You know what I think?” Billy asked, glancing over at Luke, who was riding in the front passenger seat. “I think,” she said, not waiting for an answer she knew wasn’t going to come, “that there are more than ten thousand lakes in Minnesota. Seriously, they are going to have to change the state slogan, or whatever it is you call that thingy on the bottom of the license plate. Because this is at least the five-hundredth lake we’ve passed since we left Butternut,” she added, gesturing at the dazzlingly blue body of water sliding by on their left.
“See which lake that is,” she said, picking up the map she’d set on the armrest and holding it out to Luke. To her surprise, he took it from her, albeit reluctantly, and with a sigh to indicate his exasperation at having to do this, he looked it over. Billy hid a smile. She loved maps; it was something she’d inherited from her father, and Luke had inherited it, too. Even after she’d bought a car with a navigational system, she’d always preferred to use paper maps, and more often than not, she’d made Luke her navigator. “It’s Birch Lake,” he said finally, without much interest, setting the map back down.
“Birch Lake, huh? Well, whoever named it that doesn’t get any points for originality, do they?” she said. “But there are some wonderful names of lakes in this state, Luke. When I was little, and Pop-Pop and Grandma and I used to drive up north on vacation, I’d write down all my favorite ones. Let’s see if I can remember some of them. There was . . . Lake Full of Fish. Fool Hen Lake. And . . . oh, I know, Little Too Much Lake. Swear to God on that last one,” she said, stealing a look at him. She might—might—have seen glimmer of a smile from him, but he didn’t say anything.
For once, Billy didn’t mind. It was one of those glorious Midwestern summer mornings she’d learned to expect but never to take for granted living up here. The flatness of the land had the effect of emphasizing the immensity of the sky, and of making the clouds that were drifting above it look fantastically puffy—like misshapen buffalo grazing in a field of blue. Billy had chosen the backroads route on their drive today, and every few miles they passed another lake, each of which was a variation on the same theme: cobalt water, granite shoreline, fringe of dark green pine trees. She turned off the radio now—the station was starting to break up—and rolled down her window, letting in the sounds of outside: the hum of insects and the swish of the wind in the trees. The morning air, warm and sweet, ruffled her hair, still damp from the shower. No, not even Luke, who had slumped down a little further in his seat and put his gloomy expression back in place, could stop Billy from taking pleasure in this day.
It wasn’t just from the day, either. She was excited about Luke’s North Woods Adventures trip; excited enough for both of them, she liked to think. But when she’d woken him up this morning to get up and ready for the drive to the meeting place, he’d buried his head under his pillow and mumbled something unintelligible, though definitely not positive, about the day ahead.
Billy, on the other hand, couldn’t wait for it. She’d spent the last couple of weeks poring over Luke’s itinerary and once again falling in love with place names. Were they really going to hike the Gitchi-Gami State Trail to Gooseberry Falls? They really were. She’d spent hours online, ordering Luke’s equipment and debating the relative merits of flashlights versus headlights, hiking boots versus trail runners, down versus synthetic sleeping bags. Finally she’d agonized, pleasantly, over what book to pack for him. He hadn’t asked her to do this, and she hadn’t told him she was going to, but she’d be damned if her son left on a two-week trip without anything to read. After much debate, she’d slipped the underappreciated classic Canoeing with the Cree into his backpack. The rest, she figured, was up to him.
“How long before we get to Duluth?” Billy asked now, nudging the map over to him. He studied it.
“About an hour?” he said finally.
“We’re making good time, then. I thought we’d have lunch at Canal Park,” she said, knowing that Luke had once loved (and maybe, for all she knew, still loved) looking at the carrier ships that docked there. “And then, about an hour after that—maybe less if we’re lucky—we’ll be at the meet-up point, Split Rock Lighthouse. Remember your report?” When Luke was in fifth grade and at the peak of his “shipwrecks of the Great Lakes” obsession, he’d written a report about this lighthouse. (It had been built in the early twentieth century after a stormy November during which two ships had sunk off that particularly rocky stretch of coastline.) “Did you ever think you’d visit it?” Billy prodded.
Amazingly, this got his attention. He sat up straight and turned to her. “Mom?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t really care about the lighthouse, but . . . do you know where I do want to go?”
“Where?”
“Alaska.”
She looked at him, astonished, before looking back at the road. A logging truck was coming up behind them and she needed to concentrate.
“I tried to find him in Alaska, Mom,” Luke said, the words spilling out. “I looked online. He’s not there, though. There are other Wesley Fitzgeralds in other states, but they weren’t him.”
Billy said nothing. She was waiting for a turnout so she could let the logging truck pass.
“Mom, I can’t do it by myself. You need to . . . help me find him. Maybe we could go back to the fishing lodge—the last place you saw him—and start from there.”
“Just a second,” Billy said in a controlled panic. They were approaching a roadside business, a general store. She put on her turn single, slowed, and pulled into its graveled parking lot. The logging truck rattled by. Remember when you were fascinated by those, too? she wanted, almost desperately, to ask Luke. Remember when you used to count how many we would see on our drives between Butternut and St. Paul? But when she glanced over at him, she realized he could not be distracted; he was staring intently at her. So we’re going to have this conversation now, she thought, mentally bracing herself. She put the car in park and turned the engine off.
“Luke, I understand why you’re curious about your father,” she began with what she thought was an admirable calmness. The palms of her hands, though, still on the steering wheel, felt suddenly clammy with perspiration.
“So do something about it,” he burst out. “Don’t just say you understand. That doesn’t do anything.”
“Luke,” she said, taking a hand off of the steering wheel and putting it on the dashboard, as if this would somehow steady her, “it’s a little more complicated than that. This isn’t just about contacting your father. It’s about . . . what kind of a person your father is now. And how the person he is now would feel about all of this. It’s been fourteen years since I saw him. And you have to understand, I barely knew him then. I was a teenager. I didn’t . . . I didn’t know as much about the world as I know now. He seemed like a nice guy, but I may not have been . . . the best judge of character.”
“Okay. I get it. You didn’t know him that well,” Luke said impatiently. “You told me that already. I don’t care. You act like he might be some kind of loser, Mom, but you wouldn’t have liked him when you met him if he’d been like that. You just . . . wouldn’t have.”
“I’m not saying he’s a loser, but what if, when you meet him, he’s not what you expect? What if he’s . . . different?”
Luke set his jaw stubbornly. “It doesn’t matter. Pop-Pop told me once, ‘Family is family. You take care of each other.’ He said, ‘It’s that simple.’ So even if my dad isn’t, like, perfect, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know him.”
“Pop-Pop said that?” Billy asked. She’d never heard him say this, but she knew that Pop-Pop’s own father, Douglas Harper, had been a famously difficult man. He’d had a serious gambling problem and had once lost Pop-Pop’s boyhood home in a card game. But that hadn’t stopped Pop-Pop from taking care of him before he died.
“You’re right, Luke. Family is important,” she said evenly. “But you’re forgetting something. You don’t know . . .” . . . how your dad will feel about you. Or whether he’ll even accept that you’re his son or, if he does, whether he’ll want to have anything to do with you. But she couldn’t say this. She looked over at Luke instead. His head was down, and he was unraveling a loose thread from the frayed edges of a hole in the knee of his blue jeans. This was the kind of thing she’d seen him do countless times before without feeling anything more than a mild annoyance—Did he really have to make the hole bigger?—but now, for some reason, it made her throat tighten with emotion. She didn’t want to hurt him. She’d never wanted to hurt him. But she had to broach this subject now, because if they were going to reach out to Wesley, Luke had to be prepared for the possibility of rejection.
“Luke,” she started again.
He looked up. “I know what you’re going to say, Mom.”
“You do?”
“You’re going to say he might not want to be my dad.”
“If he knew you, he’d want to be your dad,” Billy said quickly, the lump hardening in her throat. “He doesn’t know you, though, Luke. He doesn’t know anything about you.” She whispered this last part because it seemed awful to her now to think that someone as amazing as Luke should be in this world without both of his parents knowing everything about him.
“Mom,” he said. “We won’t know until we find him. And if he doesn’t want to know me, or know us, then we won’t see him again.” He said this with a resolve that surprised Billy. So he was willing to take that chance, the chance of being rejected by his own father? Billy wasn’t sure it was a chance she was willing to take.
They sat there quietly for a moment while she wrestled with what to say. Should she tell him she would think about all this while he was at camp? Or should she tell him about Pop-Pop finding his father? Now that he was so adamant about tracking Wesley down, it seemed wrong to continue pretending she didn’t know where he was. On the other hand, telling Luke now, a couple of hours before she was supposed to drop him off at camp, seemed like an inopportune moment to tell him something so . . . so momentous.
“You know what?” Luke said, interrupting her thinking. “I’m not going to camp.”
“Of course you’re going,” Billy said automatically.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I never wanted to go. You just didn’t listen to me. And now . . . you can’t make me,” he added, bracing himself against the front seat of the car as if, even now, Billy was going to try to remove him from it.
“Luke,” she said incredulously. “You have to go. It’s . . . paid for. It’s nonrefundable. And it’s a lot of money—for us, anyway, and for Grandma, too. She paid for half of it.” But she could feel Luke’s resistance hardening, and something occurred to her then. He was right. She couldn’t force him to go on a two-week hiking trip. Couldn’t even force him to get out of the car if he didn’t want to. Even if she could, if he was that unwilling to go, the counselors probably wouldn’t want him to come. It was a voluntary program, after all. Not one of those boot camps for troubled teens.
She inhaled a shaky breath and looked out the window while she tried to gather her thoughts. Luke had never defied her authority before, not so completely. Now that he had, she felt helpless. And, to be honest, a little afraid. She couldn’t let him see this, though. She needed to treat this like just another negotiation. If there was anything she’d learned to do over the last six months, it was to negotiate with Luke.
She was considering her opening move when he said impatiently, “I know you think if I don’t go on this trip I’m just going to hang out at home, but I’m not. I’m going to look for my dad. And if you won’t help me, I’ll do it myself. I have money saved up. I think it’s enough to buy an airline ticket to Alaska.”
“Luke,” she murmured, shaking her head, panic edging up on her again. And while her instincts might once have told her to list all of the reasons this plan was unworkable, the truth was, she was too afraid to do this. He had tapped, unknowingly, into one of her greatest fears: that he would run away from home. At her lowest points this summer, after his suspension and his trip to the police station, she’d asked herself if that was the direction he was heading in, the logical conclusion of his rebelliousness and the breakdown of their relationship. Now, as so often happened lately, she didn’t know if she was overreacting or not. The idea of a thirteen-year-old Luke leaving home alone on some quixotic journey to find his father seemed unlikely. Then again, even if he didn’t get far, he could still try, and that in and of itself was terrifying. (She remembered a scene she’d witnessed once from her car window: a bunch of what looked like teenagers living in a homeless encampment under a freeway overpass outside Minneapolis.)
And she knew then that she would have to tell him, right now, about Wesley. She was not going to be able to take two weeks while he was away to prepare for this moment. The moment was now.
“Luke, look at me,” she said, since he was once again pulling at a loose thread in his jeans. “I need to tell you something.”
He turned to her, his expression alert.
There was no way to say this elegantly, she realized. She pulled in a little breath. “I know where your father is.”
Luke stared at her, dumbstruck.
She nodded vigorously. “Your Pop-Pop found him. Or, rather, the private investigator Pop-Pop hired did. I’ve never contacted him, Luke. But I have an address and a phone number.”
“Where . . . where is he?” he sputtered.
“He’s on Vancouver Island. That’s in Canada.”
“Canada?”
“He lives there . . . and works there,” Billy explained, wishing she knew more. But she told him what little she did know while he stared wide-eyed back at her. She told him that his father owned a charter boat business, that he was married and had two daughters. This last piece of information seemed to stun Luke all over again.
“I have two sisters?”
“Actually, they’re considered half sisters. But yes, you are related to them.”
“I have two sisters,” he repeated as though he were still familiarizing himself with this piece of information. “How old are they?”
“They’re . . . around six and ten now, I think,” she said. It seemed incredible to her now that she hadn’t even opened the envelope. A year ago, though, she had felt as if it was a ticking time bomb that would be safer in a safety deposit box than at home. How wrong she had been.
“Wait. When did you find all this stuff out?” he asked.
“Before your Pop-Pop died,” she began. And then she made herself go back to that Easter weekend and tell Luke about her conversation with Pop-Pop in his study, and the manila envelope he’d given to her, and the safe deposit box at the bank in Butternut.
“You knew about my dad this whole time?” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell me, like, right away? And what about Pop-Pop? Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Your Pop-Pop let me make that decision. And I thought about it,” she said. “Remember, though, Luke, you were twelve at the time, and you were doing so well. Your Pop-Pop and I, we thought . . . well, we didn’t know what your dad was like, or how he’d feel if we contacted him. And it was . . . it was never a question of if,” she added quickly. “It was only a question of when you were going to get the information about him.” It struck Billy now that this reasoning seemed hollow.
He was quiet for a long time. “That’s what I used to talk to Van about,” he said when he spoke again. “About my dad. About how I’d find him and, you know, what it’d be like when I did.”
“Really?” she said. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t know that.” Why hadn’t he told her this? she wondered, tears burning unexpectedly in her eyes. Unless . . . unless, of course, he had told her. Or tried to tell her. And she remembered his heated words after they’d come back from the police station. “No, you don’t get it,” Luke had shouted. “I don’t know anything about my dad.” And this whole time, Luke was now realizing, Billy could have enlightened him. She blinked back a tear. “I’m sorry,” she said, but there was no answer from Luke.
Finally, though, he mumbled, “Okay, so, whatever.” And then he said, “When can I meet him? Like, how soon?” And he looked reflexively at Billy’s cell phone, which was propped in the cup holder.
“We’re not going to call him, Luke,” she said, alarmed. “Not right this second. And we’re not going to rush into things, either.”
“But you are going to call him?”
“I am. Eventually.”
“Eventually?” He looked incredulous.
“No, soon,” Billy amended. “I’ll get in touch with him when I get home.”
“You get home. You’re not still going to make me go to camp . . . ?”
“Yes, Luke. I am. You’re going. We just went over this.”
“Yeah, but that was before I knew—”
“This doesn’t change that,” she said firmly. “Especially since . . . I have to figure out how to do this. Try to see this from his perspective. We can’t just . . . drop this on him. I mean, we can. We’ll sort of . . . have to. But there’s a right way and a wrong way.” Even as she was saying this, though, Billy was wondering what the right way would be. They had definitely not covered this particular challenge in the parenting books she’d been reading recently.
“Look, I will contact him,” she said. “But not right this minute. We need to get you to Split Rock Lighthouse.” She glanced at her watch.
“I still don’t get why I have to go.”
“Because I think it’ll be good for you. I think you’ll love it. I know the timing’s not great. The timing almost never is great for anything,” she admitted with a rueful smile. “But, look. You’ve waited thirteen years to find out more about your dad. Do you think, maybe, you could wait another two weeks?”
“I guess,” Luke said finally, though Billy could see how conflicted he still was. It was all there in his expression. Excitement. Nervousness. Impatience. And something else, too, something she couldn’t quite name. Anger? Distrust? He turned to look out the window. She started the engine and pulled back onto the road.
By the time they’d reached the parking lot of the visitor center at Split Rock Lighthouse, where counselors, campers, and parents were already congregating, Luke had settled back inside himself—settled so far back, in fact, that when Billy said good-bye to him, she understood that she was not, under any circumstance, to hug him. She spoke instead to the head counselor, whose nickname was Mad Dog, and who had long blond hair, a BMX biking T-shirt on, and a quintessential coolness that she thought might have impressed Luke under ordinary circumstances.
“Luke,” she said quietly as the campers started getting ready to leave. “You’re going to be okay with all of this, aren’t you? I need to know that before I leave here.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, glancing around to make sure none of the other boys had heard her.
“Good,” she said. And she couldn’t resist reaching out and pushing an errant lock of hair off his forehead.
“Mom,” he said in warning, hoisting his backpack on.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go before I make a scene.” She tried to smile. “I love you, though,” she said in a voice no louder than a whisper. “I love you so much, Luke.” And then she turned and, without looking back, made her way across the parking lot to her car. She wasn’t feeling particularly lucky, but she must have had a little luck on her side, because she was safely back inside the car by the time the tears really came.