“There is something you can do for me, Lara.” My Oma rocks in her armchair. She’s put on real clothes: a floral blouse and sneakers with stretchy, coiled shoelaces. I’m thrilled at the chance to be useful. “But you’ll have to get out of your pajamas.” She says it with a wicked grin and draws out the second “a” like a yawn.
Leaning against the living room doorway, I look down at my torn t-shirt and joggers. “Hey now, these pants were actually, like, kinda expensive.”
She lifts a barely visible eyebrow and nods slowly. “Were they?”
I like letting her rib me. It’s a good thing, I think, to keep her spirits light. Plus, if she likes me, maybe she’ll actually let me take care of her. Then, I’d have a purpose in Minnesota, the place I never thought I’d come back to.
“What’s the request, ma’am? I’ll put on my Sunday finest.”
“It’s not Sunday, is it?”
“No, I just meant the phrase. It’s Friday.”
Oma looks relieved. The window streams winter light on her creased face. “All right, good. Well, it’s a bit of an errand. We’ll have to go into town, down the hill and everything.”
That’s still new to me, the way people here give directions in terms of up and down the hill. Duluth was built into a massive slope, steep and terrifying when it snows each year. “What else are we going to do, sit here and watch the wildlife? I know how you love the deer.”
“Overgrown rats,” she mutters under her breath, rocking just a bit faster in her chair, then stops abruptly. “And you can’t tell anyone.”
“C’mon, just tell me what you need, and whatever it is, let’s do it. I live for the sordid secrets of the infirmed.”
“All right, smarty.” She smiles. “There is a liquor store downtown, it’s the only place around that sells my whiskey.”
“I’ll drive. Well, first I’ll change, I guess. Gotta get cute for the liquor store clerk.”
Upstairs, I switch to jeans and a hoodie, one variation on my theme. I check myself out in the mirror, clothes droopy on my frame. Still no horns, no hooves.
My freshman year of college, I had a girlfriend who played Dungeons and Dragons. There was a character she told me about, one night on my lofted twin dorm bed, sharing a mixed drink from a coffee mug. Tiefling. It had some of the satanic traits, but not all. More humanoid. The next morning, up early despite a battering hangover, I studied my body in the mirror of the communal bathroom.
What marking of evil did I expect to find? There is no magical lore to the kinds of violence my father chose. He wasn’t a demon.
Everything I know about my dad’s crime, I learned from the internet. He made no attempt to cover his face or conceal his identity. He was wearing his uniform, name badge pinned proudly to the front. He said hello to the receptionist. She claims he smiled at her, but I don’t know if that got penciled into the memory after the fact, evidence he was “heartless.” The coffee mug he tipped over when he walked past a desk, knocking it with his duffel bag. The plastic water cooler struck with a stray bullet, spurting like a geyser. Blood flowing slowly from the victims he picked before himself. So much spilled, lost, wasted. How quickly it all ended, with some of his coworkers left hyperventilating under desks. One woman ran out after the first shot and was found still running an hour later, miles down the hill.
We get in Oma’s car, and she clutches her purse close to her chest. “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I’m a really safe driver.” She is kind enough not to mention it when I miss a stop sign. A pickup honks as it slams its brakes. Stretches of the road disappear into hills, an optical trick.
Once we get in closer to Duluth, I see Lake Superior miles down, consuming the horizon. It swallows the landscape, the city disappearing into this rough, gray water. “You know it’s not a big deal, right? To drink?” It’s not like I actually know that to be true. Maybe it’d really fuck with her health, but that’s not all she’s worried about.
“Maybe not for girls your age, but we weren’t meant to. It wasn’t classy. Of course, I always have—that’s how I know my very specific taste in whiskey.” She shifts to hold her leather purse even closer, like she could hide behind its pliable structure.
“And that’s cool. Like, you don’t have to pretend anymore.”
She flips down her clip-on sunglasses, blocking the brightness reflected from the water as we careen down the hill. “That’s not for you to decide.”
I’m making her uncomfortable, so I look for a way to change the subject. My mind swarms with numbers, facts I memorized on the plane, repeating them to myself. 9,850 people dead at the bottom of that lake, or so they estimate. There’s countless more, everyone agrees. Capsized in boats or pulled away in rip currents. I swear I see their corpses bloated and swelling to the surface, but they’re not cadavers, they’re cargo ships, shrunken on the horizon. I know that, of course. In fact, the lake absorbs the people it takes. The water is so cold that bacterial action is inhibited. The bodies sink and don’t float.
“Do you think the lake is haunted?” I ask her. I hope it sounds light-hearted, even though I’m serious. There has to be some “spiritual activity,” like they call it on the cable shows, in a body of water that outsized, that full of loss.
“That’s a silly question.”
Maybe she means because it’s so obviously true. That’s what I choose to believe. I almost run a red light, staring at the water, but manage to hit the brakes in time to slide to a stop. The buildings become more decrepit as I follow Oma’s directions. We pass a huge orange-brick structure that looks like a school, with wood panels over the windows and graffiti that reads Redrum in shaky white paint. Not a very imaginative tag, but okay. Doesn’t this town know enough about murder and dying and the ghosts that wander up from the water without spraying dumb little reminders of it everywhere?
At the liquor store, Oma leaves her glasses covered and tells me to wait in the car. “Leave it running,” she says. “For the heat.”
While I wait in the pothole ridden parking lot next to a wall painted Customer Parking Only, I do my best not to think about how close we are to the lake. Just a few blocks. Walking distance. It shouldn’t be this alive, not in the middle of winter, but despite jagged crystals of ice around the shore, it’s awake. The movement of the water is a whispering taunt, reminding me of the damage it could do if it wanted, how I’d stand no chance, just like the 9,850 people it already claimed.
I repeat the number in my mind over and over, counting it out on my fingers—9, 8, 5—and play with it like building blocks, breaking it down into pieces for addition. 9 + 8 + 5 becomes 22 becomes 2 + 2 until I can get it into a single number. Four. Just as I start to add it in backwards order, Oma scares the shit out of me knocking at the passenger window.
I’m probably a horrible caretaker. I hauled the old lady on a booze run, let her shuffle over the ice into a slummy liquor store, then locked her out in a temp so cold her breath puffs. Yeah, I’m bad at this. I fumble on my door to find the lock button and she knocks again, shaking her head. “Just pull it,” she instructs, so I stretch over the seat to manually unlock her door.
As she carefully gets in, clinging to the overhead handle with one hand, a brown paper bag in the other, she huffs, “You didn’t even notice me. What were you thinking about?”
“The number four.” I figure it’s better to be honest.
The slim bag crinkles on her lap. “You were bound to be a strange child, weren’t you.”
The car shudders as I put it in reverse.
+++
Elena Lee Anderson is a writer of upmarket fiction and personal essays. Her work can be found in Hobart, The Emerson Review, and Barstow & Grand. Elena founded the Writing to Wholeness Collective and facilitates writing workshops focused on healing and community organizing in prisons and domestic abuse shelters. Her work has been recognized by the National Alliance for Young Artists and Writers; the New Millennium Writing Awards; the Book Life Prize; and the San Francisco Writers Conference. Elena works among national leaders in the movement to end domestic and sexual violence. Find her online at elenaleeanderson.wordpress.com.