12. Madeleine
MADELEINE
First Freeze Lantern Celebration
Light flurries
Supper: Beef & barley soup · Bread bowls
Iwatched the entire gang headed out for the lantern walk from the lodge window.
All bundled up for the cold, they held little glass lanterns Finley had handed out, the lights bobbing down the path into the pines like a string of large lightning bugs.
Off past the trees, where the pond had cooperatively frozen on schedule for the lantern and skating night, I heard somebody shrieking with laughter and somebody else calling out to be careful.
I could have gone, but Knox couldn’t walk that far on crutches, especially on that trail in the dark. Oddly enough, I didn’t want to go without him. Which should have frightened me more than it did, but apparently good old Mindy Sue had possessed my body like a ghost.
Instead, I’d invited Knox to join me in the lodge after dinner where we could sit in the big room by the fire and enjoy a drink and some quiet.
I hadn’t had much time alone with him since the night before, when he’d been so open and honest with me that I’d had a silent panic attack and fled.
However, I’d awakened this morning with a promise to myself.
A gift, actually. For the rest of the month, regardless if it was only the Montana air that had rendered us newly open to each other, I would let it be.
I would let Knox in. Enjoy our time together, even if it was fleeting, which I felt strongly it was.
Knox Hartley was not about to become permanently enamored with me simply because he now knew what I’d done all those years ago.
Again, my least favorite word popped into my mind—owe.
The idea of him being nice because he felt like he owed me something was absolutely too horrid to think about, so I would choose not to.
I left Knox by the fire with his guitar and ordered a glass of wine for me and a Jack for Knox from the young lady at the front desk. She promised to bring it over from the bar.
“I ordered drinks,” I said to him as I sat on the couch before the fire.
“You’ve recovered fully from your one night bender?”
“Very funny,” I said. “And I’ll only be having one glass.”
I would not be repeating my behavior from the other night.
“That’s too bad,” he said.
“Did you write today?” I asked, ignoring him and gesturing toward his guitar.
“Yeah, I’ve been working on a song about my grandfather.”
“Oh, sing it for me?”
“It’s still a work in progress, but I’ll sing you what I have. Imagine this with Jack’s voice, not mine.”
“I like your voice.” He didn’t have Jack’s range or tone, but it was pleasant to me.
“Here goes.”
He bent his head over the strings a moment before he started to play. I’d seen him do it on stage a hundred times, and it always made me wonder what he thought about in that breath before the first note.
He started to sing.
He told me to kiss a girl under the full moon
But only if I meant to make her swoon
When the last note died, he didn’t look up right away. He kept his hand flat on the strings, stilling them. “Still figuring out the rest.”
“It’s really good,” I said.
“I don’t know what it is about this place, but I’ve been thinking about Gramps a lot. All these lessons he taught me, and how I turned them into rituals.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“You must think I’m not quite right in the head.”
I laughed. “I thought that a time or two. Especially the one about not kissing a woman under a full moon. Where did that come from?”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Come on, tell me.”
“I kissed a girl under a full moon when I was seventeen. Then her father came after me with his shotgun.”
My mouth dropped open. “For real?”
“Yep. I figured it was Gramps up in heaven, reminding me of the rules.”
I pressed my fingers against my mouth to keep from laughing again. “No way.”
He gave me a rueful smile. “I know.”
“I can tell you what your rituals are,” I said.
“Yeah?”
I rattled them off.
By the end, he was staring at me. “I didn’t realize it was so obvious.”
“Maybe not to everyone. But to me, yes.” I notice everything about you.
“I built a whole life out of Gramps’ sayings. Not the wisdom he actually meant—I turned them into superstitions. Told myself it was just something a musician did. Everybody’s got their thing, especially about performances.” He shook his head. “But that’s not what they were.”
“What were they then?”
“Everything he told me, I took after he died and shrank into a fistful of rules I could keep. Because if I followed them—if I just did everything exactly right—then maybe no one else could get taken from me.” His voice roughened.
“I thought the rules kept me safe. Really they just kept me in a cage.” He looked into the fire.
“I don’t know why, but a lot of things have become clear since I came here. ”
“For me too,” I said.
We sat there for a moment. A staff member came by to throw a few more logs onto the fire. After she left, I turned to him.
“Do you want to see a photo of Mindy Sue?” I asked.
“If you want to show me, yes.”
I took out my phone and pulled up the photo I kept of me at twelve years old.
A reminder of the person I never wanted to be again.
She kept me on track. One look at the picture, and I remembered my purpose.
I turned the screen around and held it out to him.
“That’s Mindy Sue Price. She’s twelve there.
” My teeth were crooked. I sported a bowl hair cut by my mother.
Chubby cheeks covered with pimples. And that awful nose.
A pig nose. That’s what a boy at school had called it, which spread like wild fire.
Someone started calling me Watson from Mercy Watson to the Rescue, a story about a pig who loved buttered toast.
He took my phone in his large hand, looking down at the photo.
“That’s my real nose. The teeth I fixed the same year as the nose with braces I paid for myself.
No amount of praying had sent magical money to my mother’s bank account to pay for them when I was a kid.
” I was talking too fast. “Mindy’s chubby because we ate what was cheap, and what’s cheap is what makes you look like that.
And her clothes are wrong. You can’t see it maybe but they’re out of style, bought at the thrift store.
Other kids can smell that on you. The scent of poverty.
They made sure I knew what they thought of me.
Over and over again.” I stopped to take in a deep breath.
“That’s who I actually am, Knox. After a nose job and elocution lessons I paid a woman four hundred dollars an hour for. That’s the factory setting.”
He didn’t say anything. He was still looking at the photograph.
“I keep her right here on my phone so I never forget who I used to be. Then I put my armor on and take Madeleine into the world. I never, ever let anybody see Mindy Sue because she’s dead.
I killed her. Only thing left of her is this photo.
” My eyes were burning. “Which, I’ve never shown to anyone. Not even Rhett.”
He looked at the photo a moment longer. And then he gazed up at me, his eyes damp. I braced for a platitude, a kind lie that would tell me he didn’t truly understand the power of the photograph and the way it shaped my thinking every moment of every day. You were beautiful, or you’re beautiful now.
He didn’t say any of that.
“You look exactly the same.”
“What?” I sat up straighter, sure he was joking.
“I mean, your nose and teeth are different. You lost your baby fat. Your hair’s now handled by professionals.
But I know her.” He turned the phone back around and looked at twelve-year-old me one more time.
He smiled gently and tapped the screen with the pads of his fingers.
“She’s a girl with so much grit and courage that she found a way out of the cycle of poverty.
She’s a survivor. A warrior. Yeah, that’s who I see when I look at her. So yes, you look exactly the same.”
He handed the phone back to me, and his hand closed over mine for a second, warm and dry.
“You look at a picture of the bravest person you’ve ever known and use it to keep yourself in line.
That’s the part that makes me sad. Mindy Sue’s the reason you’re here.
She did all of it. She got you out. So don’t tell me she’s anything but perfect.
You don’t need her as a cautionary tale.
She is you and you are her and for that you should be grateful, not scared or ashamed. ”
I closed my eyes, really taking in what he said, and allowed myself, for the length of one held breath, to believe his words were true. Even though I knew, when we left the firelight in this beautiful snow globe of a lodge where nothing real could reach us, it would not last.
He reached into his back pocket to pull out his own phone. “You want to see a picture of me and Gramps?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, pulling up a photo and then handing it over to me. “I’m eight there.”
I looked down at an eight-year-old version of Knox Harley.
He wore a pair of jean overalls and held a line with a fish on the end.
He was grinning from ear to ear, gaps where his front teeth should have been.
Next to him stood a man with a shock of white hair, but, unlike Knox, he wasn’t looking at the camera.
His gaze was focused on his grandson, and his expression of love told me everything I needed to know about this man who had been Knox’s special person.
“Do you remember when it was taken?” I asked, my voice husky.
“Sure, I do. I don’t know who was prouder of that fish, him or me.
But you know, it was just one day of many.
Wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t just an ordinary Sunday, you know?
It was the cumulative Sundays that turned me into the man I am now.
The hours the two of us sat on the bank of a fishing hole and communicated without even needing to talk.
He was always there for me, without judgment.
Just loved me the way I was. I guess I’ve been chasing that kind of love ever since.
Finally found it with Jack and the boys. ”
“The little boy he helped raise turned into a fine man.”
“You really think so?” The stark vulnerability in his eyes stopped me cold.
“I know so.”
“I’m sorry about the times my principles combined with my hot head have caused you trouble,” Knox said. “I’ve been wanting to say that to you.”
I smiled, reaching over to touch his cheek, wanting to kiss him.
“I never thought I’d say this out loud, but I kind of got a kick out of it.
Not every day you see a man risk his reputation by setting merch made by kids on fire in protest. Which we didn’t know, by the way.
I should have thanked you for figuring it out. ”
He blinked, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He leaned closer until his mouth was inches from mine. “How do you feel about public displays of affection?”
I laughed, looking around the empty room. “It’s just you, me, and the Christmas tree.”
“Another possible song title?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead he captured my mouth in his, and everything else faded away. I let myself be there in the moment, feeling safe and cared for. However long it lasted, I would let myself have it.