“Mrs. Brightman.” Just saying the name made me want to throw up, but I wasn’t sure why. Not yet. These were deeply buried associations rising to the surface. I reached out and held the rim of the nearby trash bin and brought the cool soda can to my forehead.
“That’s right! And you are—now let me look at you a second. I have a good memory for Riverview kids.” The woman studied me, murmuring under her breath, until at last I saw the past rush up and grip her, and the woman’s eyes widened. “Oh. I should have—you’re the Winger girl, aren’t you? I—hadn’t—” She tried to start over. “How are you, dear?”
We were on the same terms at last. Mrs. Brightman, the Riverview High school nurse, remembered me now. I let myself remember Mrs. Brightman, her medicinal green smock, the little white closet of a nursing station, and the rough sheets on the cot. Mrs. Brightman’s cool hands taking my temperature, her cool voice as she asked if there was any reason I was there, a test I wasn’t ready for perhaps. A voice that never strayed, never pried. Not even when it should have.
How am I? Would everyone always use that tone of voice on me?
“We see quite a few from Riverview,” Mrs. Brightman was prattling. “My husband, Richard? He taught at the elementary in Rhinelander for years and years, but now we’ve both retired. Don’t get into Sweetheart that much. Are you in town to visit—family?”
“You could say that.” And she would, I knew. “I need to go, as a matter of fact.”
“Won’t keep you.” Mrs. Brightman looked me up and down, and said, “Well, you turned out just fine, didn’t you?”
I launched myself off the sidewalk, across the parking lot, and into my truck. But then I couldn’t start it. I pressed my shaking hands to my thighs. I found the control for the windows and rolled them all down.
I was still sitting there when Mrs. Brightman emerged from the station with a half gallon of milk. She walked past my window to her car and noticed me watching her. “It was so good to see you,” she said. “Leeanna Winger, I’ve just remembered. An old lady’s mind. Be thankful for your youth.”
“Mrs. Brightman, my youth was a horror show.”
The nurse dropped her keys. Her eyes weren’t hiding in her cheeks now.
“If I turned out fine, it is my own doing,” I said. “If I turned out fine, it is despite Riverview High, despite my teachers, and despite you.”
“Leeanna—”
“I don’t go by that name anymore,” I said. “That girl is dead, just like you predicted. A lost cause.”
“I never thought that.” The nurse raised her chin, as though her pride were at stake. It was. It most certainly was, and I meant to drive away with it.
“Why didn’t you help me?” I said.
The milk jug dipped heavily in her arms.
“Why didn’t anyone help me?” I said.
The woman’s eyes would no longer meet mine. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “It was a different time . . . a different—things are different now.”
I searched for something smug and cutting to say. The only thing I could think of was one of Margaret’s. “That is bull and I know bull when I see it.” If I ever saw Margaret again, I’d have to tell her. But if I got the chance to tell the story, I’d have to embellish a bit, because it didn’t feel good at all to say it. Not when it was true, and not when saying it couldn’t change a thing.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The town rolled into view, and it was like any other town I had passed on the trip.
Life went on. In Sweetheart Lake, the town I’d fled thirteen years ago, groceries were being bought and sold, kids were sitting in classrooms, and their parents were over in Rhinelander or St. Germain showing real estate or selling hardware. It was the off-season, so when the road veered from the highway, and I passed the first signs of town—the Stag, open only for dinner now, the road toward Theresa’s grandfather’s cabin on Midnight Lake, and at last the little market that sold eight kinds of jerky and wooden bears that the artists carved with chainsaws and axes right there in the parking lot—the place seemed just as I’d left it. Quiet, and willing to let me leave. I could turn around now, and nobody would ever know. No one would ever care.
At first what I noticed was how much I remembered. The forest station. My heart gave a little leap at the visage of Smokey the Bear and his fire safety sign. The risk of forest fires was HIGH. That little frame house next door had been turned into a café. I drove so slowly, a truck behind me pulled around on a double yellow, just to be rid of me, and I nodded, yes, yes, this was all what I had expected. The same gas station on the left. The same curve, and the main street stretched to the horizon.
Among the T-shirt shops and knickknack stores, the same stores I’d browsed in my youth, I parked and got out, legs stiff. The same store where Theresa and I went to get I Heart Sweetheart Lake T-shirts to wear to Senior Day at school, a joke that not everyone understood. That’s not funny, the other kids said uncertainly. Was it that T-shirt shop, or had it been so long that the places I remembered had as many cat’s lives as I had, closing and reopening, closing and reopening so that I couldn’t tell the difference now? Could anyone tell the difference?
Still there: the famous fudge store, where the tourists pressed their greasy hands to the glass to watch local kids making the candy every summer. The bookstore with its half-timber fa?ade.
So much the same, but I could see what had changed, too. The town had a sort of grit to it that I didn’t remember. Another real estate office with a for-lease sign in its own window. A family restaurant closed for the season or maybe forever. The old bank had been turned into a gift shop that specialized in dog figurines, dog mugs, kitchen towels with dogs on them.
A white-haired couple, late-season tourists wearing high socks and bright new tennis shoes, stepped away from the dog store window and into my path. The woman and I, face-to-face, did the awkward lurch people do when they are just trying to get by, the woman laughing after the second dodge failed. “May I have this dance?” the man said. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t there. I was already around the corner, aghast at how much had changed, how much for the worse the town had fared in the decade-plus I’d been gone.
“Excuse us,” said a woman’s low voice. I stood back and let the woman pass. On her shoulder, a little boy lay his head. He stared back at me, his thumb in his mouth.
My breath caught in my throat. The boy reminded me of Joshua. But he looked nothing like Joshua, now or when he was that age. Trick of the light, trick of the mind—for just a moment I’d known him. Would every mother’s son remind me of my own, until he was back with me?
I watched the woman and the boy until they turned a corner, and then I went back to my tour. The town had expanded. Streets had been rerouted and buildings torn down to make room for a couple of fast-food places and a shiny yellow convenience store. In the distance, the pink neon of the Dairy Bar. At least that was still intact.