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.
She wrapped herself in a woolen robe and switched off the lamp, ignoring wooden crates, makeshift bookshelves. There was a faint smell of skunk. The spirit of the place was dissolute, dampness seeping into pores, soaking nerve endings. In the dark she admitted failure. The move, the commitment to McGaw, the painting. What had she been thinking? It was crazy. Her life was finished. Her people dead.
What she had left: one day at a time. One fucking day at a time. Bill is my one friend in the world.
“We’re soulmates,” McGaw had said to her once, briquettes sputtering in the grill on one of those perfect evenings in Fargo, with sun easing and clouds like mountains in the big sky. In his beret, a scarf around his neck, he was heroic, handsome like the doomed and mythical Kurt Cobain, ravaged face emerging from shadow, and she had taken his words to heart.
He was her type. It was fate.
When she woke, McGaw was gone. She warmed herself with coffee then went searching: bird sanctuary, hiking trails, deserted marina.
Once, in Fargo, he had disappeared for three days.
“How dare you!” she shouted when he returned, unshaven, dissipated.
He smiled and shrugged, an apology. “Three days,” he said, waving an arm in dismissal. “Looking at myself like a sculpture, examining life from every side, then eliminating what doesn’t belong. Now I can give myself to you. I did it for you. I love you. Let’s go away, forget everything.”
“Go? Where?”
“I have a place.”
She stopped searching a mile from the lake house, the sky dark like milky, black tea. Great clouds wheeled into sight as if announcing yet another plague. How many could there be? She pulled her shawl close.
Something moved.
She turned. Nothing.
Only a lonely loon, rasp of wind, gray light, stunted black oaks tenaciously holding their own, dim green forms of gaunt pines. She sat with her head against a tree.
“This kind of loneliness draws her like a magnet,” he had said. “Mirrors her soul. Coincidence. Synchronicity. I feel it. If we take what we see and re-create it, she’ll come.”
It was insanity.
Someone screamed her name. Or was it rough water, nerves? She could see him floating face down. A wolf finished him, left a torso, slivers of bone. The sheriff pulled up to the house, lowered his head in respect. He brought her to the morgue, a small gray room.
But it wasn’t the morgue. It was dark, muddy; she couldn’t breathe. The sheriff approached, waving pork-fat arms.
She shook awake, pulled on sandals.
Two days later, he was still missing.
