I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Ice Edge

Iris walks the shore, sees her father's plane in a boat-shed window, and Toby catches her collar at the edge of the ice. Her mother calls: Lars came by.

On the second morning I went to the road, and I did not go to the road.

I put on the borrowed parka from the hall hook, which smelled of a man and cedar and cold.

I pulled on a pair of boots two sizes too big.

Nobody stopped me at the door.

The two men on the porch watched me come out.

The younger one, with the scar on his chin, said, "Morning, Miss Aalto," and moved his coffee to the other hand.

I took the shore path instead of the drive, because I wanted to see what was out there.

It was a bright, bitter morning with a pale sun on the snow.

The lake was a vast gray plain, going white at the edges where the ice had begun.

The path ran along a bluff above a stony beach, with cedar and spruce crowding the left side.

Out on the right, a long way off, the lake made a sound I knew from every winter of my childhood.

It was a deep, slow groan, the ice shifting its weight.

I walked a quarter mile.

The beach opened out below me, and a gray weathered shed stood at the end of it with its back to the woods and its door to the water.

It was a boat shed, long and low, with a slipway running down into the snow.

I stopped.

The door had a new padlock.

The one window facing me was fogged on the inside.

I came down the bank and stood on tiptoe and found a clear patch in the corner of the glass.

A workbench ran along the far wall, with shavings swept under it and a row of clamps.

On the bench lay a woodworking plane.

It was an old Stanley with a rosewood knob, and a notch gouged out of the left side of the sole.

I knew the notch.

My father made it in 1998 dropping the plane off a ladder, and he swore in Finnish for ten minutes.

That plane hung on the wall of my father's boat shop in West Duluth until he died, and then my brother took it.

The week before Matti went through the ice, he showed it to me and said, "Someday this goes to the kid I have, so be nice to me."

I stood there with my breath fogging the glass.

Toby Reinholt had my brother's plane.

I thought about it very coldly, and I thought about it wrong.

I thought: the Reinholts took what my brother left.

I thought: after the funeral they went through his things and kept whatever was worth something.

I thought: he put my father's plane on a bench in a shed and shut a padlock on it.

Of course he did.

That was what men like him did.

A hand closed on the collar of my parka and pulled me backward hard.

I swung around with my elbow up.

Toby had me by the collar, one big hand gripping the back of my neck through the fur, and he had hauled me three steps up the bank.

Under my boots, where I had been standing, the snow had broken away in a long gray crack, and black water showed through.

I hadn't known I had stepped onto the lake ice at the foot of the slip.

"Not that way," he said.

His breath was hard and uneven.

He had run.

"Ice," he said.

"I was looking at the window," I said.

"You were standing on four inches of lake in boots two sizes too big."

"It's December."

"It's early ice," Toby said. "It looks like a floor, and it's a lid."

His hand was still on my neck.

I felt the warm grip of it through the fur and on the bare skin above the collar, and I felt the shake in his fingers.

Neither of us moved.

My pulse was banging in my throat under his thumb, and he had to feel it.

"Let go," I said.

He let go at once.

I rubbed the back of my neck, and the skin there stayed warm.

"Why are you out of breath?" I said.

"I ran."

"From where?"

"The house," Toby said.

"Why?"

He looked at me, and then past me, once, at the shed.

"Because you left the path," he said.

"What's in the shed?" I said.

"Boat things," he said.

"Whose?"

"Mine," Toby said.

"That plane isn't yours," I said.

His eyes came back to me, very quick.

"What plane?" he said.

"There's a plane on the bench. It was my father's. My brother took it when my father died."

I watched his face the way I'd watch a monitor.

Nothing moved in it.

Nothing at all, and that was how I knew he was working to keep it still.

"When Matti died," I said, "somebody took his tools."

"That's a long time ago, Iris," Toby said.

"It's not that long," I said.

"It's two years in February."

"Then you've had two years to give it back," I said.

"Not that way," he said again, quieter.

I could not tell whether he meant the ice or the question.

He walked me back along the bluff without touching me, a pace to my left, between me and the water.

When I looked over my shoulder at the shed, he stepped into my line of sight.

At the porch the younger man held the door.

"Take her coffee," Toby told him.

"I can carry my own coffee," I said.

"Then carry it."

In the study the phone was waiting on the desk, an old gray handset with a cord.

Beside it lay a cell phone in a black case, charged, with a Post-it on the screen that said IRIS in square, even handwriting.

I had owned my own phone for four years, and it was in the van with Brett, or in a lake somewhere.

I picked up the cell and dialed my mother's number from memory.

It rang four times.

"Hello?" my mother said.

Her voice was small and flat, the lunch-line voice she had used since the lake.

"Äiti," I said. "It's me."

"Kulta."

My throat shut for a second.

"Are you all right?" I said.

"I'm fine. I'm at the table," my mother said. "Lars came by this morning."

I went cold from the scalp down.

"What did he want?" I said.

"He brought pulla. He's very kind. He said you'd be fine."

I looked up.

Toby stood in the doorway of the study, watching me.

I held my mother's voice against my ear and watched his face change at the name.

It hardened, and under it was something I had seen once before, at the funeral, and had never been able to name.

It was fear.

"Äiti," I said carefully. "Did he say who told him?"

"Told him what?"

"That I'd be fine."

"Oh, kulta," my mother said, in the same small flat voice.

"He's always so sure of things."

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