Leave the Living (5 page)

He nearly started the SUV again and turned around, the part of his mind that relied on technology crying out against the injustice of being cut off from the world. But he wasn’t cut off, not really. The Tahoe had four-wheel drive, surely capable of tearing through any drifts that Mother Nature could conjure, and there was the landline inside the house. His father had never taken the plunge of purchasing a cell; doing so, he said, would be “adding to the erosion of social dignity.” To which Mick always reminded him that before cell phones, there were newspapers that people buried their faces inside while in public. His father had always just shaken his head.

Mick sighed and resigned himself to the fact that whoever called him would have to wait until that evening or the next morning to receive a response.

He climbed from the Tahoe into the storm, gripping his father’s key ring in his pocket like a talisman. An uncanny dread rose within him, and he swayed with it, keeping time to the clanging funeral tune of the wind chime. A pressure, not unlike the kind employed within the fuselage of a plane, gathered around him. It was as if eyes laid upon him, watching, waiting.

Something’s here with you.

Mick shivered, shrugging off the irrational thought. The snow was fresh. There were no tracks in or out. His father was gone. No one was here. He looked up at the house again, squinting against the blowing flakes.

A face peered out of the second-floor window at him.

Mick inhaled, sucking down some icy grit that made his eyes water. He blinked, taking a step back as he found the window again. Frost covered its lower half like a frigid beard and ran upward until it met the joint of the upper pane. The darkness at its center was rounded. He dropped his head. It had been an illusion, a trick of the eyes created by frost and the storm along with his nerves, which jumped like the chime’s tubes. He shot the window another look and waded forward, snow reaching halfway up his shins.

The porch was mostly free of accumulation, and he stomped his feet, pulling out the ring to find the correct key. The door opened without a sound, and he stepped inside out of the chill.

9

The house was quiet with deep afternoon shadows coating the floors and corners. The air smelled of old wood smoke, acrid but not unpleasant. Mick breathed it in and shut the door behind him. He stood in the entryway, a long open closet holding his father’s jackets and hats above two pairs of boots and a single pair of tennis shoes. The laundry was to the left, its appliances dormant. The kitchen was a wide room that opened into the dining area that held a massive oak table his father had built in the woodshop and assembled within the house, its dimensions too large to fit through any of the doors. Mick waited, the soft drip of snow melting from the back of his coat onto the tile the only sound.

He moved forward, turning on lights as he went dispelling the darkness from where it gathered. Off the dining room was a small office nook containing a desk piled high with his father’s papers. He had been an unbelievably neat man, this being the only place in the house that had a look of chaos. A massive staircase led up to the second level, its hallway opening to the master bedroom and his own vacant room. Another set of stairs dropped away near the office to the basement, its depths remaining unlit even with the glow of the lights.

The crushing weight of absence filled the home, its heart gone now and finished beating. There was no way to make the windows light up again, not in the way they used to. Mick sagged with the knowledge and stripped off his coat, leaving it to hang on the back of a dining room chair. The temperature was considerably warmer than outside but still not where it should be. Downstairs a whirring rose to meet him, the soft buzzing of a fan.

When he clambered down to the basement, he found its source. An electric heater had been plugged in and was spitting out a meager amount of warmth. The large potbellied stove was dark at the far end of the room, neatly stacked wood nearly overflowing the box beside it. Mick found the matches on the mantel, where they always were, and knelt, opening the stove’s front. In minutes a fire roared behind its gap-toothed grate, and he opened the dampers, letting the steel beast breathe all the air it needed.

Shrouded to the right sat his father’s chair. Long past its prime, it was threadbare and worn, like its owner had been, but sturdy without a whisper of falling apart. Beside it was a smaller chair, not nearly as used but comfortable in a way that made you want to fold up in it for a nap, especially when the stove glowed and popped nearby. His father had read to him here on freezing nights when the TV was lost to a storm, or sometimes when it was working just fine. The stories of pirates or an adventuring gang of youth never failed to make him see more pictures in the abstract surfaces of the floor, drapes, or ceilings.

He studied the two seats for a long time. Objects were only that until the person that used them was removed. Then they became memories, or doors to memories you couldn’t shut even if you wanted to.

Mick left the stove to its burning, the heat following him up the stairs. At the top step, movement flickered to his right and behind him heading for the stairway leading to the second floor. He twisted around seeing nothing, but the creak of a stair overhead came and went like a scream cut off midway through.

He waited, frozen above the basement. The heat seeped past him while his hands grew colder and his heart stuttered in his chest. Finally he moved forward enough to peer up at the loft holding the hallway.

Nothing waited in the cool shadows.

He climbed the stairs one at a time, waiting for and finding the same creak in the second-to-the-topmost step. He put his weight on it several times, listening to the same sound he’d heard moments ago. He stared down the short corridor to where his father’s room branched off. The darkness there was still pure, untouched by the lights from below. Mick reached to the wall, his fingers sliding on wood until they met the switch he knew was there. The overhead lights came on, showering the hall in a yellow glow.

The door to his father’s room was open.

Of all the years he’d known him, his door had never been open. Once as a boy of ten, he had ventured inside the bedroom, keen to see what his father had hidden there, because he was sure there was something meant to be kept secret. Mick had been allowed to go into the room with his father but never without. On that occasion he had crept beneath the bed, blowing dust from old hunting magazines. He’d found a picture of his mother, smiling with eyes like an angel’s as she looked back over her shoulder. She’d been wading in either a large lake or an ocean, the skirt she wore pulled up to mid-thigh. Feeling strangely intrusive, like a burglar instead of a son, he’d placed the picture back in the nightstand drawer where he’d found it and made to leave but stopped when the doorway had filled with his father’s form. Only that once had the older man ever hurt him by the grasp on his arm, pulling him from the room and saying in a deadly calm voice that barely held the anger in check to never go in there again—ever.

But now the room was open, and his father wouldn’t catch him there. But maybe that’s what he’d seen downstairs, what had made the stair creak. Maybe he was waiting inside the room, waiting for him to step in and invade his privacy again. Waiting to grab his arm.

“Stop it,” Mick said. His words echoed down the hall, falling dead at its end.

He moved forward, forcing himself to walk naturally, quelling the fear that attempted to rear its head as he came even with the room. Gray light filtered in through a half-curtained window. In its folds, he saw shoulders and the face of a man, but it was only his pictures now, nothing there other than his mind seeing patterns. Mick padded into the room and turned on the light.

His father’s bed was made, just as he’d always seen it. The laundry basket was full in the corner and a slip of paper sat on top of the bureau. He moved closer and read the slanting script of his father’s hand.
Move fish house. Gary was wrong about the new spot.
There were a dozen other chores listed above it, all crossed off, all of them complete except this one. Mick slowly sat on the bed, holding the note, maybe the last thing his father had written. The tears came, and he let them fall, being careful not to let any stain the note. When they slowed and then stopped, he moved to the adjoining bathroom and blew his nose before pacing back to the hall. On his way, he paused near the walk-in closet. Its door was ajar. Had it been that way when he came in? Mick stood there, rooted to the spot, racking his memory but couldn’t recall. He reached out to close the door. In his mind, he saw dead fingers stretching out of the dark of the closet to grasp his own, to pull him inside.

He shut the door, letting a long sigh trail out before leaving the room. He closed the outer door also and went down the stairs, realizing only after reaching the kitchen that he still held the list in one hand. He set it on the counter and went to the refrigerator. Inside were a dozen cold beers, and he pulled one free, twisting its top off. The beer was good, better than the tap he’d had with Gary that morning.

“Hope you don’t mind, Dad, I might just get shitfaced.” He drained more from the bottle, the dark part of his mind waiting for an answer from somewhere in the house. Why was he so disturbed? Here, in this place of fond memories where nothing terrible or traumatic had ever happened? The simple and irreversible fact of death shouldn’t be able to paint black his love for the house and the man who no longer inhabited it. He wouldn’t let it.
Death is another journey
, his father had told him when he was young and afraid after hearing that a distant cousin had died in a car accident.
It’s mysterious and strange and sometimes wonderful, though we don’t know it at the time. It’s the common bond we hold with everyone else in the world. No matter race or age, woman or man, we all die.
Then he had given him a hug, holding him close so that he could smell the recent sawdust on his clothes and his fading aftershave.
But we all live too.

“Yeah, I’ll drink to that,” Mick said to the empty kitchen.

Outside the storm rose another notch, casting flurries in drifting cascades that seemed to walk, like the legs of some giant snow beast trudging through the endless white waste. The wind nuzzled the house, and several creaks and cracks came from the distant rooms. That’s what he’d heard before, he assured himself, just the wind and the cold doing its work on old joints. And the movement was the light filtering in through the blowing snow. Nothing, in other words.

His eyes fell to the paper again, and he pulled it closer, running his fingertips over the writing. He looked at it for a long time and then tipped the bottle straight up, finishing the beer.

“Why the hell not,” he said, and moved back toward the entry.

10

His father’s coat still smelled like him—the same aftershave, the same wood shavings mixed with a metallic undertone that could’ve been exhaust, perhaps from a chainsaw. But the heavy wool and furry lining withstood the wind and the blowing snow much better than his own thin coat. He wore knee-high Muck boots on his feet, pulled from the back of the entry closet. A stocking cap was drawn down over his ears, and his hands were covered by his father’s thick leather choppers. Mick was sure if someone drove up the driveway right now, they would mistake him for his father. He could almost see the imaginary visitors jamming on the brakes before reversing.

The thought made him chuckle as he slogged past the Tahoe to the hill that dropped away from the drive. The windswept decline wasn’t buried as deep as he’d thought near its top, but the drifts continued to pile up at its base. A ring of pine and cedar grew on the banks of the lake, their deep green color dark in the failing afternoon light. He walked through knee-deep snow until he felt the change beneath his boots and knew he’d stepped onto the lake.

It was a field of blowing white, flat and featureless, with only the odd drift rising here and there to break the illusion of its uniformity. Untouched, the lake was always well stocked with fish. And with only his father and perhaps his uncle to fish it, a catch was almost always assured. Mick turned, looking up the hill and could still make out the general outline of the house along with the clearer shape of the SUV. Even on a relatively small lake such as this, the chance of becoming lost in a whiteout was still a threat. More than one man had walked out into the Minnesotan winter, confident and sure of his bearings, only to be found huddled and frozen through, sometimes amid the pathetic makings of a fire that had never burned.

Mick continued on, the walking easier where the wind had blown the snow away, brushing it into curved piles that he circumvented. One of the beer bottles in his pocket clinked against something metallic, and he steadied himself on a bare patch of ice. He didn’t want to slip and fall and cut himself on a broken bottle, not to mention needlessly spill any beer.

The wind dropped in pitch, coming down from a tortured howl to a moan. And as the snow calmed, he spotted the dark shape of his father’s portable spear house. It was secured beneath a small drift that had stacked against its western side. It was roughly the size of a compact car, its steel bones covered by a tough, black canvas skin that flapped in the icy breeze. A scoop shovel protruded from the bank outside the little house, and a long ice saw stood beside it, its ancient teeth hooked and flecked with frost.