South of Superior (19 page)

He worked at the prison because he needed the money, it was that simple. Every year he hoped he'd turn a corner with the pizzeria and be able to quit at the prison, but every year there was something that made that guaranteed paycheck indispensable—he needed a decent truck, a new cooler or two, there was always something. On a more metaphysical level, sometimes he thought maybe he worked at the prison because it was full of guys like Manny. Society's screw-ups. Sad to say, a lot of them were not that bright. They were the ones who'd got caught. Even though a lot of them had never had a chance to do anything
but
end Up in prison, on a day-to-day basis dealing with them was tedious and annoying.

When he was a kid, he'd loved his older cousin Manny. Always full of energy and bad ideas, Manny had been exciting, a nonstop adventure. As an adult, Manny would have grated on his nerves. In retrospect he'd probably been ADHD and not just the wild kid his parents despaired over. But people hadn't known about things like that back then, and if Manny'd just been full of youthful high spirits, he'd never had a chance to grow out of it. The motorcycle accident that had given Paul his limp had killed him.

Paul opened his book but couldn't attend to it. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He wished he wasn't alone. Two summers ago there had been Larissa from Kiev, and three summers before that there was Kate, a seasonal biologist with the Forest Service. With each of them he'd convinced himself it was something more than just a summer romance, but by Labor Day he'd known better, and so had they.

He thought about Madeline Stone. He'd driven past Gladys's house one day and seen her out in the side yard, swinging an ax, flailing at a chunk of wood, trying to split it. Her efforts had been clumsy and awkward and he'd wanted to jump out of the car and take over for her. But he didn't, he just watched. She bit her lip and repositioned the chunk of wood over and over, and when it finally split in two the look on her face was something to see. He wasn't sure he was attracted to her, but he found himself thinking about her sometimes when he didn't expect to, like now.

Paul sighed, tried to read again, but his thoughts nagged at him. He was nearly thirty-six years old and his life felt stale.
He
felt stale. He hadn't even picked Up his guitar in how long, and playing Used to be as indispensable as air. Lately—well, more than lately, for years now—he'd been in a rut that just kept getting deeper. He didn't know how to fix it, and he wouldn't have had the time or energy to fix it even if he did know. Why couldn't he be like Lily Martin at the store in Halfway and accept his life as it came? But he couldn't. He never had been able to. Or maybe he had, back when he was a kid, before the accident, but that was a long time ago.

The accident had changed everything. Before it, he was a boy who pretty much trusted in life. Afterward he knew how fast things could go wrong. Trouble could smack you down at any instant, so you'd better be on the lookout. And you'd better be careful what you asked for, too, because you just might get it. Paul had asked for—
insisted
on—a ride on Manny's motorcycle one summer afternoon. An hour later, Manny was dead.

A knock came on his outside door and Paul sat Up with alacrity, glad of the distraction.

“Hey,” Randi Hopkins said. She was wearing a short sky-blue dress that clung to her breasts but flared out from there, and flip-flops. She looked like summer.

“Hi. What's Up?”

“Nothing. I saw your light. Wondered what you were doing.”

“Reading.”

Randi nodded, tipped her head a little to see past him into his room. He stepped aside and waved her in. “You want a beer, or a pop?”

She began to shake her head but then said, “Sure.” She settled down into a chair, looked around. “You like to keep it pretty basic, eh?”

Paul smiled. He appreciated Understatement. He'd kept two rooms for himself when he started the pizzeria. Painted them both off-white. Put a bed and a bookcase and a small table with two chairs in one, a couch and a television in the second. “Basic” was the word for it. He pulled a bottle of beer and a cola out of his mini-fridge and held them Up for her consideration. She pointed at the beer. He popped off the top and handed it to her. “It's easy to take care of,” he said. “Maintenance free.”

Randi raised her eyebrows and gave him a very brief skeptical frown that made him laugh. He opened a beer of his own. “Just getting off work?”

She nodded and yawned hugely, covering her mouth and looking embarrassed.

“Long day?”

She yawned again, nodding. Paul found himself yawning in reaction, and they both started to laugh.

“So what are you reading?” Randi asked, reaching across to his bed and picking Up his book.

“Joseph Campbell.”

She shook her head, shrugged.

“Myths.”

“Like Zeus and all that?” She leafed through the pages.

“Sort of. He's talking about the stories we tell ourselves to give meaning to life.”

“Mmm,” Randi said, nodding. After a little silence she said, “What stories do you tell yourself?” smiling at him as if she really wondered.

Paul felt his entire self lean toward her.

 

 

“I'll go and get Walter,”
Ted Braith said to Madeline one afternoon near the first of July. He started along the hall and she followed. “He's Up in his room. You can go along and sit in there.”

He said the same thing every time she came. There was a small room off the hall that had perhaps once been a sunroom or a breakfast nook. A bay window bulged with houseplants. Otherwise, it held three rocking chairs, a lamp, and an end table. Madeline sat in a rocker and waited. It had been almost three weeks since she'd found out about Walter. The first time she came had been the most awkward.

She'd stood when her Uncle Walter walked in, her hands clasped in front of her, her fingers ice cold. How did you go about meeting your developmentally disabled great-uncle for the very first time?

“Walter, this is a friend of yours,” Ted had said.

“Oh, yes,” Walter answered, turning a worried smile on Ted.

“It's your niece. Your brother Joe's granddaughter. Do you remember her?”

“Oh yes. Madeline. She was a pretty little baby.”

Madeline felt a bewildered, dizzying sense of displacement.

“All right,” Ted said. “Well, she's come for a visit.”

Walter wore leather house slippers, gabardine slacks, a white T-shirt with a plaid flannel shirt over top of it. His face was grizzled, with a trace of beard, and his skin was a healthy pink. He looked like a pleasant old man, and there was nothing to tell you he was different except perhaps for some lack of Urgency in the tone of his waiting. She wondered if he looked like his brother, her grandfather.

“Hello, Walter. I'm Madeline,” she said faintly.

“Hello.” He turned to Ted with a questioning expression and Ted patted his shoulder. “Sit down, go on.”

Walter perched on the edge of a rocker, both feet planted flat on the floor and his hands on his knees. Madeline pulled a rocker around and sat down across from him, then glanced at Ted for guidance.

“You'll be fine. I'll be in through the back, in the kitchen, if you need me. My wife and I are fixing lunch.”

Walter and Madeline looked at each other, both she thought with diffident, puzzled expressions. “So I'm Madeline, your niece,” she said finally. “Great-niece.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Do you remember me?”

“Oh, yes. You were Jackie's baby.”

Madeline nodded very slowly and focused on breathing. In, out. In, out.
You were Jackie's baby.
Here it was. Her past. Her time on earth before Emmy, remembered by this old man who was, as Gladys had explained, “simple.”

“I don't—remember you,” she apologized after a moment.

“No,” Walter said. “You were a little baby. Jackie took you away.” He looked off across the room, toward the plant-filled window.

Madeline got Up and moved over to the window, touched the petals of a pink geranium. “It's pretty, huh?”

“Oh yes. Mama always loved posies. Animals too. We had a skunk, she called it Jim. I never was afraid of him, she got his sprayer took out.” He beamed at Madeline with this remembrance.

She stroked one of the geranium's petals, inhaling its particular bitter fragrance, which she admired for its bold air of unapology. After a moment she sat down again. She rocked, and Walter did too. A clock ticked Up on the wall and the rocker blades grunted on the wooden floor. She didn't want to alarm Walter (or was it herself?), and so she did not rush into questions. Plus there was something peaceful in their quiet.

She'd left when lunch was served. Walter gave her a hesitant smile and flapped one hand in a small wave, like a child. “I'll come see you again soon,” she promised.

“Okay.” He had hurried off to his lunch.

Now this was their routine. They visited a little, and were quiet more. Then when lunch was served, Madeline drove off to see Arbutus in the hospital.

Gladys hadn't come with her today, Madeline often traveled alone. It had been a long three weeks already, weeks in which Gladys's small house was cavernously empty and the two of them were stiff and formal with each other, polite but constrained. It was true that Madeline's fury at Gladys's keeping Walter a secret from her had faded at the instant of seeing Arbutus prone on the floor, but the hurt lingered. A trust that had been building was gone. It would take some time—some doing—to heal the wound. Madeline wasn't sure she really cared to. Gladys was very distant still. Madeline was sure she blamed her for Arbutus's fall, and wished she would just come right out and say so. Gladys wouldn't, though. She said very little. For now they were maintaining a civil relationship. Arbutus needed both of them, and so there was no option. Nowhere to go, nothing to change. But no future to it either, exactly.

There were only a few bright spots in her days, now: these visits with Walter, her times alone Up in the hotel (which Gladys hadn't gotten around to selling to the Bensons yet, thank God, even though the need must be greater than ever, with Arbutus in the hospital), and the time she spent with Greyson. Randi dropped him off quite often, and with Arbutus in the hospital and Gladys in a long gray funk, it fell to Madeline to entertain him and watch over him. It turned out she didn't mind this at all. Taking care of Greyson helped her keep her mind off herself. Plus she loved him.

He was full of energy for odd projects and enthusiasms, like building his own telescope, learning the names of all the snakes that lived in Michigan, digging a squirrel tunnel in Gladys's back yard. He was convinced that if he dug it, they'd Use it instead of tree branches to get around, especially if it was rainy. He was great. She was ashamed she'd resented bringing him home from Garceau's that day—a day that seemed both very long ago, and not any time at all.

Madeline pulled into the hospital parking lot and headed inside. She'd brought a map, which she Unfolded onto Butte's bedside table after Butte's lunch was cleared away. She pinpointed Stone Lake. “Right there,” she said, the tip of her pencil all but obscuring the spot that said “Cranberry L.”

Arbutus squinted and nodded, probably not seeing but always anxious to be agreeable. “You won't get back in there with a car, I don't think. It's back off behind Crosscut Plains. Down along Wildcat Creek, beyond the old fire lookout and past Simmon's Camp. It's on Firelane Trail, and that's always been rough. You're better off to find a truck somewhere.”

Madeline forced herself not to say,
Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell me about Walter and this lake and a hundred other things I probably don't know? I thought you liked me. Loved me even.
She had to fight this impulse every time she was alone with Arbutus, because she couldn't help it, she loved Arbutus and the betrayal hurt. It was as if Emmy had kept something huge from her, Unthinkable. But she had her pride. She wouldn't ask.

“Where would I get a truck?” she asked instead. The Buick was tough, it would make it. She'd waited long enough to see this lake. Going there would be her Fourth of July celebration, her declaration of independence. She was going to take better care of herself from now on. No one else was going to think,
What's best for Madeline?
That was her job, hers alone. The Fourth was perfect. She'd make a ceremony, an
event
, of this. She had a bad habit of never giving ceremony its due. But sometimes life demanded ceremony. Sometimes you owed that to yourself.

“Paul Garceau has a big truck. High off the ground, I've seen it.”

Paul did have a truck as well as the Fairlane. It was big, almost new, and a sore spot with him she thought. She suspected it was a burden he wished he hadn't Undertaken, one payment too many. He drove it as little as possible, preferring the Fairlane. He told her that the car went into storage once the snow flew, though. “I don't know if I should ask to borrow his truck. That seems like too much.”

“He's a nice man. A hard worker. And nice-looking, too. You ask him.” Arbutus's smile was dimply. “I'll bet he says okay.”

Madeline frowned, wanting to put out the matchmaking glint in Arbutus's eye, but in the end she didn't try. Let her have this harmless, wrong idea. Maybe she was right about the truck anyway.

 

 

“My truck? Why?”
Paul shoved his glasses Up with the back of his wrist and gave Madeline a perplexed look across the pass-through.