South of Superior (2 page)

M
adeline left Chicago three weeks later, on a windy night in the middle of April. It hadn't taken long to arrange things, once she'd decided. Almost before she knew it she'd quit her job, packed her belongings, said her goodbyes, taken one last look at everything. Of course she'd be back eventually, but for now she was headed for the middle of nowhere.

The general consensus—and it was a popular topic at Spinelli's, where she'd worked for so many years—was that this was a terrible idea, she'd lost her judgment, and she was going to wake Up in Timbuktu feeling very, very sorry. Richard (whom she'd met at Spinelli's, back when he was working on his dissertation and liked to come in with his laptop and sit at the counter drinking coffee for hours) thought that too, with a fury. The size of his anger had surprised Madeline, though it probably shouldn't have.

“Look,” she'd told him toward the end of yet another argument about her decision. “Our plans—they're your plans, really.”

“They're good plans,” he fumed. “And we've practically signed the papers on the house. Why are you making things so complicated? All this Upheaval—it's for nothing. You're afraid to actually live your own life, now that you can.”

She couldn't tell him that the nearer it came, the idea of the life they were supposed to lead together in that sweet little Victorian a few blocks from campus—him teaching at Northwestern, her in art school finally, on his dime, their friends (his friends?) coming over for casually gourmet dinners that involved lots of talk about books and films and music—made her Uneasy. Uneasy and curiously flat. Confined instead of secure, angry instead of happy. But then, she was angry almost all the time now.

Madeline stared at his craggy face, that shank of dark hair that fell over his eye. At first, when he was a doctoral student and she was a waitress who'd once dreamed of being an artist, the differences between them hadn't been so apparent. But that would change. It was already changing. They came from such different worlds.

Richard's parents still lived in his childhood home, six thousand square feet of elegance that required not one but two massive furnaces in the basement to heat it. Emmy, on the other hand, had struggled just to hang on to their not-huge, not-fancy apartment. She'd scrimped and saved to keep it all together, and that was what Madeline was Used to. She wasn't sure she could glide across the tracks into Richard's world. Not and still be herself, whoever that was.

She bit her lip, her heart sinking. Then she said. “I'm sorry, but I am going. I have to. I'm not sure when I'll be back.”

And suddenly there was nothing more to say. She gave his ring back. She'd been surprised at how relieved she felt when she called the bank to say that they wouldn't be buying the house after all.

Maybe everyone was right, maybe she was crazy. But the thing was, she had nothing to lose. That shouldn't have been so. Chicago was her home—Chicago, Spinelli's, the dear old drafty apartment Emmy'd bought before she ever took Madeline in, the neighborhood that was so familiar Madeline knew every angle and shadow by heart. There was her job, her friends, Richard, all their plans, everything. But the emptiness inside was more real and more pressing than any of it.

So, she was going five hundred miles north to live with strangers, taking nothing with her but her beloved cat Marley, a miscellaneous assortment of bags and boxes containing sturdy, warm clothes and a lot of books, mainly, and the Buick she'd inherited from Emmy. The Buick. Emmy's folly. What a heap. She'd bought it, Used, when Madeline was a senior in high school. She'd had ideas of taking little trips with it after Madeline was in college—Up to Madison for an annual bookkeepers' convention, to Milwaukee to tour the breweries, to Decatur and Springfield and Hannibal on the trail of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Small, innocent dreams. None of it had ever happened, though they did drive Up to Lake Winnebago every autumn to see the fall colors. The rest of the time it sat in storage, gently decaying.

It was only running well enough to make this trip thanks to the local mechanic who'd always tuned it Up for them. Madeline had been serving Pete Kinney runny eggs on rye toast for as long as she'd been at Spinelli's, and he'd become a friend over the years. He was also nearly the only person who didn't think Madeline was crazy for leaving. He'd told her that he and his late wife had loved going north, that he envied Madeline the adventure. So that's the line she began to take with people: this was to be an adventure. And it was to maybe fix what was broken in her, if anything could, but that fact she kept to herself.

On the day of her departure, Madeline left Chicago after midnight, hoping to avoid traffic. She drove slowly—the car was old and she was an inexperienced driver—but finally got through Green Bay. After that the cities and traffic fell away, the towns got smaller and shabbier and farther apart, and near dawn she crossed from Wisconsin into Michigan and was on a narrow two-lane highway that threaded through pines and cedars.

Lake Michigan crashed on shore to her right, acting wilder than it did in Chicago. She rolled down her window and sucked in the blustery air, and a shot of glee coursed through her, her excitement as involuntary as hunger. For better or worse, she was here. Before long her route curved north, away from Lake Michigan and toward Lake Superior, through more expanses of trees and swamps and scattered towns so small you hardly had time to notice you'd come into one before you were out again. She stopped often, as much to satisfy her curiosity as for the coffee, and her progress was slow, but she told herself that was all right. She could almost hear Emmy telling her to enjoy the journey, not to think ahead too much to its end.

At eleven fifteen she cruised through Crosscut—big enough to have a school and two gas stations and an auto supply store; not big enough for a McDonald's or a Pamida, which seemed to be the north's miniature version of Walmart—and turned north for the last leg of her journey. By noon she was approaching McAllaster, where Gladys Hansen and her sister Arbutus were waiting. It was just a dot on the map at the edge of Lake Superior, a tiny village settled for some reason that by now must be defunct—fur trading? fishing? lumber?—at a scoop in the shoreline called Desolation Bay. It was the edge of the earth. And her birthplace, though she remembered nothing of it. Jackie Stone had left when Madeline was a baby. It had never been anything but a hazy idea to her.

Suddenly, it was real. She came around a bend and over a small rise, and the lake and town appeared below her. It was as if the road had been unfurling for all these miles for just this purpose: to bring her to this spot.

The town sat at the base of a steep hill at the edge of the water, a lonely collection of buildings she could take in all in one glance from this distance. Huddled Under the sleet that had been falling for hours, it looked stark and desolate. And beautiful. There was still snow on the ground—had been, for the last twenty miles—and small icebergs bobbed near shore, waves lashing over them. Madeline had read that Lake Superior was as big as the State of South Carolina. It looked like an ocean. Without it, McAllaster might have been any of the small, drab hamlets she'd driven through today. With it—and from this vantage point high above—the effect was somehow thrilling.

Madeline slowed to a stop and sat motionless at the wheel, her hands still carefully placed at the ten and two o'clock positions, staring. Even in the driving rain the lake glittered and shone with movement, with the mystery of its whole huge self. It dawned on her that everyone's cautions had been correct, even if for the wrong reasons. This was a foreign, otherworldly place, complete with magic and perils and tests.

Madeline spent a long moment gazing at the town. She Understood in a way she hadn't before that if she drove down that hill, her life would change forever. Was it really too late to forget this idea? She shifted the car back into gear: of course it was. She had plenty of faults but being a coward wasn't one of them. She would not make herself ridiculous by turning back now, no matter what her misgivings. She cruised down the hill and pulled Up in front of a grand old empty relic of a building—faded lettering above the second-floor windows proclaimed it “The Hotel Leppinen” but Madeline doubted anyone had stayed there in fifty years—and looked at Gladys Hansen's directions.

Pass the Hotel on Main
, the note said.
Go left on Edsel two blocks, left again on Lake, and right on Bessel. Go just past the big hemlock that's cracking the sidewalk. We are the third house from the corner, number 26
. Madeline had read this a dozen times before she left. It hadn't seemed quite real. But now she was at the hotel and could see the sign for Edsel and there was no going back.

She started the Buick again. From high on the hill, the town had appeared mythical, a symbol of man's insignificance in the great scope of nature. Up close it was far more prosaic. She saw a hardware store, a grocery, a gas station, a bank, a bar, a few parked cars and pickups, and not one person. A dog trotted down the center of the street, as purposeful as a pedestrian out on errands. She turned left on Edsel and felt foolish for flicking on her blinker.

Number 26 Bessel was a small, elderly house covered in pebbly brown shingles. Lace curtains hung in the two windows that were centered on either side of the front door. Daffodils bloomed at the base of the steps and marched in a narrow row around the house's perimeter, and patches of grimy snow lay in shady places, but otherwise the yard was bare. It was a little forbidding—so spare and plain. Madeline sat very still, listening to the roar of the lake, the rain streaming on the car's roof, the sharp, solitary scream of a gull. This was a wide, wild quiet, so spacious it seemed endless, and she wondered how it might change a person.

“Are you going to sit there all day noodling, or are you getting out?” Gladys Hansen said, loud enough to be heard through the window, tapping on the glass.

“I'm coming—” But Gladys was already brisking away. Marley made an inquisitive mew and Madeline rubbed his ears. “We'll be fine,” she said, hoping. She scooped him from the passenger's seat and followed in Gladys's wake. Details loomed Up: the cement walk was cracked, the front door—which had already clacked shut behind Gladys—was red (this surprised her), the trim needed painting, the streaming rain fell straight off the eaves into the flower beds. The daffodils poking Up through a scrim of snow and ice were getting battered, which seemed like a shame—and then Gladys was opening the door again and Madeline was going in.

M
adeline stepped into a parlor that smelled faintly of mothballs and looked frozen in time somewhere around 1950. “Thought you'd decided to set Up camp out there,” Gladys said, heading toward the back of the house. Madeline followed, Uncertain this was the right thing to do but Unable to think of an alternative.

“I'm tired, I guess,” she said to Gladys's back. “It was a long drive.”

“Nathan drove like a bat out of Hell in that fancy vehicle of his last weekend. I thought we'd all perish. I watched the speedometer, he had it Up over eighty-five most of the way. He got Us back here even faster than he took Us down in the first place.” Gladys gave Madeline a brief glance over her shoulder and Madeline thought her eyes were twinkling a little, but she couldn't be sure. “Arbutus has asked me fifteen times already when I thought you'd be here. You'd best come set her mind at ease.”

They crossed into a kitchen that was broilingly warm. Arbutus was sitting at the table, her walker close by. Her face lit Up. “Madeline! You're here. I'm so glad.”

“Me too.” Madeline went and gave Arbutus a hug and her trepidation eased some. Even if everything else was a bust, Arbutus was a good, legitimate reason to have come. She smiled to herself. God forbid she should ever do something for no particular reason at all, or a selfish reason, or a frivolous one. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “How was your trip last weekend?”

“I'm fine, dear. It's good to be home. I can't tell you how glad I am—”

“Do you want coffee?” Gladys broke in.

After a tiny pause Madeline said, “I'd love some.” She was a guest here, she reminded herself. She'd just come. It was ridiculous to be so irritable that the least little thing, a tiny rudeness, made her want to lash out in frustration. She was tired, that was all. It had been a stressful three weeks getting ready, a big change. And it was going to
be
a change,
she
was going to change, she was no longer going to constantly feel like a wire stretched tight, about to snap.

Gladys poured the coffee and Madeline studied the room, stroking Marley to reassure him. The metal coffeepot had come off the back of a huge white porcelain range which had a stovepipe running Up from its top—a woodstove. The floor was linoleum in a pattern of brown and green squares, and the table was blue Formica with stainless-steel legs. A kerosene lamp sat in its center, along with a ceramic salt and pepper set shaped like a hen and rooster. The cupboards were covered with coffee-colored paint and the counters were narrow, with a big porcelain sink built into them. The room had lived-in warmth that Madeline liked. She took the mug Gladys offered and ventured a smile, about to say so. “Sit down, why don't you,” Gladys said, and it sounded more like an order than an invitation. Madeline sat, stifling her irritation.

Gladys got coffee for Arbutus too, rinsing out the dregs from her last cup, adding a dash of salt and cream and stirring them in, bringing the cup to the table and wrapping her sister's hand around it. Madeline had a flash of connection with Gladys in that moment. So many times in that last year she'd been careful to make sure Emmy's hands were steady on her mug of tea.