Death Under the Bridge

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

It was hard not to keep thinking of the phrase "for the last time," but those four words were haunting me as I moved from room to room through the only house I had ever known as home. I would check that nothing had been left in the closets or cupboards, that every surface was clean and free of dust. Then I would walk out of that room, and I would think my thoughts were only on the same tasks awaiting me in the next room, but then those four words would pop into my brain out of nowhere.

I was closing my bedroom door. For the last time.

I was opening the shower door to make sure the tile was still clean and bright, then leaving the bathroom my mother and I had shared since I was a toddler. For the last time.

I ended in the kitchen. The plan was to go out the back door and head to my little yellow Volkswagen that was stuffed with all of my personal belongings as well as my cat Mjolner, who had surely escaped from his crate by now. He always did.

But instead, I just came to a stop against the counter. I couldn't leave, not yet. But why? I was certain I hadn't forgotten anything. And yet I felt like I was waiting for something to happen. But there was nothing left to do at the house. The only task that remained was signing the final paperwork at the realtor's office in the morning.

I closed my eyes and tried to stop thinking entirely. Usually, when I was trying to remember something, this was the best way to summon it up. It's not that I have a bad memory; it's just that I tend to have a lot of things going on in my mind at any one time, and quieting everything down for a moment usually lets the less demanding thoughts rise to the surface.

I focused just on my breath at first, but then I heard the sound of birds outside the kitchen window, the brood that had hatched from the nest tucked into the drainpipe all mature now but still hanging close to home. Then a bus went by outside, the driver shifting expertly through the gears as he picked up speed.

I could smell the grass I had cut the day before, drying out in the sun that was technically early autumn but had the heat of late summer still. The clean smell of the grass mingled with the softer aroma of tea that always lingered in our kitchen.

I opened my eyes and looked around, but everything looked just the same. My thoughts weren't going to get any quieter than this. So what was I missing?

Then the phone on the wall rang, loud and jangling. The landline. I hadn't heard that phone ring in years; my mother had shut the ringer off when we both got our cellphones. When had it been turned back on?

It was surely a wrong number, but I picked it up anyway. I half-expected to hear the whine and beeps of a fax machine trying to send me something and didn't put the receiver against my ear right away. But when no sound came out of it at all, I pressed it to my ear. "Hello?" I said.

"Ingrid?" a woman asked. Her voice sounded familiar. Maybe one of my mother's friends, one who had missed the announcement in the paper for the wake but was calling now.

"This is she," I said.

"Ingrid, this is your grandmother, Nora Torfa."

I suppose in other, normal families that sentence might seem strangely formal. But I hadn't spoken to my grandmother in years. She hated telephones, my mother always told me, preferring letters and cards that I was, I admit, not the best at responding to.

The last call had been when I was ten, after my father had died. But that wasn't what I was remembering in that moment. No, what came back to me was the last time I had seen my grandmother face to face. That had been when I was eight, when my mother had started the long and ultimately futile search for a diagnosis for the disease that finally killed her. I had spent that entire summer at my grandmother's house, without my parents.

And until that very moment, I had forgotten it entirely. How was that possible?

But as a cascade of memories washed over me - images and sounds and tastes all in a jumble - I realized I hadn't forgotten entirely. I had just somehow thought I had dreamed it all. The vastness of Lake Superior shining like silver in the setting sun for as far as the eye could see. The strong smell of the fishings huts that dotted the shore where the fisherman gutted their catch, scraping the entrails into holes cut in the tabletops to fall into bins below. The taste of honey fresh from the comb, sticky and sweet.

But then other images started to mix in. These were things I had never forgotten; in fact, they always came back to me when I sat down to draw, but really had to have been from dreams. I suppose a summer spent in a fishing town populated by the descendants of Norwegian immigrants had had quite an influence on my young mind. I was forever after drawing pictures of the Norse gods, of trolls and crones, dwarves and elves. Vikings and their ships.

I had never actually seen such things, of course.

Had I? I felt so strange, like electric currents were dancing up and down my spine.

"Ingrid?" my grandmother said.

"Yes, sorry," I said. "I didn't expect to hear from you. I got your card."

"And the letter? Did you get my letter?" she asked.

"Oh," I said. But of course that was why she was calling. "I did get your letter."

"And?" she asked.

"I'm not sure this is a good time," I started to say, but it was like I couldn't hear my own words past the ringing of my ears. My skin felt all tingly, and my hair was rising on end. I looked around the kitchen as if I could see something causing all this, but what could I possibly expect to see? Some mad scientist in the doorway shooting me with a weird ray?

I realized that the feeling like I was waiting for something was gone now, but it had been replaced by another, more urgent feeling. Like I was about to make a decision, the most important decision in my life.

"This is precisely the right time," my grandmother said. "You have to come home now. Come to Runde."

Ah, I had forgotten that. Most Minnesotans pronounce the town "Roundie," like a nickname for a fat baby. But not my grandmother. She said it "Run-deh," with a u that sounded like if it were German, it would need an umlaut. She insisted that was how the original settlers had pronounced it, and I was never sure if she meant the settlers of the village founded in the 1880s on the north shore of Lake Superior, or if she meant their ancestors that had settled the island of the same name generations before back in Norway. Either way, she said it like she'd been there herself, at the founding and naming.

"I was planning to stay in the Twin Cities," I said. "I'm hoping to get a gig illustrating books, maybe sell a children's book of my own. I have some submissions out, but I haven't heard back yet."

"You can do that here as well as you can do there," she said gruffly. "Better, actually. It's cheaper to live here."

"But it's so remote," I said.

"We have the internet," she said, but she over-pronounced it, like it was a foreign word. "I know you're selling the house because you have to. Did you have somewhere there in town to stay? A friend with a spare room or something?"

"No," I admitted, glancing out the window at the car full of everything I had in the world. It all fit in a Volkswagen.

"Then you should come here," she said.

"I don't know," I said, but she cut me off.

"What are you feeling? Really feeling? Think before you answer."

I sucked in a breath as another memory hit me. That thing I do where I clear my mind to let the quieter thoughts come? She had taught me that when I was eight.

But I didn't need to do it again. I knew exactly what I was feeling. I had been picking up that letter several times a day since she sent it to me days before, and every time I did, the same two feelings struck me.

I really, really wanted to go. It was a deep feeling of longing so intense it almost scared me.

And I really, really didn't want to. And that feeling actually did scare me. Even now, with the memories coming back, I didn't know why I would be afraid to go back to a sleepy little town on the shore of Lake Superior, but I was. I was afraid.

"All right," my grandmother said as if I had said any part of that out loud. "Go to the window."

"How do you know I'm by a window?" I asked, looking around as if I was about to find a hidden camera somewhere.

"Why wouldn't you be by a window?" she asked and sounded annoyed. Well, she had called on the landline. It's not like people put those in dark basements or stuffy attics.

"Okay, I'm at the window," I said, leaning my belly against the edge of the gleaming sink.

"What do you see?" she asked.

"The juniper trees," I said. "The remains of a nest tucked between the drain pipe and the corner of the house. The maple in the back yard is starting to turn already. Too soon, tree."

My grandmother sighed. "Ingrid, focus. I'm asking you to look for a sign."

Had we had this conversation before?

"Mormor," I said, then hesitated. The word had just percolated up out of me, but not out of nowhere. I had called her that, when I was young. "Mormor," I said again, "I don't believe in signs or omens or any of that."

"No messages from the powers that be?" she asked leadingly.

"No, not really," I said and bit my lip.

"Well, good, because I told you before that was all nonsense," she said briskly. "Your mind is in conflict." I couldn't argue with that. "But you already know what you want to do; you just don't know you know it yet. Look around, and whatever jumps out at you is your answer."

"All right," I agreed.

At first, when I looked around, nothing seemed different. The colors on the maple were popping, but I wouldn't say they were jumping out at me. Or if they were, I had no idea what they were trying to tell me.

Then my eyes worked their way over to the yellow Volkswagen, the one with my whole life inside it. Then a black shape caught my eye.

Mjolner had gotten out of his travel crate. Really, he did this so often I don't know why I bothered ever putting him inside it. He was sitting calmly on the passenger seat, perched on top of a tall stack of my art portfolios, his tail carefully arranged around his over-sized paws. He was facing the front of the car, staring straight ahead through the windshield as if pretending to be driving somewhere.

Then he turned his head to look at me. The silver hammer pendant on his collar - the hammer that was his namesake - caught the light in a momentary flash.

Then he winked at me. Just a slow closing of his eye, an equally slow opening.

Sometimes something happens so fast you think you might have imagined it. This was just the opposite, so slow I wasn't sure it had even happened at all.

Then he resumed his previous position of staring straight ahead through the windshield.

"Ingrid?" my grandmother said.

"I'm coming," I said. "I have to go to the realtor's office to sign the papers in the morning, but after that, I'll drive up north. I should be there by mid-afternoon."

"Good," she said. "You still have the letter? Because you're going to need that map I drew for you."

"I have it," I said, although really all I would need was the address. The GPS on my phone would do the rest. But I had a feeling saying that to my grandmother was going to involve a lot of explaining. She didn't even like using landline phones; I could only imagine what she thought of smartphones.

"I'll see you then," my grandmother said, and then she hung up the phone.

I put the receiver back on the cradle then pulled my sleeve down over my hand to wipe my fingerprints off the hard plastic case.

My grandmother was right that I needed a place to stay, and that trying to stay in the city was going to be too expensive for a struggling artist to manage. But hopefully after a month or two, I'd have enough saved up to afford a place of my own, maybe in Duluth. It would be cheaper there than in St. Paul, but a little more urban than Runde.

Just a couple of months, I promised myself as I locked the back door behind me and walked to my car. A couple of months to get my feet under me. That's all it would be.

So why did I feel like I'd just sealed my fate?