Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Bodul
Somewhere past Nashville the air starts to change, and my body knows it before the map does.
The wet green heat I've spent years calling home thins out mile by mile, and by the time I cross into Kentucky the wind turns mean and cutting, and by Illinois the sky's gone the flat gray of a thing that's forgotten how to be blue.
I ride into the cold like a man riding backward through his own life.
Every hour north peels a layer off the version of me that Tindra knows, the one who fixes her grout, drinks cortados, and lies still under her while she sleeps, and puts the old one back on in its place.
Colder. Emptier.
A boy who learned to hold still on a staircase because holding still was the only thing that ever made it stop.
My hands go numb around the grips somewhere in Wisconsin, and I don't stop to warm them, because stopping means thinking, and thinking means turning the bike around.
I should turn the bike around.
I don't.
The plan was one hard push, Tallahassee to Duluth in a day and a half, sleep for maybe four hours.
My body has other ideas.
Around four in the morning outside Eau Claire, the road starts to double on itself, the lane lines sliding sideways.
I catch myself drifting toward the shoulder with my eyes half shut, and I know the difference between tired and dangerous the way you know it after enough years on two wheels.
I pull into a motel with a sign missing half its letters and pay cash for a room that smells like other people's cigarettes.
I don't sleep so much as lose consciousness for four hours.
I dream about the staircase, because of course I do, and I wake with my heart going and my shirt stuck to my back.
Then I get back on the bike, and I finish the ride into the place that made me.
Duluth comes up out of the lake like a gray fist.
The hill, the water going on forever and cold enough to stop your heart in June.
The houses stacked up the slope with their backs against the wind.
I know these streets in my spine.
I know which corner store used to sell to kids, which alley you cut through to lose someone following you, and which house on which street has a staircase I'd burn to the ground if fire could reach that far back.
I park across from it and I don't get off the bike.
The house is smaller than it lives in my head. They always are.
Peeling paint the color of old teeth, a sagging porch, a window upstairs with a sheet tacked over it where a curtain should be.
Somebody's car up on blocks in the side yard, weeds grown through the wheel wells.
It looks like nothing. It looks like every tired house in every tired town.
It looks like the worst place I've ever been.
I sit there long enough that a neighbor twitches a blind, and I think about Tindra's parking lot, about sitting outside her shop yesterday morning unable to make myself walk in.
I almost laugh, because here's what nobody's clocked about me yet.
I'm a man who keeps arriving at doors he can't go through.
Then the front door opens, and it's not my father standing in it.
It's a girl.
Marit.
The last time I saw her she was seven, gap-toothed, hair in two braids I did myself and did badly, small enough to carry on my hip when our father's voice came up the stairs.
The girl in the doorway is sixteen, tall and thin in a way that isn't the good kind, arms crossed over a hoodie two sizes too big, watching me cross the street toward her with a face that's decided nothing yet.
"You came," she says.
Not glad. Not surprised. Only marking it, the way you'd note weather.
"I came." My voice comes out rough from the road, the cold, and nine years of not using it to say her name. "Look at you. You're?—"
"Don't." She steps back to let me in, and it's not a welcome, it's just moving out of a doorway. "Don't tell me how big I got. You missed it. You don't get to be amazed at the part you missed."
She meant that to sting, and it does.
I follow her inside, and the house swallows me the way I knew it would.
Same smell, cigarettes, dampness and something fried a long time ago.
I keep my eyes off the staircase and mostly manage it.
She takes me to the kitchen and puts the width of the table between us and looks at me.
I make myself look back, and what I see makes my stomach drop through the floor.
It's not the thinness, though that scares me.
It's not the chipped black polish or the way she holds herself like she's bracing for a hand that hasn't been raised yet.
It's her eyes.
She's got our father's trick already, the flatness he puts on like a coat, the nothing you show the world so the world can't use what it finds.
Sixteen and she's already learned to go empty on command.
Somebody taught her that. I know exactly who, and I know exactly what it's for.
"How bad is it?"
"How bad is what?" She doesn't uncross her arms.
"Here. Him. Whatever he's got you doing." I hold my voice level and it takes everything in me to keep it there. "You called for me. He said you asked for me. So talk to me, Marit. How bad?"
She picks at the chipped polish on one thumbnail and doesn't answer for a while, and when she does her voice comes out older than sixteen, worn smooth, rehearsed.
"He takes me places now," she says. "Nice places. Dinners. He says I'm good at it. Making people comfortable, getting them talking." She shrugs one shoulder, and the casualness of it turns my stomach worse than tears would. "He says I've got a gift. That I'm going to be worth a lot to the family."
Worth a lot. I hear my father's mouth in hers, his exact arithmetic, and I want to put my fist through the wall behind her head.
"That's not a gift," I say. "That's him getting you ready to sell."
"Don't." Her eyes come up fast, and for one second there's a flash of the kid I left, furious and terrified at once.
"You don't get to ride in here after all these years and tell me what my life is.
You left. You got out. Good for you." Her voice cracks on the last word and she hates that it does, I can see her hate it.
"Some of us didn't have a bike and a fake name waiting. "
For a second something moves behind the flat, something young and drowning, and she almost, almost lets me see the whole of it.
Then the front door bangs, and whatever I saw goes back under.
She straightens off the counter like a soldier hearing a boot in the hall.
"You shouldn't have come," she says, fast and low, and it's the truest thing she's said. "Whatever he offers you, don't. Just get back on your bike."
"Marit—"
"He's here."
My father fills the kitchen doorway, and eleven years fall away like they were nothing.
Bigger than his voice on the phone, though smaller than the giant on the staircase.
Gone gray and gone soft in the gut, but the eyes are the same, cold and clean and already doing arithmetic on me, adding up what I'm worth.
Behind him in the hall I clock two men I don't know, big, still, hands loose at their sides.
Men who get paid to be a wall until someone tells them to be a fist.
"There he is." My father spreads his arms like he'd hug me if we were people who did that. "My boy. Rode all this way." He looks me over, the road on me, the exhaustion. "You look like hell."
"Say what you brought me here to say." I stay planted in the middle of the kitchen and don't move toward the chair he wants me in.
"Sit down first. Marit, get your brother a?—"
"She doesn't need to get me anything." I don't sit. "You told me I had two days. You've got until I'm bored. Talk."
He smiles, and it's Marit's flatness with teeth in it.
He pulls out a chair and sits himself even though I won't, because he wants me standing while he's easy, wants the room arranged so I'm the one with nowhere to put my hands.
"There's people," he says, "with an interest in your new friends."
And he lays it out, and it's exactly as blank as it was on the phone, and that vagueness is the worst part.
People. That's all he'll give me.
People with money, people with reach, people who've been watching the Raiders of Valhalla and have decided there's something inside that club they want.
It's Tindra. It was always going to be Tindra.
He doesn't say buyer. He doesn't say what they want her for.
He doesn't have to, because I've spent years inside that club, and I've heard the story the way you hear the stories that hold a place together, in pieces, over fires, in the half-sentences men use for what they can't say all the way out loud.
I know what the Raiders did, years back, to an operation like the one my father's fronting for now.
I know they found it, they ended it, and they didn't leave enough of it to bury.
And I know why.
I know the part nobody says above a certain volume, the part about their own, about a teenager who got taken and used as breeding stock for a ring that treated people like livestock, made to father children on command for buyers who ordered them like stock in a store.
I know that man walks around that club now with a gavel in his future and a daughter he'd burn the world for.
They want to do to Tindra what was done to Tor.
And my father wants me to open the door.
The kitchen tilts. I put a hand on the back of the empty chair and hold the room still by force.
"No," I say.
"Anders—"
"The answer's no. It was no on the phone, and it's no now, and nothing you do to me in this kitchen turns it into a yes.
" I make myself look at Marit, pressed into the corner by the sink, gone flat and far away.
"You want to take care of her, you take care of her.
You don't get to hang her over a fire and call it a deal. "
My father sighs, like I've disappointed him at something small.
"That's a shame," he says, and he doesn't raise his voice, he never had to, that was always the worst of him. "I told them you'd see sense. I told them, my boy's a lot of things, but he's not stupid." He nods at the hall, once, barely. "Turns out I raised a disappointment after all."
The two men come off the wall.
I get one good hit in.