“And here, too?” I touched the long line on her chin.
“I took a dive on the ice. Seventeen stitches.”
“Don’t they wear face guards up here?”
“In college you have to,” she said. “But not out on the lakes. Face guards are for pussies. And Americans.”
We rolled around a couple of times over that one. Then she got up and put her sweats back on. I couldn’t help thinking, what kind of woman invites a man over and doesn’t do anything to get fixed up? Maybe the kind who at the last moment was hoping nothing would happen between them? If that was it, her resolution lasted all of three seconds. Hell if I knew.
She served me her beef stew at the big dining room table, under the antique light with the five glowing lanterns. When she sat down across from me, I finally got her story. It’s funny how you can distill your whole life down to a few minutes, telling it like it had a plot and a theme and a moral at the end. Or at least what will pass for a moral for the time being, until your whole life story is done.
“This house,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “It was my grandparents’. But it was my house, too. I grew up here. My father…”
She looked down for a moment.
“He was killed when I was six years old. He was shot in a bar. Apparently he was trying to protect somebody. Some woman was getting roughed up and he stepped in to help her. Anyway, I only have a couple of memories of him. Good memories, I guess. Him holding me up in the air and swinging me around. One Christmas when he bought me this big rocking horse. I think it’s still in the attic.”
She looked at the ceiling again.
“And your mother?”
She looked me in the eye. “What about her?”
“I’m just asking. I’m sorry, go ahead.”
“My mother,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “She didn’t exactly get along with my grandparents. I guess it was kinda tough, living with your in-laws after your husband is dead, but she didn’t try real hard to make it work. We moved out once when I was like twelve years old, but, well…”
She stopped.
“What is it?” I said.
“Alex, you’ve got to understand… Some things happened to me back then. I know it was a long time ago, but…”
I waited.
“Some things you don’t get over,” she said. “Maybe you get better at dealing with them. That’s all.”
“What happened?”
“My mother got remarried for a while. That’s when we moved out of here. My stepfather… Well, for now I’ll just say this, eh? He died a couple of years ago.”
“Natalie, did he-”
“He made a lot of money, too-after he left my mother for somebody else. He became some kind of real estate big shot or something. I don’t know exactly. All I know is that Albert DeMarco had a long and happy life. If there’s any kind of justice in that, somebody is going to have to explain it to me.”
My stomach started to burn. I wasn’t sure what to say.
“I finally ran away,” she said. “I came back here. My grandfather told Albert he’d have to kill him to take me away again.”
“So your mother… Is she still around?”
“Yeah, she is. Although, hell, when’s the last time I even talked to her? I think it was when she called me to tell me Albert had died. I think she actually thought I’d be happy enough to start forgiving her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “My grandparents were great, okay? They were the best. My grandfather, you should have seen him…” She smiled at the memory. “He was so strong. So kind. He’s been gone a long time now, but I still miss him.”
She took a hit off her beer bottle and then put it back down.
“Anyway, as great as they were, I was still kind of lonely growing up. I was such an awkward kid. And shy, especially after everything that had happened to me.”
I could see it in her. As beautiful as she was on that night, I could see that kid in her face. A tomboy with a slight overbite and big eyebrows.
“But I loved playing hockey. I used to play with all the boys, and I was faster than most of them. When I started playing girl’s hockey in high school and then in college, it was okay, but you could never really hit anybody. I led my women’s hockey team in penalty minutes- I guess that sums me up pretty well, eh?”
I shook my head and smiled.
“After hockey, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. But you know, whenever I thought about my stepfather… I said to myself, why not become a police officer? Maybe help stop it from happening to somebody else. So I took the tests and joined the OPP. I don’t know how it works down there, but up here a woman can do pretty well.”
“You never got married?”
She looked at me. “No, Alex. I got close once. There was this other officer, Jimmy Natoli. That’s right, my name would have been Natalie Natoli. But he really wanted me to quit the force after I married him. I didn’t want to do that. Although maybe, looking back on it… I suppose I still had problems getting close to someone. After it fell apart, I was still on the force with him, so things got a little weird. That’s when I got shipped up to the Hearst station. I was thinking, great, look where they stuck me, way the hell up here. They partnered me with Claude DeMers, too, this ancient guy. They must really want to bury me up here.”
She took another drink.
“But then he turned out to be so great. It sounds kind of dumb, but with my grandfather gone… It was like I really needed him, you know? He tried to make things good for me. Until that business at the lake.”
“Yeah,” I said. That part I knew.
“I swear, I’m cursed, Alex. Wherever I go, bad things happen.”
“Come on, Natalie.”
“But no matter what,” she said, “I always had this place to come back to. When my grandmother died, she left it to me. I hired somebody to come in and keep things working. Run the furnace, make sure the pipes didn’t freeze. But I was never sure what to do with it. I couldn’t bring myself to sell it. It was like my refuge from the world. But now… I’ve been here for a few weeks, and I’m thinking maybe it’s time.”
“That’s why you’re doing all this packing.”
She nodded her head. “Yeah. But after I sell it, then what? I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”
I didn’t say anything. I sat there with her for a while until she got up to do the dishes. I grabbed a towel and dried while she washed. Later, we went to bed and this time we slept together, despite what she had said about always sleeping alone. I couldn’t stop thinking about what she had told me that day, about her own scars and how they’d never heal completely. It helped me to understand her a little bit better, how she could be so close to me one moment and then suddenly a million miles away.
I worked with her on some more packing the next morning. Then I went home. I thought about her all the way home and all that day and that night. I sat at Jackie’s in front of the fire and I thought about her.
I had been alone too long. To a starving man, this sudden feast.
“You’ve got to keep your head on straight,” I said to the flames. “Or you’re gonna be in big trouble.”
I kept plowing. The sun came up, somewhere behind the snow clouds, giving the world a muted glow and no warmth. I rumbled down the main road to fill up the tank. There were a few poor souls out trying to shovel in the dim light, but aside from that it was quiet in Paradise.
I pumped the gas and paid Ruthie, the lady who owned the place. She told me I looked different and I agreed with her. “It’s been a long night,” I said.
“No, I mean there’s something else.”
I knew exactly what she was talking about, but I left before she could figure it out. I got back in the truck and pulled out right behind one of the county trucks. He had his big blade down and he was kicking that snow at least
