shadows of them both on the road. The dog growls, but barely, and somewhere up on the hillside a choir of wolves lets loose their baleful howls. The dog cocks her head and her ears flip forward.
“How close are they?” I whisper.
“If I were guessing, I’d say they’re on the Burnt Wood. Up on one of the ridgelines. So, a half-mile away?”
Then, as suddenly as the first chorus came, there is an answer from down the hill. A lone voice. The dog jumps and faces that direction. She takes a couple steps backward so her rump is right on Clara’s leg. She has pinned her ears back now and sharpened her eyes and her shadow has fallen into Clara’s.
“Good girl,” Clara says, and we stand for a moment in the silent moonlight.
And then we hear it—so very near—the snapping of twigs and the whooshing of snow before the unmistakable skitter of stones on the dirt road, two leaping steps, and again the wolf enters the woods. It’s so close that I swear I can feel the breeze of its passing. When I look back from the darkness, Clara is smiling broadly and the dog is ready to launch. But my daughter squats and rests her hand on Dolly’s hackles. She leans over and kisses her. Or whispers in her ear. And pacified, the dog sits, her ears thrust forward again.
“Good girl,” she says again. Then in a normal voice she says to me, “What a bonus.”
This morning—a lifetime ago—has met its other end. And her smile almost tricks me into believing that what leapt across the road was just a wolf.