THE SUMMER PASSED QUICKLY AFTER THE GARDNERS LEFT. Or, not quickly but in fragments. It was one of the hottest summers in a while. It was so hot some nights in July that I soaked my T-shirt in lake water before going to sleep. I wrung it out in the woods and wore it dripping through the dark house and up my ladder. Mornings, the sun coaxed steam off the lake and it was too humid in the afternoons to do anything at all. I remember waiting out the worst hours in some flickering patch of shade beneath the pines, brushing away flies with a fir branch, searching for ticks on the dogs—all four—who lay collapsed around me in the dust. Working my fingers through Abe’s thick halfhusky fur, I could feel each of his ribs in turn, convulsing as he panted. I could feel the way the bones separated and contracted again, making room for more oxygen. I could feel him scooching away, patiently, from the unfamiliar heaviness of my hand.
I remember bouncing one humid evening on the back of my dad’s ATV to the police station in Whitewood, where they gave me a Coke poured so fast into a Styrofoam cup it overflowed on the table. This was a few days after an officer showed up at the bottom of the sumac trail and spoke with my dad over the hood of his black and white car. At the police station, they handed me a roll of brown paper towels to wipe the spilled Coke. They offered to get me another can, but I shook my head and sucked the froth from the top. Someone turned on a fan that blew warm air into my face, and as it dried out my nose and eyes, I remember wondering if this was where Lily had come. If this was where she’d sat last spring and had a Coke and said her piece against Mr. Grierson.
I never knew for sure.
I spent hours in that one little room that summer, in a green plastic lawn chair, answering questions from different people in uniforms and suits. I no longer remember who asked what, or when, or in what order. I know I drank lots of warm Coke. I chewed lots of lips off the smallish Styrofoam cups meant for coffee. I sprinkled the chewed white bits across the table, like clumpy snow, and eventually I learned to ask for the one cushioned folding chair they had, which was kept behind the front desk. By late July, I’d been prepped by a lady with a pouty face—the DA’s assistant?—to cross my legs at the ankle and fold my hands and, if I remembered, to say “ma’am” to the judge and “sir” to the defense lawyer. “Don’t let him scare you, now,” she told me. “Don’t bite your nails like that, don’t look down, don’t let it get to you. Think of yourself as floating or something? Like a fish? You like to fish, don’t you? But not a dead fish, I don’t mean float like that. I mean swimming? In the water? Get that image in your mind, remember you’re not the one on trial.”
I wasn’t scared, though. I didn’t need to think of myself as a walleye drifting along in a current somewhere, just waiting for my hook. I was yearning for it.
*
August came. The days grew hazier, ash scented. Forest fires were going strong a few lakes north of us, and the air tasted of it, though the worst of the blaze was more than fifty miles away. “Safe by the skin of our teeth,” people were saying. By then, by the end of summer, all the deciduous trees—all the aspens and birch—had gone crinkly and blond in the hot weather. The pink geraniums in the window boxes of the Whitewood County district courthouse lay slung over, and the grass along the front walk was brown in strips. Brown, except for a square of emerald sod laid down against the marble steps, like a tiny pricey carpet. For weeks the heat had been oppressive, but now that summer was ending, now that September was on the horizon and the first geese were in flight, everyone was going on about how perfect the season had been, how lucky we’d been all along, how blessed to live in the north, in the woods, which was God’s own country.
“What a doozy of a day!” I heard, as my mom and I filed up the marble stairs to the courthouse.
“What a perfect ten!” was the reply—though it was ninety degrees already.
Inside, I had to listen to the same conversation about the weather again and again. I watched the DA’s assistant flick a finger in a glass of water and dampen her lips as she spoke to a man who was painstakingly rolling up one of his sleeves, inch-by-inch-by-inch. I watched them eyeing me in my thrift-store dress—assessing me, and at the same time pretending they weren’t. When I glared back, they pinched their eyes into smiles, looked at their watches, crossed their legs. Beside me, my mom sat too close on the gallery bench, sweating and fanning herself with one limp hand. My dad had decided not to come. He’d said he was afraid that a shift in the wind would bring the fires closer, and though I’d hoped for more from him I knew better than to question this or ask him to reconsider. Someone shoved open a window at the back of the courtroom and a breeze trickled in, but it wasn’t enough. At one point, my mom put her damp hand on my arm.
“Oh my, oh my,” she said, so I followed her gaze.