Northwest Angle

FOURTEEN

At eighteen, she’d been in love. Desperately in love. The way you can be in love only once and only when you’re very young. His name was Sean Pflugleman. He was a poet and the son of a pharmacist. She was a writer of—well, everything then. They’d begun dating when he was seventeen and she sixteen. They’d talked of going to Paris together after graduation, of becoming the new Lost Generation, of embracing the bohemian, of throwing convention to the wind and living simply to discover life and all the experiences that the world offered. Sex was, of course, a part of that discovery. And although they were careful—condoms—in the summer after she finished high school, Jenny O’Connor had become pregnant.

And that had changed everything.

Sean, so eager in his lovemaking and gallant in his poetry, bridled at the idea of becoming a father. He became sullen and accusatory, and when his parents strongly suggested that he “do the right thing,” he blamed Jenny for ruining his life. It was odd, she’d thought then, how quickly that kind of love could die. She wasn’t necessarily thinking of Sean’s love for her; when she saw what he’d become, she’d wanted nothing to do with tying her life to his, or his to the child they’d conceived, and her love for him had shriveled to almost nothing. She’d been determined to have the baby, and her mother and father had pledged their full support in helping her raise their grandchild.

Near the end of her first trimester, she’d miscarried. She was counseled not to think of it as losing a child, but how could she not? Life had been inside her, connected to her, dependent on her. Her blood had flowed through the baby and the baby’s blood through her. She’d felt it every day, a connection more powerful than anything she’d ever known, including her passion for Sean. Once she’d accepted her situation and had made her decision to keep the baby, she’d embraced her new life with joyful expectation. A baby. Her baby. She would wake sometimes, alone in her bed in the house where she’d grown up on Gooseberry Lane in Aurora, Minnesota, and feel tears of happiness as she imagined what her new life would be like. Not easy, she clearly understood. A single mother. It would mean a shift in all her plans. She’d been accepted to the University of Iowa, with the idea that someday she might become part of the famous writers’ program there. But that wouldn’t be. The child would come first. Maybe she would attend Aurora Community College. Maybe she would take over management of Sam’s Place, the burger stand her father owned on Iron Lake. It didn’t matter. What she did would be done for her child, and whatever was required of her, she would do it with love.

The miscarriage had changed everything again.

She’d gone to Iowa City, graduated with honors, been accepted in the writers’ program. She’d met Aaron Houseman, a poet-farmer who lived in the area. He was older than she by several years, but he was a good man and shared with her a love of language and an understanding of the power of words. Last June, they’d moved in together, his place, an old farmhouse on acreage that straddled a little creek a few miles outside Iowa City. He hadn’t grown up farming, but land was part of his inspiration and poetic vision, and he dabbled at planting and harvesting, though his real money came from a trust fund. He’d built a shack on the stream, where he would disappear for long hours to write. She had a job at the Press-Citizen, the Iowa City newspaper. In the evenings, she worked on a novel.

It was a good life. But there was a complication. Aaron wanted to marry; she did not. The reason for her reluctance was the whole question of children. She wanted them; Aaron didn’t. In a way, he was like Sean. He had his work and he had Jenny and he was happy with that. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand. To be an artist required so much focus, so much energy. But she believed that this kind of creation was only a part of a life. And in its way, Aaron’s refusal to have children was a refusal to participate fully in the panoply of existence, and wasn’t that really the responsibility of an artist? To experience life in all its aspects?

When she was honest with herself, she knew that her arguments were intellectual justification for a desire that ran deeper than the mind, that grew from her own knowledge of what it was to have life inside her, real life, not imagined in typed lines or on scribbled pages. She wanted life in her that way again. She wanted to produce life. She wanted, and God help her it sounded so mundane, to be a mother.

Her father had climbed the rock rise and been gone a long time when the baby began to fuss. She sniffed his diaper and understood. She laid him on the blanket in the moonlight and took care of cleaning and changing him. His face was round and luminous, as if the man in the moon himself lay on the ground before her. His eyes, dark and beetle-shell shiny, watched her face intently.

“Oh, little one,” she cooed and lifted him into her arms.

He reached up. His fingers, tiny as caterpillars, crawled her face.

A soft scraping came from above her on the rise, and she spotted the shape of her father, gray against the white rock and black veins, making his way down. When he stepped away from the formation, she asked, “What about our friend in the cigarette boat?”

“He’s landed on an island a few hundred yards south,” her father replied. “As nearly as I can tell, he’s just waiting.”

“For dawn?”

“That would be my guess. Probably being cautious. If he didn’t kill the girl, he may be figuring that, if whoever did is still on the island, they’re armed, and dark isn’t a good time to come calling. If he’s the one who killed her, he may be coming back because he saw that things had been taken from the cabin, and he needs to check it out further. Same issue with the dark.”

Jenny rocked back and forth, and the baby sighed in her arms.

“If I were him and I’d killed the girl,” she said, “know what I’d do?”

“What?”

“Burn the cabin. You told me he took the body, so he’s probably already dumped it somewhere it will never be found. Now he should get rid of any evidence he left behind that might link him to the crime.”

Cork looked at her. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

“I’m just thinking,” she said.

“It’s good thinking. Come dawn, I guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, why don’t we try to get a little sleep? Me, I’m bushed.” He eyed the baby. “Will he sleep now?”

“I’ll put him down and see. I could use some sleep, too.”

She covered the baby with the blanket from the wicker basket, lay down next to him, and rolled to her side so that she could watch him. She thought of the horror of what had occurred inside the old cabin. She was afraid, but not for herself.

I swear to God, little guy, she promised silently, I won’t let anything bad happen to you.

He smiled in his sleep, as if he’d heard.

Ever, she promised.