Charlevoix

It’s easier for Daniel to start with tears—to imagine pulling a binky away, popping the head off a favorite doll. A simple denial: “Uncle Daniel doesn’t love you.” There are certain thoughts that trigger the brain’s defenses, but sometimes the seeds slip by. Sadness shifts to pain: a yank of a ponytail, an outstretched foot lying in wait in the hallway for a pair of unsuspecting toddler shins. At the top of the stairs, a push from behind—just the slightest push.

It’s only on the worst days that Daniel allows it to go further—only when the baby wakes at three in the morning and won’t stop crying, not even when they hold him, not even when they give him gas drops or Tylenol or lay him out on the bed to let him stretch and roll. Days like these are when Daniel allows himself to forget which thoughts he’s supposed to be blocking. When the fantasies bleed into one another, each more hateful than the last, mounting with the baby’s constant screams into a single, glorious vision: Daniel gripping the fat thing by its haunches and punting it into the valley, watching it plummet into the tall grass, downed unceremoniously by the trees.

“Can you take him for me, please?” Daniel’s mother snaps the TV off with her foot, quieting the clamor of voices he’d turned on to drown the sobs. “Just for one minute?”

Without waiting for an answer, she drops the crying baby in his lap, all wet cheeks and scarlet face and balled fists at his eyes. Daniel turns him around on his knees. He’s as light as Spalding Pro.

~

Daniel and Claire had fought most often when Daniel was still wild and unfiltered, when Claire was old enough to defend herself but still boyish enough to tackle. Daniel, thirteen, would dunk his eleven-year-old sister in Lake Charlevoix or pin her elbows behind her back to get a laugh from his friends. Their fighting was common enough, but the wrestling matches ended the night Claire broke free of her brother’s headlock and pushed him backwards into a bonfire, six of Daniel’s eighth grade basketball teammates staring dumbly as he cried and flailed on the ground in front of the woodpile.

The look on Claire’s face afterward wasn’t one of triumph or celebration, but instead a lingering mask of panic—a frenzied look she got when she had escape in her sights, when she had made up her mind not to let anyone force her somewhere she wasn’t already headed.

Years later, when Clare was in the hospital with her first child, Daniel recognized that same look. At first it was only a hint—a glance so fleeting Daniel told himself it must have been something that came to a woman with childbirth, some motherly change in his sister it wasn’t his place to recognize. But after her second child, there was no mistaking it: when the nurse placed Claire’s little boy in her arms, she held him like a cloud holds rain, showed the kind of smile that’s only given because it’s asked for.

Six months later she was on her way to stay with a friend in Sacramento. Daniel’s mother had said yes to watching the kids too quickly, telling Daniel the way Claire had been working lately she deserved the break. Claire was living in Lansing then, a few hours south of Charlevoix, and it was true she had her hands full raising both kids without their father, a college boyfriend who lived out of state and didn’t even make it back for the birth of his son. But Daniel had been watching Claire during the hand-off. He had seen enough to tell that this wasn’t just a break, that she wouldn’t be coming back to Charlevoix—at least not until coming back to Charlevoix was what she wanted.

Daniel bobs the boy on his chest while his mother plays puzzles with the two-year-old in the bedroom down the hall. They call the kids’ temporary room the back room, but really the house is so small that the back of it isn’t far from the front. From the kitchen, Daniel can hear his niece giggling, putting cat heads to duck bodies. With his free hand, he reaches into the refrigerator for a beer and cracks it.

“It’s probably time for his bottle,” his mother calls.

“Time for brother’s bottle,” the two-year-old echoes.

Daniel takes a drink and straps the baby into his activity chair on the kitchen table.

“Ack,” the baby says, loud and punchy. “Ack!”

“Shut up.”

“What’s that?” asks Daniel’s mother and her echo.

Daniel’s mother used to ground him from the kitchen when she heard him swearing in his bedroom down the hall. Not once during the first eighteen years of his life did he sneak in past curfew; now she never seems to catch anything the first time.

The boy reaches out for Daniel’s beer like a stupid drunk. Reaches so far that Daniel starts to think he might fall right out of the chair, hit the floor with a wet smack.

“I said what time did you feed him last?” he asks, sifting through the cupboard for a bottle.

~

Sounds travel a long way in northern Michigan—longer, at least, than any place Daniel’s ever been. Boat horns, rifle reports and coyote howls rove in waves, dipping in and out of hilly pockets that ripple the landscape, trickling or flooding into Daniel’s yard from five or six miles away. After Daniel feeds the baby, he sits outside and burns trash in the fire pit, drinking the rest of his six-pack and trying to pinpoint from what part of town the music is drifting, whether the car gaining momentum down the big hill nearby is roaring off to Petoskey, Harbor Springs, Indian River.

Daniel and his father built the fire pit themselves, like they did almost everything else on the property. Daniel’s father did the digging while Daniel, only seven, got lost in the valley’s tall grass picking out the rocks that now marked the edge of the pit. It had been more than three years since Daniel’s father died, but it was still impossible to look at any part of the family’s thirty acres without thinking of him. There was the pole barn Daniel had helped him put up behind the house, the garden he and Daniel’s mother had tended for half a decade, the wooden fence that lined the property down by the road.

The house itself was the least impressive part of the land: a short, boxy thing that looked especially so surrounded by thirty acres of open green. In the sixties, Daniel’s grandfather lost control of a fire in his front yard that ended up burning down half the county, including everything standing on his own land. The house he built as a replacement was only meant to be temporary, Daniel’s grandfather’s stubborn opposition to importing a cheap modular, but fifty years later it was still standing. Daniel’s father had sketched out a blueprint for a new house—ranch style with sliding doors and a wraparound porch that looked out over the valley—but before he got a chance to build it, he took a twenty-foot drop off Bill Johnson’s roof and died on impact when he hit the ground. It was that kind of freelance carpentry that had kept Daniel’s father from working on his own land in the first place—everyone up north knew his reputation for good work, and it was his reputation that paid the bills.

Without him, Daniel and his mother get by on her pension and his paycheck from the dealership. Neither of them say a thing about Daniel contributing money; his mother never asks for it, and Daniel never makes a show about writing out a check for the water or electric bill.

“Oh they’re fine, they’re just fine,” Daniel’s mother’s voice floats down to the fire pit from the porch. “But I do think they’re starting to miss their mother.”

When Claire left, she promised she’d call to check in on the kids once or twice every week. It’s a promise she’s kept so far, though she always seems to call late at night after the kids are asleep and Daniel’s mother is exhausted from giving them both their baths, or quieting a tantrum.

“No, don’t say that, you know that’s not true,” Daniel’s mother says. “You know I love my grandbabies, even if they are a handful.”

Daniel’s mother sits slumped in her chair, but when the baby starts to cry, she snaps to attention. Daniel sets his beer on the ground and jogs over to the porch, but when he gets to the door his mother steps in front of him.

“Hold on, Claire, the baby’s up again. Talk to your brother for a while,” she says, handing the phone to Daniel before either sibling can argue.

Daniel puts the phone to his ear, still breathing heavy from the jog over. He waits to talk until his mother closes the door behind her.

“Claire.”

“Hey, Daniel. How are you?”

“How the hell do you think I am?”

“I don’t know.”

“Havin’ fun in California?” he asks.

“It’s Oregon now,” she says.

“Great.”

“Listen, Daniel, I was just telling mom that if everything works out over here I’ll be coming back—”

“You ain’t coming back,” Daniel says. “We both know you ain’t.”

“OK.”

Inside, the baby’s cries escalate into throaty screams and gasps for air. It’s been a week since the boy slept all the way through a night.

“You got no idea what you stuck us with, do you?” he says. “You don’t see what you’re doing to mom.”

“Daniel, she’s their grandmother.”

“They’re your kids, Claire,” Daniel says. “You forget that already?”

“I haven’t forgotten anything,” Claire says. “I call here every night to check in, and every night mom tells me you’re all doing just fine.”

“They’re killing her.”

“Daniel, don’t freak out. You always freak out,” she says. “I’m coming back. I told you I was coming back.”

Daniel runs his arm across his forehead. He and his sister have the same conversation every week, and every week it leaves him with a sweat-soaked sleeve.

“What about me?” he says. “What am I supposed to do.”

“Daniel, no one’s saying you got to stay.”

Her mother is singing to the boy in the kitchen, trying to keep him quiet while the bottle heats in the microwave.

“You always do this to yourself,” Claire says. “You have an excuse for everything.”

“That’s not true.”

“No? Then how come you’re still in Charlevoix? How come you never took any of those scholarships? You’re a big boy, Daniel, and mom’s fine without you. Do you honestly think Daddy would have wanted to see you like this, after all he tried to do for you?”

Daniel’s mother walks out with the baby in one arm and the bottle in another. Her hair, streaked with gray, is matted to her forehead.

When Daniel and Claire were young, their mother was always the one to put an end to their fights; even now, she doesn’t let Daniel say a word against Claire. She meets his eyes and gives what he guesses is supposed to be an encouraging smile.

“I’ve got to go,” he says, and, against his better judgment, swaps the phone for the boy.

~

The baby is not like other babies. When Claire first brought him to the house, he was rigid and tense, balling his hands into fists and striking Daniel on the side of his neck when he was angry. Even now he is beyond control most of the time, breaking through the makeshift barriers Daniel and his mother construct to keep him in the living room, pulling himself up onto couches and chairs. Though he has become more pliable in the past month, he is still too brutish—still stiffer and stronger than a baby should be.

On weekend mornings Daniel lies in bed pitting sleep against the baby’s screams, the piercing “Ack” and retching growls that mean the boy is finding some new obstacle to climb, some new height to fall from. A couch or a chair or a step. A dumpster, a pit. A basket taken by nightfall to the coyotes at the edge of the woods.

Daniel lived for sports in high school, but he never loved the locker room humor, the farts and the rat tails and the dead baby jokes. Even now he cringes as his thoughts start to spiral—cringes at the relief he feels from orchestrating dismemberment, burial, drowning. He presses his eyes shut tighter and imagines walking back from the crest of the valley, wiping his hands clean at the lake.

In the living room, Daniel’s mother drops the softness in her voice, sheds the practiced tone meant only for babies. Normally she is playful with the kids, giving voices to their toys or singing as she bakes in the kitchen, but on the mornings she is alone with them she is overpowered by the crying and grunting, her words lost amid the noise of screams and Disney movies and toys crashing off wood floors.

Daniel turns over in bed and puts his hands to his ears, digs his fingers into the skin around his temples. There are a set of small scratches there already. Any second, he’s sure he’ll draw blood.

~

Miles from the scenic strip of Charlevoix where land meets water, miles from the boat races, parades down Main and live music at the pavilion, the city’s clean streets crack and turn to gravel. Open fields stretch wider, settling deep in pockets of land otherwise dominated by trees. Freeway centerlines fade as the roads split and narrow, branching into clusters of mobile homes, small ghettos of ramshackle housing peppered throughout the wilderness like rocks in a sandbar. Neighborhoods give way to “property,” with “No Trespassing” signs linked across hidden paths and livestock keeping guard over acres of valley, deep and sprawling. Scattered like the rest of the structures in this wooded country are the community centers and schools, the post offices, gas stations, bars and diners, some buildings still in use and others split through the husk with weeds.

Daniel and Seth both grew up in this other Charlevoix, this city that wasn’t a city but a constellation of gravel roads and abandoned houses. As kids, they memorized the city’s trails and back roads, exploring with their bikes wherever they weren’t allowed. Their best find was a basketball court they fast claimed as theirs, a thin blacktop with tall rims, surrounded so completely by brush that there was only one path leading into the clearing, nearly invisible from the road. The court served as part of the playground for an old school building down the road, but Daniel and Seth haven’t seen anyone there for as long as they’ve been playing on it.

Seth is already tossing up jumpers when Daniel pulls up on his dirt bike. For the past week, Daniel’s been riding over to the court after his shift ends to shoot around with his old teammate. They play for an hour, sometimes two if Daniel knows his grandparents are in from Pellston to help with the kids.

The court was already old when Daniel and Seth first found it, but it’s decayed even more since then. The chain nets they hung have been beaten to only a few limp threads that slap at the rim with each make, and a series of cracks split the blacktop from one end to the other. Daniel kills his motor and watches Seth’s miss clang off the rim.

“I hate to say it, but I don’t think carving stone does shit for your jumper,” Daniel says.

After Daniel and Seth graduated high school, Daniel applied for a job cutting, sanding and polishing cement floors for businesses on the east coast, three months on, three months off. Their landline was down around the time Daniel was expecting the call, so he gave the company Seth’s number instead. When they called to offer Daniel the job, Seth accepted it for himself. A week later, Daniel picked up his job at the dealership and started putting in his forty hours. The two friends didn’t talk for almost a year.

“Shit,” Seth says, “between your shirt and that old bike, I smelled you all the way from Kring’s. Threw me off so bad, I haven’t made a shot in ten minutes.”

Daniel grins and the two friends slap hands. Seth passes the ball to Daniel and they fall into their routine, jogging along the faded 3-point arc, feeding each other soft underhand passes around the key. Daniel takes a step in and shoots short jumpers until he finds his rhythm, Seth collecting rebounds and passing the ball back to him from beneath the net. The two stay quiet as Daniel heats up from the corner, hitting one shot, two shots, three. The fourth clangs off the front of the rim, and the two men switch roles.

In high school Daniel had been good enough to earn scholarships to a handful of colleges, both in-state and out, but the calls started around the time of Daniel’s dad’s funeral and there wasn’t anyone, not Seth or Daniel’s coaches or his mother, that could get him to answer the phone.

“You remember that game against TC Central?” Seth asks. “Senior year?”

“The one where you got dunked on?”

“What? No. Fuck no. That never happened.”

“Sure it did,” Daniel grins. “Kirby was too slow to get around the pick and you had to switch to his guy. I know it was TC because that big old boy ended up playing college ball at State.”

“Screw off, man, I was hungover.”

Seth launches a fadeaway three that knocks off the top of the backboard, forcing Daniel to chase after it in the tall grass.

“You were always hungover,” Daniel calls over his shoulder.

“Yeah, and you never were,” Seth says. “Always made the rest of us look bad.”

“Look bad? I made you look good.”

“Bullshit,” Seth says. “If I’d been running point instead of you, maybe we would’ve made it past state semis one of those years.”

“Easy now,” Daniel says. “If your sorry ass had been starting instead of me, that team would’ve never even sniffed the playoffs.”

Seth laughs and misses another three. Daniel collects the rebound and dribbles back out to the point.

“If I make this shot,” he says, crouching with the ball in his hands and his eyes on the rim, “I say we go find Kirby and kick his ass.”

“Hell yeah.”

This was a game they had played since they were boys—equal parts fantasy, prophecy and skill. Daniel’s shot clangs off the rim and bounces back toward Seth.

“If I make this shot,” Seth says, “you finally take me up on my offer and we’ll be watching Celtics games in the Garden before Christmas.”

Seth fires, and the shot banks in off the backboard.

“There it is,” he says.

“You know I can’t.”

“Come on now, Daniel, has this ball ever lied?”

“I can’t.”

Seth jogs over to where the ball settled and steps back out from the key.

“OK, how about this,” he says, crouching again. “If I make this shot, we drive out to California and drag that bitch sister of yours back by her hair.”

“Don’t,” Daniel says.

“And then you come out to Boston,”

“Man, don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Just don’t.”

Seth straightens up, sets the ball on the ground and rests his foot on top of it. He pulls a tin of chewing tobacco from his pocket and sticks a wad under his lip.

“Seriously? She takes off the for other side of the country, leaves you with her dirty screaming kids and you won’t even talk shit?”

Seth tosses the tin to Daniel, and Daniel tosses it back.

“Ain’t as simple as that.”

“Sounds pretty damn simple to me,” Seth says. “Girl sleeps with half the guys in the state and then books it, lets her family deal with the mess she left behind.”

“Stop it,” Daniel says. “It’s not your problem. You don’t get to talk shit.”

“Man, I’m not the only one talking.”

“Fuck you.”

Seth raises both hands above his head.

“OK, listen, let’s calm down,” he says. “I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just trying to understand why I’m the one that’s mad and not you. I’d be furious. Hell, I am furious. After all the shit you been though, this is the thing that screws you over? After your—”

“Wait, wait,” Daniel interrupts. “The thing that screws me over? Who said I was screwed?”

Seth shifts his weight and returns Daniel’s stare. He raps his thumb against the tin in his pocket and spits off the court.

“You got two kids at home and their mom’s two thousand miles away. Says she’s coming back but let’s be honest, she’s not the type of girl who always keeps a promise. I’m not saying you’re screwed. I’m just saying—a lot of folks thought you were going to take one of those scholarships, Daniel. Lot of folks thought you’d jump on the coaching job that opened up at the high school. Lot of folks thought—”

“Like I give a damn what a lot of folks thought,” Daniel says. He starts walking toward Seth but then stops, raising a hand to point but clenching the gesture in his fist instead. “You’re as bad as my dad. Always telling me to leave but you ain’t ever gone anywhere yourself.”

“Don’t take this out on me because you’re mad about what I got and you don’t,” Seth says.

Daniel grabs the ball in front of Seth’s feet, holds it between his bicep and his side and keeps walking off the court.

“Hey,” Seth says. “What are you doing?”

Daniel keeps walking.

“Where are you going?” Seth asks. “You can’t be serious.”

“Do me a favor,” Daniel says. “Next time you go to Boston, just stay there.”

He drops the ball behind him and swings a leg over his dirt bike. The ball bounces a few times and then settles in the grass. Daniel kicks at the starter until the bike sputters to life.

~

Daniel’s niece is just waking up from her afternoon nap when Daniel pulls in. He puts on a clean shirt and then helps her eat her dinner while his mother changes the baby in the back room.

Daniel spoons a pear slice into his niece’s mouth. She cocks her head as she chews, pointing at his elbow and resting her hand on his arm. Daniel isn’t big by any means, but her fingers look like a doll’s on his forearm.

“You gots an elbow?” she asks.

“Sure do.”

She spears one of her noodles and drags it along the table.

“An’ a teeth?”

“Right up here,” he smiles.

She giggles and bites the noodle off the fork.

It isn’t until Daniel makes the girl laugh that he realizes how rarely it happens. His sister made it look easy, but he often feels he’s boring the child, that she is measuring him up against her real parent. If her life to this point has been a flickering of faces, some that are constant and others that come and go, he wonders if she has yet to classify him as one or the other.

“Hey,” Daniel says. “You miss your mom?”

The little girl stares back at him, not smiling or frowning. Her eyes don’t show panic, or confusion, or love—only the simple determination of trying to separate one thought from another.

Before his niece can answer, she’s interrupted by a wail from the back room—a thump and two sets of sobs that bring Daniel out of the kitchen and down the hall so fast his chair freezes on two legs before crashing on the floor behind him.

In the bedroom, his mother is standing next to the changing table, rocking the half-naked boy to her chest. Both are flushed and wet with tears.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” his mother says. “I must have closed my eyes for a second and he slipped.”

“Shit,” Daniel says. “Is he bleeding?” He walks over and scoops the baby off his mother’s chest.

“It just hit me so fast,” she says, one hand to her forehead. “I didn’t—”

The baby howls in Daniel’s arm. From the kitchen, the two-year-old echoes: “So fast.”

“He’s fine, I’m sure he’s fine,” Daniel says, pulling the binky from his mother’s hand. “Just rest for a while.”

“Daniel, you—”

“Just rest, OK?”

Daniel carries the boy out of the room and examines his head in the hallway light. He walks to the front door, wrapping the boy with a blanket from the couch along the way. The boy is tense again, his back going rigid against Daniel’s hand, his shoulders jerking side to side.

Daniel walks him out on the front porch and then back around to the fire pit, shushing and bobbing as he steps. He takes the boy out past the pole barn, all the way to the edge of the valley, where a spectrum of landscapes sit just beyond the dipping land: a clump of rolling hills, a ribbon of forest, the lights from town perched just above.

“Out there is Lake Charlevoix,” Daniel whispers to the boy, still twisting and sobbing on his shoulder. “Then Burt Lake and Walloon Lake, too, and then Huron all the way over on the other side.”

A light from the kitchen illuminates a patch of the yard behind them. The back door creaks open, pauses as the phone rings and creaks again as it closes. Daniel glances at the house and then turns back toward the valley, bouncing the boy on his shoulder again and again.

“Shh,” Daniel whispers to the baby, pointing out at the land. “Just look at it,” he says. “Just look at how far it goes.”