Chapter 4
Ash
The road into Lakeview Restoration is a mile and a half of private drive and it was plowed better than the county highway, and I want to start there, because that's the whole place in one detail.
Somebody paid a man to be out there at four in the morning making sure that the first thing you feel, coming in, is taken care of.
"That's a good plow job," Wren said.
"Is it?"
"It's a great plow job. He's got the banks laid back so the drifting doesn't rebuild. Most guys just push it and go home." She frowned at the windrow. "That's an eleven-hundred-dollar-a-month plow job."
"Is that a lot?"
"For a mile and a half of driveway in a county with four hundred people in it? Ash, that's somebody's whole living."
Then the trees opened up and there it was, and she stopped talking.
Long low buildings in cedar and stone, snow on everything, and the lake past it going white and flat all the way out to a line of pines on the far shore that looked drawn on. Woodsmoke. Two chimneys. A stack of split hardwood under an eave, done properly, bark side up.
And out past the main lodge, in the field, seven men in canvas coats splitting rounds with mauls, working easy, one of them laughing at something, breath going up off all of them in the cold like they were something powering the place.
"Huh," Wren said.
"Yeah."
"That's the magazine photograph."
"That's the magazine photograph," I said.
Sylvie Marchand came out onto the steps before we'd shut the doors.
She's maybe fifty-five. Silver hair cut short, no makeup that I could see, a good gray sweater and boots that had actually been outside. She's got a way of standing very still while you approach, and the stillness reads as patience, and the patience reads as I have nowhere else to be.
"Mr. Delacroix." Both hands out. She took mine in both of hers. "You should have called ahead. I'd have had a room made up."
"We weren't sure of the timing."
"Nine hours in this weather." She looked past me and up, at Delores, and her face opened. "Is this yours?"
"It is," Wren said.
"Would you mind terribly if I looked at it later? My brother drove a wrecker in Sault Ste. Marie for nineteen years and I have never once been up in one."
And I watched Wren Adeyemi — who had not been impressed by a foundry, thirty motorcycles, or a man telling her the truth in a locked room — get hit exactly on the seam.
"Sure," she said.
"Wonderful. Come in. You must be Wren."
"How'd you know that?"
"Because Kai has your photograph on his wall," Marchand said, "and because he mentions you more than he mentions anyone, and because you look exactly like the way he talks about you." She held the door. "Come in out of it. There's bread."
Behind her back, without looking at me, Wren held up one finger.
One. One point. She'd told me she didn't get charmed and I'd told her everybody does, and the woman had gotten there in under ninety seconds with bread.
They gave us the tour. That's the thing about the place. They give you the tour before you ask for the tour.
Rooms: single occupancy, actual doors that lock from the inside, a window in every one. Kitchen: two cooks, a walk-in with real food in it, a whiteboard where residents write requests and somebody had written SOMETHING SPICY. ANYTHING. PLEASE. and somebody else had written THURSDAY underneath it.
Wren stopped at that whiteboard for a good four seconds.
Clinic: a nurse practitioner named Bea who'd been there six years and answered questions before we asked them. Medication room, double-locked, log book, count sheets initialed twice a day going back years.
"May I?" Wren said, at the log.
"Of course," Marchand said.
Wren read three pages of it. She reads paperwork the way other people read faces.
"It's clean," she said to me, quietly, in the hall.
"I know."
"No, Ash. It's clean. I've audited fuel logs for nine years and I know what a book looks like when somebody's massaging it, and this isn't that. This is somebody who counts pills twice a day because they want to."
"I know."
"That's not comforting."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
They fed us at noon with the residents, which no facility I've ever heard of does, because it makes the visitors into people and the residents into hosts and there's no controlling either.
We ate at a long table with six men and a cook. Chili, cornbread, an argument about the chili.
"It's not spicy."
"It's plenty spicy."
"Deacon, it's got a bell pepper in it. A bell pepper is a vegetable that's given up."
"Somebody wrote SOMETHING SPICY on the board," said the cook, mildly, "and somebody else wrote THURSDAY, and today is Tuesday, so I don't want to hear it."
The man across from me was maybe fifty-five, big hands, a beard going white in a stripe. He'd been there five months. He asked what I did and I told him, and he put his spoon down.
"Thirty ton?"
"Thirty ton."
"What's your boom?"
"Underlift, twenty-five."
"Get out."
"You want to see it?"
And that's how I ended up in a coat in nineteen degrees at twelve-forty in the afternoon showing four grown men in a treatment program the controls on Delores, one of whom used to run a rollback in Bay City before everything, and who put his hand flat on the fender the way you'd touch a horse.
"Don't let 'em tell you the new ones are better," he said.
"They're not."
"They're not."
"Electronics in the winter," I said.
"Electronics in the winter," he said, with feeling, and I stood there in the snow with something in my throat, because that man was well, and he was well because of that building, and I had come there to find something wrong with it.
Ash watched the whole thing from the steps with his hands in his pockets and didn't say a word about it until Ohio.
We saw the woodlot. We saw the shop, where a man was rebuilding a Kohler engine with the parts laid out on a towel in an order I recognized. We saw the dock, buried. We saw the lake.
And Marchand talked the whole time and never once sold us anything.
That's the part I couldn't get past, then or later.
She didn't pitch. She'd say things like the wood is nonsense, therapeutically, but they like it and it's warm in here so it's not nothing, or our completion numbers are good but I'd distrust anyone who quotes you completion numbers, because you can get any number you like by choosing who you admit.
Wren said: "So who do you admit?"
"Men no one else will take," Marchand said. "That's not a virtue. It's a market position. There is enormous demand and almost no supply and I have never had to advertise."
"Then why were you in a dentist's magazine?"
Marchand laughed — genuinely, delighted. "Oh, that. A patient of my sister's wrote it. She was very kind and got two facts wrong." She looked at me. "That's how you found us. I remember."
"You remember every intake?"
"I remember every man," she said. "There have been eighty-one."
Before that, Marchand walked me through her office, which is the smallest room in the building and has a window onto the parking lot rather than the lake, and I noticed that and hated noticing it.
"Ask me the hard one," she said. "You've been circling it since the medication room."
"How do you afford this?"
"Poorly." She sat on the edge of the desk. "Forty percent private pay, which is the men whose families have money and whose families are usually the reason they need us. Twenty percent county contracts that pay eleven months late. And the rest is — " she made a gesture — "arrangements."
"Arrangements."
"Grants, a foundation in Grand Rapids, aftercare partners.
" She smiled slightly. "Mr. Delacroix, you've been paying me four hundred and ten dollars a week for four years out of what I assume is not a salaried position, and you have never once asked me for an itemization, and I've always thought that was strange of you. "
"I trusted you."
"Yes," she said. "That's what I mean."
I've replayed that eleven times. There's no read of it where she's warning me. There's also no read of it where she isn't.
They brought Kai to the front room at two.
I've thought a lot about how to write down what was wrong with him and the trouble is that nothing was.
He'd gained about twelve pounds and it was the good kind. He'd shaved. His color was back. His hands were still — Kai's hands have never been still in the six years I've known him, he drums, he picks at labels, he takes apart the sugar caddy — and they lay in his lap like two things at rest.
He saw Wren and he smiled.
"Isolde," he said. Then: "Sorry. Wren."
And I watched a woman get hit by a truck without moving a muscle.
"Hey, bud," she said.
"You came."
"That's the rule."
"That's the rule," he agreed, pleasantly, the way you'd agree that it was February.
They sat. I stood by the window because I'd decided in the hallway that I'd say nothing for the first ten minutes, and it was the only smart thing I did that day.
"You missed three Sundays," Wren said.
"I know. I'm sorry. It's — the phone thing here is on a schedule, and Tuesdays work better for the group, and I kept meaning to write."
"You could have written."
"I know."
"Kai."
"I know, Wren." Still pleasant. Still smiling.
"I've been thinking about it a lot, actually.
In group. About how much of my life has been organized around not disappointing you, and how — " he stopped, checked something internally, and came back with it — "and how that's a load.
For both of us. That's a load I put on you when I was seven. "
"You didn't put anything on me when you were seven."
"I think I did."
"Kai, I wrote it on you."
"You did," he said. "I've thought about that too."
The fire moved. Somebody outside dropped a round of oak and it made that hollow sound.
"Do you want to come home?" Wren said.
And here's the thing — he took the question seriously. That's what got me. If he'd been drugged, if he'd been coached, he'd have had it ready. Instead he sat with it for probably eight full seconds, looking at the fire, like a man being asked about a job offer.
"No," Kai said. "Not yet. I don't think I'm done."
"Done with what?"
"I don't know how to say it in a way that doesn't sound like a brochure."
"Try."
"It's the first place I've ever been," he said, "where nobody needs anything from me."
Wren's hands were flat on her knees.
"I need things from you," she said.
"I know," said Kai. "That's what I mean."
"Tell me one thing about it," Wren said. "One real thing. Not the fire, not the food."
Kai considered it seriously. He considers everything seriously now. That's the thing I couldn't stop noticing — he'd become a man who considers, and every considered answer was another inch of distance.
"There's a guy here named Deacon," he said. "Fifty-something. Ran a rollback in Bay City."
"I met him."
"You met him? Wren, don't — "
"I showed him the truck."
"Oh, that's — " and for one second, one, my prospect's whole face came back, delighted, appalled. "You showed Deacon the truck? He's going to be insufferable. He's going to talk about that at dinner for a week."
"He said the new ones aren't better."
"He says that about everything! He said that about the bread!"
And they laughed, both of them, at the same time, in the same register — a family sound, the kind you can't fake — and it lasted about three seconds and then Kai put it away, visibly, the way you'd close a drawer.
"Anyway," he said. "He's my roommate's sponsor. That's the thing I was going to say. There's a whole — there's a structure here. Everybody's holding somebody."
"Who are you holding?" Wren said.
He blinked.
"Nobody yet."
"Who's holding you?"
"Everybody," said Kai, pleasantly, and that is the single most frightening sentence I heard in that building.
I got about ninety seconds with him alone in the hallway while Wren was in the restroom with the door shut, doing whatever she was doing in there, which I did not and do not ask about.
"VP."
"Kid."
"You look tired."
"I drove."
"You always drive," he said, and smiled, and it was almost — almost — his actual smile.
"Kai. Marcus Trill."
Nothing. Not a flicker, not a tightening, nothing.
"Who?"
"Marcus. Prospect before you. Little guy, drove the Ranger with the bad door. He was up here last year."
"I don't think I know him," Kai said.
"He'd have been here in the spring."
"There's a lot of guys." He shrugged, easy, and then he said — and this is the sentence I drove home with — "The graduates don't really come back through, though. That's kind of the point, right?"
"Who told you that?"
"Nobody told me that," said Kai. "That's just what it is."
In the truck, in the lot, with the engine off and the cold starting to come in through the glass, Wren sat with her hands on the wheel of a truck she wasn't driving.
"He called me Isolde," she said.
"I heard."
"He's called me Wren since he was four. He doesn't know Isolde. That's what's on the state paperwork. That's the name a caseworker calls me."
"Yeah."
"Nobody's hurting him."
"No."
"He's healthier than I've seen him since he was nineteen. The pill log's clean. The staff are good. That woman remembers eighty-one men's names." She turned her head. "Ash, I have been in eleven bad places in my life and I know the smell and this place does not have it. It smells like bread."
"I know."
"So tell me what's wrong with it."
I looked out at the field. The men had finished. The wood was stacked, bark side up, in a line so straight it made me think of thirty motorcycles in gravel.
"When Denny came home," I said, "he was angry."
"What?"
"Four months up here, and he came back and he was furious. At me, at the club, at his mother, at the guy who sold to him. He yelled at me in the parking lot for twenty minutes. He said I'd shipped him off like a package."
"And?"
"And that's what getting better looks like," I said. "It's ugly and loud and it argues with you. Denny fought me for a year."
Wren looked at the lodge. Woodsmoke going straight up. Somebody had put a lamp on in a window.
"Kai didn't argue with me once," she said.
"No."
"Kai's argued with me every day of his life."
"Yes."
"There's nothing to hit," she said.
"No," I said. "There's nothing to hit. That's the part I couldn't explain in Pennsylvania. Everything up here is a yes, and every yes is legal, and the woman running it would give you her coat."
Wren was quiet a long moment.
"Then we don't hit it," she said. "We read it."
"Read what?"
"She gave you discharge records four years ago, right? For Denny. Because you asked."
"Yeah."
"So ask again," Wren said, and started the truck. "Ask nicely. She'll say yes. That's the whole thing about this place, Ash — she always says yes."