meet me downstairs in the kitchen. Milk and cookies are the best cure for nightmares that I know.”
His shoulders still quaking, the boy went down the hallway to the bathroom. Logan walked to the kitchen, carefully shutting a swinging door so as not to wake the other boys. He put on a light above the stove and set out two plates with some cheap store-bought cookies, the kind with cream inside. Then he poured two tall glasses of milk. In the room beyond, the other boys slept on, oblivious.
Logan waited and waited. Lee did not come.
Eventually, he walked down the hall and knocked on the bathroom door. When there was no response he opened it to find the empty robe lying on the floor in a black puddle.
Lee was gone. He had walked off into the icy night in his wet clothes. He had run, run as if being pursued.
Later, as Logan told Clara all this, he shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t get over what he said to me. How he apologized. It was about more than the blankets. It sounded like a confession.”
THE GIRLS’ STORY OF the woman in the woods made Clara dream of her mother again, and when she woke she knew what she had to do. After all the teens had gone home and Logan left on errands, she set out the next morning. This whole time Sylvia’s grave had been right outside Clara’s window. Why had her father buried her here instead of taking her back to the Cities? Why had he never told Clara where she could find her? In the days since Nora had told her, the knowledge she was out here prickled inside her brain, made her hyperattuned to her body and breath.
Now she was out in the yard in the early day. A north wind whisked clouds as thin as tissue paper across a peerless sky milky with early morning light. The grass below her was yellow and water starved, the earth stretching taut in the cold, like the skin on her stretched belly, thick as a drum. While the air tasted of snow, none had fallen yet, but Clara felt it gathering somewhere, building strength as it swept across the Dakota prairies.
Did anyone see her in the town below? She had on Logan’s red down jacket because her own was too small. Underneath it, a wool sweater covered a shapeless maternity dress, brown as a potato sack. Clara was having trouble finding decent clothes this far from any shopping centers. Her breath smoked in gauzy streams in the cold. Below her she saw the grid of the sleeping town, a few trucks moving along the main drag, but she felt cut off from them. Why then this strange sense of being watched? This sense that eyes were on her even now?
She walked the rows, seeking out a pattern of organization. The older tombstones bore laments in German. SEELIG SIN DIE TODEN DIE DEN HERRN STERBEN, DEN IHRE WERKE FOLGEN IHNEN NACH. Clara traced the cold marble with her fingers, guessing at some of the words since Anglo-Saxon was close to Low German. Though he is dead, his work follows after him. People had left plastic flowers, the bright yellows and reds the only color in this place. She recited the names: Gunther, Helga, Wolfgang, Frieda. Names of the original settlers who carved out “civilization” from these woods, who killed the Indians and tamed the wolves and made the land safe for livestock and crop rotations. Shannon. Halvorsen. Brecken. Scheuler. Names of those who continued to hold sway in Logan’s church, whom her husband dared not anger.
She went deeper into the cemetery, the marble tombstones growing less ornate as she came to what she guessed was the suicide corner here at the edge closest to the woods. No more angels. Clara found no grave for Sylvia Meyers. Maybe she was not here? It didn’t make sense for her father to bury her here. She had been so wrapped up in her search that she hadn’t even noticed where she was until she saw the name below her. It was a simple gravestone of polished purple granite. SETH FALLON: DECEMBER 11, 1970–SEPTEMBER 13, 1987. Logan had told her the story of the boy’s strange burial, Seth’s body now up on the mountain.
Clara knelt in the grass. She felt a prickling along the ends of her fingers. The leafless woods loomed nearby. All the corn had come out of the field