What We Lost in the Dark (17 page)

On the other hand, every square inch of my skin was about to combust with longing for Rob’s touch, and my mother had been single for thirteen years. Who was I to judge her? I knew that she would gratefully be celibate for the rest of her life if I could be well.

We both sat quietly in the chair for minutes. Then I said, “It’s too late for Juliet.”

Jackie said, “It is.”

My throat caught. “Just such a little bit too late,” I said.

She nodded. “Everything about this is wonderful except that part. It was not the first thing I thought, but it was up there. I will have to tell Ginny and Tommy myself. I don’t
want them to hear it on some news report about the clinic.” I wanted to go on talking, but Jackie got up and hugged me so hard she knocked the breath out of me.

“I won’t sleep, though. It’s like Christmas morning.”

I was almost as happy for her as I was for myself.

Happier.

That day, which turned out to be the last day of even-close-to-normal, I didn’t end up sleeping very much, either.

Finally, sensing it was dark, I decided to hell with pride and everything else. I would call Rob. I couldn’t wait to talk to Rob.

Everything was changed.

We’d had a fight, or at least, he’d had a fight … or something, but the news about the clinical trials trumped that. It couldn’t even wait three more days until he got home. I thought I remembered him mentioning that his uncle was bringing his kids out there, too, after Christmas, so I knew Rob would be busy. The news about clinical trials was too good to keep to myself.

How would it be to go on our honeymoon in St. Lucia? How would it be to go hiking in a sunny mountain meadow? We might actually be able to … do things. We might have experiences so lush and light-filled that I could hardly ever think of them real. You had to pay to get to them, but the
experiencing, the memories, anything your senses could accommodate—that was all free. How could anyone ever be bored in a world where there was sun?

For me, the thought of the possibility of being able to do things the way Daytimers did was like being blind and trying to imagine the color orange. I certainly knew what it felt like to be out in the sun, under my protective gear, but to feel its heat? Unafraid?

I took our phone into my room, and I called him.

No answer.

Ducking downstairs, I liberated my mother’s phone from her purse and sent texts asking Rob if he’d heard the news from his parents, hoping that referring to “the news” would pique his curiosity. Then, I carried Jackie’s cell phone around like I was in seventh grade in case a text pinged. Nothing. Finally, I looked up the resort called Heavenly, called the desk, and asked if I could speak to anyone in the Dorn family. The phone rang and rang. Finally, the operator at the hotel took a message.

Roiling, I left a note for my mom and took Angie directly from the bus to the movies. Mom was nowhere in evidence, although the car was there. This normally would have spiked fear in me, at least since the cavalcade of Tabor’s surveillance photos of my family; but now, I thought she might be at a meeting about the clinical trials or having an afternoon delight with a resident named Spencer.

At 4
P.M.
, it was already more or less dark. There was a new cartoon horror flick at the mall halfway between Iron Harbor and Duluth, based on a crazy Neil Gaiman story about twin babies raised by doting vampire godparents. So we hunched in our seats and ate our way through that—consuming two tubs of popcorn with double butter and brewer’s
yeast. Afterward, we drove back home to Gitchee for a real meal. At 6:30
P.M.
, the town was as dark as midnight.

The place was deserted.

Gid sat in a booth by himself, reading the Sunday
New York Times
. His new wife (I’d never spoken more than three words to her) was spinning around on one of the stools at the bar. On this early January night, an older couple sharing a modest foccacia were his only guests.

Angela and I sat down in the booth.

“You hungry?” Gid said.

“Always,” Angela answered.

Out of deference to our mom, we ordered vegetarian: a large double-cheese with mushrooms, onions, olives, pineapple, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted eggplant, and two kinds of bell peppers. We insisted on paying, although I hadn’t paid Gid for food since middle school. To defeat me, he gave us two pizzas and a jug of homemade cream soda.

While we ate, he sat with us.

“I get depressed after Christmas,” he said. “I get depressed before, too.”

“I think that’s common,” I offered.

“I’m very depressed,” Angela said. “My cousins, Merit and Mia, have a budget for clothes for a year, and it’s five hundred dollars. Each. They’re like … eight years old.” Angela wouldn’t be ten until May, so this made both Gid and I laugh.

“Go play pinball,” I told Angie, giving her seven quarters.

As soon as she was happily bashing away at the machine, Gid said, “Where’s Rob?”

“Colorado. He went skiing in Vail with his parents. I think some cousins came out there, too. His dad’s sisters and their kids.”

“Bet that’s beautiful.”

“You’ve never been?”

“Never been out West. Never farther away than Tennessee. And wherever the team went. Florida once. And then only two years.” Gideon looked at me as though I’d asked a question, which I hadn’t. “Yes, Allie. I went to college. Baseball scholarship. A full ride.”

“What position did you play?”

“Pitcher. Like Cy Young. He was a Lac du Flambeau Chippewa. An Indian like me. You’ve heard of the Cy Young award.” I hadn’t, and I didn’t care, but something in Gid’s eyes made me nod.

“Why only two years? What happened?”

“I wrecked my arm. Rotator cuff. It’s common for young guys. I spent a year rehabbing it. I got back in and wrecked it again. The doctor said if I didn’t stop I could lose the use of the arm. So I came home. Got married. My father was a cook up at the Timbers. We bought this place together. We bought up land, wherever we could. Rentals. Cabins. Real estate. My dad retired to Tennessee. Him and my mom have a cabin on Stirrup Lake that’s the size of a strip mall. Three stories. He did good. Me, too. I don’t have to do this, Allie.” I realized then that I had no idea how old Gideon was. He could have been forty or sixty. “I like running this place because I get aggravated if I’m not around people. Plus, I don’t want the Tabors to buy it no matter what the price. But I could live on what I have forever, and leave plenty to my sons.”

“That’s great, though, Gid. You didn’t have one dream. But you got another.” So far as I knew, however, he didn’t yet have any sons, although he’d recently married again.

“I would give it all up to have played two seasons in the show.”

“What show?”

“Pro ball.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m sorry. What did you want to study?”

“Playing ball. College was nothing to me without it. That was all I wanted to do. You going to college, Allie?” Just him saying that lit an electric wire in my chest. All I’d thought about was Rob, and my last encounter with the mad Mr. Tabor, and then the clinical trials. But next week, I would be a freshman in college. Life just kept contriving and contriving, the way Thornton Wilder said.

“In ten days, Gid.”

“You graduated?”

“Early.”

“What do you want to do? Where are you going?”

“I’m not going anyplace but my room. It’s all online, because of my … you know.” Angie came back. This time Gideon dug deep into the pockets of his work pants and pulled out a fistful of quarters for her. “I’m going to study criminal justice. I want to be a forensic scientist.”

“This because of Juliet?”

“It was true before Juliet. But sure, more now.”

“Why before?”

“Gid, that time when Garrett Tabor chased me over here?”

Without warning, Gideon stood, pulled a rag out off a shelf nearby and began swabbing the table. His jaw flickered. He retrieved a white box with a laughing chef on it and began to pack up the quarter of the pizza Angie and I had left, packing another box with the one we hadn’t touched. Then he said under his breath, “That piece of shit.”

“I know he’s bad, Gideon. He’s really bad. He’s done bad things, and I can’t prove it even though I’ve seen the proof.”

“How bad?”

The room suddenly felt very small and hot, and my voice very loud. My head began to pound as though the veins were bursting; the pizza threatened to boil up at the back of my throat. “As bad as you can do, Gideon.”

“Like he killed somebody.”

“Like that. Yes.”

He nodded without so much as a blink. “I have known that bastard all his life and all of mine. Even when he was a kid, he gave me the creeps. He would pick girls up at the bus stop, girls who came up here from Chicago? Or down from Canada? Bring them in here. I would hear him talking about his family’s chalets and their ski stores and how they owned this whole town. And the girls would just be dazzled. You could tell he could do anything he wanted with them. But never the same one two times.”

I wanted to ask him about Samantha Kelly Young, with her curly blonde hair and her pendant that formed the Japanese letters for
sky
. But how would Gideon remember one particular girl? The way Gid drank, he was lucky to remember his way home, and he lived upstairs.

“Do you know his dad?” My voice was almost too quiet for me to hear, much less Gid.

“He’s a very nice man. The mother was even nicer. My dad played American Legion ball with Steve in the summers when they were young. And I guess Steve and Merry met young. Merry taught music at the school for a while. She was a dancer. I guess she majored in music before she was a nurse.”

“Did you know about the accident?”

Gideon glanced around to see if Angela was nearby. “I was the one who saw it, right after it happened. I was driving home that night with my mother, from a big dance at a
relatives’ house. We stopped, but my mother made us go on to town and get the fire department. You could tell there was nothing that could be done for poor Merry.”

I pressed him. “And what about Garrett?”

“He was standing there. Hands in his pockets. He was looking at his mother like it was interesting to him. I think that was when I first got the idea something was missing there.”

I gathered my big sweater closer around me. If only the mother I imagined Gideon’s mother to be—a great strong brave bear of a woman, like Gid—would have grabbed that little girl from her car seat before they’d sped away for help. It would have been the wrong thing to do, in every way, in the first aid sense. But maybe she would have been alive today.

Still, was that possible, even for Tabor? Was his own little sister his first victim?

Gideon added, “And I never should have sold him that land.”

“What land?”

“Where he’s building his ‘ski school.’ ” Gid made air quotes with his thick fingers. “He’s supposedly been building it for five years, and it’s been ten years since I sold him the property, but when I go out there, all I ever see is a light on up in his boink pad …” He looked up. “I’m sorry, Allie. He has a big chalet, and apparently, he just uses the bottom for storage, because he’s always up there in the loft part with some chickie.”

I was having a hard time breathing. “How do you know?”

“I’ve got eyes, don’t I?” Gideon smiled slowly. “I got binocs, too.”

“Where is it?”

“Out by my dad’s house, the house where I stay during summers.”

“Where the teepee is?”

“Right. You guys stayed there that one night. Yes, where I have my teepee. Up on the south ridge of Lutsen Mountain, the soft ridge. You know where I mean. His land is about a mile before my dad’s old place. Under the ridge. There’s a good logging track that goes up slow. You can see it right from Cannon Road.” He managed a sad smile. “Allie, I know you and Rob and Juliet skied out there.”

“We did, but when we stayed in the teepee, Rob’s dad drove us up there. Why did we only come one time? That was the coolest night ever. I’m trying to place it …”

“If you think of looking over the left shoulder of Torch Mountain …”

“Oh! I know now.” And I did. The trails that circled that part of Lutsen Mountain were too gentle to be much fun on anything except cross-country skis, but they made cross-country a little bit more of an adventure. The three of us had gone there a few times. “There aren’t many houses out there.”

“That’s because it’s either tribal land or Gideon land.”

Angela was back, and had nestled next to me in the booth. Her eyes were drooping. It was after ten o’clock. Some good big sister, me.

“Could I use your boat?” I asked Gideon. The plan had formed in my mind before I could even form the words.

“Going fishing?”

“No, I left something out in the lake the other night,” I said, and it was a measure of Gid’s character that he didn’t ask what I’d accidentally left on Lake Superior in January. He only nodded. I said, “Can I use your truck, too?”

“Be hard to pull the boat without the truck.” Gid paused. “When do you want to use it? I have to go get it.”

“Tonight? Tomorrow? The next day?” I had clinic tests tomorrow, for the experimental trials.

“I’ll leave it out back. Wednesday.”

Rob would be back on Thursday.

That was good. If he couldn’t answer my phone calls, or my texts, or anything, I would … I would show him how much I could do without the help of anyone. I was Allie Kim, just as I had told Garrett Tabor, so long ago. I was Allie Kim, the Great and Terrible. Juliet used to have
G.T
. tattooed just below her hipbone. She said it was what the other skiers called her, Juliet, the Great and Terrible. Although I knew now what those letters really stood for, I still thought of her that way.

Once, years before, Angela asked me if there was a beforeward, like there was an afterward. I know that she meant. If I had known “beforeward” what the afterward of my borrowing Gid’s boat and his truck, would I have done it? It’s human nature to make loops in our minds. The yes-loop. The no-loop. The of-course-not-loop. Most of the time, both of the loops twist and turn and wind up the same place.