MY PHONE CALLS WITH POPS started with his first from prison. We hadn’t talked directly since that day in the bingo hall basement. He spoke with Bett first, then said hello to a sullen Anton, and saved me for last. He said he was sorry to have brought me into that mess and sorrier still for what I’d had to do. He said he’d never be able to make it up to me, a notion that seemed preposterous when he spoke it but took on a new and inevitable quality as the years slunk by. Almost three of them he spent in the state pen on that manslaughter charge, calling us every month to say hello. After he got out, and after I moved to Duluth, we talked on the phone often enough. Usually in the evening, after Bett had gone to sleep and I’d returned from work or classes. It was a habit we continued until the Christmas before he passed, when we spoke for the last time.
Occasionally, we’d speak about our fateful day, and of Patollo and Sheb and the ignoble turn our lives took. If those conversations were difficult for both of us at first, over the years they became almost nostalgic, and he’d usually praise me for overcoming the sorry conditions he had laid at my feet. He asked once or twice about the time Anton and I spent at the Torrs’ place on Lake Forsone, but I believe that topic stirred in him a depth of regret he found too hard to surface from, and so the rest of that story had to live inside me and me alone. I had to live alone with my memory of Helene, too. Only once or twice did Pops mention her, that young woman who swooped in under Patollo’s vicious wings, and left as swiftly under Sheb’s, never to be heard from again, his voice then trailing into a faraway tone that announced a depth beyond sadness.
I can’t imagine the yearning. The looking back and only ever finding her absence. Sitting now at the dark window at Clara’s, staring at the mellowing lake, I suppose the same fate is in store for me. That’s what Doctor Zheng said, anyway. Time would win. That’s exactly what she said, and of course she’s right. I at least got to love my children. Pops could not have said the same at the end. Not about his daughter.
If he were alive, I’d call him now. I’d wait for his jolly voice. The happiness in hearing from me. It would do me good. But of course I can’t call him. Five years is a long time to go without your father’s voice. That’s one thing I’ve learned.
Ingrid comes from the bathroom, switching off the light and fan as she opens the door. “Sitting in the dark, Jon?”
“To see the night,” I say.
She sidles up beside me and puts her hand in my hair and sighs. “It’s getting late. You must be exhausted.”
I nod.
“My goodness, but it’s lovely to be here with the girls and their prospects.”
“Oh my,” I say. It’s almost more than I can bear. Certainly, it’s more than I deserve.
“And Annika joining us tomorrow.”
“Remind me not to be stupid around her?” I say.
“You’ve never been stupid.”
That’s not true, though I appreciate her saying as much. I lift my face to hers. “I’m sorry. For laying the burden of this disease at your feet. And for the stories I told you today. The fact I’ve kept them from you all these years. I don’t know which is worse.”
She doesn’t reply.
“I always thought I could live without you knowing. Turns out I can’t die that way, though. I suppose I’m being selfish. I’m sorry for that, too.”
“You’ve had quite a day, Jon. We’ll have time to talk about all that. It’s not important we do it now. We have other things to think about—joyful things. Why don’t you join me in bed? I need you to keep me warm.”
She leans down and kisses my head and I say, “I’ll be to bed in a little while.”
“Don’t fall into the lake out there.” She crosses the room and pulls the covers back and climbs in.
“Sweet dreams, Ingrid.”
“Oh, I hope so.”
The rustle of the comforter behind me and the quiet night outside put me in mind of another fateful night’s sleep, one I’m happy to revisit, even if I can hardly see it anymore. I close my eyes, and there’s my little brother on the couch at the Torrs’ cabin on Lake Forsone, not twenty miles as the crow flies from where I sit now. Olaf, after ushering us up there, had left with Noah the next day. Headed back home to Duluth with promises of checking in as often as he could, leaving Anton and me alone. I played brave, but by God I was scared. Olaf had showed us how to break the ice on the lake to get water. He’d told us which pile to pull our wood from. He’d bought us more groceries at The Landing, and he instructed the woman behind the counter that if we two boys needed anything else she should let us have it and charge it to his account. He told us that if either of us broke a leg on the jump, we should go to the hospital up in Gunflint and have them call him. Then he smiled and said, “Better not be you that breaks a leg, Jon. I don’t know if our quiet friend is ready to make that drive yet.”
In ordinary times, Anton would have smiled and taken the bait and assured Mr. Torr that he could damn well drive any car, broken leg or not. But this Anton still didn’t respond. Not at all. In fact, the last thing Olaf said after he got in his Suburban and rolled down the window before returning to Duluth was, “Put some words back in that boy’s mouth, eh?”
I said I’d try, and we watched him drive up the hill and away from the cabin. When his taillights disappeared in the gloaming, I said, “You don’t have anything to worry about, got that? Fuck Sheb and that twisted school for boys.” I looked down at Anton with what I hoped was a steadfastness like Pops’s. “We’re gonna camp here until I can figure things out.”
He wouldn’t look at me.
Back in the cabin, he sat by the woodstove and stared into the fire. I put a pan of baked beans to warm on the stove and made a pot of coffee and added sugar to his. He drank it like he was an old man, the scalding hotness unfelt. We ate the beans and Salted Nut Rolls for dinner and sipped our coffee and later I said we should go outside and take a piss before bed.
There was something alight in the dark. Layer upon layer of defiant light. First a new falling snow, then the fallen snow, then the sudden warmth of our bodies out in the yard. In the woods, the darkness had a firmer hold. But even still there were shadows. Mirages. Forms that might have been bears or wolves or antlered moose but were probably only pockets of darker evening. Were probably only the idea of Sheb haunting me.
To distract Anton, I told him to look up at the sky. It was filtered by the empty limbs of a thousand towering trees. But I said, “Imagine how many stars we’ll see on nights like this.”
He just zipped up and turned back for the cabin. When we got inside we pulled the lumpy mattress off the queen bed in the second bedroom and arranged it at the foot of the stove. We got pillows and afghans, one each from the chair and the sofa, and before we hit the sack Anton took his notepad out and wrote: WHAT ABOUT MA?
“I don’t know,” I said, hardly able to mask my vitriol. I hated her then as much as I ever would. I was scared. Even more afraid, I suspect, than Anton. “But we got groceries to last us a month and enough wood to build a fire to the moon and a ski jump in our backyard. What’s better even than that is we aren’t stuck at St. Balder’s anymore. We’re our own men now. If Bett wants to find us, she won’t have to look far. Mr. Torr is going to let Pops know where we are. He can tell Bett if she wants to know. But Sheb? That motherfucker? He could search for a year and never track us down. We’re safe from him.”
I doused the lantern and put another log on the fire and collapsed under the skunky afghan. Anton laid down, too, and we stared at the ceiling.
“I’m already too warm,” I said, not even a minute into dreamtime. “I guess Sheb and his twelve-degree dormitory can kiss our hot asses, eh little brother?” The nightsounds curled about the cabin. “Goddamn freak, wanted to send you away to a home for imbeciles, why? Because you’re having a little trouble with your words? Fuck no.”
Anton rolled over to look at me and took a deep breath.
“Get a toothbrush on those chiclets in the morning, eh? Your breath smells worse than one of Sheb’s Sunday morning farts.”
He laughed. Anton did. And then to put an exclamation point on it, he farted himself, and we laughed together. When we settled down, I could hear the wind swirl around the house, whistling in through the leaky windows above the couch. Through that window, I could see those tree limbs dancing.
“We’re gonna be all right, Anton. I promise.”
He took a deep breath and was asleep just like that. The way kids go. Me? I was so tired I thought I’d sleep forever, but I lay there a long time instead. Listening to the sweet ease of his slumber. Listening to the wind. Listening to what might have been wolfsong, or what might have been the start of the dream of the rest of my life.
“What are you doing over there, Jon?” Ingrid asks.
I turn to her, lying in bed. I can see her prettiness and already tousled hair in silhouette. She looks as if she’s just woken from a dream herself.
“Just watching the lake, sweetheart.”
“The deepest parts?” she asks.
She can’t see my smile. It’s one that finds me because I know I’ll be okay as long as I’ve got her by my side.
“I was just remembering when Bett came up to the Torrs’ cabin to retrieve my brother and me after we stayed there that winter.”
“Was it really a whole winter?”
“A couple months.”
“Can you imagine her relief laying eyes on you?” Ingrid says.
I’d never once thought of that, always reverting instead to my own admonishment. My seething anger. It’s never found rest.
“She would have been mortified,” Ingrid goes on. “Her boys alone in the woods for all that time while she was just holding on for dear life.”
I have an instinct to disagree with her, but I don’t. There’s not enough time for that anymore.
“She just rolled up there? Said, ‘Time to go home, boys’? Something like that?”
“Exactly like that, actually. Olaf brought her.” I could see Bett standing in the doorway, looking around our bunkhouse. “ ‘You’ll have to tidy up here before we leave,’ she said, like we’d been at a friend’s house for a sleepover. Olaf said no, we should just grab our things and leave, he’d take care of the cabin.”
Ingrid rolls on her side and fluffs her pillow.
“We grabbed our things and went out to the car and that was it. We stopped for donuts at Tobies on the way home. We slept in our beds at home that night. We went back to our regular schools the next day. Pops got out of the hoosegow a couple years later. We went to dinner at Vescio’s the night he did.”
“All those years and you never patched things up. What a pity.”
Outside the lake wasn’t deep enough.
“I should have. You’re right.”
She sighs, a sound that tells me she’s had enough of all this, and says, “Now you’ll be a grandpa! Another chance for something new. A chance to do things better.”
I don’t disagree, but look out at the darkness and see something less than chance. Instead of admitting that, I say, “Indeed.”
“Come to bed, sweet husband of mine.”
“Will it bother you too much if I call Anton first?”
“Right now?”
I check my watch. “It’s only ten o’clock. He’ll be up.”
“Are you going to tell him, Jon?”
“I think so. And anyway, I want to hear his voice.”
Answering, she pulls the covers up to her chin and rolls to face away. Like she won’t be listening. Like I can have my privacy.
“Sleep sweetly, sweet woman. I love you.”
“Yes, you do,” she says, and I can hear the smile in her voice.
“Well goddamn, if it ain’t my big brother,” Anton says.
“I’d ask if it’s too late to call, but you’re probably just sitting down for lunch.”
“That’s not true! Though I did have some peanuts and a Coke. Do I need to pour myself a strong one?”
He’s off the sauce. Has been since Boff’s closed a year ago. The city wouldn’t grandfather the adult entertainment zoning laws to Anton after Sheb died. But don’t worry about him: he sold the property to a developer and is coasting on that.
“Where are you? Sounds like you’re in a wind tunnel.”
“I’m up in Gunflint. At Clara’s. She and Delia are expecting. I’m going to be a grandfather, can you believe that?”
He coughs. I hear the click of a lighter and him taking the first drag off a cigarette. As he exhales he says, “Congratulations, Jon. That’s something else.” He takes another drag from his cigarette and says, “Sounds nice, having your girls up there. But surely you didn’t call to tell me about your family gathering. What’s going on?”
“It’s not enough to just want to say hi?”
“Of course it is, but that’s also not why you called.”
I hear the squeak of a chair sliding out from under the table. “You’re at the kitchen table, yeah?”
“I was playing solitaire with my late-night snack.” He takes a drink of his Coke. “How’d you know that, anyway?”
“I heard the chair move. I thought it sounded like the kitchen.”
“Your intuition remains a goddamn fright. It’s like you’re a witch or something.”
Now I hear him open the fridge, then the crack of another can of Coke. “I gotta tell you, man, it’s still weird living back here.”
“I can’t imagine.”
He sits back down at the kitchen table. “Tell me why you’re really calling?”
“I wanted to talk to Pops,” I say, recognizing as I say it that it’s true, “but, well, I guess that would just be talking to myself.”
“I guess it would.”
“How’s Angel?”
“Asleep in her bedroom, actually. She’s here for a visit. And she’s going to the U next year, so she’ll be living with us.”
“That’s spectacular.”
“It is indeed.”
“Missy’s happy about it?”
“They’re like best friends. You wouldn’t believe it. The way they outfox me, it’s not fair.”
“I’ve spent plenty of time being outfoxed by my wife and daughters, I think I know what you mean.” I pause, thinking about how much Ingrid has taught me over the years. And how much my daughters have taught me. And how I’ve had so little to offer in return. And now Bett streaks across my mind, as an absence as much as an image. “Maybe we can chalk up some of our thickheadedness in this department to Bett.”
I can as much as see him nod, in that way of his that’s come to be an acknowledgment of my unbreakable grudge. To his credit, he remains patient with me. He takes a drink, lets out a soft burp. “Ma was a lot of things, but great teacher of sons sure wasn’t one of them.”
“I do that out of habit more than anything,” I say.
“Do what?”
“Make my faults and shortcomings her responsibility.”
“Oh, she did a number on us,” he admits and, as so often happens when we talk these days, the schism between us seems to shrink a little more.
“What do you know about her that I don’t?”
“Everything,” he says. “Not only did I take care of her the last years of her life, but now I spend a bunch of time sitting around listening to her ghost.”
“The house is haunted, eh?”
“I’m not sure if it’s the house or me.”
“Did she ever tell you why?” My confidence in the question—asking it, yes, but also wanting the answer—trails off in a long, uncertain exhalation.
“Why what?”
“Why she took all those pills?”
He takes a drag from his cigarette and says, “Well, she was depressed, obviously. Angel majored in psychology, and she’s coming to the U to get a master’s degree in behavioral psych, so she has some authority on the subject. Her theory is Ma was schizophrenic. The obsessive-compulsive streak, the isolation, the suicidal thoughts. Of course, Ma wouldn’t’ve ever had it diagnosed. She wouldn’t even have thought about it.”
“Schizophrenic? I’m not even sure what that means.”
“It means she should’ve had help. A doctor and treatment. Drugs. Instead she had nothing. It means she looked deep into her unhappiness and swallowed all those pills because she thought it was the best solution. Of course, schizophrenia’s just a hypothesis.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about her today.”
“Regrets?” he says.
“Sure. Of course. But mostly just wondering.”
“Anything in particular? Beyond her mental health?”
“I guess I was wondering about what might really have happened between her and her sister and Pops. It must’ve been a soap opera the way that all went down.”
“To hear Ma talk about it, Lena couldn’t get out of here fast enough. She turned around nearly as soon as they got here. And because Ma relied on her as much as she did, because Lena was about the only thing she ever knew, Ma was wrecked.”
“Not so wrecked she didn’t stick around for Pops.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“I wonder what happened, that time Bett went to see Lena in Chicago. When she met Helene.”
“I can tell you what happened: she knocked on her sister’s door, asked her if she could come in, and was told no.”
“Ma told you this?”
“Yup. I would’ve turned right around myself, but Ma went back the next morning. That’s when she met Helene. Sounds like they had a cup of tea together—she and Lena—before Lena told her she didn’t want to see her anymore. Far as I know, Ma never reached out again.”
“We’re a long line of misfits,” I say.
“We had our reasons, they must’ve had theirs.”
“True enough. Thank God those days are behind us, eh?”
“No doubt,” he says, and takes another drag on his smoke. “So, if you were talking to Pops, what would you say?”
It comes out of me like it was slingshot: “I’m sick, Anton.”
He says, “I could’ve told you that” before he realizes I’m being serious. Then he adds, “Not the common cold, I take it?”
“Not by a long shot.”
“Well, fuck,” he says.
“I’ve been absentminded lately. More than that, really.”
“Fuck,” he says again. “Goddamnit.”
“They call it younger-onset Alzheimer’s. Things are going to get gray.”
He’s silent.
“I wanted to tell you.” I realize as soon as I say this it’s because I want him to understand how much he’s come to mean to me again. And that I want to mean as much to him.
“What can I do? Do you want me to come up there?”
“You’re welcome any time, of course. That’ll always be true. But there’s nothing to do.”
“What does it even mean? Younger-onset?”
“Just that I’m young for Alzheimer’s, which sounds ridiculous, given my old and creaking bones.” I reach down to my leg and press back against the scars on either side of my calf. “I’ve still got some time, though. I mean, I might function for a couple more years.”
“A couple years is good,” he says.
“It’s better than nothing.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I never know how to talk about this shit.”
“No one does. You don’t have to apologize.”
“Is Ingrid all right?”
I look over at the bed. Her silhouette now cocooned under the comforter. The steadiness of her breathing makes me think she’s sleeping, and not just pretending. That would be like her, easy to bed. I can hardly believe how much I love her.
“She’s doing as well as can be expected. We just found out yesterday.”
“When are you going to be home? We’ll meet you.”
“We’re headed back the day after tomorrow. We’ll be home by lunchtime.”
“We’ll bring something to eat, then. All three of us. Can we do that? Can we come?”
“I’d love that.”
“Then we’re all set.”
“You know, I was at the Torrs’ cabin today. On Lake Forsone.”
“Really?”
“Well, Noah lives there now. He’s turned into his dad, I guess. All alone in the middle of the woods.”
Now it’s Anton who doesn’t say anything. I suppose it’s traumatic, in a way, to conjure that place up.
“I was just thinking about the jump there. All those rides we took.”
“Here we go!” Anton says, the tone of his voice instantly lifted. Lighter. Flying.
“It’s too late to get on that train, but I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever apologized.”
“Hey.” He says it like a scolding parent. Like he’s going to dictate the rules and limits of this conversation. “You said all your apologies that night we skied across town.”
“It was one of the best nights of my life.”
“Me too,” he says.
Then we sit in silence for a spell. I shift the phone from one ear to the other and turn from looking at Ingrid to looking at the lake again. The sky’s broken and a line of stars is on the horizon. Their light shines on the clouds above them and on the edge of the water farthest away.
“You should see it here. The sky above the lake.”
“I’ve seen it before,” he says. Then he says, “I love you, big brother.”
I’ve brushed my teeth and stripped down to my skivvies and taken my watch from my wrist and removed my notebook from the back pocket of my trousers and set it on the bedside table next to my watch. I’ve left the window curtains open because I want to see the rest of the sky come to light. I want to dream under it, beside Ingrid.
And so I rest my eyes. Finally. And stretch my ankles the way I always do. I lay my hands at my side and I lift my chin up to crack my neck but leave it jutted up there for a minute, pulling into sleep, hoping to catch the same dream I woke up from this morning.