“Then there’s spring,” he said.
Valka laughed at the both of us, at our spring fancying.
“We love Nebraska,” I said.
“We do,” said Timber.
We reached the front door and I stood, ankle-high in the snow, and tried to unlock it. The dead bolt was locked. I did not have a key for it. It was something my mother had put in years ago, when there had been a mass murder at a Wendy’s near the Walmart where my dad worked. The killer had taken his ex-girlfriend and all of her coworkers into the deep freezer and shot them all execution-style. The police found the bodies bent over gallon jugs of ketchup and mustard. The killer made it all the way to the Canadian border but was stopped by the guards there. Wrestled to the ground. Screaming holy hell. They showed him in cuffs on the TV. He was a local boy, just like the rest of us. But he had gone mad for love. My mother muttered about the crazies for a few weeks and then finally one night my father pulled out his drill and installed the dead bolt. We used it just at night. Just to keep the crazies away. Crazies like me.
“She does not want me here,” I said. I pointed at the door. “She used the extra lock.”
“Too bad,” said Valka. “You’re here.” She sounded tough and masculine. She could crush someone at any moment.
We stood for a moment, balancing ourselves in the snow.
“We could throw something through a window,” said Valka.
“Or climb up to the second floor,” said Timber.
“Or we could just walk around the house and use the back door,” I said.
They both booed me.
“You are like the least fun superhero ever,” said Valka.
We trudged around back through the snow, all of us taking turns at tipping over. I eyed the right side of the roof as we passed it. It looked like the house was shedding itself, scallops of siding dripping down toward the ground. That could not have just happened this winter.
We rounded the corner, past the shivering, barren elms and the tips of the thatched wire fence that bounded what was once my mother’s vegetable garden. When we were little we would help dig up potatoes with her, and then she would slice and fry them and make fresh French fries for dinner. She stopped gardening once we got older, but there was still rosemary and a handful of lonely potatoes every summer.
I heard a cough and looked up. It was my father sitting on the bench on the back porch. He had a glass in his hand filled with brown liquor and ice. He was smoking, something I had not seen him do for years. I moved faster, leaving Valka and Timber behind. As I got closer I could see he was as skinny as a stray cat begging for scraps. It was so quiet, except for the sound of us wading. He coughed again. The sky was gray. My father was surrounded by snow, which he had dug out and molded to make a sort of chair for himself, including arm rests. A bottle of whiskey and a ring of cigarette butts sat at his feet. Valka fell again and shrieked, and he looked up.
“Well, looky-here,” he said. “Miss Catherine.” He had never taken to calling me Moonie. I was named after his mother. “I thought you’d be in Hawaii by now. Doing the hula.” He did a halfhearted sway with his hands to one side and then another. Oh, he was ripped.
“Dad, what’s going on in there?” I said.
“Well,” he said and leaned back, resting his arms on the snow. “Something’s come over your mother.”
His skin was white and the circles under his eyes hung down a few rungs.
“You know what I mean,” he said.
Yes, I did.
23.
Something had been coming over my mother my entire life. We all knew it, in my family. We all knew my mother had been wounded. We all knew she was only sometimes healed, and if it was only sometimes, it was probably not at all. We never talked about it. We never told a soul. We were all in her shame with her. In it so far we could not make our way out again.
I had been keeping my secrets for so long. Other people’s secrets. I took everyone’s pain for my own. But when I left my husband, when I lost my mind, when I stole all the money, when I hit the road, when I saw the mountains build in the distance until I was right up next to them, so close it seemed I could have climbed right to the top, when my world unfolded before my eyes, all I had wanted to do the whole time was tell someone this one thing. I could not tell Valka. It just seemed too dangerous to give it all to her, and I needed her too much. But I could tell someone else. Someone new. And I had.