Needle Lake

Needle Lake

1

My name is Ida. I was raised in Mineral, Washington, a logging town on the border of a vast national forest three hours north of Seattle. My mother owned a convenience store, which was situated on the ground floor of our home on the town’s main street. It was a two-story building that had once housed a local paper, The Mineral Star. These words were painted in faded blue letters along the side of the building, five-point stars accentuating the swoops of the S. My mother and I lived in the rooms in the back, behind the store, and rented out the rooms on the top floor to the loggers. There was a single gas pump out front, and a coin laundry in the basement. I was responsible for emptying out the coins into a bucket every Sunday and counting them out on a table, rolling them into color-coded wrappers, and walking them to the bank. I was not to run to the bank. I was not supposed to run at all. I was born with a hole in my heart, large enough to sometimes cause me to faint, small enough to avoid operation in the opinion of the cardiologist at the hospital where I first entered the world. Twice a year I went to the cold, iodine-smelling office of our local, ancient Dr. Fields to be examined, an icy stethoscope pressed against my bare chest, his milky blue eyes magnified under thick glasses, gazing at the wall behind me as he listened. I was always smaller than other girls my age. Gaunt and bony where they’d all begun to grow. I was confined to the school library during gym class, never permitted to play dodgeball or horse or to climb the ropes.

I was entranced by the globe that sat in the corner of the library by the card catalog, far from the librarian who perched like a hawk on her elevated platform behind the checkout desk, date stamp in hand, scowling. I was in love with geography. I could place every country on a blank map, name its capital, identify its flag. I won a five-hundred-dollar municipal bond in the 1996 junior state geography bee. The runner-up, a boy from Tacoma, mislabeled the region of Sikkim as being a part of Bhutan and left me to answer the final question: How many islands make up the Philippines? Seven thousand, six hundred, and forty-one. When I couldn’t fall asleep at night, which was often, I went through an alphabetical list of countries and their capitals in my mind. The process made me feel like my brain was being slowly submerged into a warm bath.

I loved salt and vinegar potato chips, honing pencils into fine points on the hand-cranked wall sharpeners at school, the smell of mothballs, the sound of crickets, the way orange goldfish looked inside round glass bowls, heart-shaped chocolate boxes for Valentine’s Day with white lace trim and pillowy sateen covers, how a cat’s eyes shined in the dark, green olives from a can. And, even though I wasn’t supposed to, I secretly loved to swim. I loved to sneak out to the dock at Needle Lake early summer mornings before anyone else was around. I loved the moment my body first sliced through the water’s surface, the way the noise of the world muffled into a soft quiet and everything went slow and blue. I could hold my breath for ninety-six seconds, on average, though I once stayed under for one hundred and one. Sometimes I saw snapping turtles huddled on mossy rocks, asleep. I found things on the bottom. Glasses, an unopened bottle of gin, a metal toy train. A gold wedding band, glistening in the silt.

And once, after Elna came to stay, I watched a man drown there on Christmas Eve, his body trapped beneath the ice.

2

My cousin Elna arrived mid-December the year I was fourteen. I didn’t even know she’d been invited to stay. I’d only seen her a single time before, when I was in first grade, at our grandfather’s funeral in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Autumn of 1990. The memory was a blur to me: the chalky, sweet smell of white flowers, six tall men in dark coats on either side of a lacquered casket, and, faintly, Elna, staring at me from the other side of the grave site as the dirt was piled on.

I was sitting behind the cash register looking at one of my maps when the bells on the front door rattled. A tall, slim, redheaded girl in a mint green winter coat was standing there, looking around. She had two bags with her, both also green, and was wearing a pair of silver winter boots. She was very pretty. From twenty feet away, I could see that. I blinked at her, baffled, and before I could open my mouth to say anything my mother came swooping in from the back room in her coveralls, securing the red-haired girl in a firm, two-handed grip on the shoulders. They spoke some muffled words to each other, too faint for me to hear at the other end of the store, and then walked past all the shelves over to where I was seated at the counter. The girl shook some snow out of her long hair, fluffing up her bangs with her fingers. I noticed that her nails were painted a bright, pearlescent pink, filed into slender ovals. She wore several rhinestone rings, a shiny gold charm bracelet, and a pair of star-shaped earrings with little purple crystals in them.

“Ida,” my mother said. “You remember your cousin.” It took me a moment to understand who, exactly, that was. Apart from the hair, she looked nothing like the child I distantly remembered.

“Hello,” I said.

My mother went on, “She’s going to stay with us for a little while. Maybe through January.”

Elna gave a coy half-smile to neither of us in particular and placed both her bags on the ground. She slipped out of her wet snow boots and began to wander around the store, stocking-footed. She inspected the place slowly, prowling between the shelves like a panther dropped in a new enclosure, skittish and aloof at the same time. She tapped her nails on the glass refrigerator case, then turned to us and said in a wispy voice, “I’ve had a very long bus ride,” before brushing aside the curtain that divided the store from our living area and slipping out of view. My mother paused uncertainly mid-step with her hands outstretched toward Elna’s suitcases. I almost never saw her like that. She was always in motion: hauling bulk shipments of beer and canned beans in from the curb, chasing a bat or a raccoon out of the store with a broomstick, lugging twenty-pound jugs of detergent down to fill the pay dispenser in the basement laundry. But now she was very still. It made me uneasy.

I looked at Elna’s empty shoes. “She’s here alone?” I asked.

My mother cleared her throat. “Your aunt Candace isn’t coming,” she said.

“Why not?”

“She isn’t well right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s having a lot of problems.” My mother and I did not discuss her sister often. Sometimes, I overheard the two of them on the phone. I could always tell when it was Candace on the line. The conversations took on a hushed, tense tone. It didn’t sound angry to me, not like the tension of an argument, but more worried, with a fraught closeness that was hard for me to understand though unmistakable in the sound of my mother’s voice.

I’d only met my aunt twice—first at the same funeral in Idaho where I met Elna, and then another time when she visited on my tenth birthday, without her daughter, just for the day. She brought me a brilliant pink spiral seashell, with a softly worn fifty-dollar bill wedged inside. My mother deposited this money at the bank. Candace drove back that night to where she was staying in Seattle with an ex-boyfriend, after she and my mother took a long cigarette walk together. I remember seeing them folded into a hug from my bedroom window. Candace had a bag at her feet with some sundries from our shop. Gifts, I understood. Her car was banged up around the sides and had many glittery stickers on the back, two plastic rosaries dangling from the rearview mirror, and a steering wheel cover made of fake purple fur. I knew she lived in San Francisco. I knew she had appeared in a handful of commercials, and in three episodes of a TV drama. She was two years younger than my mother. I got the sense she’d always had a lot of problems.

I could hear Elna in the back, her feet shuffling in the hall, the sound of a glass being set on a counter, the bathroom faucet going on and off. “No one told me she was coming,” I huffed.

“No one needs to tell you anything,” my mother replied. “Least of all me.”

“Where’s she going to sleep?” I asked. “Upstairs is full.”

“She’s not staying upstairs with the tenants, even if there was space. She’ll stay in the spare room next to yours.”

“It’s full of boxes.”

“I’ll move them.”

“There isn’t even a bed in there.”

“We have an extra cot.”

“How long have you known she was coming?”

“I wasn’t completely sure until she arrived, honestly. I’ve told you how your aunt can be.” My mother picked up Elna’s bags and carried them to the threshold of our rooms, then turned around and looked at me. “You don’t mind her being here for a little bit?” she asked, her voice now hesitant and very quiet.

I could tell she wanted reassurance more than anything else, but I answered honestly. “How can I know if I’ll mind or not if she’s only been here for ten minutes?”

“I mean do you think you will mind?”