Betty snorted. “Lots of men in this county don’t hunt. Except for new ways to make their women miserable.”
Jim crossed his arms and watched the TV with resolve, so Betty leaned over the bar at Chuck. “You knew him. And, wait, cousin-girl, you knew him.” She swiveled on her stool to look at me.
“Not really,” I said.
“Wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Jim muttered.
Chuck stood to take my money, offered the change. When I shook my head, he folded the bills away and stood staring at me, kindly, intellectually, the way I might study a signature I’d seen by accident—someone’s signature in line at the bank, say, or a hand-lettered sign in a shop window.
“I don’t want to speak ill of your family,” Chuck said. He slid the hand-drawn map across the bar. “But the way I remember Ray Levis is, if there ever was a guy who would hurt a fly just to hurt a fly, it was him.”
Chapter Thirty
The Northwoods were for getting lost, getting forgotten.
A certain breed was drawn to dense woods, to the sparse population. People with grudges and grudges against them. People with bad families, bad credit, bad exes.
That was always the problem with my escape plan. I watched the trees fall away to each side of the road through the truck’s windshield. I was always trying to find a hiding place from the best hiding place in the world.
The road curved through the forest and around the lakes. The colors, Betty had said, but it was the green that made my heart ache. The pine trees on one side of the road were skinny and exposed, trimmed away from the telephone wires, but beyond their knock-kneed youth were the elders, all rough trunks and black needles. The river crossed under the highway and fell into place on my left, the water tumbling around rocks and smoothing to green glass as it deepened.
When the paper napkin map said to turn, I did, and then again, until all I could see past the scrub near the road were pines and the dark knees of white aspen. Trees, trees, and more trees, as the guy in the bar had said. He might feel differently about the woods if he’d been living in Parks County, Indiana. Town of Parks, tree population: three. Here the sun cut lines of gold through the thick canopy like spotlights.
The map guided me through a series of turns, the roads twisting around an unseen lake.
My family had never had a place, of course, since we’d barely been able to keep a roof over us at all. But Theresa’s family had, and I’d spent weeks of several summers in a row as the assumed guest. The family compound was a tradition, all the cousins finding a way to converge. At Theresa’s, I would find myself surrounded by a matched set of adults, the women shy in their suits and the men pale-bellied. Adults who threw their heads back and laughed, who didn’t seem in a hurry, or anxious, or angry. At Theresa’s, we spent the sunshine hours running around the land in our suits, jumping off the end of the dock whenever we got hot. When our stomachs growled, we went up to grab hot dogs and bags of chips and ate with our water-pruned fingers back on the dock, as if we feared the lake wouldn’t be there if we stayed away too long.
It was one of those summer days on the lake with Theresa when I had met Ray, though neither of us brought it up later, when things went bad. When Theresa couldn’t stand to be around me because I had gone back again. Back then Theresa worked at her parents’ T-shirt shop but on her day off we went to one of the coves to sun ourselves. The inside of my mouth was sore from too many sugary candies, and I was stupid from the heat.
“Yuck,” Theresa said, kicking at the water.
“What?” I was leaning back on a boulder. I was hotter than a human should be allowed to get.
“Why do they have to die here? I want to swim.”
“What’s dying?”
“The mayflies,” she said.
“They don’t die at the water’s edge, dumbass,” said a male voice high above us.
We both turned and looked up. Theresa pulled her towel from the rocks and tucked it around her. She’s grown into her suit that summer, maybe a little too much. Some of the men in town had started watching us as we passed by, but it wasn’t me who caught their eyes. The guy above us, though, wasn’t looking at her. I smiled and he smiled back.
“They die everywhere,” he said. He was older than we were by a few years, tan and muscular in a way that the guys in our grade had yet to figure out. He wore wet jean shorts, and that was all. His hair dripped onto his chest. “They die everywhere and then the water brings them to the edges. It’s not some big plan to ruin your swim today.”
Theresa didn’t like being called a dumbass. And she didn’t like having someone crouched over us, talking down. And maybe she didn’t like that the guy—the man—doing the talking hadn’t given her a moment’s notice. If he’d flirted with her at all, I might never have learned the man’s name. “What are you even doing up there?” Theresa said, pouting like a baby.
“Jumping off the high dive,” he said. He looked at me. “You want to come up?”
“Don’t you dare,” Theresa said under her breath. Theresa was safety in human form to me, but she was also too careful for a girl who’d never faced a single barrier in life. She could wear makeup. She could go on dates. She could drive and hold a job. She could wear short sleeves without anyone asking about her bruises. In a year, she’d be gone, in college probably. I would be here. If she hadn’t told me what to do, though, I wouldn’t have taken the dare.
I was already rising and looking for a good handhold in the rock.
I climbed, certain until the very end. He reached down and pulled me up the rest of the way.
“Look at you,” he said quietly, and did. I couldn’t breathe. “What’s your name?”
“Leeanna,” I said.
“Well, Ell, what are you going to do? There’s only one way down.”
He still held my hand. I shook it off, gazed out at the lake for a moment, and then ran toward the edge. Behind me I heard someone screaming and someone laughing. I stretched toward the water, knowing I would climb up again. Dripping, shaking, the lake water in the back of my throat. I would do it, just to fly again.
I shook off the memories and followed the road deeper into the woods, past turnoffs for a summer camp and a series of rentals with cute names. Pining for Home. Honeymoon Hideaway. Past the white arrow signs for a hundred families, and then I saw the one I’d been looking for and dreading: Levis.