“It’s all right,” the detective said. “We’ll get it sorted. That’s what we’re here for.” There was antiseptic in the room and a bandage she could feel on the back of her itchy head when she tried to scratch. The bedsheets were impossible, heavy as shrouds. She wanted to kick them off but couldn’t. Why did everything take so much energy?

“What do I smell?” she asked.

She remembered that Hemingway had left her. “Look,” he said, “I sat on it. I didn’t know it was a dog. My mistake. C’est la vie.” She could remember her hysteria, but he disappeared. Walked away pushing the bike with the wobbly wheel.

Or maybe she disappeared, blacked out, and came to in the hospital bed to stare at a nurse. Had he brought her here? Where was Schnitzel? At least she had tapes, the record of what he did when he found out she was pregnant.

“Tapes,” she said, nodding off, jerking awake, terrified. Head injury. Stay alert. But how long had she been in bed? Hours, days? Weeks? A coma?

She would get even with Hemingway. The tapes, answering machine tapes, messages from him full of threat, bluster. He lived alone, she knew that, and would have no alibi because he was guilty. He had no alibi, and she had the tapes. She had the tapes and he was guilty. It had to be true, because she remembered it with clarity.

“I know you’re home, bitch,” one tape said. “If I come over and knock and you don’t answer, I’ll huff and puff and break down your goddamn door. And then you’ll be sorry as hell.”

Big bad Wolf, she thought; he killed the big bad Wolf.

Heimlich listened but gave up trying to sort it. He let her talk. What did it matter if he understood? She could tell it again, until she had it straight. She could dream and wake to the memory. That was his job. To listen. The sun-fired summer with its sweats and bilious odors would give way to woodsmoke and morning frost. Powdery thoughts would blow away.

Clouds moved fast outside the window in the room where they both sat. He was already thinking ahead to the life he might make in Tulsa, if that’s where he ended up.

PART THREE

In Transit

Fish Go Wild for the Swedish Pimple

To get to the fish house on the ice, Serena had to negotiate what felt like a gauntlet, a line of pickups and jeeps and cars stacked up waiting at the wintry resort to get on the ice like jets waiting on the tarmac for takeoff. The fish house belonged to an uncle, not the resort, but this access point was the one she knew. She hadn’t seen him in years, didn’t know if he was still among the living. There had been a falling-out between him and her Nana.

On the thick ice, streets had been plowed and road signs set up. No Marauders up in these parts, too damn cold. Too many local vigilantes and Militias. All hell might break loose if anybody had the audacity to mess with fish house culture. Walleye Lane, Jiggen Lane. Serena had a quick flash of her Nana doing a jig to cheer her up the night after she had scored her first righteous kill. Things had settled down some since that day. She still had the gun she had used, kept it oiled. She had used it since and would do so again if it came to that, but she wasn’t looking for trouble. Sometimes, though, trouble came her way. This was a different kind of trouble.

Some fish houses were two stories tall. One had a chimney spewing smoke that smelled of bacon. Her stomach grumbled. She crunched over ice past the transient town to an unplowed section of lake, kept wiping the windshield because her defroster in the old pickup, the one that had belonged to Nana, didn’t work the way it should. She clenched the steering wheel. Smoke belched from the exhaust. Her breath came in shallow gulps, but the truck’s other passenger, bundled like fishing gear on the floor beside her, couldn’t speak. Would never utter a word.

Udder, she thought, her breasts distended with milk. Udder. Mudder. Madre. Ava, she thought. My mother is a palindrome. It was a catchphrase she repeated too often for comfort.

The landscape astonished. She gulped; a salty tear froze on her face. In the past, on the lake with her boyfriend for a tryst in the fish house—a bottle of Kentucky bourbon half empty to make them forget how cold it was near the Canadian border as they drove on water in the mythical region known as Lake of the Woods, not so far from the Boundary Waters where her mother, Ava, had been taken long ago, never to return—she had stared hypnotized at the tree line miles away, lost in a fairy tale of romance about the pretty boy beside her, the sun sometimes sculpting the afternoon sky with twin rainbows, or sundogs, the wind whipping the air into a frenzy, the fish houses big or small dotting the tundra like a scene from one of the Grimm tales that her stern and abusive birth father had read to her once or twice when she was young. That was many years ago, when she had a father, so far as he went, only a comma in a long sentence, and her mother, Ava. She longed for Ava sometimes.

It’s that kind of world, she thought with stoicism. She fishtailed into light snow next to the house. She fished out the key entrusted to her Nana by the uncle, a hunter and vigilante whose eagle eye had made her Nana feel safe, from a pocket of the humongous winter coat patched and pelted with oblongs of fur. It was hideous, but one that she loved (in part, she thought, because it was hideous and had once kept her Nana warm). It kept her warm too in her badly heated Fargo basement flat with its boarded-up windows.

She kept the engine running in the pickup, clumped in cleats to the fish house door and worked the lock loose with fingers that felt frostbit; wet, they might freeze fast to the lock. There was a movie she remembered where a school kid put his tongue on a pole in the cold and got stuck; the image made her laugh. She kicked aside a frozen burbot, a big ugly fish nobody ever kept. Her uncle went for walleyes, always getting more than his limit because nobody bothered much about limits anymore, when she and her Nana had fished with him many moons ago. Good eating, she thought. She had also fished with her boyfriend after their lovemaking, and once she brought up a big flopping thing. “A tullibee,” her boyfriend had pronounced with disdain. A Canadian whitefish full of bones. “Too bad it’s too big to toss back.”

Once inside, she could see that the holes in the ice were half frozen. She started up the propane heater, put it on high, and with a blunt hatchet hacked open one of the fish holes, the largest one, though whether it would be big enough for what she had to do, she refused to think about.

She saw a length of abandoned fishing line wound in a loose coil on the concrete floor. A twisted skein of lies, she thought. She loved the way the phrase echoed, and she said it aloud to hear the vowels and consonants braid together.

Her voice sounded tinny and haunted and echoed in the shack.

She went back out, careful to latch the door from the outside, and sat in the truck for a while. She stared past the shack to the makeshift town on the ice. Three snowmobiles churned up snow and zoomed in a race along the plowed ice roads. A family of four, all big and chunky specimens of the Upper Midwest, full of corn-fed beef, juggled their ice shack off a trailer. They were hard at it, though a young one stopped to pelt the others with snowballs.

Nothing registered. She could imagine the family gathered inside by a propane stove eating ham sandwiches on white bread plastered with mayonnaise and butter. She procrastinated, though she didn’t have a watch; the pickup was an older model without an onboard clock. She was unobserved, that was obvious, almost cozy in the cold, safe and free, which was a good thing, because she burst into a frenzy of compulsive activity that might have aroused the suspicions of a bystander.

Inside the shack, where she held the bundle over the largest hole in the ice, she did what she had decided had to be done; but a court of law, a jury, would have been hard put to call it premeditation. With the heel of one shoe, she tried to push the entire bundle through the ice, but something caught and she couldn’t manage it. So she shook it, nearly hysterical now, and her companion finally came free and floated under the bundle of blanket. She reached for a rusted shovel and used its sharp blade to hack down while she uttered a sound like a seal or like any animal that might live year-round unconscious under the ice, until perhaps one winter day the right fisherman might bring it up—some strange hybrid specimen that at first glance would appear to be different from anything he had ever seen. A big prune. A giant pickle.

He would be using a three-pronged hook and the Swedish Pimple for bait that her boyfriend had sworn by. He had told her, more than once, for it was his mantra, that the two of them, together forever, might catch something amazing, something never seen before, if they stayed faithful to the Swedish Pimple. To seal the deal, he had given her a gift, a plastic monkey the size of a grape from a gumball machine.

She had always believed him, but now understood it was just something he said—that he would say to someone else with the same I’ve-never-said-this-to-anyone conviction that had made her feel so unique. It was just something to say, she thought. Everything is just something to say.

Still, she said a few words. Nothing in particular. Nobody who heard it could call it praying. She had wept and gnashed her teeth when the life had ebbed. There had been nothing to do. Nowhere to go. There was no medicine anymore for somebody without the money to pay. And medicine would have done no good, she thought. Whatever was wrong had been too broken to fix. She had the baby, alone; would never have allowed it to grow like a cancer inside her if she hadn’t been too frightened that she might be charged with murder. It came out without a whimper. It came out stone-cold dead.

Gone to a better place, she thought, and laughed at the absurdity.

She knew that she would be home by dark, cozy more or less under covers. She wondered if the place would still feel like home. It was safe where she was, with boarded-up windows, loaded gun, with an acquaintance nearby, though he was as old as Nana had been when death took her. A group of people she knew—she couldn’t really call them friends—were ginning up a convoy to make its way to Tulsa.

Tulsa had been Nana’s magic word to conjure up justice and paradise. But her Nana had trusted the open road. She had grown up miserable, sometimes beaten, first by her migrant father and then her husband, who had done something terrible to Ava that nobody talked about. And they could never get out of debt. Nobody ever did anymore.

Tulsa. She was thinking about it as she gathered up the empty bundle of blankets, locked the fish house, and decided. It was time to get the hell out of the Dakotas, face the future. Get up and go. Nothing anymore to stay for.

The Girl on the Beach

Ava couldn’t help it. She was drawn to certain men who lived in bleak, lonely habitats. When she was lucky, and it was luck, nothing but, they were good to her. Straight now, holding to sobriety like a life raft, she fantasized about a life with Serena, the daughter she had lost, had given away really, let’s be honest, in the time when the next fix was her only ambition. She had returned to Fargo, searched without luck, but couldn’t let go of hope, however slight, and had fallen in with McGaw—what a name, only McGaw, nothing else—who was kind and took her with him to his small, ruined house on the rocky shore of a great lake where the rough water spoke in a language she understood. She had been someplace like it more than once in the past.

McGaw thought he saw Serena, whose childhood photograph adorned the wall over their bed, balancing on the rocks in the surf. “But really,” Ava said, waking beside him. She touched his hand. “No, don’t switch on the light.” She preferred to listen in the dark. And she was tired, bone-tired. There was something in him that wouldn’t let her sleep, some force worming into her until she woke. “You satisfied?” she asked. “Now that I’m up? Is that what you wanted?” Insomnia seldom left her alone.

She was glowing like abalone, McGaw explained, visible in moonlight, her dress fluttering in the lake wind, cries audible. “She was calling out to you. Can’t you see?” he said. “It would prove everything. It would show something exciting is going on. Which I know there is; but knowing is one thing, actually seeing’s another.”

She rubbed her eyes. She had met McGaw at a lamplit séance. He was familiar with Ouija boards and tarot cards and occult lore. He knew about invisible worlds and the dark web. He shuffled pseudonyms the way others work a pack of playing cards. He assuaged her grief over a life lost. Mother. Daughter. Heroin. The three loves of her life, all gone.

She had quit her job without notice to be with him.

She had taken up painting in Fargo, had studied with a self-proclaimed genius, lost herself in paint when she felt the need for a fix. She had faith in art; she would find the right rhythm, the right form. Complete the painting. One painting. It would be her life’s work. It would speak, urgently, to any man or woman who stood before it with due diligence.

Their secluded beach house had a wood-burning stove and a tiny artist’s studio. Nobody bothered them. She stood, her joints aching, before the canvas each day as the light changed. She could only stare, eyes burning, at what she had wrought, couldn’t bring herself to work in the luminous fast-drying tones of egg tempura, an old Renaissance technique she had struggled to master. It was a new life. She knew nothing about painting but stood there day after day. She had once lived in such solitude with a painter, a man who had turned her into a slave. McGaw didn’t care. She had no idea what he did when he wandered alone into the woods or along the rowdy shore. The more she waited on the half-finished canvas, brush in hand, attempting to obliterate her personality for the sake of art and sobriety, the more restless McGaw became.

She knew her situation was all wrong, the inverse of that relationship years ago when her lover, the painter, kept her fixed up and compliant in a place just as isolated as this one, only more so. And now there would be another hour, or two, or more, until dawn. He would prowl the dark outside. “Maybe it’s nothing,” he said, “but maybe this is what we’ve been waiting for.” He continued nagging, so she turned on the lamp and pulled herself from bed, every bone in protest. In the narrow hallway, on the small back porch, chill rushed through her gown. “I need a witness,” he said. “You should come. You’re a part of this.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

They stared across the sandy yard, coated with dew, to the cave-like shadows of the studio. A shack, really. There was a glimmer, a brief splash of light, elusive. A metallic odor, like blood, filled the air around her. It gave her a start, but it was a tatter of bright cloth, polyester maybe, an old skirt flapping like a bird, caught in screen mesh. She would admit that much. But the door was latched. Who would climb through the windows of a desolate shack? Certainly not her grown daughter. Only him, plagued by delusions. Only he would imagine a tattered skirt draped around the pale waist of a girl he had never met. And who the hell was he to assume her daughter was a spirit, dead to the world except in visions?

He slipped on his khakis. She knew it was useless to plead. He smelled of mildew and metal. He strapped a camera over a shoulder. He took in her bright stare. “You coming?”

An antagonism flared, an anger. It would be nervous doodles in her sketchpad until dawn, the desire for dope flaring up with exhaustion. There was at least that—no dope out here to tempt her.

“She’s there,” he repeated. “Your daughter. Serena. If you watch, you’ll see that flicker like a candle. She’s not coming back forever. She doesn’t know she’s gone. She thinks she’s lost. She left the world too fast. She’s in shock.” He tottered down the back steps as though plagued with rheumatism. He looked tubercular making his way across the yard, even the baggy khakis unable to disguise his pipestem legs, even heavy flannel failing to protect his concave chest.

The chill overcame her. The stiff leather of the hunting jacket worked like sandpaper. Against her will she shook with fright. She had wanted solitude, not pathological isolation. Every cracked-off slat or stain was evidence. Or so you would think, listening to him. Besides, she thought again, anger flaring, who was he to her to claim her daughter was dead?

Exhaustion took him down near dawn. She stood in the studio before the canvas. Century postcards, wooden packing crates, old books with pages stuck together. Dregs. Often now, he spoke of nothing but Serena. It was obscene. Her winsomeness, white skin, long nails. “She’s our point of access. She was abducted, brought here by a crazed carpenter, bludgeoned to death in her sleep.”

Skag would be better than this, Ava thought.