I pulled off my own balaclava, and the wind slapped my face, as if it were mad at me. “Look, go home if you want, but it’s been ten years, Anna. Ten years.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?”
“I know you do. I think that’s why you don’t want to go. I’m just saying, you’ll regret it if you miss this one.”
Anna tilted her head and blew smoke toward the trees. “Blah blah blah. God, Shelby, give it a rest, will you? I know you’re into the spiritual New Age stuff, but I’m just not, okay? Coming out here doesn’t change a thing. If it makes you feel better, great, go for it. But I hate it.”
“Okay. If that’s how you feel, then go.”
Anna threw her cigarette into the snow. Awkwardly, she lifted up her skis and turned around on the trail, forcing me to glide a few steps forward to make room for her. I twisted around to watch her over my shoulder. She settled into the tracks we’d made and with a giant shove on both ski poles, she launched herself toward the crest of the hill, heading back the way we’d come. Her arms and legs pumped. Her loose hair flew behind her. A few seconds later, she slid across the top and vanished.
It was just me and Bartholomew now. I wondered if he really was sick.
I tapped my poles on the slope and let gravity whisk me downhill past the dense trees. A couple of minutes later, I reached the clearing, where I slowed to a stop. It had been a mild winter until recently, melting most of the early season snow, but January had taken us back to the deep freeze. Six inches of fresh snow had covered up some of the flat headstones that we usually saw here. It was like missing old friends. Even so, I relished the peace and silence here. The grove, like the bears, was in hibernation until spring, although a few deer tracks tiptoed through the fresh powder to let me know I wasn’t alone.
Trina was buried on the far side of the clearing.
Her headstone was built of pink marble and topped with the sculpture of an angel. With her rosy face and wings, she looked like a fairy caught in the middle of a dance. I skied that way, until the angel was in front of me and Trina was below me in the frozen ground. Her carved name rose over the snow.
“So I’m back.”
I never felt strange talking to her as if she could hear me. Anna didn’t feel the same way. In all the years we’d been making these visits, Anna had never said a single word to her mother. She’d always stood beside me in frozen silence, her face showing the anger she felt that Trina had left her so young. But until this time, she’d always come with me. This was the first year she’d made good on her threat to turn back and leave me to visit the grave alone.
“My father says hi,” I went on.
Then I figured, why lie to the dead?
“Actually, that’s not true. I told him I was coming here, but he didn’t remember you. Don’t feel bad. Most days he still knows me and Monica, but not too many others. He doesn’t even recognize Adam anymore. He’s still physically healthy, which is a good thing, I guess. I don’t know, maybe he’s happy, too. I’m the one who can’t handle it. It’s getting to a point where I don’t know how much longer I can do it myself, you know? I still have to work. Friends help out, but there’s only so much they can do. I’m putting off the decision, because I don’t want to deal with it. I can’t even think about it.”
I wiped a couple of tears from my face. I thought about what else to tell her. I always gave her an update about her husband.
“Karl changed jobs. He can work remotely now, so he doesn’t have to travel as much. That’s good. And he’s seeing somebody. A woman he met at an IT class he was giving in Stanton. It’s been a year now. It seems serious. I didn’t tell you last time, because I wasn’t sure it was going anywhere, but now, I don’t know. He might be ready to move on. He didn’t know what you’d think about that, but I told him you’d say it was crazy he waited so long.”
The wind blew and swirled a little cloud of snow around the angel’s face. I thought that was Trina agreeing with me.
“And Anna,” I began.
But I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry she’s not here. It’s still hard for her. She’s so lost, Trina. It breaks my heart.”
I crouched down in the snow, so I was eye to eye with the angel.
“She hates the woman Karl is seeing, but it’s not about her. I’ve met this woman. She’s nice. Anna just can’t accept it. She had a huge fight with Karl over the summer, and she left. Took all her stuff and moved out. We didn’t know where she was. We were all in a panic. Breezy finally told me she saw her in the bar in Witch Tree with Will Gruder. That girl knows how to pick them, doesn’t she? I mean, Will hasn’t been much trouble since his brother died, but I wasn’t going to let her stay there. I told her she had two choices, move back home or move in with me. So she picked me. She’s been living with me and Dad for about three months. At least she has a mission in life now. She wants to find every way humanly possible to push my buttons and make me lose it with her. So far, I haven’t, but the ice is getting pretty thin.”
I didn’t tell her the rest.
I didn’t tell her about Anna barely graduating from high school and saying no to college. I didn’t tell her about the girl getting fired from four jobs in eighteen months since then. Or about the boys and the bars, one after another. Or about the shoplifting charge in Stanton that I was able to get dropped when I paid the owner back.
Then again, I suppose she knows.
“Anyway, I miss you. I can’t believe it’s been ten years. Every time I pass your photograph on my dresser, I stop and think it’s just not possible that you’re gone. I don’t know. Life just feels pretty empty at the moment. The thing is, I’m letting you down. That’s what really hurts. I promised you I’d be there for Anna, and I can’t reach her. I don’t know how to get through to her. She’s such a great kid, but she’s in so much pain, and she shuts me out. She’s going off the rails just like you feared, and I can’t do anything about it. I could use your help, Trina. That sounds silly, but wow, I could really use your help right now.”
She didn’t answer, of course.
I laughed a little at myself.
There was nothing more to say, so I told Trina goodbye and said I’d be back on Mother’s Day. Then I worked myself around on my skis to head home.
That’s when I saw the owl.
He was perched on top of a stone cross on one of the headstones jutting out of the snow. A perfect, serious, white-and-gray snowy owl. We stared at each other like old friends. I hadn’t seen one in a long, long time. In fact, it took me a while to remember the last time I’d seen a snowy owl, and I realized it was atop Adam’s motorcycle on the day Jeremiah disappeared.
Was it another sign?
Did Trina send it to me?
You don’t have to believe that if you don’t want to. All I know is, later that same day Jeremiah’s ghost came back into my life. And just like it had ten years ago, everything changed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Winter is traditionally the slow time at the Nowhere Café. Not too many tourists come to Mittel County in January. A few ice fishermen, a few lonely artists, a few naturalists doing research. Otherwise, we have no one to talk to except each other, and we always look up when the bell rings on the diner door to see who’s coming in next.
It’s slow for the Sheriff’s Department, too. We get busy during ice storms when cars and trucks slide off the highway, but sub-zero cold tends to keep people inside and out of trouble. The nights bring out the domestic disturbance calls, but the days can pass without the phone ringing at all.