The Driest Season Read online

  “Then something else will happen.”

  Their boots scuffled over the dirt, snow, and ice. It felt easier to ask these questions in the dark, while moving. She thought a lot about what she didn’t know, and worried about what might happen or not happen.

  “What if I don’t get into college, or no one thinks I’m any good at anything? What if no one wants me?”

  “Then that’s their loss and you figure out other ways to get what you want. It doesn’t mean you give up. You’re too young to worry about these things.”

  “I’m not too young.”

  He pulled her in by her shoulder, and she tucked in under his arm as they walked. “So much will happen in your life you can’t even imagine. We have little control over most of what happens.”

  “Then what’s the point, if I don’t get what I want?”

  “You’ll end up where you’re supposed to be. Sometimes what you want isn’t what you need.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “No such thing as fair.”

  Through the summer thickness, Cielle looked for the oak tree and barely saw the top of it. The barn was gone. Its light was gone forever. And her father was right—things would happen she couldn’t even imagine. She was warm and tired from worrying and from being afraid. She wanted to stop thinking so much and just be. All the thinking, all of her what-if’s, seemed to lead to sorrow and more heartache and uncertainty.

  Darren was still at their house, and Trudy had come over for Helen’s birthday dinner. They all squeezed around the kitchen table and ate pork chops, and roasted potatoes, and carrots. It almost felt like a normal night. Her mother didn’t question Bodie’s absence, and Cielle assumed Mrs. Mitchell had called earlier to explain.

  Her mother cut the coconut cake and they took slices on plates to sit in the family room. A small pile of pretty wrapped gifts sat next to the sofa and her mother pointed at the pile with her fork and said, “Let’s see what’s in those boxes.”

  Helen opened a present from Trudy first. It was a silver link charm bracelet from Tiffany with her initials engraved on the charm of a heart. It was the fanciest present Helen had ever received, and Trudy was too generous for giving it, even though Cielle knew Trudy’s parents had paid for it. Her grandmother gave Helen a hand-knit scarf made from beautiful deep violet wool, to keep her warm in the fall and winter in Madison. Her mother gave her a set of new canvases, paintbrushes, and paints.

  There were three gifts left. Cielle handed hers to Helen. It was a box of letterpress stationery with Helen’s full name engraved on top—HELEN CAMILLA JACOBSON. And she included a set of stamps. “That’s so you keep in touch and write me.”

  “I’ll write. I won’t be that far away.”

  “Far enough,” Cielle said.

  “Far enough is right,” her mother said.

  “Leaving home is a necessary part of life,” her grandmother said.

  “When did it become natural to leave your people and never return?” Trudy asked.

  “You’ve got to learn to live on your own,” her grandmother said.

  “Who says?” Trudy asked.

  “Are you girls planning to stay home and help your mothers cook, clean, and farm instead of taking courses, going to parties, and meeting handsome young men?” Cielle’s mother asked.

  “We could use you at my house,” Darren said. “My mother’s no good at housekeeping.”

  “Nonsense,” Cielle’s mother said to Darren. “I’m sure she’s fine.” She put the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.

  No one said a word, and Darren looked down at his plate and ate another bite of cake. “Especially now that my brother’s home from the war.”

  “That’s good he’s home,” Cielle’s grandmother said.

  “He’s not all there,” Cielle said and her grandmother nodded in understanding. She thought to say, He’s not all gone either, and Mrs. Olsen knows more than any of us about Dad, but she kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t an expert. She didn’t know about wounded soldiers, marriage, being a mother, what makes you drink your sorrow away, or about sadness heavy enough to make you want to end your life.

  “What are these other two gifts?” Helen asked.

  Her mother wiped her hands on a dish towel and walked back into the room. “One was left in the mailbox this afternoon. The other is from your father.”

  Helen shuffled over to the gifts. “I’m glad he could make it.”

  “Your father has had that thing wrapped and in his sock drawer for months,” her mother said.

  Her grandmother tapped her hand on her thigh. Cielle wondered if he knew during their winter walk that he would be gone by summer.

  “He planned ahead,” Helen said.

  “I guess so,” her mother said.

  “Do you know what it is?” Helen shook it near her ear.

  “Maybe,” her mother said.

  “Let’s have you open this one first,” her grandmother said. She picked it off the floor and handed it to Helen. “It’s heavy.”

  “The mystery present,” Helen said.

  There was the sound of tires on gravel and Cielle leaned to look out the window. “A surprise someone’s here,” she said as Matthew’s car pulled into the drive.

  “If it’s Bodie, I’m not interested.”

  “You have to see him before he goes,” Cielle said.

  “No, I don’t,” Helen said.

  Her grandmother looked out the window, her eyebrows raised. “It is a handsome young man who’s not Bodie.”

  Trudy looked out. “Handsome indeed.”

  Helen leaned toward the window. “Relax, everyone, it’s Matthew.”

  “Matthew the lawyer,” Cielle said.

  “The gorgeous lawyer.” Trudy elbowed Helen.

  Matthew knocked on the door, and waited. Cielle’s mother’s cheeks flushed. “This young man saved Helen’s life,” she said, as she opened the door and held out her hand to shake his. “She choked on a potato and he saved her at the Bredahl Inn.”

  He held her mother’s hand and looked at Helen. “At your service. Happy birthday.”

  “Thank you,” Helen said. “How did you know?”

  “Your mother may have told me and invited me for cake. I hope that’s okay.” He pointed to the box in Helen’s hands. “I see you have my present yet to open. I left it in the mailbox in case I couldn’t get off work in time.”

  Helen tore the light blue paper off the box, then set it on the floor, opened the lid, and lifted out a bulbous potato the size of a football.

  He winked at her. “Happy birthday.”

  “You already said that,” Helen said.

  “I said it again.”

  She held up the potato.

  “I was thinking a doorstop, a paperweight, in case you get hungry, or just a decoration to remind you of me,” Matthew said.

  “We owe you a thousand thank-yous for what you did,” her mother said.

  Helen placed the potato by the kitchen door. “Thanks.”

  “You didn’t know our father, did you?” Cielle asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t.”

  “He’d marry you to one of these girls if he were here,” her grandmother said.

  “A man would be lucky to marry any of these girls,” Matthew said.

  Her mother’s smile was so bright, Cielle imagined she was already planning dresses to make, cakes to bake, flowers to grow and arrange, a guest list in alphabetical order, and booties to knit for a grandchild.

  “This could be promising,” Trudy said. “Be careful what you say.”

  “I’m always careful with what I say,” he said.

  “Here, Helen.” Cielle’s mother extended her hand. “Pick up that little box and come with me.” Her mother nodded. Helen picked up the box, took her mother’s hand, and was led outside. Cielle, her grandmother, Trudy, Darren, and Matthew followed. Cielle wondered what might be waiting from her father for her sixteenth birthday—another sma
ll box buried in his sock drawer? What if there was nothing?

  Her mother walked to the shed down the hill behind the house. “Open the box,” she said.

  Helen lifted the top of box and there was a key. She pointed the key at the shed. “Grandfather’s old car?” she asked.

  “Yours,” Cielle’s mother said. “To come home whenever you want, as often as you want.”

  Her mother unlatched the shed’s double doors, and inside was a pretty, shiny car. It was clean, sturdy, and painted black, with whitewall tires, and burgundy red seats.

  “It’s a 1935 Plymouth PJ Sedan. When your grandfather passed away and we inherited the car, it was in poor shape and just sat in here for years. Your father fixed it up nicely,” her mother said.

  “I guess I have to go somewhere now that I have a car. I guess I can’t stay in Boaz.” Helen twirled the key ring around her finger.

  “I’ll give you the Wisconsin key chain I won at the fair for your key,” Cielle said. “Now you have somewhere to go.”

  It was late when Cielle walked Darren outside to say goodbye. The sky was cloudless and the stars were bright and spectacular. On clear nights the universe was deeper and fuller than ever. She sensed how small they were in the scheme of things, and hoped she’d remember to look up often and know there was more than where she stood.

  “I should get back but I don’t want to go,” Darren said. “All this time I missed my brother, and now I can’t stand him.”

  “Maybe it will get easier,” Cielle said.

  “It won’t get easier, I’ll just get used to it.”

  “I guess that’s how things go. I guess that will happen with my father—I’ll get used to it.”

  Darren leaned against the porch. “I wish I could drive away tonight. Go live another life.”

  Cielle hadn’t been many places. She’d been to Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago, but she’d never seen the ocean. She’d never seen a true mountain. She’d never seen a canyon, a desert, or a jungle. She wanted to see the world. She wanted to know how other people lived. She’d imagined herself on a cobblestone street in London, in a bistro in Paris, on a horse in the plains of Colorado with the spiked peaks of the Rockies in the distance, in a skyscraper in Manhattan. And yet, she couldn’t imagine anything but Wisconsin and its soft rolling hills, lush fields, and winding roads, as home.

  “Where would you go?” she asked.

  “Probably Chicago,” he said. “You?”

  “The ocean, the mountains, New York City, and Europe.”

  “You better get busy,” he said.

  She’d never been on a plane but had had flying dreams. Dreams of twisting and lifting into the sky, straight up or sometimes hovering over the ground through clear air. Through treetops. Through clouds. She’d go up, up, up, and have a view of fields and farms, barns and animals below. A view of Boaz. A view of her life. That flying feeling was exhilarating. It was a feeling of being free, weightless, without boundaries, with the ability to go somewhere, anywhere. It was the feeling of galloping on Ginger around the track. Cielle wanted that feeling always. She wanted to know the world she didn’t yet know. Every piece of it. And in that moment, she understood that maybe Bodie did too.

  Darren stood up from leaning on the porch. He was close; there was a foot between them. He had an upside-down triangle of freckles under his left eye. She crossed her arms and didn’t know where to look, so she looked at the fine definition of his clavicle and the small dip of his neck where a vein pulsed under his skin.

  “You have a big life ahead of you.” He stepped nearer and put his hands on her crossed arms. He uncrossed them as though untying a knot. She looked at him and a wave of heat swept through her. The back of her neck tingled. She’d never kissed a boy before.

  He moved his hands to her waist, to her lower back, and pulled her toward him. She moved forward and kissed him, slowly, softly. She loved the heat of his stomach against hers, of his arms around her, of her hands on his neck and face. In that moment, she understood how easy it could be to open up and love someone. He touched her neck, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She felt calm and tingly and warm. She wanted connection: to be understood, chosen, loved, seen, noticed, and known. It felt as though touch could heal her, could make her whole again.

  He pulled back, kissed her cheek, found her hands, and held them. “We should do this more often.”

  “I’d like that.”

  He leaned in and kissed her cheek again. “Good night, Cielle Jacobson.”

  “Good night, Darren Olsen.”

  When he was gone she sat on the lawn and watched the stars. She felt happy and then guilty for feeling happy, but she knew her father would want her to feel happy. She let herself be happy to be alive and to have kissed Darren Olsen. She was glad her father’s death had brought Darren into her life. She considered cause and effect, and wondered if that was the law of nature—that for one thing to exist another had to expire, for one thing to happen something else had to happen before it, and always, always, if there was bad, there was good, and vice versa.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A WEEK PASSED. She was surprised it took that long for Mr. Skaar to show up at the house. He was in the kitchen with her mother and an older man, and they all sat at the table and drank iced tea.

  “Mr. Olsen, this is my youngest, Cielle,” her mother said. “And Mr. Skaar, you know Cielle.”

  “I know Cielle,” Mr. Skaar said.

  Old Mr. Olsen’s heavy eyelids made him look sleepy, but his eyes were blue, bright, and alert. His thick hair was snow-white and mussed-up, and his eyebrows were bone-white bushy things, like little hedges on his face.

  “I met you as a wrinkled newborn,” Mr. Olsen said, and held his hands apart the length of a loaf of bread. “Now I’m a wrinkled old man.” He put his glass on the table, slapped his palm on the table, and pushed back his chair. “And I hear you’re friends with my grandson.”

  “Darren is a friend,” she said, and blushed.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “Nice to know I can still make a girl blush. Well, I saw your daddy’s obituary in the newspaper, and then Mr. Skaar called to tell me a few other things.”

  Her mother looked down at her hands. Cielle nodded yes.

  “So I came to pay my respects.” Mr. Olsen stood. “I knew your daddy and granddaddy. We have history.” Mr. Skaar looked ready to talk, but Mr. Olsen held his hand up to cut him off, and then put his hand on Cielle’s shoulder and said, “Come outside with me, girl.”

  He led her out the door to the back of the house and nodded ahead. “Been told you cut that field.”

  “My grandmother and I cut it,” she said.

  “You’re resourceful.”

  “We do what we need to do.”

  “As you should,” he said.

  She crossed her arms.

  “Seems your daddy’s death on this farm is a mystery of sorts.”

  “That’s why they called it an accident.”

  He nodded his head up and down and smiled. “Resourceful.”

  “Seems we have that in common,” she said. “What with all the land you’ve acquired. You must be a rich man.”

  “That’s fair,” he said. “I am. Mostly because I follow the rules. Which here means if a man signs a contract, and that man dies by his own hand, he forgoes his land rights.”

  “And if he dies in an accident?”

  “The family has the option to buy back at the sell price.”

  “What did my mother say about that?”

  “She says it was an accident, and that you found him.”

  “I did.”

  “Trouble is, Mr. Skaar said he saw you just over a week ago and showed you a file on your daddy, where there were questionable photographs, but now that file’s gone missing.” He snapped his fingers. “Poof. Gone. Where do you suppose that file went on its own?”

  “I don’t recall a file.”

  “You calling Mr. Skaar a liar?”
r />   “No, sir. I’m saying I don’t recall a file.”

  “You’re a smart young lady,” he said. He chewed on his lip, and then turned and waved toward the house. Mr. Skaar came out of the doorway where he’d been watching and waiting. He caught up to Old Mr. Olsen and was talking fast, but Mr. Olsen shook his head no and just held his hand up to silence him.

  That night, Cielle couldn’t sleep. She had her father’s file in her underwear drawer and she wanted it gone. And she couldn’t stop thinking about Bodie leaving and if Mrs. Mitchell was okay. Neither Bodie nor his parents had called or come over. Helen wouldn’t talk about Bodie, and would go for long walks to who knows where. It didn’t make sense to Cielle that Bodie was leaving for training in a place none of them had ever seen, and would ship off even farther away to fight in a war. He could be gone for years. He could be gone forever.

  Cielle wanted to see him. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if he got hurt, or worse. The moon grew toward fullness and shone brightly like a lamp on the landscape. Shadow-shapes from trees, power lines, and buildings were black and white in the bright nighttime. It was eleven and she was wide awake. She dressed, took the file, and rode her bike to the Mitchells’. She knew Bodie cleaned tack at night and might still be up in the barn.

  She pedaled into the Mitchells’ driveway, and leaned her bike against the barn. The house was dark, but there was a light on in the barn. Bodie’s figure came to the doorway.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Cielle said. “And I wanted to see you.”

  “I was planning on saying goodbye.”

  “Were you?”

  “My parents wouldn’t let me leave without saying goodbye.”

  “Would you have come to say goodbye on your own?”

  “Sure.” He turned back into the light of the barn. Cielle followed. He sat on a stool and picked up his beer and took a swig. “You want one?”

  “Yes.”

  He lifted a bottle from a nearby bucket of cold water, popped off the top, and handed the beer to Cielle. He clinked the neck of his bottle to hers. A strip of leather and a set of knives were on the floor in front of him, and two bridles and oil soap to his right. He picked up a knife and slid it across the leather, back and forth. “I can’t sleep either.”