The Winter Place Page 5

  “We’re going to have to make do,” Mrs. Ridgeland said, returning to the sitting room. She held a tray with three mugs on it, a box of crackers, and an assortment of store-brand dips in plastic tubs. “I’m used to shopping for one.” She squeezed in between Tess and Axel, orange construction paper crumpling beneath her, and made space for the tray by whisking her forearm across the coffee table.

  “I’m afraid the bedrooms are a bit . . . messy.” She opened each of the tubs and gave the contents a good sniff. The onion dip and the southwest dip were promptly recapped and set off to one side. “But there’s a couch in the basement,” she went on. “It doesn’t fold out, but it’s a sectional. I think you two should fit all right.”

  “Thank you,” Tess said.

  “None of that.” Mrs. Ridgeland put a hand on Tess’s cheek, not even trying to brush away the heavy gloss of tears. “Listen,” she said, turning to Axel and putting her free hand on his. “This is awful. This is a terrible thing that’s happened to both of you. But it happened. It’s real, and it’s permanent. You can feel whatever you need to feel, whenever you need to feel it. You can be as tough as you want to be right now. Denial, I’ve found, is underrated. As long as it’s only to delay pain, have at it. But understand—the facts are forever. Your father was . . .” She trailed off, her eyes drifting to her telescope. Axel followed her gaze and noticed something moving in the yard. It was a dark thing, slithering serpentine between the statues. Not the bear—the wheelchair. It entered the rectangle of orange light cast out the window and seemed to stare up at him patiently. It seemed, for a weird moment, like Mrs. Ridgeland could see it too.

  “To be honest,” she continued, “I never knew your father that well. But he seemed like a sweet man. He’s gone now, and he isn’t coming back.” This last bit seemed directed at Axel in particular. She stared down at him as she said it, and her voice had a strange, pleading ring to it.

  Tess pulled away from Mrs. Ridgeland, whose hand stayed exactly where it was, clutching the air where her cheek had been. “You’re terrible at this,” Tess said.

  “That’s fine,” Mrs. Ridgeland said. “As tough as you need to be.” Whatever the point of her bizarre little speech was, she seemed satisfied that she’d made it. She clapped her hands on her knees, hoisting herself up off the love seat. “Let’s go see about those beds.” They followed Mrs. Ridgeland into the basement and helped her tuck sheets between the cushions of a big L-shaped sectional, the short end of which was just long enough for Axel. It was a lot less cluttered down there, but the air felt close. A black workout bench sat opposite the sectional, flanked by two hulking sets of free weights. Axel couldn’t explain why, but it was among the most depressing things he’d ever seen.

  Mrs. Ridgeland left, and they both changed into their pajamas in the dark. Axel lay still, looking at the shadows of the workout gear, listening to the wet rattle of his sister’s breathing. Listening to the night and the creak of the wheelchair as it rounded Mrs. Ridgeland’s big house. There was a little window near the top of the wall, which was just at ground level. Through it Axel could see the curve of black rubber, the greased spokes of the wheel. It was bumping gently into the brickwork. If the wheelchair could have stooped down and crawled in through the window, it no doubt would have. Axel wondered if he would ever sleep again. It certainly wasn’t going to happen now. He sat up. His brain was buzzing, but not with thoughts about his father. He was thinking about the bear.

  Tess must have heard him slip out of bed, but she didn’t say anything. Silently Axel crept back upstairs. With all the junk in the house, there must be a computer somewhere. He’d see if the Post-Standard had anything about a loose grizzly on its website. He could even double-check the catalog for the Renaissance Faire, on the slim chance that there was an exhibit he’d missed. Mrs. Ridgeland was on the telephone in the kitchen; Axel could hear her dialing as he snuck through the sitting room. She wasn’t having much luck—she dialed and hung up, dialed again and hung up again. If she were trying to reach their grandpa Paul, she’d need her patience.

  The stairs were so cluttered that it was hard to get up to the second floor without making too much noise, but Axel found that if he stepped mostly on the piles of clothes, he was all right. He checked the master bedroom first and got lucky. Not just a computer, but several of them. Mrs. Ridgeland even had decent Internet.

  The word “bear” appeared nowhere on the front pages or associated blogs for the Standard, or YNN, or any of the network affiliates. Axel even checked the papers out of Albany, Rochester, and Binghamton, but found zilch there as well. There was a story that did repeat on a number of the pages, usually above the fold of the scroll bar, but it had nothing to do with animals. One website bore a photograph of what looked like a sword sticking out of a beaver mound, paired with the seemingly unrelated headline: SLEEPY TRUCKER CAUSES HAVOC. Axel clicked on it, thus stumbling backward into the story of his father’s death.

  It had been a long-haul driver, just starting his trip from the Canadian border down to Austin. In an attempt to bypass interstate construction and the choke point of downtown Syracuse, this trucker had put himself and his rig on the same road Sam used to travel from Baldwin to his evening class. The trucker had, apparently, missed three signs advising drivers of the low clearance of a pedestrian overpass, which spanned the highway and allowed residents of a new subdivision to access the jogging trail around Onondaga Lake. The top of the rig tore into the overpass, scattering suitcase-size chunks of concrete across the road. A pickup traveling behind the rig was struck directly and rolled into the embankment. The driver of this private vehicle—who later died en route to hospital, the only fatality of the accident—was a performer at the Central New York Renaissance Faire. As he had failed to secure his costume materials in the bed of his truck, they, too, were scattered. Banded armor and mail, a helmet half crushed under a slab of the ruined bridge, and the sword flung well clear of the road, stabbed deep into the dome of a beaver mound, Excaliburesque. It would have been news either way, but this twist made the story irresistible. The whole road had to be closed down, and a member of the cleaning crew had cut himself on a battle-ax and would require stitches. Axel kept reading past the end of the article—there had to be more than just: “a performer at the Central New York Renaissance Faire”—and into the comments section. The trolls had beat him there. Should have used a warding spell! sat right at the top. Below several people wasting their typing breath admonishing the idiot, another charmer had written, simply: No more HP?

  Axel turned the monitor off. He unplugged the A-cord from the tower, unplugged the keyboard and mouse as well. He wanted to put his foot through something, but he couldn’t find anything soft enough.

  Axel went back downstairs, now making no attempt at all to be quiet. But Mrs. Ridgeland still didn’t hear him. She must have gotten through to somebody, because she was shouting into the receiver like a woman calling against a stiff wind. “England . . . what? Say again?” There was a long pause. “No, I don’t. I see. Well, how am I supposed to call there, then?”

  She still didn’t hear Axel when he reached the landing and trudged heavy-footed into the sitting room. He went right up to the window and pressed his face against it. He knew it was out there. “Come back,” he said. He put his hands on the glass, and they left smudges. Why did he want to see it so badly? “Come back, please,” he said again, louder this time. He was crying a little now, which was good, he guessed. It had been weird that he couldn’t do it before. Though it was only slightly less weird that he was now standing outside of his own crying self, appraising it for normalcy.

  “Bear,” he said. “Please.”

  Suddenly Tess was standing right behind him. He didn’t know how long she’d been there, but she turned him around and hugged him and said: “It’s going to be all right.” They were the first words his sister had spoken to him since they’d left the Keeper. The first words they’d shared since they found out that Sam had died. He
didn’t believe them for a second.

  5

  Oakwood

  Sam’s funeral was set for Monday, though later postponed to the middle of the week. Nobody would tell Tess why, but it wasn’t hard to guess. It was because of Grandpa Paul. He’d probably need at least a few days to shake off the smell of bourbon and pawn his way to an airline ticket. The fact that her grandfather was a total, irreparable screw-up was the worst-kept secret in the Fortune family. And Tess thought that was saying something.

  He called her on the night Sam died, a few hours after she’d brought Axel back to bed. Tess hadn’t been able to tell who it was at first, because her grandfather was using a pay phone and because he was a good deal drunker than usual. Of course, she wasn’t supposed to know about her granddad’s troubles, but honestly. Two years ago when they’d visited him at home, Grandpa Paul had greeted the family in a yard littered with shattered empties, cigarette butts, and the forest-green shells of discharged buckshot. His closet-size shower and dinky, waterless sink had been filled with uncapped bottles, saved for the dregs in their bottoms. Sam had put on a wooden smile, depositing the children up on the bank of the steaming pond out back and telling them that the first one to spot the endemic Florida scrub jay would win a milk shake. Then he disappeared back into the trailer, where Grandpa Paul was singing a song about horses. Tess had never heard a fistfight happen so quietly, and for the rest of the day neither her father nor her grandfather would acknowledge the black eyes they’d given each other. It was the last time she or Axel had set foot in the trailer; every visit since was anchored to the safety of a strip mall, fast-casual food, and hugs good-bye in skillet-hot parking lots. Still, Tess knew that Sam loved the old man. She did, too.

  “Oh, baby girl, my darling.” Grandpa Paul was lilting on the phone, trailing off. He must have had a bottle to his lips since hearing the news.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” Tess said. She whispered it, so as not to wake Axel up.

  “If this isn’t a bucket of awful, I don’t . . .” He paused. A sob escaped him like a belch, high and tinny. “Listen. Listen.” He was steeling himself against crying, or trying to, at least. “We’re coming, baby girl. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  Tess sat up on the sectional. She turned her back to her brother and then hunched over to make her body a catcher’s mitt for her voice. “Who’s we, Grandpa?”

  If Grandpa Paul heard what she’d said, it certainly didn’t register. “You. Your brother. Both of you, now. You are going to be taken care of. Hear me? Plenty to be sad about right now. Plenty.” He paused again to master his breathing. “But nothing to worry about. I want you to know that, Tess.”

  “Grandpa, are you bringing somebody with you?” She spoke a little louder now.

  “Of course I am, sweetheart. I’m coming, and I’m bringing your grandma.”

  “Please, whoever she is, don’t call her that,” Tess said. Grandpa Paul had a girlfriend more often than he didn’t, though never for more than a few months straight. By her count, Tess had met at least three would-be stepgrannies at various Olive Gardens scattered throughout central Florida. “Please,” she repeated, “could you just come alone?”

  “Nonsense. I just spoke to her. When you meet her, you—”

  “I don’t want to meet anybody, Grandpa.”

  “Can’t help you with that, honey.” Grandpa Paul didn’t say anything more for a while. Tess could faintly hear music on the other end, the buzzing whoosh of a truck driving on a wet road. There was a single tavern in the Boils. She knew because it was set right up against the drop point for one of the Ocala canoe runs, and they used to stop by for early waffles before putting in. Tess imagined her granddad standing outside now, broom-skinny in an old phone booth, ferns and palmetto reaching darkly from the bank. Did he have any idea that it was one of his son’s favorite places in the world? Whatever woman he was seeing must have been in the tavern, waiting on another round, maybe planning her upcoming trip to New York. Tess wondered if he’d even told her it was for his son’s funeral.

  “How’s your brother doing?” Grandpa Paul said, sort of suddenly.

  Tess turned to peek at Axel on the short end of the sectional. He was either asleep or faking it well. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  “Come on, now,” Grandpa Paul said. “Yes, you do.”

  Tess and Axel went back to the A-frame every day to feed Bigwig, but on the morning of the funeral they were surprised to see that somebody had boxed up nearly all of their possessions. The library shelves stood bare, and the furniture was shoved against the walls. There were open crates everywhere, many already labeled in thick blue marker. BOOKS—ENGLISH and BOOKS—NOT ENGLISH, as well as KITCHEN and, oddly: WEAPONS. Tess and Axel stood speechless on the threshold.

  “Most of your clothes got packed yesterday afternoon,” Mrs. Ridgeland said, “but I left a few options out on your beds. Nothing is quite right for today, I’m afraid, but there’s no helping it. We don’t have time to shop.”

  Neither Tess nor Axel said a word. Axel made for his bedroom, pausing on the way to grip the rim of an overflowing box. Tess followed him, picking a few spilled books up off the floor. One of them was an old Finnish grammar reader, the recycled pages gray and soft as newspaper. It lay open to a worksheet on families—äiti, isä, sisko, veli. Mother, father, sister, and brother. Beside the words was a space where you could practice writing them, dark with shaky pencil marks. Tess recognized her brother’s handwriting. He’d written only one of the words, over and over, stretching out beyond the dotted lines. Äiti-Äiti-Äiti-Äiti. Mom-Mom-Mom-Mom. All his life, Tess’s little brother had longed for a missing parent. Now it was two for the price of one.

  “Get angry,” Tess thought. Actually, she did more than think it. She whispered it aloud. Because anger was the only alternative she could see to sinking to the floor right then and there and crying for a month or so. She slapped the workbook shut, focusing on the revolting thought of Mrs. Ridgeland’s plump, plaster-white fingers on it. It’s not that Tess had any illusions. She didn’t think that she and Axel would keep living in the A-frame by themselves, taking the bus to school in Baldwin, ordering groceries online, and drilling each other on Finnish verbs every evening. And she knew that Grandpa Paul would never leave his juniper woods to live up here with them. But still, the speed with which they were being booted out was ridiculous. “You should have told us,” she said.

  Mrs. Ridgeland paused to consider this. “Maybe,” she said, breezing through the maze of boxes like she owned the place. Which, to be fair, she did. “But it had to be done, and you couldn’t have changed it. If you want, you can come by tomorrow morning to help finish up. In the meantime, you’ve got to change.”

  The service was scheduled for midday, in the Oakwood Cemetery down in Syracuse. It was a big, old cemetery that abutted the south end of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where their father had taught undergraduates about lichens and hardwoods. The Oakwood was also where their mother was buried, and Sam’s plot would be right beside hers. Grandpa Paul was supposed to land in the late morning, presumably with his new lady friend in tow, and would meet Tess and Axel at the cemetery. Tess hoped that her granddad would be able to hold it together and make it through the day. She hoped that she’d be able to, as well, because whenever she lost her immediate focus on the boxes, or her clothes, or spying on Axel to judge his energy levels, the world went flimsy. Tess felt a sadness so deep and desperate that it was like the sun—she was sure that if she looked right at it, she’d go blind.

  “I know that was a shock,” Mrs. Ridgeland said as they left the A-frame and got back into her car. “I’m sorry about that. I don’t mean to make you feel like you’re being pushed out. But we have to be realistic.” She backed them down the dirt drive. A minute later they were on 690, heading southeast. It was the exact same route their dad had taken, not even a week ago, on the night of the brown bear.

  “Everything’s been wor
ked out with a moving company,” Mrs. Ridgeland went on. “Your stuff should arrive at your grandparents’ place in no time at all.”

  “What about Bigwig?” Axel said, tugging at his shiny sleeves—the only thing he had that approached funeral attire was a costume tux from the previous Halloween. “I think we’ll need special papers,” he went on. “It’s not the same for a hare.”

  “What’s that?” Mrs. Ridgeland eyed him in the rearview.

  “As a rabbit,” Axel said. “I mean, I think it’s easier for a rabbit.” They stared at each other via reflections.

  “I’m not following.”

  Axel sighed. He kept his voice reasonable. “Bigwig is a hare. She’s technically a wild animal. We need a permit to take her out of the state.”

  “I see. We’ll have to look into that.” Mrs. Ridgeland nodded up in the driver’s seat, and Tess knew that there wasn’t a chance in hell that the hare would be coming with them. A tiny loss, in comparison, but Axel would take it hard. He loved that little animal.

  They passed the exit for Camillus and came abreast of Onondaga Lake, on the final stretch to Syracuse. The lake was lined with a low, marshy forest. Red-winged blackbirds tilted among the reeds, trilling. Up ahead were the remains of the concrete pedestrian bridge. It looked like a diving board now, terminating in a crisscross of caution tape, a full stop, a drop into the passing lane. They glided under it without a word.

  “Grandfather,” Tess said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You said grandparents. It’s grandfather, singular. No matter what he told you.”

  “None of my business,” Mrs. Ridgeland said, sounding relieved that it wasn’t.

  The funeral was a lot bigger than Tess had expected. A good portion of the faculty and student body of the College of Environmental Science and Forestry turned out, along with the Mud Lake Birding Society and the performance troupe from the Renaissance Faire. As they approached the site, Tess was horrified to see that Sam’s fellow knights of the realm were attending in full-on period pretend—swords snug in scabbards, colored plumes sprouting out of their helmets like gouts of flame. Kilted bards played a running dirge on lute, bagpipe, and fiddle. The bizarre crowd parted as Tess and Axel approached, and people shushed one another, all of them apparently nervous about making eye contact with the newly minted orphans. Tess heard someone say her name, and only then did she recognize her grandfather among these strangers. He’d shaved, and his hair was pulled back into a clean, puffy ponytail. He wore a pressed but ill-fitting suit, and when he hugged her he smelled of toothpaste and nothing else. And he was alone, thank God.