I tell her that my mother’s name is Kathryn. I show her a picture I keep in my wallet for safekeeping. It’s an outdated photo, taken a decade or so ago. She says she can see my eyes on her, the seriousness and the mystery. My mother’s smile is forced, revealing a crooked eyetooth that drives her crazy.
“When you talk about her,” she says to me, “you actually smile.” My mother’s hair is dark, like mine. It’s straight as an arrow. I say that my father’s is, too. My own curls are a mystery, the result of some recessive gene, I guess. I never knew my grandparents to know if they had curly hair.
I can’t go home for a number of reasons, but the one I never mention is the fact that the police want me behind bars. I was twenty-three when I broke the law for the first time. That was eight years ago. I tried to live the right way. I tried to follow the rules, but life just didn’t work out that way. I robbed a gas station and sent every dollar I snatched to my mom to pay for her prescriptions. A few months later I did it again to pay the doctor bills. I figured out how much money I could make selling dope and did that for a while until I was caught by an undercover cop and spent a few months in jail. After that, I tried to play it straight again, but when my mother received an eviction notice, I became desperate.
I don’t know why luck has been on my side. I don’t understand why I’ve gone so long without getting nailed by the cops, really nailed. Part of me wishes it would happen, so I don’t have to go on like this, on the run, hiding behind fake names.
“Then—” she begins. We’re outside, walking through the vast trees. It’s a milder November day, temperatures lingering in the upper 40s, and she’s wearing my coat, sinking into it and burying her hands in the pockets. The hood envelops her head. I have no idea how long we’ve been walking, but I can no longer see the cabin. We step over fallen logs and I push aside the branches of an evergreen so she can sneak by without having to wrestle the sixty-foot balsam fir. We hike up hills and nearly fall down gulleys. We kick aside pinecones and listen to the call of birds. We lean against a western hemlock, in the midst of dozen similar trees, to catch our breath. “Then you’re not Owen.”
“No.”
“And you’re not from Toledo.”
“I’m not.”
But I don’t tell her who I am.
I say that my dad brought me here once, to Minnesota, to the Gunflint Trail. I tell her that he owns the cabin, that it’s been in his family for as long as anyone can remember. He’d met some lady. “What she saw in the bastard, I don’t know,” I say. “I know it didn’t last.” We hadn’t spoken in years and I’d all but forgotten about him. Then one day he invited me on this trip. We’d rent an RV. We’d drive from the home he owned in Gary, Indiana, to Minnesota. This was long before he moved to Winona to work for the D.O.T. I didn’t want to go, but my mom said I had to. She had some naive idea my father wanted to fix things with me, but she was wrong. “The lady had some prick kid about the same age as me. So he planned some big vacation, as if this was something we did. The lady, her kid and me. He wanted to impress her. He promised me a bike if I didn’t do anything to screw it up. I kept my mouth shut the whole time. Never saw the bike.” I tell her that I haven’t spoken to him since. But still, I keep tabs on him. Just in case.
She says that she doesn’t know how I maneuver my way through the woods. I say that it’s second nature. Boy Scouts, for one, and this innate ability to know which way is north and which way is south. That and a lot of time spent roaming the woods—anything to get away from fighting parents—when I was a kid.
She keeps up with me as I hike through the woods. She doesn’t get tired.
How does a girl who grew up in the city know all the names of the trees? She points them out to me—balsam fir and spruce and pine—as if it’s a fucking biology lesson. She knows that acorns belong to oak trees, and those stupid little helicopters fall from maple trees.
I guess it doesn’t take a genius to know that. It’s just that I never cared—not until I watched her hands release the seeds and then watched her eyes as she stared in awe as they spun their way to the ground.
She teaches without meaning to. She points out that those helicopters are samaras and the red cardinal is the male. She’s offended that all the showy animals are male and the females are drab. Cardinals, ducks, peacocks, lions. I’d never noticed the difference. She wouldn’t be so offended if she hadn’t been screwed over by every man in her life.