She looked back at him and rolled her eyes.
Later, she stood at the open door. Beyond her the sky was going dark. The wind blew straight out of the north now, and a cool breeze came through the door screen. Dina was working on her third cup of coffee. She’d be up all night, Cork figured.
“Mind if I ask you a question?” he said.
She kept her back to him and shrugged.
“What was your childhood like?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Why do you want to know?”
“Something you said this afternoon made me wonder.”
She turned back to the darkening sky. “I didn’t have a childhood. My mother was an alcoholic. I took care of her. Until I wised up and left.”
“When was that?”
“When I got tired of everything, including her boyfriends pawing at me. About Charlie’s age.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Relatives first. It didn’t take me long to realize where my mother’s problems came from. Then I was on the streets for a while.”
“Harsh,” he said.
“Reality check.”
“And you got yourself together?”
“Not without help. A social worker. Marcia Kaufmann. A smart woman with a dry sense of humor and a big heart. She helped me get a place to live, finish school. She worked with me until I was off to college. Sometimes you’re born into the wrong people’s lives. If you’re lucky, you stumble into the right ones.”
Cork heard the sound of Jewell’s Blazer.
“Here they come,” Dina said.
A couple of minutes later, Ren walked in. His mother was a few steps behind.
“Well?” Cork asked.
The boy shook his head and looked down at the floor. “She wasn’t there.”
20
Death visited Ren that night. It came in the form of a girl with a body blue as lake ice. Her hair drifted behind her, lifting just a little now and then as if caught in a dreamy current. She opened her mouth and spoke to him, words that later he wouldn’t recall. She pointed at him in an accusing way, and the tattooed snake on her arm came alive. It crawled down her skin and hung from her wrist for a second before dropping to the ground, where it slithered toward him. He tried to back away, but his feet were sunk deep in black mud, cemented there. Broad, chestnut-colored bands marked the snake, and Ren thought, Copperhead, and panicked because he knew it was deadly. Thinking, too, in the middle of his fear, Odd, because there were no copperheads in the U.P. of Michigan. Thinking finally as the snake wriggled across the surface of the mud and coiled to strike, Dreaming
…
And he woke.
It was raining, a steady downpour. The wind was still up and drove the rain against the windows so that the panes, as Ren stared at them from his bed, seemed to weep.
Although he’d dreamed of the dead girl in the lake, it was Charlie on his mind when he woke.
“Dead,” he whispered, out loud and hopelessly. “Oh Jesus, she’s dead.”
He stared at the ceiling and he wondered what that meant, to be dead.
His father had been murdered fifteen hundred miles away. He was just gone. He became the emptiness of the cabin, and that’s how Ren had thought of death. Emptiness. A grabbing at air. A conversation stopped in mid- sentence. A body from which the soul had simply departed. He’d learned in church that the soul could go to different places: heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo. His grandfather had told him the Ojibwe believed the dead traveled west on the Path of Souls to a beautiful place.
But that was after. What about the slide into death? What about the dying?
Until he saw Charlie’s father on the floor in a puddle of blood and brain, he’d never before thought about what his own father might have felt. His father, he realized, must have died in much the same way. Did he know what was happening? Did it hurt? Was he scared?
The girl in the lake, what did she feel? She was just a kid, like Ren. He’d been in the lake before, but only for moments at a time because the water was so cold, so painfully cold. Suicide, the constable had said. That seemed terribly lonely, to feel all that pain, to sink alone into the darkness with the light still above you, to know that you were about to die.
And Charlie? What about her?
He’d begun to cry, softly, because he didn’t want his mother to hear. He didn’t mind crying when he was alone. It felt good. Sometimes it was the only way to let out everything that he kept squeezed inside.
A thump at his window startled him. Something had hit the screen. A pinecone blown by the wind? He waited. The thump came again, sharp and deliberate.
The night and the rain made everything outside impenetrable. He threw the covers back and crept across the room. He reached the window just as a fist came out of the dark and rapped on the screen. He lifted the pane.
“Charlie?” he called hopefully.
He received no response.
Then Charlie’s voice: “Let me in, asshole. I’m freezing.”
He hurried through the dark cabin to the front door and opened it. He stood on the porch waiting for Charlie to appear. Finally she slipped around the corner of the cabin and dashed toward Ren.
As she reached the first porch step, a flashlight beam burst over her. The source came from somewhere behind Ren, from the direction of the other cabins. Charlie tried to stop, to halt her momentum in mid-stride and backpedal. Her feet slid in the mud. She managed a difficult spin and began to sprint toward the trees that marked the boundary of the woods that edged the resort. The flashlight followed at a dead run.
Ren leaped from the porch and brought up the rear of the chase.
Shit. Someone had been waiting, someone who knew that Charlie would eventually come to the old resort as she’d often done in the past. Ren’s heart galloped. His feet were bare, and although the cold of the ground penetrated his soles like icy needles, he hardly noticed. The rain instantly soaked his pajamas and the material clung to his skin. He held to one hope: that Charlie, the fastest runner in Bodine Middle School, would not be caught.
His hope collapsed when he saw the flashlight hit the ground as Charlie was tackled twenty yards ahead of him. He lowered his head to run faster, not knowing at all what he’d do to help his friend, knowing only that he had to try.
Then he heard a familiar voice come from the black shape that sat on top of Charlie, pinning her to the ground.
“Charlene Miller,” Dina Willner said. “Or am I crazy?”
When Dina brought her in, the girl smelled like roadkill. Jewell ran a hot bath and gave her a sweatshirt and sweatpants to wear afterward. Charlie sat on the sofa near the leaping flames of the fire Ren had laid in the fireplace. The flare and shadow that the fire created on her face gave her a restless, jumpy appearance. She drank hot chocolate and refused to look at Dina.
Jewell fixed her a ham sandwich and gave her some Fritos. Charlie tore into the food.
Ren, who’d put on jeans and a flannel shirt, sat beside her on the sofa. Cork could see the boy’s eyes were shining with delight. Every so often, Ren floated his hand toward Charlie as if to touch her, to be certain she was real, but he always drew up shy.
While the girl was bathing, Ren had asked Dina how she knew Charlie would come.
