Hunter's Moon Page 21
* * *
In 2011, the late summer, Aileen publishes a memoir, Horizons. “My first book for grown-ups,” she enthuses. Lisa has read an advance copy. The parallels between their lives are uncanny—the childhood on a struggling family farm (Aileen’s in Wisconsin), marriage to an older man (Alex is ten years her senior), the decision to launch a small business in a small town—and deepens their friendship into sisterhood.
One afternoon in mid-September, Lisa drops in to the diner to pick up a batch of Aileen’s blueberry muffins for the next day’s breakfast and to have her copy of Horizons autographed.
“I loved it,” she says.
“You better have.” Aileen smiles. She has small teeth, straight but small, like a child’s. She sits down in a booth, takes the ballpoint clipped to her sweatshirt collar, and scrawls on the title page. “If my career takes off,” she says, passing the book back to Lisa, “that might be worth the price of a pastrami sandwich after I’m dead.”
The inscription reads: Sept. 18, 2011—For Lisa Williams, my dear friend and blood sister. With love, Aileen Earhart (no relation to Amelia).
“I promise not to sell it after you’re dead. I don’t like pastrami anyway.”
She has news, Aileen. She’s been invited to be on a panel at the Traverse City Book Festival next month.
“My biggest gig yet!” she exclaims with uncontained excitement. “That festival has pulled in some major names. My panel is about regional writing. Guess I’m on it for the local angle. They told me we’ll be talking to four, five hundred people. Holy shit! Ten, twelve kids in a high school library—that’s been my usual audience.”
“Congratulations,” says Lisa, a little envious, though she’s never written anything more complicated than a term paper. “Next month when?”
“First weekend. Saturday, the First. I’ve reserved a few tickets for people from town. I’ll feel more relaxed if people I know are there. Hope you can make it.”
Lisa hesitates. “Damn, I’ve got people coming in then. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t mean to be pushy, but it’s just for one night. You can find somebody to manage things for one night, can’t you?”
Lisa slides into the booth, facing Aileen across the table.
“I’ve been seeing somebody, and I’ll be seeing him that weekend,” she says in a confidential tone. “We don’t get to spend much time together—it’s, you know, a once-a-year kind of thing.”
Aileen gives an understanding nod. “Well, I wouldn’t want to stand in the way, but you’d be welcome to bring him.”
“It would be a case of what he wants to do.” She feels relieved to have shared her secret yet wary of possible consequences. “I’d appreciate it if you kept this to yourself. The guy is married.”
“Uh-oh. Not from town, I hope. Wait. Couldn’t be. Once a year you said. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about—” Aileen stops herself, recognition flashing in her eyes. “No! Him? The voice of Zeus?”
“I don’t know how Zeus sounds, but, yeah, him. If he does come, there might be a problem for me. He knows a lot of people in this town. Some of the ones you’re inviting might recognize him, and if we’re seen together, well, you know.”
“Oh, if anybody says anything, I’ll just tell them that I invited him, he’s a regular customer and my guest. But…” Aileen lays both hands on Lisa’s arm. “Be careful.”
“We have been. We’ve been super discreet.”
“I don’t mean that. Nine times out of ten no good comes of these things.”
* * *
She hires the night desk clerk from the Hiawatha Lodge, the big motel on the highway into town, to run her place over the weekend. He’d filled in for her six months ago, when she took a couple of days to visit her family downstate, so she knows he’s reliable and can fry eggs.
On Friday morning, she checks in a retired man and his wife, then a Canadian couple, bikers riding the Great Lakes Circle Tour on a Honda cruiser. To all four, she explains that a commitment is taking her to Traverse City but assures them that they’ll be well taken care of until she returns on Sunday afternoon. Gaetan shows up late in the day. She offers him a more detailed explanation after he’s hauled his guns and duffel and dog into his usual downstairs room.
“You’re invited, too, if you’re interested. Otherwise, you’ll have to live without me for a night.”
“I live without you three hundred and fifty nights a year, so I suppose I can for one more. But…” Wrapping his arms around her waist, he shuts the door with a flick of his foot and kisses her. “I don’t want to.”
He’s fifty but has lost none of his charm.
“Easy, bub,” she says, pulling away. “It’s still daylight, and”—motioning at the ceiling—“I’ve got guests.”
“Can’t help myself. The last commercial I did was a voice-over for Cialis. They gave me a free sample.” She throws him an incredulous look. He laughs. “Joking. I didn’t take any. Donated it to the less fortunate. So Aileen is a celebrity now?”
“Sort of. Like she would say, a good ten floors down from movie-star celebrity.”
“But still in the fame hotel. I’ll be damned. I’ll find a kennel for Klaus.”
* * *
The drive to Traverse in Gaetan’s new dark-red Range Rover takes five hours. It’s midafternoon when they pull into the Bayshore Resort, an environment more fit for the Rover—ninety thousand dollars on four wheels—than the Best Western Lisa had chosen. No chain motel for Gaetan, who booked a suite at the Bayshore. Private balcony. Splendid view of Grand Traverse bay. In-room spa.
They deliver Klaus to the kennel, kill some time with a stroll along the bayfront and downtown. Traverse City isn’t a real city—only fifteen thousand people—but it has a moneyed, cosmopolitan vibe. “Wants to be the Hamptons of the Middlewest,” Gaetan says. They eat an early dinner at a bistro called Amical. He orders risotto, Lisa the salmon, done in a blood-orange glaze and dusted with fennel pollen, the waiter declares, rather proudly. Dressed in black pants, a cream-colored blouse, and a linen jacket, Lisa is pleased that she doesn’t look like a hick, and she doesn’t want to come off as one. She waits until the waiter is gone before asking Gaetan, “What is fennel pollen?”
“It’s a spice, collected from fennel flowers. Popular in Italy. My mother used it a lot.”
The book festival starts at seven in the City Opera House, a grand old place with putti and trompe l’oeil clouds flying across the central dome, an ornamented balcony curving above ranks of plush red seats, almost every one of which is filled. Lisa and Gaetan sit with the half-dozen people Aileen invited from Vieux Desert, but they make sure to sit at opposite ends of the row. Aileen and her co-panelists, onstage in upholstered chairs, flank their moderator, a New York publisher wearing a blazer over a black T-shirt. Lisa is amazed at her friend’s transformation: a gray smartly tailored dress has replaced her usual jeans and sweatshirt, high heels her sneakers, and her hair is not bound in a ponytail but tumbles freely over her shoulders. Overall, she looks glamorous and is poised and witty answering the moderator’s questions. Lisa notices another change after the panel discussion ends and the authors move to tables in the lobby to autograph their books. Aileen has shucked off the accommodating, welcoming manner she wears at the diner; she’s slightly aloof, composed, a frank expression in her chocolate-brown eyes that’s strangely alluring. One her invitees, Harry McSweeney (president of the chamber of commerce), can’t resist embracing her. Aileen winces when he declares, “Are we proud of our local girl or what?” as though she’s a ninth-grader who has won a spelling bee.
Lisa stands back, maintaining distance from Gaetan. Although Harry hasn’t cast curious looks at her or him, much less said anything about them, Aileen sees fit to provide cover, just in case.
“Harry, do you know Gaetan Clyne? One of the diner’s most loyal customers! So I asked him to come on down for the show!”
“Oh, that’s why you were sitting with us,” Harry says
to Gaetan. “I was wondering what the connection was. Come to think of it, I’ve seen you around town.”
Lisa is grateful for the preemptive smoke-screen. Gaetan appears to be too, but maybe it’s not gratitude that moves him to bestow an admiring gaze on Aileen. It lingers a bit too long—far too long, in fact. A prickling, reflexive as a flinch, races across Lisa’s cheeks. You have no prior rights to him, she advises herself. You can’t afford to fall for him. But jealousy, like desire, isn’t obedient to the will. That night, after they’ve polished off half a bottle of wine from the minibar, she stages a memorable performance in the spa, making love to him like a madwoman, pressing him against the tub’s tiles into the spewing jets. They towel off without speaking and collapse into bed, where Gaetan whispers, “Hey, Lisa Williams, it could be I’m falling in love with you.”
She makes no reply, thinking, I can’t afford that, either.
* * *
They sleep late on Sunday morning and skip breakfast. Lisa is anxious to get home, but it’s past ten by the time they retrieve Klaus and start out, heading east through cherry orchards and brilliant woods, then north toward the interstate, forty miles away.
“I could use something to eat,” Lisa says.
“Thought you were in a hurry.”
“In a hurry and hungry. That means a McDonald’s drive-through. An Egg McMuffin.”
In half an hour, they come to a town. A billboard on the outskirts displays a hand reaching out of a cloud and the message: DESPAIR? JESUS IS YOUR HOPE. Passing an abandoned factory, its glassless windows revealing pipe and conduit dripping from the ceilings like jungle vines, they cruise slowly down the main street, whose handsome old buildings are either boarded up or repurposed into the sort of businesses that thrive in hard times—thrift shops, payday loan agencies.
Two doors down from a café, on a plywood sheet covering a window, someone has painted a plea in blood-red letters. CLEAN UP TOXIC WASTE, GOVERNOR! TCE KILLS!
“Trichloroethylene,” she murmurs.
“Yeah,” says Gaetan. “I read about it. A cleaning solvent they used in factories. Poisoned drinking water, right?”
“Hey, there, a McDonald’s.”
“I see it.”
It is across a railroad siding from another industrial ruin, this one larger than the other, covering at least an acre, and of more recent dereliction: the weeds sprouting from the cracks in the parking lot are inches high rather than feet, and none of the letters are missing from the sign at the base of a flagless flagpole. TATE AUTOMOTIVE SYSTEMS, it reads. Teenage boys are tossing a football in the lot, younger children playing tag, their shouts and laughter somehow heightening the atmosphere of desolation. Aileen described a scene much like this in her book. Lisa recalls the line: like kids cavorting in the ruined temple of a religion no one believes in anymore.
“McDonald’s must be the place for Sunday brunch,” Gaetan says, falling in behind a long line of cars in the drive-through lane.
They creep forward, stop, creep, stop, creep, and stop again, alongside a tall, square shipping container enclosed on three sides by a block brick wall. The van in front of Gaetan’s car is at the kiosk. It must be fully loaded, because the driver takes a long time relaying his passengers’ orders. Lisa glimpses two kids atop the container, a girl in a soiled jacket and a scruffy towheaded boy. Just as the van starts forward to the pickup window and Gaetan releases the brake, the girl either jumps or falls, crashes onto the Rover’s hood with a heart-stopping thud, and rolls off the front end and under the car. “Jesus Christ!” Gaetan yells, slamming the brake pedal. Klaus, in a car kennel in the back, yips once; the girl howls in pain, a cry both chilling and comforting—it means she’s conscious. The boy, who is still on top of the container, hollers out, “Kim got runned over! Kim got runned over!”
Gaetan and Lisa leap out of the car. The girl named Kim is lying on her back, her legs spraddled, the right a few inches from the front tire and torqued at the knee at a sharp angle to her thigh. Lisa kneels beside her and strokes her hair and face and tries to quiet her cries. Could the car have rolled over her leg, then rolled back when Gaetan hit the brake? Lisa hadn’t felt a bump, though she might not have because they had been barely moving. Most likely, the girl injured herself in the fall. She appears to be eleven or twelve, brown-haired and lanky, and reminds Lisa of herself as she was at that age—a gawky country girl, tall for her age, and maybe a bit reckless. If she had jumped, it had been out of recklessness, perhaps taking a dare from the boy to hurtle over the hood while the Rover sat motionless below them.
“Don’t move her,” says a man wearing a bomber jacket. He’s standing beside the car behind theirs.
“I haven’t,” Lisa replies, her voice a little shaky.
The man whips out his cellphone. Gaetan gestures to him to put it away. He’s called the police; they’re on the way.
A patrolman arrives five minutes later, while a siren sounds in the distance—the ambulance, probably. The patrolman, who can’t be a day past twenty-two, asks to see Gaetan’s insurance card and driver’s license, takes down his tag number, gets statements from him and Lisa, then turns to the bystanders, asking if anyone saw what happened. No one did, except the man in the bomber jacket.
“She was up there”—pointing at the shipping container—“next thing, she’s flying through the air, right on top of this fella’s car.”
The patrolman examines the dented hood, then writes on a report sheet fastened to a clipboard. The ambulance pulls in, announcing itself with that awful noise ambulances make to clear a path, part blare, part squawk. The decals on the doors state that it’s from the volunteer fire department. Kim’s parents are right behind it, in a pale-blue sedan that looks to be ten years old and shows its age. The mother is a heavyset woman with short hair the same chestnut shade as her daughter’s; the father is also on the hefty side, but muscle is evident beneath the flab, and his shaved skull and dark beard and bullish gait convey an air of menace.
The scruffy boy runs up to him. “Mr. Parichy! Mr. Parichy! Kim got runned over!”
“Why do you think we’re here, Bobby?” he says sharply.
The two people follow the paramedics, a young man and woman, to their daughter’s side.
“Mom! Mom!” Kim groans. “My leg … my knee…”
“Take it easy, baby,” the mother says, gripping her outstretched hand. “Lay still and these nice people will take good care of you.”
Neither she nor her husband makes a fuss when Kim yelps as the paramedics straighten her right leg or when they fit an air splint over it, inflate the splint, and lift her onto a gurney. No fuss at all. It’s the stoic calm, which Lisa knows well, of country people who are shocked more by good news than bad.
“Munson Hospital in Traverse,” the male paramedic says to the father while the woman buckles the gurney straps.
“How’s it look to you, Pete?”
“I’d say Kimmy is one lucky little kid.”
“If you call gettin’ hit by a car lucky.”
Kimmy. Bobby. Mr. Parichy. Pete. They all know each other. Lisa is afraid that tribal defenses will go up; she and Gaetan are outsiders here.
“Excuse me, sir, we didn’t hit her,” she says pleasantly. “She jumped or fell from there.”
Her hand sweeps from the container to the bruised metal on the hood above the grille and the chrome letters that spell RANGE ROVER.
“It couldn’t be helped, but we feel awful about it all the same,” Gaetan interjects. “And relieved that she wasn’t … That she’ll be all right.”
Parichy levels his gaze on Gaetan, then casts a longer look at the Rover, which stands out among the beat-up cars and pickup trucks like a man in black tie at a meeting of the welders’ union.
“We’ll wait and see what the doctor has to say about that,” Parichy says.
With a single gulp of its siren, the ambulance rolls out onto the street, Kim’s parents’ sedan trailing. The patrolman comes up to Gaetan
.
“Looks like it was unavoidable, sir. I’m not going to cite you for anything, and I’ve got all your information in case it’s needed. You’re free to go.”
* * *
“What are you doing?” asks Lisa, watching Gaetan punch Munson Hospital, Traverse City, MI into the car’s GPS.
“We’ve got to make sure that little girl really is going to be okay.”
“What can we do, whether she is or she isn’t? And the cop said it wasn’t your fault.”
“That’s beside the point. What’s with you? Are you just being practical or are you worried that you’ll be late getting back? Gotta get those omelets out on time tomorrow morning.”
She governs a sudden urge to smack him. “It’s the kid’s father. He scares me. You didn’t see the way he looked at you? Like he wanted to punch your lights out?”
“He’s upset. Who wouldn’t be?”
They volley for another minute, and during that minute they are no longer lovers; they’re a feuding couple.
* * *
The ER is quiet on a Sunday afternoon, the waiting room empty except for the four of them, sitting in molded plastic chairs: Lisa and Gaetan, Ken and Nancy Parichy, whose first names came courtesy of Nancy, as did the information that Kim is in radiology, undergoing an MRI for what the doctor believes is a broken knee. Ken says nothing, arms crossed over his bulging chest, billiard-ball head tilted aside, chin cocked—a posture that communicates a mixture of defensiveness and belligerence.
“Thanks for coming in to check on her,” says Nancy. “You didn’t need to.”
Gaetan avers that they most certainly did, they would have been wondering and worrying about her daughter’s condition. The least they could do, really. He’s a parent himself; he can well imagine how they’re feeling right now.