PRAISE FOR Cold Spell
“Cold Spell is Greek tragedy. From the very first pages, these lives are out of control. You’ll care for Sylvie, and also her mother Ruth, and you’ll want them not to hurt each other, but of course they will.”
–David Vann, author of Legends of a Suicide and Goat Mountain
“I was hooked from the first word, a chapter title no less — Isostacy. Vanasse folds landscape into a human story-scape with such honesty that I found myself suddenly distrustful of the usual writerly approaches to nature — the flattering romanticist, the swooning naturalist, the battling survivalist. Vanasse brings that same tenderized realism to the people she’s created. (I’m loath to call them “characters.” They are that real.) She’s both tender toward them and unmerciful. As I finished the novel, I kept catching myself wanting to crawl into her brain, stake out a cozy corner, and keep watching life unfold through her eyes. I’m buying several copies for friends.
–Cindy Dyson, author of And She Was
"In subtle, careful prose, Vanasse explores what lures the so-called newbie to Alaska—from the myth to the very real magic of the wild—and, at the same time, creates a sensitive portrait of a family on the verge of falling apart. Poignant and compelling."
–Leigh Newman, author of Still Points North
“Cold Spell is an honest and compelling coming-of-age-in-the-wilderness tale where packing bear meat and scaling a glacier are rites of passage. Sixteen-year-old Sylvie and her family move north and learn that there's the dream of Alaska, and then there's waking up from that dream. Vanasse's characters in the fictional Alaskan town are rustic and real and all of them, including the adults, experience growing pains.”
–Melinda Moustakis, author Bear Down, Bear North:
Alaska Stories (Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction)
“In clear, gracious prose Cold Spell tells the story of mother and daughter each caught at the intersection of desire and vulnerability. From the Midwest to the Far North, the story of Sylvie and Ruth shines a light on the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, while examining the trauma of a fractured home and the complications of starting over. Cold Spell is an important addition to the growing shelf of Alaskan fiction.”
–Brendan Jones, author of The Alaskan Laundry
"Cold Spell will catch you in its icy grip as Vanasse deftly reveals the cracks and fissures of a frozen heart. A love story, a coming-of-age tale, and glimpse into a rarely seen slice of Alaska, the story reminds us that a life without dreams and without love might not be living at all."
–Don Rearden, author of The Raven's Gift
Cold Spell
Deb Vanasse
Running Fox Books
Copyright © 2014 Deb Vanasse
All rights reserved
Running Fox Books
P.O. Box 7772384
Eagle River, AK 99577
English language print edition by University of Alaska Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vanasse, Deb.
Cold spell / by Deb Vanasse.
ISBN 978-1-940320-05-2 (digital)
1. Women—Alaska—Fiction. 2. Glaciers—Alaska—Fiction. 3. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3622.A585894C65 2014
813’.6—dc23
Cover photo by Mitya Ku
Printed in the United States
“I seek the everlasting ices of the north.”
—Mary Shelley
Isostasy
Ogive
Fracture Zone
Advance
Icefall
Erratic
Foliation
Accumulation
Mass Balance
Arete
Cirque
Crevasse
Downwasted
Ablation
Regelation
Trimline
Moulin
Distributary
Neve
Serac
Acknowledgments
Displacement from the advance or retreat of a glacier
I am a poem, Sylvie once thought, swollen like a springtime river, light swirled in dark, music and memory. Then her father ran off and her mother became obsessed with a glacier and she realized this was what happened to girls who believed themselves poems, poems in fact being prone to bad turns and misunderstandings.
Before the glacier, Sylvie’s mother had been ordinary and dependable, a plain woman with kind eyes, unlike her father who was dashing and quick, with a flair for the dramatic. When he’d come home cursing his boss in the Ford parts department or when he’d blow up at the neighbor for turning his dog loose, Sylvie’s mother would massage the base of his neck and speak calm, soothing words. After he left Minnesota for Florida in the company of Mirabelle, a redhead from the dealership, Sylvie cried in long, heaving sobs every night for a week, and because she cried her sister Anna did too, and there was nothing poetic in their sorrow, no words for it even.
With her soft, steady voice and her fingers stroking their hair, Sylvie’s mother assured the girls that their father loved them whether he was still in Pine Lake or not. For her mother’s sake Sylvie tried to pretend this was so, though in truth she doubted it deeply. She wished her mother would cry, wished she would wail and scream and flail, wished she would rage at something, at someone, at anyone, even at Sylvie.
Instead her mother’s smile, always ready, became automatic, as if by the push of a button her lips made their slight upward turn. She roused the girls every day at precisely 6:30, even on weekends. She sliced bananas over their oatmeal and sprinkled brown sugar, one tablespoon each. She sipped coffee brewed in a new pot that made only one cup and ate toast spread thin with peach preserves and deflected Sylvie’s complaints that no one else ate oatmeal for breakfast. She rinsed the dishes and loaded the dishwasher, glasses on top, bowls on the bottom, spoons up, butter knives down, and she folded tidy waxed paper over sandwiches cut on the diagonal, peanut butter and apple for Anna, cream cheese and turkey for Sylvie, both on wheat bread no matter how Anna begged for white, the old-fashioned wrapping an embarrassment to Sylvie, who turned her wishes to small things like thin, transparent plastic. The tiniest quiver in her mother’s smile hinted at their shared understanding, hers and Sylvie’s, of how a single uncontrolled moment could upend everything.
Not long after Sylvie’s father drove off, her mother took the girls for their annual physicals. Dr. Temple was the only pediatrician in Pine Lake, and for as long as Sylvie could remember she had been ushered to him for every sniffle and cough. She was humiliated at the idea of the old doctor with his hairy hands and long ears poking her cold naked chest where breasts had recently sprouted. She begged to be taken to Gainesville, to the sprawling clinic where no one would know her, but her mother refused, insisting of course on their usual routine. So Sylvie planted herself in a corner of Dr. Temple’s waiting room, apart from her mother and sister, and buried her head in a book as she tried not to choke on the heavy smell that hangs over medical places, part alcohol and part cleaning products, foolishly confident that after her father’s sudden departure things at least couldn’t get any worse.
From the doorway that separated the waiting room from the business inside, Dr. Temple’s nurse called for Sylvie and Anna. When their mother rose to join them, the nurse suggested the girls were old enough to see the doctor alone. “But Anna is only five,” Sylvie’s mother said through her auto-smile. “She just started kindergarten.”
The nurse cupped a milky white hand over Anna’s shoulder. “Eleven and five. Plenty old to see the doctor alone.” As she steered the girls toward the door, Sylvie’s mother blinked hard, like a shutter that closed on an image to save it.
“You’re a big girl,” the nurse said to Sylvie as she trotted them down the corridor. “Slide right on into this little room and slip off your clothes and put on that gown while I help your sister.” The nurse brushed back a strand of Anna’s hair, silky and fine like their mother’s.
“We always . . .” But Sylvie had no words for their self-conscious cleaving since her father had left.
“It’s okay.” Anna’s pressed lips turned up like their mother’s. “I don’t mind.”
Since she was in no way a poem, Sylvie did as the nurse said, slipping out of her jeans and her shirt and folding inside them her underpants and her sad little bra. She eased onto the exam table, her slender but big-knuckled feet dangling as her haunches stuck to the vinyl and her nipples stiffened beneath the rough cotton. She had never before had to fully undress for the doctor, and her resentment at this fell squarely on her mother, helpless to insist on a routine when for once one was needed.
She sat hunched under the impossible blue gown, a limp balloon from which her limbs protruded, while Dr. Temple tapped at her knees with his little hammer and pretended not to look as he pressed his cold stethoscope to her chest. Then he started in with the questions. How were things at home, now that it was only the girls? Did Sylvie miss her dad something awful? Were there bad dreams she might want to share?
Sylvie mumbled fine, no, and no as she beat back the dream image of her father sinking in a vast, lapping ocean, and Sylvie paddling with all she had, trying to save him. Finally the doctor gave up with his stethoscope and patted her shoulder, his hand sweet with soap, and pronounced her a good strong girl who would be a great help to her mother during this difficult time.
That’s when Sylvie realized that not only a few of the parents but the whole town of Pine Lake was talking about how her dad had run off. If she’d been the good strong girl the doctor pronounced her to be, she might have thought how this gossip must impact her mother. But instead her resentment balled up even tighter, like a leech left to dry in the sun.
Dressed, she returned to the waiting room. On her mother’s lap was a magazine, splayed open to a white and blue-shadowed mass that shrugged out from a large range of mountains. Sylvie slid into a chair and waited for her mother to ask what had gone on with the doctor. But her mother only stared at the ice as if it were the most lovely and mysterious thing she had ever encountered. A tingling crept beneath Sylvie’s skin, up her arms to her chest, dread at how a mere image could insert itself between them, so that it was no longer just her and her mother, pretending for Anna’s sake that everything would be fine.
Sylvie’s mother glanced at the receptionist, then pressed the magazine flat and with great precision tore out the glacier, folded it twice, and tucked the photo into her purse. “You’re not supposed to do that,” Sylvie said. Known by everyone, including herself, to be a compliant child, she was struck by the power in so few words. “The magazines are for everyone.”
“What magazines?” From the hallway, Anna came forward.
Their mother pressed a finger to her lips. The way she draped her hand on her purse made Sylvie suspicious of what else might be stashed inside. Sylvie’s father was the one to come home with a fluffy hotel towel stuffed in his suitcase or a shot glass swiped from a bar in his pocket. Her mother she’d never known to take anything.
They piled into the car. “I can’t believe you ripped out that picture,” Sylvie said.
“I want to see,” Anna said.
Their mother tucked the purse next to her hip and folded her elbow across it. “Later.”
In light of Sylvie’s recent exposure, her mother’s smug smile was especially hateful. “They’re all talking about us,” she said
Her mother’s eyes shone in the rearview mirror. “Who’s talking about us?”
“Everyone.” Of all things, her mother was smiling; you could see it in the way the skin crinkled at the corners of her eyes. “Everyone in this whole entire town. And you think it’s funny.”
“No, honey.” The smile stayed. “It’s not funny. But there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Is it a picture of someone we know?” Anna poked the side of the purse. “I want to see.”
“In a minute.” Their mother hung a sharp right into the Carson Crafts parking lot, where she wheeled the sedan between a panel truck and a big Suburban.
“You’re parked crooked.” How had Sylvie not noticed sooner this duty to point out her mother’s flaws? “The door of that truck’s gonna smack us.”
“I’m just running in for a minute.” Her neck flushed at the base, her mother pressed her purse between her ribs and her arm.
“I’m coming in.” When Anna swung open her door, it clunked against the side of the panel truck.
“Told you,” said Sylvie, but already her mother was scurrying toward the entrance, Anna half-running to keep up. Sylvie scooted out of the sunlit square that beamed through the window into her lap. She was used to hanging back, not drawing attention, but she had failed to anticipate this unexpected consequence, that Anna would latch on to their mother in her place.
When they returned, her mother clutched a small bag next to her purse. Anna got in from the driver’s side. “It’s a glacier,” she informed Sylvie. “A big bunch of ice that never melts.”
“I know that,” said Sylvie, though it was clear no one cared.
Once home, Sylvie’s mother trimmed the magazine picture and used a knife to pry back the wires that held cardboard next to the glass. She balled up the glossy photo that came with the frame, a girl plucking petals from a daisy, and replaced it with the glacier. Then she bent the wires back into place and raised the picture between her hands. “This will sit right on my desk.”
“I’m never eating oatmeal again.” It was the single act of rebellion Sylvie could summon on short notice. “Never.”
“Goodness,” her mother said. “What’s gotten into you?” But her eyes never left the glacier.
An undulation formed on the surface of ice
In the flat farm country of central Minnesota where mothers went crazy for things like PTA fundraisers and shoe sales at Henkes, her mother’s picture drew attention as it sat on her secretary’s desk outside the principal’s office at Pine Lake High School, where she used her calm words to soothe students who’d gotten in trouble and their parents who believed bad behavior was all the fault of the school. Photos of Sylvie and Anna were displaced to a shelf behind her. When people asked about the glacier, Sylvie’s mother would shrug and say she liked ice. Sometimes she’d balance the frame between her two index fingers and lift the image to her face, as if there were secrets chiseled into the frozen fissures of the glacier.
She passed through her own Little Ice Age. At home she’d pull the shades, dim the lights, draw her knees to her chest, wrap herself in a blanket, and stare for hours at movie footage of glaciers. Docu-voices crooned over snow that fell soft and light, gathering into a mass that turned harder than rock and yet still flowed like water. Calving ice crashed alarmingly into the sea. Cameras tracked climbers who scuttled backwards, clinging to ropes as they disappeared into steep blue crevasses. Helicopters chopped like insects, hovering over glaciers that might one day disappear, if the earth kept heating up.
You couldn’t walk past the living room without being assaulted by some cold fact or another. Glaciers trap three times the fresh water that runs free on earth. The pressure inside a glacier builds to one thousand pounds per square inch. Believing ice had a soul, medieval peasants set crosses in front of glaciers, in vain hope of stopping them. One documentary featured a man who claimed that through the sheer power of thought you could infuse ice with beauty. He amassed believers who prayed for pure, crystalline ice, as if the forces that conjured a glacier could be moved by a tiny thing like desire.
The ice drew her mother as it shut out Sylvie, who was helpless to stop it. It was as if once her father packed his belongings into that refurbished Ford and pointed it south, her mother’s head had swelled with palm trees and beaches and skimpy swimsuits that a woman like Mirabelle might still pull off, and she needed the big frozen mass to butt those tropical images out of her head. Or maybe she simply aspired to the cold, regal power of ice.
Sylvie grew into her body, the wisp of a bra swapped for a real one. A young woman, her father remarked when Sylvie and Anna flew down for their annual visit, eyeing Sylvie in a way that made her look down at her feet. She sensed the bad things that rattled inside her—anger, unsteadiness, guilt—but she remained an obedient girl, a good student, reliable in ways that would prove no match for ice.
On a cloudy February day during Sylvie’s sophomore year, Kenny arrived. Sent to the school to retrieve his cousin’s son after he’d gotten smacked with a ball in PE, no one would deal with him until he first signed in and received the required visitor’s pass. He’d gone fuming to her mother’s desk, directed first by the hall monitor and then by the school nurse. Sylvie’s mother had set down her pen and tucked her hair in back of her ear while Kenny went on about the sorts of rules that robbed the last bits of freedom left in this country. Where he came from, he said, a man could do as he pleased. She’d nodded and watched with her plain but kind eyes until at last Kenny jabbed at her photo and said, “I’ll be damned. That’s my glacier.”
By the time Kenny got done explaining how he’d come from Alaska where he lived not far from this same piece of ice, by the time he’d finished saying how the glacier wound twenty-six miles down from the mountains and how the face of it reared up wide as a fortress, he’d calmed himself. In the meantime her mother’s obsession had grown to encompass a man, not that she realized it yet. As she escorted Kenny to the nurse’s office, she slipped him her telephone number. What were the chances, she would say later. What were the chances a man from that very glacier would walk right up to her desk? And not any man, but one who with the press of his hands and his deliberate speech and the depth of his eyes seemed the glacier incarnate.
The attention she’d lavished on ice, Sylvie’s mother now turned on Kenny. He began spending the night. Sylvie could hardly stand the sight of him shirtless in their tiny kitchen, the sun teasing the coiled hairs of his chest as he kneaded her mother’s shoulders. The furrows on her mother’s forehead softened and her plain eyes turned wide and alert with the mascara and shadow and liner she’d started to wear. For breakfast she set out cocoa and toast—no more oatmeal—and sliced peaches, Kenny’s favorite, instead of bananas, and she sent the girls off with money instead of packed lunches. On her shirts, she left so many buttons unfastened that their principal, old doddering Mr. Stanton, could only stammer and look the other way.
Sylvie had just turned sixteen, and though she should have been happy for her mother, the danger locked up in the glacier was nothing compared to this man. One night their eyes met, hers and Kenny’s, across the living room, and the look that passed between them was a humming that rippled down Sylvie’s legs to her toes, an exquisite and shameful vibration that replayed when she lay down to sleep.
Anna loved Kenny because he took her and their mother to Happy Pete’s Ice Cream Emporium, where he bought them waffle cones in flavors like Bubble Gum Mint and Cherry Cheesecake Surprise. He always brought a pint home for Sylvie, Double Deep Chocolate: a reward for staying back with her homework. With a flash of his perfect white smile, he’d set the frosty carton in Sylvie’s hand, and with a mumbled thanks she’d shove the ice cream in the back of the freezer behind bags of peas and whole chickens. Only after everyone else was asleep and she could hear the puff-puffs of Kenny’s breathing behind her mother’s bedroom door would she sneak to the kitchen and scoop spoonfuls straight from the carton, the cold chocolate sliding in accusatory lumps down the back of her throat.
Her only hope was that Kenny would soon leave. The work he’d come to help with at his cousin’s was done, and he swore any day he’d head back to Alaska. In the meantime, Sylvie did her best to avoid the yellow-flecked blue of his eyes.
Daffodils poked through the dirt and after them tulips. The yard went dizzy with lilacs. May came, the first day and the next and the next. Still Kenny lingered. Sylvie buried herself in her homework, projects and papers and tests that teachers piled on at the end of the year. But at night she’d catch her tongue running over the edge of her teeth as if they were his teeth and her hand touching her thigh as if it were his hand, and the humming would start all over.
The last day of school came, and still Kenny was there. Sylvie waded the halls to her mother’s office where she sometimes sat after school, swiveling in the tall, cushioned chair, enjoying the way the attendance counter cut her view of the hallway, forcing her to imagine the bottom halves of bodies as they passed, the legs of girls who held themselves prim and tight while others self-consciously swayed at the hips, the feet of boys so full of themselves that they swaggered, shoelaces dangling, tempting fate.
She swung through the gate in the attendance counter and strode to her mother, bent over her desk. Sylvie shifted her books on her hip. “I’m going to Karen’s,” she said. “Right after school.”
Her mother looked up. “We’re going with Kenny to the lake.”
Sylvie dismissed the swell that came from hearing his name. “Karen’s filling the pool. I told her I’d help.”
“Filling the pool takes one person,” her mother said. “And a hose. We’ll swim at the lake. And Kenny’s renting a boat, to go fishing.”
Sylvie’s eyes flitted to the hallway, where the crowd was starting to thin, so she wouldn’t think of the four of them packed in a boat, her mother and Kenny and Anna and Sylvie, so close their knees would be touching. “It’s too cold to swim at the lake,” Sylvie said. “And I hate fishing.”
“A few hours with family,” said her mother. “That’s not asking much.”
“Kenny’s not family.” He wasn’t. He never would be.
Her mother fingered the papers on her desk as she searched Sylvie’s face, looking perhaps for some trace of the child she had been—the wondering eyes, the compliant smile—a version of herself that Sylvie, too, longed for, reaching back to a time before the glacier and Kenny had inserted themselves between her and her mother.
“Family is whatever we make it,” said Sylvie’s mother, looking satisfied with the cagey truth of her words. “Wherever we make it.”
Sylvie shifted her books to the other hip. “But I promised Karen.”
Her mother looked down at the red squiggles and lines that crisscrossed the paper on her desk, then up at the glacier as if for fortitude. “You’re coming with us,” she said. “End of discussion.”
There were moments captured on film, when huge chunks of ice fell booming and crashing to the sea. Though these collapses seemed sudden, there was always some kind of warning. Hairline fissures. Downwasting. Icefalls. Shifting you’d notice if only you tried. And Sylvie was trying. She was weary with trying. Queasy and weak, from pushing Kenny aside only to have him thrust back at her.
“You should get rid of that thing,” Sylvie said, with the slightest of nods at the glacier. She turned and with a deliberate sway of her hips left the calm of the office for the noise of the hallway, forgetting the way the attendance counter would work, slicing her to half of what she thought she might be.
The lake glittered with the promise of summer. Sylvie’s sixteen years were wrapped around the oblong body of water along which the town arranged itself. In this town her father was raised, her grandmother buried. It was where Sylvie had gone to grade school and middle school and where she would graduate high school. She knew every shop that lined Grand Street, the florist and the chocolate store and the six antique dealers that aimed to lure tourists off the two-lane on their way to Minnesota’s North Country. She knew every farm yard along County 15, including the one where she’d gone on the hay ride that ended in her first-ever kiss. More times than she could count, she’d biked the four-and-a-half-mile circumference of Pine Lake, sometimes with Karen and sometimes alone, marking spring and summer and fall on the road that circled from the downtown shops to the fancy homes on the north end to the eastside park and back to the old part of town, where the lumber mill had been boarded up and closed three years before.
At the park that stretched along the east side of the lake, her mother lay on the dock, squeezed into shorts and a button-down shirt, her head in Kenny’s lap. Kenny swung his feet in the water, stirring up mud, his pants rolled to expose thick, white legs. He lifted her mother’s hair in his fingers, then let it fall. Her mother brushed her hand along the edge of his chin, as if Anna and Sylvie weren’t there to see, on the hard seats of the rented boat tied to the dock.
Anna traced a finger over the gills of the dead fish that lay at her feet, a perch hardening in the sun, too small to keep. “Stop it.” Sylvie whiffed at her hand. “That thing stinks.”
Anna clutched her fingers to her chest. “I thought you liked me.”
Their mother lifted her head. “You girls enjoy the sunshine,” she said. “Before you know it’ll be winter all over.”
Kenny’s fingers snagged in her hair. “You haven’t seen winter till you’ve been at the glacier.” He glanced at Sylvie, and the lake shimmered and its edges blurred and the sky shifted, a widening, a falling away. Then he leaned back on the gray boards of the dock, hands locked under his head, and Sylvie’s mother arranged herself to accommodate the loss of his lap, her head at his shoulder, her shirt riding up to expose the thin skin of her waist as she fingered a worn spot in his jeans.
Kenny hoisted his head and squinted at Anna and Sylvie. “You kids run and play,” he said, as if a merry-go-round were the thing they most needed.
You kids. Sylvie gripped the hot metal seat. From the shore rose the rank smell of lake weeds, from the boat the dead smell of the fish. You kids. “Race you,” she said, and reached a hand to her sister.
Their feet thundered the dock. “Whoa, Nellie,” said Kenny, but Sylvie refused his smile. Gone, gone, gone. Once he returned to Alaska, it would be as if he’d never had any part in their lives.
At ten, Anna was still of the age where a playground got her excited as long as she wasn’t with girls who liked to watch boys acting like they weren’t being watched. She clattered the worn wood of the merry-go-round and gripped the metal bars and closed her eyes and demanded Sylvie spin her faster and faster. Sylvie crouched, slapping the cold metal of each passing bar with the flat of her hand, until the spin acquired its own whirring force. Anna squealed and flung back her head, hair splayed in the sun. Sylvie might have jumped on and ridden with her sister, but she refused to give Kenny the satisfaction. You kids.
Anna dragged her feet in the dust and stumbled off the platform, swaying and staggering like a drunk. She insisted Sylvie ride the swings, the two of them pumping their legs like horses racing the sky. “Look, Sylvie. My toes will touch the trees.” She flattened herself as she swung, arms rigid, face toward the sun, fearless. Sylvie half-stretched to pump her swing higher, but the gap between them was too wide to reach.
She left Anna arcing toward the blue-screeched sky and wandered toward Kenny’s truck. It was the sort of vehicle her father and his friends at the dealership would have made fun of if someone had been foolish enough to take it on trade. The dull orange-red paint screamed after-market and the right fender was caved in and the driver’s door rattled and the tailgate was crinkled so it had to be slammed. She grabbed the roll bar, the one part that still looked shiny and new, and swung herself onto the running boards, the metallic smell of the bar rubbing into her palms as she slid into the driver’s seat.
The cab smelled like Kenny, dusty and raw. Ripped vinyl scraped her shoulder, pink from the sun. Stuffed in the visor were pull tabs and pay stubs and torn bits of paper, pieces of him. On a scrap torn from a yellow tablet, she read a handwritten number from some other area code, then tucked it back so it appeared undisturbed. Frowning at her bare thighs flattened against the worn gray upholstery, she leaned forward. Her chest brushed the steering wheel, and she had a sudden strong urge for the keys, though until now she’d driven only their tinny sedan, her mother gripping the seat, telling her when to brake, when to turn, how to watch backing up.
She rooted under the floor mats, gritty with sand and a winter’s accumulation of dirt, pawing through crumpled fast food bags and smashed aluminum cans and wrinkled work shirts. The deeper she dug, the more convinced she became she would find them. She thrust her hand in the dark hole of the glove box where she’d seen Kenny lob keys, in where papers were shoved without creasing or care. She rifled through books of matches. Bottle openers. The serrated foil edges of condoms wrapped and ready. A fat pamphlet with a black-and-white sketch of Jesus. Good News, it said. Bits of Kenny that she felt as if blind, with her fingers. Her hopes rose when she came upon a thin looped wire that might have held keys, but it was only the tag from a repair shop.
She eased over to the passenger side and with a sweep of her arm dumped the entire contents of the glove box into her lap. You kids. A red matchbook with silver letters read Pharaoh’s Den Cairo, Illinois. Sylvie had been through Cairo once, on the way to Missouri with Karen’s family. It was a long way south of Pine Lake, down the Mississippi, where people talked in slow drawls. With the matchbook, she could challenge Kenny’s claim that he’d driven straight to Pine Lake from Alaska and weaken perhaps her mother’s unwavering trust.
She struck a match to the book, and the smell of sulfur and smoke rose. As she hovered the flame over the trash in her lap, a reluctant corner of a damp pink receipt from Joe’s Transmission and Body ignited, a thin yellow burn wriggling along its edge. Near the smoldering paper lay a full matchbook that had the potential to ignite. She held that possibility like a full breath before a deep plunge.
Anna pounded the truck. “Whatcha doing?” she yelled at the window. Sylvie snuffed the creeping flame under the heel of her hand, then shoved the papers and condoms and matches and Jesus book into the glove box, slammed it shut, and slid out of the truck. She rubbed her hands on the sides of her legs, leaving a faint charcoaled streak. “Let’s get Mom,” she said, avoiding Anna’s wide eyes. “Let’s get Mom and go home.” But even as she said the word home, she felt it slipping away. Like the glacier, Kenny was part of them now.
She would later recall the afternoon heat, the prickle of grass through the blanket, the remarkable flatness of land, lake, and sky. The smell of mustard on rye, the hurried clouds blotting the sun, her desire to take Anna’s hand, even though Anna didn’t need her the way that she once had. The knowing way Kenny had looked at her mother, like she was the only one there, and the loathing that floated like an oily sheen across her desire.
Kenny wouldn’t stay. No, that was too easy. With a large smile, Sylvie’s mother announced that the three of them would pack into Kenny’s truck and ride with him up to Alaska. Not for the summer. For good.
“We’ll get to see moose,” Anna said.
“Moose. Fox. Wolverine. Wolf.” Kenny swatted a slow-circling fly away from the sandwiches, then roughed Anna’s hair with the flat of his hand. “Heck, we might even find you a bear.”
Her mother reached across the blanket toward Sylvie. “I know what you’re thinking. But you’ll make friends there just as easy as here.”
Sylvie sprang up. Tipped soda gurgled from her can and streamed toward her feet. “You don’t know what I’m thinking. And you can’t make me leave.” Her voice caught on leave. She would not cry, would not cry, would not cry. This punishment was beyond anything she deserved, no matter what evil thoughts she’d refused to let go of. She swore it all off. Anything could be denied. She might quite possibly hate Kenny, him and his sorry excuse for a truck, now that she saw where this was going, yanking her straight out of her life. She plucked a single sorry objection out of the jumble of hurt. “You’ll lose your job,” she said.
“Mr. Stanton already knows.” Her mother spoke with deliberate, hateful calm. “I left him a note.”
Of course. She must have nestled with Kenny on the front porch swing as she penned in careful script an explanation for this ridiculous turn of events. Creepy Mr. Stanton with his liver-spotted hands and shiny bald head must have nearly keeled over, reading it. Alaska. Of all places. Though what he’d mean of course would be of all people.
“Beauty of Alaska,” said Kenny, “is you don’t need a job.” He stroked the back of her mother’s hand. “And I’ve got a nice little place for you girls.”
A nice little place for you girls. All Sylvie could picture was ice, bitter and cold.
That night Kenny took her mother to the movies to celebrate. Once his truck pulled away, Sylvie emerged from her room, her belly tight from having refused the mustard-laced ham and cheese. She stirred up mayo and tuna, then rinsed out the can and hid it in the bottom of the trash so no one would know she’d given in to her hunger.
Their house in Pine Lake was small, and even though they’d lived there for years and the landlord was willing to sell it, her mother had never shown any interest, making excuses about how the girls shared a bedroom and how the bathroom paint peeled and how the rusty kitchen sink leaked. This seemed a sign now, that her mother had somehow seen from the moment she tore the glacier out of the magazine the entire outrageous mess Kenny would make of their lives, while Sylvie herself had been too stupid to notice.
In the bedroom, Anna flattened herself on a quilt pieced of sharp-edged triangles, like dishes broken and scattered. “Aren’t you excited?” she asked. “Not even one little bit?”
“No.” Steam burbled from the iron as Sylvie pressed the collar of a crisp white shirt. “And you shouldn’t be either.”
“But it’s an adventure.”
“That’s just what Mom says.”
Anna rolled to her stomach and propped her chin on her hands. “How come you’re so cranky?”
“Zip it,” said Sylvie.
Anna looked away. A lump rose in Sylvie’s throat as she slipped the warm sleeves over her arms. “What’s to get excited about?” she asked. “No more Happy Pete’s. No more swimming at the lake.”
“I don’t care.” Anna jutted her chin.
In front of the mirror, Sylvie buttoned her shirt, then undid one button. She flattened the collar and turned to the side, catching the pleasing rise of her breasts. She bent toward the mirror and with her mother’s liquid liner traced her eyes like Karen had been forever after her to.
“You look pretty,” said Anna. “Prettier than Mom.”
“Don’t let Mom hear you say that.” Sylvie brushed blush over the color that rose in her cheeks. “You’ll hurt her feelings.” Then she crouched next to the bed, the quilt a warm mess of cut blue and purple. “Tuck you in?”
“No thanks.” Anna crossed her ankles and swung her legs, up and back. “I’ll go to bed later.”
“Someone’s getting big for her britches.” Their dad liked to say that. Sylvie jumped on the bed. She straddled Anna, who squealed and wriggled and rolled herself over while Sylvie dove for her ribs, tickling. “Uncle,” said Sylvie. “Say uncle.”
Anna laughed, and Sylvie laughed, too. “Uncle, uncle, uncle,” Anna screeched.
“That’s better,” Sylvie said as Anna quit her thrashing. She tucked her shirt back into her jeans and checked her hair in the mirror. “Now, you want me to tuck you in?”
“Nope,” Anna said.
Sylvie’s disappointment in this small ritual forgone was larger than it should have been. She retreated to the top step of the porch and tucked her knees to her chin and waited for Karen. The night was starting to cool, a half-moon lighting a tendril of cloud that trailed in the sky. The far edge of town glowed with the lights of the state prison, shot up into the night. She had no sense of who she might be outside of this place, or of what she might become.
When her father first left, she’d developed a fear of the places they might end up if their mother acquired the same sudden urge to take off. Holiday visits to Miami were barely tolerable, between Mirabelle’s dangling jewelry and her over-teased hair and the unending sound of traffic below the condo’s guest bedroom with its seashell lamp and flimsy curtains, sea green, and its postage-stamp view of the ocean. Coming home to the gray skies and snow of Pine Lake, Sylvie felt as if God had breathed it to earth only for her. She loved the smell of mower exhaust mixed with the neighbor’s fresh-cut grass in summer and the smoke-sting of trash that smoldered in burn barrels and the fine powdered smell of grain dumped in the Miller’s Feed silo.
Tires scraped the curb. “Sorry I’m late.” Karen leaned across the seat to pop the door, which didn’t open from outside. “Lecture about good behavior and watching myself and all that. You have no idea how lucky you are. Your mom doesn’t nag.”
“There’s Kenny.” Sylvie’s pulse betrayed her, quickening as she spoke his name. “Don’t let those boys get all handsy.” She dropped her voice, inflecting the way Kenny did.
Karen laughed. “I think Kenny’s cute. In an old guy kinda way. Nice blue eyes.”
“I hate how he talks,” Sylvie said, so quickly she almost believed it herself. “He’s all country music gone wrong. I ain’t never seen no one as pretty as you.”
Karen laughed, fleeting as a snowflake that lands, crystal and perfect, on a patch of warm flesh. “I like what you’ve done to your eyes.”
Sylvie touched the edge of the liner, leaving a gentle smudge on the tip of her finger. She would not cry, would not cry. Karen hit the brakes, stopping hard at the four-way. Having pulled out partway, the driver to the right looked annoyed. Karen flipped him off. Then she started in about Ginny DeLong who was seeing Joe Matthews after dumping Brent Skinner, and about Tracy Larkin who was chasing Charlie Hodges who supposedly had gotten a girl pregnant over in Little Falls. Small-town talk, the indulgence of good girls. Karen might flip off a stranger, but only if there was no chance it would get back to her parents. Like Sylvie, she took honors classes and only copied her homework when the teacher didn’t care enough to catch on. They went out to the dike not to be bad but because everyone did, and they only went out there together.
The party was well underway by the time they arrived. Karen eased the car into a dark shrubby spot. The dew on the grass chilled Sylvie’s toes, open in sandals. Out here where the prison lights didn’t quite reach, stars punched the sky. Beside the dike a bonfire glowed, lighting faces still giddy from the last day of school, fresh with the splat of water balloons and the pained looks of teachers and the plastic smell of silly string let loose in the halls.
Karen stuffed some cash in the bucket and filled a cup from the tap. Sylvie filled hers only to half. She should tell Karen now, but she had no words. They hovered next to the fire, the dike rising behind them, a long bump in a flat place. Near the keg a girl screamed, and a bunch of boys laughed.
Aside from a few out-of-towners, the lit faces were ones Sylvie had grown up with. The half-light made them look changed, but that was only illusion. They were the same, would always be the same, and among them only Sylvie would be transformed into someone she barely recognized.
Along the edge of her tongue, the beer tasted bitter. “What went on at the lake?” Karen asked.
“Not much,” Sylvie said. There were things she couldn’t speak aloud, even to Karen. How she’d once thought herself like a poem. How she lay in the dark, hanging on to the knowing and wanting she’d felt when her eyes had met Kenny’s. How there would soon be nothing to ground her, not her friends or their house or the town she’d grown up in.
She sipped from her cup, holding the plastic rim between her teeth, warming the beer in her mouth. “You’re awful quiet,” said Karen. She leaned into Sylvie, brushing against her goose-bumped arm. “Kaelynn’s gonna break up with Skyler. Maybe tonight. And you always said Skyler was cute.”
Sylvie looked beyond the fire to where a truck gleamed the way Kenny’s truck must have once. “I see Ricky drove his new truck.” Amazing, the way your voice could carry on with the smallest things no matter what else fell apart. Rick Clement had just turned sixteen, and for his birthday his dad, who worked at the bank, had bought him a shiny new truck. Rick had one arm slung over a girl and in the other he clutched a big plastic cup, fresh-headed with beer. “Who’s the girl?”
Karen leaned to look. “Dunno. Maybe from Gainesville. Or the Falls.” When a Piney Lake boy got his first truck, an out-of-town girl would follow, sure as if she were part of the accessory package. Losers whose parents couldn’t afford to buy them a truck got stuck with the locals.
Rick’s eyes flitted, anxious, from the girl to the truck, like he didn’t know which might escape from him first. The girl pulled out from under Rick’s arm and began flirting with one of his friends. She laughed, wide and pretty, in a way that reminded Sylvie of Mirabelle. Rick leaned toward his truck like he didn’t know where else to look, like he too needed grounding. “He looks lonely,” said Sylvie.
“Rick the Prick?” Karen asked. He liked to strip his shirt, showing off in the gym, and so they’d christened him that.
“Rick’s not so bad,” Sylvie said. There were worse sins than wanting to be noticed.
Karen nodded toward the group at the fire. “I’m telling you. Skyler.”
The girl turned completely from Rick to Pine Lake’s football hero, the guy who’d thrown a game-winning pass in the final match of the season. There was talk he might play college ball. Rick wrestled, and while his body was tough and hard on the mats, in Pine Lake and in the towns all around, it was football that mattered, and in football Rick walked off the field in a uniform as clean as the one he’d walked on with. He was already dumped. Anyone could see it.
Sylvie handed Karen her cup and nodded toward Rick. “I’ll be back.”
Karen sipped first from her own cup, then from Sylvie’s. “Really. Rick Clement.”
Sylvie ran her fingers along the hem of her shorts as she worked her way toward the fire. Hey, Sylvie. Hey. Kids she’d known since grade school huddled close to the warmth, smelling of smoke and beer. She murmured heys back as she moved close to Rick, filling the space where the girl’s perfume lingered. Next to Sylvie’s hand, Rick jittered his leg, like he was weighing whether going after the girl or letting her go would do the least damage.
“That’s a nice-looking truck,” Sylvie said. She trailed her words one into the other like it might be the beer. In the fire a log popped, the sparks a dizzy swirl in the night. A thin film of sweat glistened on Rick’s forehead. Sylvie felt awake without having known that she’d slept, disoriented but alert. Though she’d never been one for bold moves, she walked her fingers over the bulge of keys in Rick’s pocket. “How ’bout a ride?”
His eyes fell on Sylvie like she was new and fresh like the truck, and they seemed good eyes and strong. She kept one hand on his pocket and ran the other up the inside of his arm. She would not think of Kenny. “Please,” she said in a voice that wasn’t quite hers.
She presented herself with enough possibility that Rick quit looking back at the out-of-town girl. Together they moved, shoulders touching, to the far side of the truck, away from the fire. It was cool there, and dark. Sharp-edged grass brushed Sylvie’s feet. She moved her hands from the sides of Rick’s jeans to his belt and ran her fingers under his waistband. He sucked in a breath where she touched. “Wow,” Rick said. “Sylvie.”
She took him all in with the truck, plucked from dozens that lined the lot where her father once worked. It was only her eyes but she saw how he liked it. He bent over her, parting his lips for a kiss. She slid underneath him, her back to the truck, palms flattened into the door. “Careful,” he said. She spread her fingers and flush with power massaged the shiny red paint as he watched, helpless and panicked and filled with desire. “We should get in,” he said.
They sprawled on the seat, Sylvie flattened beneath him, choked by the smell of the new dash and new mats and new floorboards, smells that had rolled over the darkened showroom each time her father would open the door of a new vehicle and hoist her inside, pretending they’d drive home together and surprise her mother.
“God, I never knew you were hot.”’“’”