The Winter Place Read online

  The boy snatched the collar of Axel’s tunic, backing him up into a broad patch of horse-trod mud. He seemed almost sad as he did this—the boy must have realized that he’d been checkmated. Nowhere to go from here but down, so he gave Axel a hard push that sent him sprawling feet over face into the mud. Axel landed flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him so hard that Tess could actually hear his lungs empty. She knew that this was restraint on the boy’s part. He could have done a lot worse.

  “Stop it,” she said, pushing past the boy and stepping into the mud to help Axel sit up. He was gulping air, trying very hard not to cry. “I think you should go,” she said, not even turning to look at the boy.

  That was restraint, too. It wouldn’t have been impossible—or even all that difficult—for Tess to have put that bully back on his ass. She had the advantage of staggered puberty, to say nothing of the element of surprise. Because who expects to be leveled by a willowy girl with thin arms and post-goth hair? Certainly not this boy. But Tess could have done it.

  She should have.

  She knew that.

  They found their father waiting in the employee lot, the engine of his rattletrap pickup running, his armor and weapons trembling in the bed. Sam knew that something had happened the moment he saw Axel’s muddied costume and bloodshot eyes—the look of bruised pride was not uncommon in their house. He reached across to open the passenger door.

  “Get in,” he said.

  “I’ll get the seat dirty,” Axel said.

  Sam smiled lamely. “The seat’s already dirty.” His expression darkened as he turned to Tess. “You too.”

  They pulled out of the lot without uttering another word, Sam flashing his high beams at the attendants, all of whom tipped their feathered caps respectfully—he was, after all, a knight of the realm. The drive home didn’t take two minutes, but it was a long two minutes. Their house lay just ahead, all alone between the park and the surrounding farmland. It was a boxy little single-level, above which their father had erected a sort of high-peaked, timbered bivouac, designed to keep the winter snows from flattening them. From the road the house appeared to be a traditional A-frame, but from up close it looked more like a shanty under a wooden tent. Sam turned down the driveway and put the truck into park, leaving the engine idling. “There are potpies in the freezer,” he said. “Tess will make you one.” There was a long silence. Nobody got out of the truck or said anything. “Give us a second, little man.” Sam had been calling Axel that for years, but only recently had the phrase taken on an air of unintentional mockery. Because Axel was little—too little.

  “She didn’t do anything,” Axel said, loyal to a fault.

  “Obviously, she did.” Sam waited, but Axel didn’t move. “Out,” he said, his voice loose and gravelly; about as close to yelling as he ever got.

  Axel slid across Tess’s lap to dismount the truck. He whispered over her, light as Pinocchio, hardly bending the grass when he landed woodenly in the yard. He accepted the key without a word, leaving them to it.

  “So I take it that’s the kid’s idea of flirting with you?” Sam said. “Who is he?”

  “Nobody,” Tess said.

  “Not nobody. Somebody. Somebody who’d hurt your little brother.”

  “Yeah. Because I knew he’d do that.”

  Sam gave her a look. “And now that you know?”

  “I’m not going to talk to him anymore.” The answer was automatic, but it was also true. The boy, who’d meant little to her before, now meant nothing at all.

  “And if he does it again?”

  Tess squirmed, eager to be out of the vibrating pickup and free of this conversation. “I don’t know, Dad. I’ll kick him in the balls. I’ll give him a nosebleed. I’ll break his arm in three places.”

  “Gosh, that’d be smart. Get yourself good and suspended. And who’d look after your brother then?”

  Sam was always saying stuff like that. It hardly surprised her anymore. “Yeah, it sure would be a shame for Axel, me getting suspended,” Tess said.

  Her father opened his mouth, ready to chop that sarcasm off at the neck. But he caught himself. “Sorry,” he said. “I know you were kidding. But the point is that . . . You know the point.”

  Tess was quiet. Given the circumstances, her poor ground in this fight, an apology from her dad should be pretty close to victory.

  “Want me to put a pie in the oven for you?” she said.

  “I’m doing a session at the writing clinic after class,” her father said. “I’ll pick something up in between.”

  “All right,” Tess said, stepping out of the truck. “See you.”

  Sam reached across the passenger bench and pulled the door closed behind her. The window was still open, and he called to her through it. “I love you, honey.” Nothing but a throwaway had it been any other day. For years to come, Tess would play this moment over and over again in her mind. It was only a fluke, a temporary and benevolent glitch in the universe, that she answered the right way.

  “Love you, too, Dad,” Tess said.

  Sam nodded, glanced at the dash clock, and drove away.

  2

  Inexplicably Brown Bear

  Axel immediately sensed that there was something strange going on back at their house. A smell hung in the air—animal, but unfamiliar. It struck him faintly as he got out of the pickup, and by the time he’d reached the front door it became undeniable. Some raccoons had been after their trash cans last spring, but this smell was different. There was something aggressive about it, something musty and rotten. Odd. But when Axel shouldered open the front door, the scent faded. The A-frame smelled exactly the way it was supposed to—like hearth ash and canned chili. Like holly and old paper. Like home.

  Axel shut the door behind him and peeled off his muddy tunic and tights, draping them over the back of a wooden chair to dry. Then, wearing nothing but his underwear, he plucked a book from what he and Tess called the “school shelf” and planted himself on the couch to wait for his sister. Axel knew that he was at least partly to blame for what had happened that afternoon, and if Tess was getting chewed-out on his account, loyalty demanded he wait for her. The book he’d chosen was one of Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories. It was in Finnish. Most of the books squeezed into their little living room were a mix of English and Latin—work stuff for their father’s job. These included botanical field guides, graduate-level textbooks, and crisply bound student theses on the minutia of lichens and soil nitrogen. But everything on the school shelf was in their mother’s native language. An old leather-bound edition of the Finnish epic The Kalevala held the place of honor at the top, followed closely by their full set of Moomin books. There was an abundance of filled-in grammar readers, a collection of Astrid Lindgren novels—translated into Finnish from the original Swedish—as well as enormous Finnish editions of Tolkien, Grahame, Adams, and Holdstock. The reason they called this the school shelf was that every evening their father would take one of the books down for an hour and a half of Finnish lessons. Sam always said that knowing the language was a way of knowing their mom—a way, even, of knowing themselves. Axel wasn’t so sure about that, but he kept up with the practice all the same. It made his father happy, and besides, he liked the stories.

  Tess came in before he even finished a page, shutting and bolting the door behind her. Axel closed his book and stood.

  “I just want to say—”

  “Please don’t. Turkey or veg?” She meant the pies.

  “Turkey,” he said after a pause.

  She nodded, crossed through the living room and entered the kitchen at the back of the house. Axel watched her pull two potpies from the freezer and thumb the frost off one of the boxes to read the cook temperature. She knelt to set the oven and slid the unwrapped pies inside.

  “Call me if I don’t hear the beep,” she said, fast-walking to Sam’s office and closing the door behind her. The computer was in there, and she’d no doubt be locked up with it well into t
he evening. Axel remained on the couch for a moment, contemplating his sister. It wasn’t just that Tess was a different person these days; she seemed to be many different people. He hoped that whatever personality she settled on in the end was one that he liked. Because he really used to like her.

  Axel put the Moomin book back on the shelf and went into the kitchen to pick up some lettuce for Bigwig, a hare they kept as a pet. But when he opened the door to his bedroom, he got two more indications that something was vaguely wrong. For one, the wheelchair was there, glowering at him from beside the bed. It had never come inside their house before. It was the old-fashioned kind—lightweight and collapsible, with folding footrests and a sagging leather seat in hospice-navy-blue. It wasn’t a real wheelchair. Nobody but Axel could see it, and even he couldn’t see it most of the time. But on bad days he could hear its oiled wheels swishing behind him, and sometimes he’d turn to catch it rounding a bush or a stump. One morning it rolled insanely after his school bus, bouncing over potholes and stones, as though fastened to the hitch with a twenty-foot length of invisible bungee.

  Axel had no idea why it had started to follow him. He’d come across it in Mud Lake Park that summer—worn from use but totally clean—and wheeled it to the nature center so he could drop it off with Lost and Found. The poor lady at reception just stared at him, her pained smile shellacked into place. When Axel looked down at his hands, he found them empty, clutching tubes of air where the handles had been. “Do you want me to call your daddy?” she asked, soft and cooing. Needless to say, he’d never told Sam or Tess about the wheelchair.

  The other clue that something was off was Bigwig herself. She was a snowshoe hare, and just about as tame as those animals ever get. She’d darted in front of Sam’s truck a few years ago, when he was returning from a lecture at the Ranger School on Cranberry Lake. Their father brought her home all bound up in splints. Bigwig healed quickly and had grown more or less accustomed to their touch and to the unpredictable sounds of a human house. So it was exceedingly strange to see her now, tight as a basketball in the far corner of her hutch, ears flat against her back, whiskers pert, shivering like it was the end of the world.

  Axel opened the top of the hutch and made to pick her up. Then he thought better of it—Bigwig looked like she’d take a chunk out of whatever came near. And she stank—her whole inner den was in tatters, littered with pellets. Sam had cut a passageway into the wall, which led to another enclosure out in the yard. Bigwig normally passed droppings out there, but now the floor was covered with them. The wire and wood framing the hutch was bent and splintered. It looked like she had spent the whole afternoon inside, flipping out.

  There must have been something in the woods. No raccoons could have put Bigwig into such a frenzy of fear. Could be a coyote was skulking about, or a fisher, but more likely than not it was just a stray dog.

  Carefully, Axel reached into Bigwig’s hutch and dropped the lettuce. She’d upended her water dish into the wood chips, so he retrieved it and went into the kitchen to refill it. Their old oven was protesting, sounding like a workshop of busy elves, clinking and tinkering. Tess sounded much the same, through the thin door to their father’s study—a mania of typing.

  “Something’s the matter with Bigwig,” Axel called.

  Tess stopped typing briefly. “Is she sick?”

  “She’s scared. Really scared.”

  There was a pause. “She’ll be fine,” Tess said.

  Back in his room, Axel set the fresh water at the far end of Bigwig’s hutch and dug a dry pair of pants out of the hamper. There was a faint creaking sound, and he looked back to see that the wheelchair had rounded the bed and was approaching him, like some kind of screwed-up doom-pet. He gave the chair a kick, sending it backward into the wall, where it shattered into loose gears and smoke and disappeared. Axel had only just finished getting dressed when he heard more creaking. The chair—the mirage, the hallucination . . . whatever it was—was rarely this persistent. “Leave me alone,” Axel said, spinning back around.

  But it wasn’t the wheelchair this time. It was Bigwig, gnawing and pawing at the edge of her hutch. She was suddenly insane with fear, a froth of spit and blood around her mouth from chewing at the wood. Whatever had been terrorizing her must still be out there. And if she didn’t stop soon, Bigwig could really hurt herself. Quick as he could, Axel rushed out the door, yelling “Ya! Ya! Ya!” which didn’t sound all that menacing, even to him. He grabbed up a broom that was leaning against the stoop and started slamming it on the ground in front of him. He ran around the A-frame, still yelling: “Ya! Ya!” so that whatever it was would get good and gone. When he got to the backyard, he stopped.

  There was a brown bear sitting in the garden patch, staring at him. For a strange moment it was like Axel was just looking through it. Like it couldn’t be any more real than the imagined wheelchair. But no. It was a bear—a huge one. Axel’s broom made a thwacking noise, and he realized that he was still hitting it against the ground. He stopped. The bear looked him over. Axel thought a bunch of things all at once. He flew through all the sometimes helpful, sometimes contradictory bear-encounter advice that he’d gleaned from park rangers and his father and the Internet. Was he supposed to make noises so the bear knew what he was? Was he supposed to keep quiet so the bear wouldn’t be startled? The literature was sometimes vague, and species dependent. Basically, what it all boiled down to was: Don’t run. Lie down and protect your organs. If you have to fight, do it like your life depends on it, because it does. Axel didn’t run. He put his free hand over his belly, snorted at how ineffective that’d be, silently scolded himself for snorting. The brown bear just stared. That was another thing he thought—and this much more intensely than the survival tips—that the bear was brown. Totally, inexplicably the wrong color. There were no brown bears in Baldwin. Black bears. New York State had black bears. So where the hell had this thing come from?

  As if in answer, the bear huffed. It got up off its haunches and took a step closer. Axel suddenly began thinking nothing at all. The bear took another step. The palms of its forepaws were so short, almost human, the back ones elongated and beastly. The bear’s head was larger around than Axel’s torso, and it swung from left to right, rhythmically. Axel had been avoiding eye contact with the animal, but he stole a glance and saw that it wasn’t looking at him anymore. The bear was staring over his shoulder, at the little house from which he’d just emerged. Maybe it smelled the pies in there? Or Bigwig? Or Tess? Maybe it just wondered if Axel were alone. Would it be allowed to eat him in peace, right here? Again Axel wondered: Where did you come from?

  What happened next did not happen quickly, but for how fast Axel reacted it could have passed in just a second. The bear began to approach. Axel couldn’t seem to get his body to do anything, other than shake, as the bear closed in. But the thing didn’t swipe at him, or bite. It walked right past Axel, knocking him with a shoulder big and looming as a hooked side of frozen beef, sending him toppling backward for the second time that day. The bear then made for the kitchen window. Its front paws seemed to clap at the ground lightly before lifting off, standing on its hind legs to peer into the kitchen. Tess was there—Axel could see that now. The animal blocked glare from the setting sun, leaving a bear-shaped patch of darkness on the window glass. In that patch he could see Tess, staring out.

  Axel actually felt the ground thwump as the bear fell back down onto its forepaws. The animal rocked its head again and gave a sort of low groan—it sounded distinctly dissatisfied. Then the bear turned and made its way around Axel, back through the vegetable garden, departing with a slow, discouraged gait. It seemed no more than a second later that Tess’s arms closed around his chest. She lifted him right up into the air. And then he was in the kitchen, on his hands and knees. Tess was bolting the back door and cussing not a little. “What the hell, Axel? What’s wrong with you?” He meant to answer, but he couldn’t just yet. He realized he hadn’t been breathing for a while.
He started again.

  “Are you, like, broken?” Tess said.

  “Did you see it? It was brown,” he was gasping, giddy. “Why was it brown?”

  Tess glared at him, but her disdain seemed almost forced. She was giddy too. “Next time you go outside and you see a damn bear, come back inside. Even if it’s purple. Too complicated?” Still pressing her weight against the door, she shifted slightly to peek out the window.

  “Where did it come from?” Axel said. He got up and pressed his nose against the glass. The bear was trundling through the dying light in the garden.

  “Don’t know,” Tess said. “Zoo? Or was there, like, a dancing-bear thing at the faire?”

  “I didn’t”—he was still catching his breath—“see one.” The bear was disappearing. What was wrong with him? Why was he just standing there? Another minute and it’d be gone! “Keep an eye on it,” Axel said, darting back through the living room.

  “I swear to God if you go outside I’m just going to watch!” Tess hollered from the kitchen. But Axel was only looking for Sam’s camera. He found it on his father’s desk, stacks of paper swishing away as he grabbed it. By the time he was back in the kitchen, the bear had already reached the edge of the yard, skirting slowly into the deepening shadows beneath a knot of birch trees.

  “You don’t have enough light,” Tess said.

  “No one will believe us otherwise,” Axel said. He rested the lens on the windowsill and pressed his eye to the viewfinder. The image of the brown bear was just about as clear as your middling Bigfoot picture, a ball of dark against lesser dark. But the road beyond the papery birches was open and lit by a huge bar of setting sunlight. Sure enough, the bear surfaced from the birches edging their yard and stepped onto the road, at once brilliant and distinct. Axel pressed the shutter, but nothing happened. He pressed it again. The camera was off. He turned it on, but it was too late. The bear had submerged into the murky parkland, its shape blending to nothing.