RYAN TRIED TO LOOK AROUND HIS HOUSE AS IF HE’D NEVER seen it before. If this were the first time he’d crossed the doorway, what would he think about the man who lived here?
It would take them three days. He’d done it in just over one. I’ll text you as we get near, Andrea had said on the phone.
I don’t text. I don’t have a cell phone, he’d said.
Of course you don’t, she’d said. And I thought I was a Luddite for not joining Facebook. Well, we leave Saturday so we’ll be there Monday evening. Should I, like, call when we’re close?
Just call if something goes awry, he said. I’ll be here.
Very nineties.
I guess that’s fitting.
“This might have been worth mentioning sooner,” Kelly said grimly. “What else are you not telling me?”
“You have a whole life that precedes me,” he countered. “I don’t need to know everything.”
“Come on, Ryan. You know where I stand on the important stuff.” Kelly was thirty-four and didn’t want kids, which was a pleasant distinction between her and most of the available female stock up here. She had a doctorate from Arizona State but she’d grown up in Fargo and was tough as nails. She never wore makeup or sunscreen, so she had a few extra lines that crinkled around her eyes, and even in October the faint pale outline of her tank-top tan dipped across her collarbone and shoulders.
Ryan had thought the two of them might be onto something. But when Kelly’s pickup coughed to life and growled out of the driveway this time, he knew that was the last he’d see of her for a while. Possibly ever. Possibly just a while. It was impossible to avoid someone here, the options were limited, and after a long enough cooling-off period he’d probably start to look good to her again.
It was Sunday night. They’d be here tomorrow. He vacuumed and swept again. He sat at the table and wrote Kelly a short, sweet letter to drop in the mail tomorrow or the next day. It had never failed him, the letter, especially if he put a little drawing on the envelope. By the time she received it and thought about it, they’d probably have come and gone. Who would these people be, anyway? Who was this kid? His sole input had been genetic—she’d known only Andrea, and Portland, her whole life, and that’s what would determine her. What kind of kid came out of there? Portland was a place he barely thought of anymore, and spoke of even less. He’d been in Bemidji long enough that no one asked, and besides, Where did you come from? wasn’t a question people asked much. In Portland people always asked because the answer was never “Here.”
Every now and then he’d come across some rapturous piece online about the fantastical wonderland of Portland—it seemed the New York Times discovered it anew every three months. They cited Powell’s Books, Forest Park, the obvious, but also a million restaurants and cafés he’d never heard of that were now established staples. And the neighborhoods they cited as shopping and dining meccas, arts districts—Alberta Street? North Mississippi Avenue? It was another city they described. He wondered about his old haunts, his old apartment. The Portland in his head was sticky dark bars, cafés that were really diners, damp junkies, the big old craftsman houses he and his friends could never afford to live in now, the stretch of gray months where you had to turn on the lights at noon. He’d appreciated it most upon leaving and returning—descending toward hills nearly black with evergreens, or crossing the Columbia River, or driving in at night when the neon and streetlights seeped color into the mist. It had been a great place to escape and a great place to come home to, but a hard place to stay. Anyone not in a band seemed to go nowhere else. Andrea practically had moss growing on her back.
Yet everything in Portland, no matter how fixed it appeared, seemed to split apart so effortlessly. A high erosion rate. The roots ran shallow. Even Andrea and her beloved queer community were as bad as or worse than anyone—they clung so fiercely to each other, and yet they’d cheat or fall out and entire friend networks would break into pieces. The band had felt like home; Andrea had briefly felt like home; he had lost, or given up, both of them.
Now he had a real one. Ryan’s house had been used as a hunting cabin for several years before he moved in as a renter, and a year later he’d persuaded the absentee owner to sell it to him. It was one story, built in the 1940s, with split-log siding painted dark brown and forest-green trim. It came with dirty rust-colored carpet and bunks in the lone bedroom and a harvest-gold refrigerator with yellowing shelves. The garage floor had been piebald with auburn deer bloodstains. Friends came over to help him clean and fix it up. People here knew how to fix and build the way his Northwest friends knew their way around a guitar. A different DIY culture, a different basic knowledge.
To his surprise, living out in the woods suited him. He learned all the trees’ names and developed allegiances with and animosities toward various birds. Noticed tracks and where the deer bedded down. Winter was the best—it was the longest, hardest season, but also the most clean and beautiful, and no mosquitoes. He had come to love how when snow fell it absorbed all sound, the air cottony with it; how in the morning, the trees cast blue zebra-stripes of shadows across the white; how the hard-packed snow squeaked underfoot. Ryan hadn’t intended to settle down in Bemidji so long, but he had grown deeply attached to this patch of land. And his friends were loyal and smart. They got each other through rough patches. The long-term small-town weirdos were a different species from the urban kind he’d known; each lived against the grain in their own way, with little expectation of reward for their idiosyncrasies, grateful to find like-minded people of any stripe.
Bemidji was a place people were from. Most had grown up here or nearby; they had stayed, or they had left briefly and then returned. With twelve thousand people and a small state university, this was the biggest town in the region. It had a dogged little food co-op and an old woolen mill and a new tattoo parlor. The stores in town hung signage in Ojibwe and English. Ryan’s friends ranged from their twenties to their seventies. For his fortieth birthday last December, they’d thrown a big party out at Bud’s place, merging it with the winter solstice party Bud usually held. There was a bonfire six feet tall and mountains of hot food in the house. Crossing that line into forty had been a relief. His twenties and thirties solidly behind him, done with, forty was like an absolution. So he’d thought.
At the barbershop on Monday, Ryan was so distracted he nearly shaved a stripe into the side of a client’s head. He closed early, at three, and went home. There was nothing more to clean. He had a cup of coffee. He had a shot of bourbon. He brushed his teeth. He forced himself to eat a banana. The house grew dim and he turned on the lights. He walked out to the end of the driveway and then back in to see what it looked like from the approach. If he was in there, you could see whatever dumb thing he was doing. Normally he never dropped the blinds, since no one could see his place from the road, but he went back inside and let them all down.
Finally, a car slowed on the road.
Headlights in the driveway.
A momentary urge to shut off all the lights, like his mom had done on Halloween when they had no candy to give. He wanted to head out the back door, to the open space of the yard and the dark sky and the waxing moon overhead.
But no. The motor went quiet. A few seconds later, he heard car doors thunk shut.
The most peculiar feeling. He imagined he was in a movie, playing the improbable role of a man meeting his . . . daughter for the first time. What kind of movie would that be? A war movie?
He flicked on the outside lights.
He pulled on his sneakers and coat and opened the front door.