Thief River Falls

16

Lisa made sure her safety belt was buckled, and then she twisted around to check on Purdue in the back seat of the four-seater Cessna. The boy looked ready to head off on a grand adventure. His wavy blond hair flopped in front of his big eyes, which took in everything about the plane and its instruments. She gave him a thumbs-up, and he returned the gesture with an excited grin. He didn’t look scared at all. He had faith that she would protect him from whatever was out there, that she would find a way to fix everything. She wasn’t so sure. She studied the wet, grassy runway ahead of her, and the charcoal sky looming to the southeast, and she hoped that the boy’s faith in her wasn’t misplaced.

She waited for Curtis, who stood in the field with Laurel fifty yards away. From their demeanor, it was obvious that they were arguing. Laurel did most of the talking, and Curtis shook his head in firm opposition to whatever she was saying. He planted his feet in the ground and braced his hands on his hips. Lisa wished she could hear what they were saying. She knew they were both smart, stubborn people, and she’d seen them bump heads in the past, but this looked worse than usual.

Before she could climb out of the plane and talk to them, the fight ended. Laurel took both of Curtis’s hands, kissed him, and whispered something in his ear. Curtis shrugged her off and headed for the plane without looking back at his wife. Lisa wasn’t sure which of them had won, but if history was any indication, she thought that Curtis had finally surrendered to whatever Laurel wanted.

Curtis performed his final safety checks on the plane’s exterior. Then he got into the pilot’s seat without acknowledging his passengers. He ran through his cockpit checks, not saying a word to Lisa as he did, and he squinted at the clouds.

“Everything okay?” she asked him finally.

“Fine.” His voice was clipped, but that wasn’t unusual. Curtis never used two words when one was enough.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

But Lisa was worried anyway. She was certain they’d been arguing about her. And Purdue.

“Thank you for doing this,” she said.

“I do what I’m told,” he replied, which did nothing to ease Lisa’s concerns.

He put on a headset and started the engine. A second headset hung on a hook in front of her, but she left it where it was. She welcomed the white noise, no matter how loud. In front of her, the propeller accelerated, making fluttery half moons in front of the windshield. Lisa felt the plane rock and heard the whine of the motor grow louder as they inched forward. The ground beneath them was uneven, and she could feel every bump. Spray rose from pools of standing water as they plowed through it. The plane hardly seemed to move at all, even as they went faster, but in no time, the nose tilted up and the Cessna floated off the ground, as if it couldn’t wait to fly. The wings waggled, and the plane dipped. They took a few seconds to steady.

Lisa looked back through the window, watching Laurel grow smaller. They could see each other, but her friend didn’t wave. She wasn’t the sentimental type. Even so, she could see Laurel following them as Curtis increased altitude and then bent into a turn that took them back over the house. Lisa leaned with the plane. The sharp angle always made her feel untethered, as if she would spill through the door and fall. She wondered if it made Purdue afraid, but when she looked over her shoulder, she saw the boy staring out the window, mesmerized by the flat earth stretching out below them.

As they climbed higher, the ground became a checkerboard of roads and farm fields, occasionally interrupted by an uneven plot of woodland. There weren’t many lakes in this part of the land of ten thousand lakes. Curtis was using Highway 59 as a guidepost to lead them southeast, and she recognized the familiar landmarks, the places she knew. She could see the thin black line of a freight train on the railroad tracks, heading toward Canada. A cluster of roads met like threads leading into the nucleus of a cell, which was the town of Karlstad. The houses and streets below them came and went, and the emptiness of the earth took over again.

It was a rocky flight, the worst she’d ever been on with Curtis. The clouds were a low shroud, so low she felt as if she could raise her hand and skim her fingers through them. As they flew, rain began to spit across the windshield. The unsettled air threw the plane around like a drunk dancer, lifting her off the seat with each rise and fall. The unexpected jolts made her want to scream, but she held it in, biting her tongue so hard she was sure it would bleed.

Curtis touched her shoulder and gestured at the headset. She slipped it over her ears, and he spoke into the microphone.

“We need to keep an eye on this,” he said, his voice crackling into her ears. “Weather’s getting worse.”

Lisa nodded without a word. She left the headset on. Curtis’s face was calm, but that didn’t make her any less nervous. Her fingers were clutched around the leather grip on the door, but it was hard to hold on through the pockets of turbulence. They’d only been airborne for a few minutes, and the flight already felt long. Minneapolis seemed a world away. She looked back at Purdue, but he rode the waves like a kid on a roller coaster. She envied him that innocence.

Her eyes followed the squares of green fields, as dark as emeralds under the grim sky. The highway shot south like an arrow, but they were too high to see any cars on the road. A strange sense of foreboding clouded her mind, a feeling of danger and despair that she was flying into a nightmare. Through the window, between the raindrops, she could see a black snake on the ground, slithery and poisonous, coiling in tight swirls, and she knew what that snake was. It was the Thief River. And she knew why her stomach felt hollow, why she could hardly breathe, why tears had begun to leak from her eyes.

They were closing in on the town of Thief River Falls.

She could see it all from up here, every building she knew, every cross street, every park that had been part of her childhood. Thief River Falls, where the Thief River and the Red Lake River met in a kind of psychedelic Y. This was the town where she’d been born. Until recently, it was a town she’d loved and had never dreamed of leaving. Anyone who lived in this place had to embrace its fierceness and remoteness, because this was not a soft part of the world. It was a town that stared north at the bitter Canadian plains and pounded in tent stakes against the winter winds. It was a town dropped down in the middle of nothingness, where every mile looked like every other mile.

She loved the drama of its name, the way each word rolled off her tongue like a thriller with a twist ending. Thief. River. Falls. It was made to be the title of a book, the title of her book. When you saw the name on a highway sign, you knew you were coming to a place that had stories to tell, a place the Indians had made their own centuries ago, a place where pioneers had lived and died, a place of farmers and loggers. It didn’t matter how many years passed. Nothing changed. Drive a mile in any direction, and you went back in time, and the stories weren’t far away.

Thief River Falls. Population nine thousand. And they all knew their hometown girl, Lisa Power.

She knew it was wrong to blame the town for everything that had happened to her, but she did. Every house, shop, trail, and intersection was a reminder of what she’d lost. The thing about living where she’d been born was that all her memories made a chain, linked together, like pencil marks scratched on a wall as she got taller. There was a time when Greenwood Cemetery had reminded her of midnight adventures at homecoming. Now it was where Danny was buried. There was a time when passing the Arctic Cat headquarters had reminded her of snowmobiling with her brothers on Christmas Eve. Now it was a reminder that her brothers had both worked on the factory floor before they died in the flood.

She couldn’t X out her memories with a black marker. All she could do was run away from them, and that was what she’d been trying to do. When they started coming back, she ran even faster.

Slowly, the plane crossed over the town and left it behind. Lisa closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. But her relief was short lived. It was as if the town refused to let her go. As they headed south, the rain got worse, pouring in sheets across the windows and sticking with a kind of glaze. The plane yawed as it fought the wind, bucking like a mechanical bull. It felt like something was wrong. She saw Curtis twist his shoulders to look back and check the left wing. Whatever he saw made him bend his lips into a frown.

Then he took the radio and said one word. “Ice.”

Ice on the windows. Ice on the wings.

She mouthed back at him. “What do we do?”

“Land.”

She didn’t bother saying no. It wouldn’t do any good. She felt the plane descending; she leaned as it swung around. They weren’t going back north to the grassy runway they’d left. Underneath the clouds, barely a mile to the east, she could see the long ribbon of pavement at the Thief River Falls airport. That was where Curtis was taking her. She’d flown into one storm, and now she was flying into an entirely different storm. No matter how hard she tried to get away, the town clung to her like a hawk with prey.

The plane sank lower, struggling against the current that wanted to keep them airborne. The ground grew larger, coming up fast. The buildings of the small airport took shape ahead of them. She squeezed her hands into fists and closed her eyes, and she felt the plane bounce as the wheels hit the runway. When she opened them again, she saw the drab fields around them. Their speed slowed; the whine of the engine got softer.

Whether she liked it or not, she was inside the dark heart of the mystery.

She was home.