Thief River Falls

22

Lisa assumed that the police would be watching her family house, but she had the advantage of knowing every square inch of that neighborhood. She knew how to get around undetected. She’d played spy and detective with Noah for years when they were kids, and she’d always been able to sneak up behind him with her cap gun before he knew she was there.

She didn’t park the Camaro anywhere close to their house. There was a better place. One of Lisa’s old grammar school teachers lived at the far end of Conley Avenue, and she was retired and housebound, with a side yard full of mature trees whose branches hung practically to the ground. Lisa stored the sports car there, mostly out of sight, and then she and Purdue walked two blocks through the front yards toward her old house. The snow flurries and trees gave them cover.

Darkness was giving way to dawn, slowly lighting up homes she knew from her childhood and filling her with memories and sadness. The houses were small and dated back to before World War II. Over the decades, the trees had grown leafy and tall, sheltering the homes. There were no fences. Neighbors didn’t need fences here. The driveways were unpaved. In the summer, the open green lawns were dotted with clover, but now it looked like winter and Christmas. The road was directly across the street from the north-south railroad tracks, and Lisa could remember their whole house shaking whenever a train rumbled by.

She was so caught up in her past that she didn’t immediately notice that Purdue kept glancing over at the railroad tracks, too. His face looked absorbed in memories of his own. She asked him about it, but he shrugged and said nothing.

Her old house waited for her. Two houses, actually. Her parents’ two-story house was on the corner, and next to it was the matchbox rental house where she’d lived for a decade, right up to the moment she bought the place near Lake Bronson. Her entire life sat there side by side. The rental house had new tenants; from where she was, she could see a light inside. But the house of Madeleine and Jerry Power was unoccupied. A time capsule. The key was in her pocket, the way it always was.

If the police were waiting for her, she didn’t see them. The streets looked deserted. Even so, she took the precaution of veering into the rear yards of the neighboring houses and taking Purdue around to the back door. Then she let them inside the cold house.

The ghosts of her family welcomed her.

Nothing had changed since she’d been back, other than a thicker layer of dust on the furniture. No matter how much time had gone by, it smelled the same, as if Madeleine were still trailing violet perfume through the rooms. She could hear her mother singing French nursery rhymes in her head. She could hear the excited shouts of her brothers playing football in the yard. When she went to the kitchen window and looked across the driveway at the rental house next door, she saw a young woman moving back and forth behind the curtains, then bending down to talk to a child. It could have been her.

The past felt so vivid it was difficult to believe it was really the past.

“You lived here?” Purdue asked.

“I was born here.”

She went upstairs, and Purdue followed her. Her own bedroom, which she’d shared with Noah, was nothing special. It was so small that it was a place to sleep, not a place to play. The one thing she remembered from that room was all the time that she and Noah had spent in the darkness, trying to read each other’s thoughts. Noah had always believed in the special power of twins. She wasn’t so sure. Yes, there were times when words and emotions would pop into her head out of nowhere, and sometimes she wondered if that was her twin brother. Or maybe it was just her imagination. She’d felt that odd presence a lot lately, and whenever she did, she found herself thinking, Go away, Noah.

She didn’t want to go into her parents’ bedroom, but the place drew her there anyway. Everything was exactly as it had been when they were alive, so it looked as if Madeleine should be sitting at the mirror and humming as she did her makeup, and her father should be in the bathroom, in his white T-shirt, pulling a razor across his face. Their queen bed was neatly made, with its burgundy comforter and pillowcases decorated with a geometric design. The closet door was closed. She always kept it closed.

She’d been the one to open the door and find her father hanging from the rod by the loop of his belt.

The note in his pocket read, There’s no life without Madeleine.

“You’re crying,” Purdue said.

“Am I?” She touched her cheek and realized that he was right. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been here in a while.”

Lisa sat down on the end of the bed, and Purdue sat next to her, pedaling his legs.

“Why are we here?” he asked.

“Because I need a place where you can be safe. Where no one can find you. I have to go out and get some answers, and I don’t know how long that will take me. So you can wait here. I’m going to show you a hiding place down in the basement. Noah and I used to go there when we didn’t want anyone to find us. If someone comes to the door, I want you to hide there.”

“Why can’t I come with you?”

“I wish you could. The trouble is, everyone’s looking for you. For me, too, but mostly for you. I don’t know why, but I do know that it’s important that nobody find you until we understand who you are and what happened to you two nights ago. So I want you to stay here while I look for some people who might be able to help us.”

The boy’s face bent into a frown. “What if you don’t come back?”

“I will come back. I promise.”

“You’re all I have now. I don’t want to lose you.”

“You’re not going to lose me. I’ll always protect you.”

He nodded, but she didn’t think he believed her. He was a smart boy. Promises were empty things. She was trying to be strong for him, and he was trying to be strong for her, but neither of them knew the future.

“How are you going to figure out who I am?” he asked her.

“Well, I need your help with that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know someone hurt you. I know you don’t remember everything. But I also think you remember more than you’ve told me. I wasn’t going to push you while we were trying to get out of town, but things are different now. You can’t hide the truth from me anymore.”

“I don’t remember anything,” he protested, but he had that nervous look again, the look of a boy who was keeping secrets.

“I think you do remember. At least you remember some things. I think that whatever it is, it’s really hard for you, but at some point, we have to figure out how to face hard things. Even memories that are awful and painful for us. Sometimes we really, really don’t want to do that, and our brains come up with ways to avoid thinking about them, but sooner or later you have to deal with the pain. You have to stare it down and let it out. That’s the only way you can begin to live with it. Does that make any sense?”

He didn’t answer. She could see him biting his lip, holding back tears.

“There are a lot of things in this house that I’d rather forget,” she told him, shivering as she stared at the closet door. “I haven’t been back in more than a year because it was so hard. But here I am. That’s the first step.”

She waited, hoping Purdue would open up to her. They sat in silence for a long time. The ghosts who were here must have been waiting, too, wondering if she’d meant what she said about facing down the hard things in life. Because she was a hypocrite. She couldn’t deal with the Dark Star that had taken her family. She was just like Noah, running away to Lake Bronson when the going got tough.

The house began to shake.

Literally. The floor trembled under her feet, and the windows rattled, and a whistle that was more like a scream split the air. Purdue’s eyes widened with wonder.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“A train. They go by right in front of the house. Want to see?”

“Yeah!”

They went to the bedroom windows, and Purdue pressed his nose against the glass. Across the street, the engine of a freight train rumbled through the crossing, dragging car after car, some stacked one on top of the other. The freight cars were a kaleidoscope of peeling paint, rust, and wild graffiti, and they went on forever. By instinct, Lisa counted the cars, and she got to seventy-one before the caboose brought up the rear and the earthquake eased under the ground.

Purdue stayed at the window, watching until the train had completely disappeared. Even then, he didn’t move; he just stared at the tracks the way he had when the two of them were creeping down the street toward the house. There was always something about boys and trains, but this was more than that.

“Purdue?” she murmured.

He said nothing, but she could tell that the rattling of the train had jarred something loose in his head.

“Purdue, talk to me.”

He looked up at her, and suddenly he was calm.

“That’s how I got here,” he said. “I came on a train. I was running away.”