Chapter 1 Ilsa
Ilsa
Once upon a time, I called this cabin on Cotters Lake home.
As I spun in a slow circle, past swirled with present. Then and now.
Then.
A crackling fireplace and the steady clicks from Mom’s knitting needles. The scents of cigars and sugar cookies. A small living room, but a clean, happy room. A little girl with dirt under her fingernails, curled on her father’s lap as he read her a story.
Now.
Dust motes floating past dirty windows. Stale air with the faint stench of a long-dead mouse. Clutter beyond clutter to the point of chaos. A tattered recliner and lonely, quiet rooms.
Dad’s cabin was smaller than I remembered. The ceilings seemed too short, the walls too close.
Probably to be expected, considering the last time I’d been in this house, I’d been sixteen. A lot had changed in the past ten years. Yet if I closed my eyes, I was that little girl again, curled on her father’s lap.
My earliest memory was in this cabin. In this living room. I’d been three, maybe four.
There was a fire burning in the stove. Dad had built it for Mom before he’d left to go ice fishing on the lake because Mom didn’t like building fires. She got splinters from the wood.
Frost trimmed the windows. The couch was pushed into a corner to make space for the Christmas tree. Mom and I were decorating it with ornaments while she complained about the insufferable snow.
That was the day I’d learned what insufferable meant.
Mom was upset because we’d had to cancel our shopping trip to Missoula when they’d closed the roads. I’d been too young to remember her exact words, but the way she’d spoken about Montana had always been such a contrast to Dad’s feelings.
He’d been sunshine. She’d been gloom. His lifestyle had been her misery.
Until the spring I’d turned six, when the snow melted, the daffodils bloomed, and Mom loaded me into her olive-green Oldsmobile and left Dalton.
Left Dad.
Mom had been lighter after that. Happier. But her joy had been the death of his laughter. Their roles had switched. She’d blossomed. He’d withered.
Daylight and despair.
And somewhere in the middle: me.
Always in the middle. Until now. Dad was dead and there wasn’t a middle to occupy.
A shiver chased down my spine. Goose bumps dotted my forearms. The fire I’d started in the hearth was rushing to a roar, but it hadn’t chased away the cold yet.
It had been twenty years since I’d spent a winter in Montana.
I’d forgotten just how bitterly cold it could get.
I’d been back in Dalton for a week, and the temperatures had dropped lower and lower each day.
But despite the cold, the winters were beautiful.
Even Mom couldn’t argue the splendor of Montana covered in snow.
Beyond the filmy windows, the sun had dipped below the jagged mountain horizon.
Its fading light tinged the world in blues and violets.
The trees looked more indigo than green.
Beneath their trunks, the yard was blanketed with snow.
Past the boat dock, the frozen lake stretched from one icy shore to the next.
Once upon a time, I’d loved that lake. I’d spent countless hours swimming, playing on the gravel beach, and floating on an old inner tube.
Strange that I could remember a Christmas from decades ago, but I couldn’t remember who’d taught me to swim. Was it Dad? For as long as I could remember, I’d just known how to swim.
He’d been a good swimmer too.
Just not good enough.
My heart twisted, the pain a constant companion this week.
I’d spent most of the past week avoiding this cabin, throwing myself into my new teaching job at Dalton High School.
And when I was here, I’d hidden in my childhood bedroom, huddled beneath blankets, blocking out the memories and cold.
But a week of surviving in this clutter was enough.
I’d come to Montana to settle my father’s estate. To clean this cabin and sell it in the spring.
To say goodbye.
Yesterday, I’d tackled the kitchen. Tonight, maybe I’d find the living room couch. It was buried somewhere beneath a mountain of boxes and bags and whatever else Dad had been collecting over the last ten years.
When I’d arrived last weekend, I’d barely been able to get into the cabin, so I’d focused on cleaning the essential rooms. The bathroom. My bedroom. The spaces I’d needed to survive my first week in Dalton.
Everything else, well . . . ignorance wasn’t bliss, but it was my favorite hobby. Except there was simply no more ignoring the hoard of junk my father had amassed in this tiny house.
Dad had piled boxes nearly to the ceiling, leaving only narrow paths to move from room to room. The entryway was still overloaded, mostly from stuff I’d moved off my bed so I could sleep.
Was this mess my punishment for not visiting Dad sooner? How long had he been living like this?
I should know the answer. But Ike Poe had always been a bit of a mystery, even before I’d stopped coming to Montana for my summer vacations. That mystery would remain unsolved now that he was gone.
Maybe in this sea of boxes, I’d learn more about the man my father had been before his death.
I walked to the closest stack, stretching onto my tiptoes to heft down the box at the top. A puff of dust billowed off the cardboard as I set it beside my feet. Whatever was inside gave a tinny clatter.
Prying open the box’s flaps, I did a double take at the contents. “Cans.”
Empty cans. From the looks of it, Dad had been surviving on Campbell’s Tomato Soup and Western Family Whole Kernel Corn.
I pushed the cans aside, making sure there wasn’t anything else in the box. Then I carried it outside, adding it to the growing pile in the snowy driveway. The next three boxes were more empty cans. They joined the heap, destined for the dump.
As I lifted down the fifth box, heavier than the others and hopefully not full of cans, the phone rang, interrupting my cleaning.
It was a Sunday. Troy always called on Sundays.
Dread swirled with excitement—excitement that felt more like a habit than genuine interest.
For years, I’d looked forward to these Sunday calls. I’d made sure, no matter what, I was home whenever my phone rang. I’d loved the familiarity of Troy’s voice on a Sunday evening. I’d loved the consistency of talking to my friend. My best friend.
Were we best friends? We had been once. I wasn’t sure what we were right now.
Maybe we were two people who needed to stop talking on Sundays.
Yet I set the box aside and walked to the phone, lifting the handset from its cradle. “Hello?”
“Hello.” Troy’s one word was laced with enough pity to fill a thousand of Dad’s empty soup cans.
Did all grieving people reach the point when they were fucking tired of receiving sympathy?
“How are you?” he asked.
“Good,” I lied.
“Ilsa.” My name in that smooth timbre, and my shoulders sagged. He knew me well enough to hear through a bad lie.
“I’m taking it one day at a time.” I walked to the closest window, stretching the phone’s spiral cord to its limit.
Beyond the filmy glass, night was falling. It was still early, just after five o’clock, but the short winter days meant the sun had already set, giving way to long winter nights.
Dad used to say there wasn’t a place on earth that had as many stars as the shoreline of Cotters Lake after dark. Maybe after I got these windows cleaned, I’d actually be able to see them.
“How was the first week in Montana?” Troy asked.
I groaned. “Rough. But I’ve got a job.”
“Yeah? That’s great. How’s it going?”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure what the previous teacher was doing with these kids, but it wasn’t teaching them math.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Beyond bad. I gave everyone a review test on last semester’s material. Only half of the juniors and seniors passed. A third of the sophomores. And of the fifteen freshmen, only two passed. And when I say passed, I mean they each got seventy percent.”
“Ouch. Sorry.”
“There’s nowhere to go but up, right?”
Troy chuckled. “There’s that sunny optimism.”
A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. “You know me. I’ll never give up on a kid.”
“As you shouldn’t. And the house? How’s it coming?”
“I haven’t made much progress yet.”
My focus this past week had been on work.
I’d driven into town early each morning and stayed late at the school each evening, trying to make sense of the previous teacher’s notes and chaotic filing system.
Every student seemed to have a different version of the curriculum textbook, and either they were all putting me through some sort of strange hazing ritual or none of them actually knew what chapter they’d been on when she left before winter break.
It was a thirty-minute trip from Cotters Lake to Dalton, and by the time I’d gotten home each evening, I’d been too tired to tackle the cleaning. Though this weekend, I’d made some progress.
Yesterday, I’d scoured kitchen cabinets and washed dishes and scrubbed countertops so that I could cook and use the sink and stove.
This morning, I’d spent hours in the laundry room, clearing out old boots and coats and Dad’s collection of fishing gear, moving it to the shed.
The door to his bedroom had stayed firmly shut.
I wasn’t ready to go in there yet, to sort his clothes.
“I don’t know what to keep,” I told Troy. “And the fact that I don’t know what to keep and what to trash makes me feel guilty.”
A good daughter who knew her father wouldn’t have hesitated. She would have known what he’d deemed important. What he would have wanted me to have.
A good daughter would have cried for the loss of her father.
It hurt being here. Missing him. Regretting him. But I hadn’t cried, not once. Not yet.
“Are you sure you want to do this alone?” Troy asked. “We can hire someone to do the cleaning. Then you can put it on the market and leave it behind.”
“No,” I whispered.