“Yeah, over the summer, I think. He knows I want to. But I told him I didn’t want to have sex until we were so close it felt like we were having sex already.”
“I like that.”
“Plus, I have to start taking the pill.”
“You could use condoms,” she said.
It was the strangest conversation she and I had ever had, because it was such a normal sister-sister kind of thing. We just didn’t talk like that. But I knew what she was doing. She had changed the subject from her to me.
“I don’t want to,” I said. “If I’m going to have sex, I want to really feel it, you know?”
Laura laughed. “No, I don’t know.”
“Are you on the pill?”
“Don’t need it.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say next. “I’ve got a job for the summer.”
“Yeah? Doing what?”
“Waitressing at that new place by the bridge. Grandma’s.”
“Good for you.”
“They need people. I can get you in there if you’re thinking of sticking around.”
That was as close as I had come to asking flat out if Laura was planning to leave home after she graduated next month. For months she had told Dad she was going away as soon as school was out. Travel. Work. See the world. Now I wasn’t so sure. No ring.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” Laura said.
I got out of the beanbag. “I’m going for a run,” I said.
“Have fun.”
I decided to stick my nose a little further into her business. “Listen, I really think you should tell someone about that note. Whoever this creep is, he sounds dangerous.”
Laura slid open her nightstand drawer and looked inside. The letter was on top. I saw the lipstick through the thin paper. “He’s just some freak,” she said. “I’m going to throw them out.”
She took the note and tore it over and over until the pieces were the size of confetti. Then she sprinkled them into her wastebasket.
I felt uneasy. “Them? Are there more?”
“Yeah.” Laura shrugged.
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Ten maybe.”
“Ten? When did this start?”
“A few weeks ago.”
“Do you still have them?”
She nodded.
“I want to see them,” I told her.
Laura sighed theatrically, as if I were making a big deal over nothing, and dug inside the drawer. She came out with a small stack of papers tied together with a rubber band. She pulled them apart and spilled them onto the blanket.
I couldn’t believe what I saw.
Some were written in lipstick like the other one. All of the messages were obscene and violent.
I’m going to fuck you.
Keep your door locked.
Are you going to be alone tonight, whore?
There were photographs, too. Whoever had done this had cut them out of porno magazines. I saw black-and-white shots of men with huge penises and women servicing them with their mouths. More messages were scrawled on the photos.
You’ll suck mine, too.
Is your ass still a virgin?
“Are you crazy?” I nearly screamed at her. “You have to go to the police with this.”
“I don’t want to make things worse. School will be done soon, and he’ll stop.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Come on, he hasn’t done anything. He’s just trying to creep me out. He’s like some peeping tom trying to get under my skin. Well, I won’t let him.”
“Do you have any idea who’s doing this?” I asked again.
“No. I talked to a few guys, you know, to see if they’d heard anything. I thought maybe he’d be bragging about it to his buddies. But nobody knew who it was, or if they did, they wouldn’t tell me.”
“Did you tell Dad?”
“Are you kidding? He’d flip. And don’t you dare breathe a word, little sister. Somehow it would wind up as my fault.”
While I watched, Laura began tearing up all of the notes and photographs. I wanted to stop her. I told her I thought she was making a big mistake, but Laura shredded and ripped and tore until she had a small mountain of remnants that she slid off her bed into the garbage.
“So much for that,” she said.
3
Stride and Tish left Grandma’s Saloon together. Tish lit a cigarette when they were alone on the concrete pier that jutted out into Lake Superior. Her muscles unwound. She tilted her chin and exhaled a stream of smoke like a sigh. The breeze caught and dispersed it, but Stride could taste the ghost of smoke in the air, and he had to jam his hands in his pockets to beat down the craving.
She leaned against the wall bordering the canal. Stride was next to her. The deep, narrow channel led from the lake to the inner harbors of Duluth and Superior. A century-old lift bridge, resplendent in gray steel, rose and fell over the canal when the boats came. On the opposite side of the bridge was the area known as the Point, a tiny finger of land jutting out like a natural shelter for the harbor. Stride and Serena lived there, in a lakeside cottage that dated back to the 1890s. The city side of the bridge was known as Canal Park, and it had become a haven for restaurants and hotels in the last twenty years. Tourists came to Canal Park to watch the big boats because it was like seeing living dinosaurs from the city’s past. Once upon a time, Duluth had been an industrial boomtown, whose economy was linked to the fate of hundreds of great boats carrying iron ore. The downtown area was filled with Victorian-style mansions that were reminders of a time when the city was rich from mining and shipping. Not anymore.
“I can’t believe how this area has changed,” Tish said. “When I was a kid, there was nothing but old factory buildings down here. Now it’s like Coney Island.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of money in Canal Park, but it doesn’t trickle down,” Stride told her. “They’re building condos to lure people up from Minneapolis, but the city is struggling. Like always.”
“You live out on the Point?” Tish asked.
Stride nodded.
“Nobody lived out there in the old days. The Point was where kids went to smoke dope and have sex on the beach.”
