I looked at Mama but I did not feel that old, familiar anger. I did not feel the rage or the sadness. Even the relief at her return was gone. The only thing I felt now was tired. I was pure exhausted.
I pulled my hand away, turned, and hurried down the porch steps. I ran for the truck, started her back up, and gassed it hard down Clark Street. The sidewalk was empty outside of Night Moves and my tires shot slush as I drove fast through the blue light. I fled Mama the same way I did Shelton Potter—like my life depended on it.
I drove Clark through East Cutler and downtown, but when I came to the highway I did not turn toward the north hills. This time I stopped at the blinking red and headed south. I had no idea at all where I was going, but I drove fast and watched town fade into a soft, distant blur behind me.
I took MacDougal Road off the highway and lost myself on the back roads between Cutler and Porcupine County. In the black sky and gentle snow. I had the radio on country and Emmylou Harris was singing about a wrecking ball. Mama loved that song and as it played I found myself remembering the afternoons she used to take me to feed the swans at Spring Lake.
It was strange. I hadn’t thought about those memories in years and all of a sudden there I was, walking into the little lake just off Highway 31. I was only a girl then but I could still feel the warm water and the sand beneath my feet as I waded to the edge of the shallows. I could see the bread crumbs we tossed and how the swans glided straight-necked through the reeds.
Mama had warned me not to, but once I ventured too close. I remembered the hissing and how it frightened me, how it froze me in the water. I remembered the quick jab of a beak, and how I screamed out just as Mama scooped me up and ran me back to shore, laughing.
“I told you, Sweetgirl,” she had said.
I remembered Mama straightening my hair after we retreated to a faraway picnic table, and the way she’d smiled at me in the sun and asked did I want to skip the rest of the bread crumbs and go to McDonald’s for an ice cream?
Mama loved me. I knew that she did. She loved me in a way not even Starr could, but it had been a long time, maybe as far back as that day at Spring Lake, that her love had not felt confused and undercut with sadness. This had always been the torment of Mama’s love and it remained so now—it was both the sun that had borne me and the endless orbit I tread around its burning.
Emmylou sang and I went along with the words I knew. An angel and a ghost are two different things, but she sounded like both all at once and when she melted into the final chorus it stood my neck hairs on end.
Mama hadn’t died. She hadn’t even changed. I was the one who’d left her, and that was why I’d felt so torn up and afraid. I made my choice the moment I ripped Jenna from her arms, then cast her into the storm and locked the door against her. All along, I was the one who wasn’t coming home.
I drove until I hit the dirt roads and the gravel drives, the far-flung Cutler where trailers sat behind chain-link fence and the yards were strewn with machine parts. I was on the county line now, driving the flatland where it’s all cornfields and dairy farms. I passed the giant cross that stood along the edge of the road and then the dirt field where everybody goes to trip acid—where you can see the red pulse of the radio towers, and behind them the blinking lights from the airstrip in Harbor Springs.
The radio played and as one song bled into another there were moments I was certain I could hear Jenna cry. I heard her high-pitched wail, like from when I changed her that first time in the cabin, and though I knew she was somewhere far away, hopefully in the care of good people, my heart still raced at the sound.
I shut the radio off and tried to focus solely on driving but then her crying would come back and I would have to shake my head to clear it. I would have to remind myself where I was and what I was doing. I would have to remind myself that I’d left her at the hospital over a week earlier.
I drove and drove. I drove and smoked cigarettes and by the time dawn broke I could see the snow set around me in high, rolling banks. The sky was like washed metal above the white and I looked out and wondered where Jenna was in all that wide-open space.
I drove until I saw something dart through the fields, something low and black and slanting hard for the truck. I slammed the brakes and fishtailed and I thought I was going to roll until the Nissan settled hard and flung me forward against the wheel. I lost my wind on the impact and then looked up to see Wolfdog standing there in the road. Her front paws were staggered as she leaned forward, her tongue lolling while her breath misted in a cloud.
Chapter Twenty-Two
This was how I came to leave Cutler. I left Mama at the house, found Wolfdog, and knew it was time. I knew it was past time.
I pushed the passenger door open, called for Wolfdog, and she trotted over and jumped in the cab. I put my hand out to pet her and she sighed and leaned in for a nuzzle.