Why am I here? Quinn thought, sitting in her idling car in the parking lot of the Butternut Motel in a cold, bluish twilight in late March. Here was the town of Butternut, Minnesota, her home for the first eighteen years of her life, and by all accounts an idyllic and lovely place, with quaint shops, small houses, and a beautiful lake surrounded by great northern pines. It was her home, if home was the place you were born and grew up. But for Quinn it was also the place she’d avoided for the last ten years.
Who was it who wrote “you can’t go home again”? she wondered now. Thomas Wolfe, she decided, and, for a moment, she wasn’t in a motel parking lot but was back in her AP English class in the fall of her senior year, Mrs. McKinley droning on about autobiographical fiction while the boy at the desk next to Quinn doodled an image from World of Warcraft in the margin of his notebook. No, she thought, Thomas Wolfe was wrong. At least in her case. You could go home again, but maybe you shouldn’t go home again. Maybe you should listen to the same voice that, a decade earlier, had said, as you packed your suitcases after graduation, Leave, leave now, and don’t come back.
She wanted to put her car in reverse, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t go. Not yet. She’d do what she’d come here to do. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t run this time. She’d stay for the weekend. Probably longer. She turned off the car’s ignition. The engine stilled, and the heating vents, which had been piping warm air into the car, went cool. But she didn’t get out yet. She cocked her head and looked at the view through the windshield. It wasn’t encouraging. The Butternut Motel, a single-story building whose twelve rooms faced the parking lot, had struck Quinn, when she’d last lived in town, as charming and retro, with emerald-green paint, bright white trim, and an emerald-and-white-striped canopy that shaded the front office and had Butternut Motel printed on it in a jaunty cursive. Now, well . . . now the whole thing looked a little worse for wear, though in fairness that might have been the season. Mounds of tired snow separated the parking lot from the sidewalk that fronted the motel, and the bare shrubs that stood in for landscaping between the rooms shook, disconsolately, in the wind. Saddest of all was the plastic table and chair that stood sentry outside of each room. Who was sitting outdoors when the nights were still below freezing, and the days barely edging into the forties?
When the car started to get cold, Quinn got out. She lifted her suitcase from the trunk and wheeled it over to the office, where, through the windows, she could see a woman sitting at a reception counter. As Quinn pushed open the swinging glass door, though, her eyes slid past the woman and settled instead behind her where, on a table, there was a wire cage with a ferret inside of it. She flinched. She hated ferrets. Her neighbor had raised them when she was growing up, and she’d always found there to be something faintly repulsive about them.
“That’s Hank Williams,” the woman said, turning around to look at the ferret too. “Believe it or not,” she went on, “last year, one of our guests checked out of their room and left him behind.”
“I believe it,” Quinn said, though she smiled as she said it.
The woman smiled back. She was young—early twenties, Quinn guessed—and the general impression she gave was one of paleness. Pale hair, pale eyes, pale skin. Even her lips, when she smiled at Quinn, were pale. “Fortunately for Hank,” she confided to Quinn now, “—the Hank’s for Hank Williams, ’cause he just goes crazy when he hears country music—the owner, Mr. Tremblay, took a real shine to him. So, he put his cage in here, where he’d always have someone to keep him company.” She added, without a trace of humor, “It’s a selling point for some people, I think. Especially when we put his little leash on and let him walk around. You know, let him have the run of the place.” She paused. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked Quinn.
“Do we know each other?” Quinn said, realizing that she did indeed look familiar.
“Well,” the woman said, brushing pale bangs off a pale forehead. “I grew up in Winton. You went to high school with my brother, though. Liam Schultz. I think he was a couple of years behind you. I was in middle school when you graduated. I’m Carla Schultz.”
“Riiight,” Quinn said. The Schultzes. She remembered them now. They’d lived in Winton, the next town over, but their school had emptied into the same high school as Quinn’s. There’d been several children in that family, as she recalled, and they’d all been equally pallid.
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw your name on the reservations for today,” Carla continued. “And then I was, like, ‘oh, yeah, she’s here for—’” Something stopped her, though. “Here for the thing,” she said.
“The thing.” Quinn nodded, hoping Carla wouldn’t say any more. She didn’t want to talk about it. An awkward silence followed, interrupted by a gnawing sound emanating from Hank Williams’s cage. Quinn took her wallet out of her handbag, extracted a credit card from it, and slid it across the counter. “It’s for two nights,” she said. Carla nodded and ran the card.
“There’s free Wi-Fi,” she said to Quinn. “And a free continental breakfast in here every morning. Have you had dinner yet?” she asked, handing the card back to Quinn.
“Not yet, no,” Quinn said. “But I’m not that hungry.”
“No? Well, there’s the Corner Bar, three blocks down. You remember that, of course.” Quinn nodded. What she really wanted now was a drink. A glass of pinot grigio would be nice.
“How late is it open?” Quinn asked.
“Until ten tonight,” Carla said. “And if you’d prefer to eat in your room, you can call in a take-out order. Otherwise, we’ve got vending machines around the corner from room twelve. One of them has a chicken-flavored noodle soup in it that’s not too bad.”
“Oh, well, chicken flavored,” Quinn said. “I don’t know if I can pass that up.” But Carla stared back at her, a serious expression on her face. No, Quinn didn’t think she’d be eating chicken-flavored soup when the Corner Bar was down the street. She’d always loved that place; the atmosphere was casual and friendly and the bartender, Marty, was a local institution, as was the Corner Burger, the only thing on the menu that anyone ever ordered. She wanted to stop there at least once before she left Butternut.
“You’re in room six,” Carla said, taking a key out of a drawer and handing it to her. It was a real key, not a key card. When had she last seen one of these at a motel? Never, she decided, but Hank Williams had stopped chewing on whatever he’d been chewing on and was standing up on his hind feet and looking at her challengingly, as if he knew how much she disliked him and his kind, so Quinn thanked Carla and headed to room 6.
When she let herself in, her morale sank a little lower. It wasn’t the worst motel room she’d ever stayed in, and maybe, when this place had opened—in the ’50s?—it had had a kind of charm. But it had been redecorated since then, redecorated during a decade that favored heavy faux-walnut furniture, cheap brass light fixtures, and aggressively ugly bedspreads and curtains that were neither fabric nor plastic but some shiny compromise between the two. Quinn towed her suitcase inside, placed it on the luggage rack, and hung up her coat in the closet. She checked the bathroom—small but serviceable—and the bedside table drawer. Yep, there was the Gideon Bible. She reached to turn on the bedside lamp—more brass—and was amused to find it bolted down to the table. Who would ever consider taking it, unless, of course, they also decided to take the artificial potted fern standing in the corner? There were framed photographs on the walls, too, photographs of what appeared to be the local lakes, but the colors in them were so bright and garish—autumn leaves! blue water!—that they somehow made the scenery look as fake as the room.
She sat down on the bed, pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, and made a call. “Quinny?” she heard a moment later. She smiled. Her dad was the only person who’d ever been allowed to call her that. “Are you there?” he asked.
“I’m here,” she said. A big part of her, though, wanted to be back in Evanston, Illinois, in her safe, sunny second-floor apartment, not far from Lake Michigan, but plenty far from Butternut.
“And how is it?” he asked. He sounded casual, but Quinn could hear the undercurrent of concern in his voice.
“I don’t know, Dad. I just got here. I’m going to get through it, though,” she added, as much for his benefit as for hers. “I’m only committed to this weekend. Then, we’ll see.” What she didn’t say was that she felt as if a kind of darkness was encroaching, right on the edge of her consciousness. But she couldn’t explain this to her dad. “Oh, and by the way,” she said, wanting to change the subject, “there’s a pet ferret in the lobby of the Butternut Motel.”
“Oh, God,” he said. “You hate ferrets. I still don’t understand, though, why you’re staying at that motel. The Johnsons would have loved to have had you.” Like her, Quinn’s father had left Butternut ten years ago. Unlike her, he’d stayed in touch with his friends from there.
“I know that, Dad. And it’s true, this place is a little depressing, but”—she glanced around the room—“it suits my mood. Besides, I don’t think I’d be very good company at someone’s house.”
“You’re always good company,” he said.
“How’s Johanna?” Quinn asked. Johanna was her stepmother, of whom she was very fond. Quinn’s mother had died when she was too young to remember her, and her father hadn’t remarried until he’d met Johanna, seventeen years later. Since this was after Quinn had left for college, the three of them had been spared the challenge of building a life together. What they’d gotten, instead, when Quinn visited them, was a comfortable family of three. Comfortable because Quinn liked Johanna—who was approachable, warm, and down to earth—but also because the two of them shared something in common: they both adored Gene, Quinn’s father.
“Johanna’s fine,” Gene said. “She’s right here. She sends her love.”
“How was the show today?” Quinn asked. “Did Johanna sell any quilts?” Johanna’s quilts were beautiful, and because of them, she and Gene had embraced a nomadic lifestyle, spending part of the year at their house in Winona, in southern Minnesota, and the other part of it on the road, in their Airstream trailer, attending quilting shows all over the country.
“The show went well,” Gene said. “Johanna sold three of the cathedral windows quilts,” he added, mentioning one of the more difficult patterns Johanna did.
“Oh, I love those,” Quinn said, lying back on the bed. And she imagined her dad and Johanna in their cozy trailer, surrounded by quilts, a pot of Johanna’s beef stew—or something comparably delicious—bubbling on the stove, a loaf of bread baking in the oven. I miss you two, she almost said, but she caught herself. She wanted to visit them, but this was the busiest time of year for them. They spent most of their spring and summer on the craft fair circuit and wouldn’t be home again until September.
“Did I tell you that Theo suggested I write about this?” she said, changing the subject. “You know, the dedication ceremony tomorrow. Write about it for myself, at least. Not necessarily for publication.” Theo Grayson was Quinn’s editor at Great Lakes Living, the online magazine she freelanced for. She’d written so many articles for him, in fact, that she was practically a staff writer.
“Really?” he said. “Just the dedication, or the accident, too?”
“All of it,” Quinn said, running a hand over the bedspread. It felt more like plastic than fabric.
Her father was quiet. “Would you be in it?” he asked. “I mean, would you be a part of the story?”
Quinn hesitated. “I think that’s the idea. To write a personal essay. He thinks the harder it is to write about something that’s happened to you, the more important it is to write about it. He also thinks I should take a couple of weeks off. He says I work too hard. Imagine that,” she added in a joking tone. But it was more than that. Theo was worried about her. And the truth, however uncomfortable for Quinn, was that she was worried about herself too. Since winter she’d been struggling through even the simplest routines in her life. And the dreams, the dreams had begun again. The last time this had happened, back in college . . . But she pushed the memory of that time in her life away now. It couldn’t happen again. She wouldn’t fall apart. She wouldn’t let it happen. That’s why she was here. For reasons she didn’t entirely understand, she felt that returning to Butternut—which had long seemed to be the problem—was part of the solution.
“I think taking a little time off is a good idea, Quinn,” her dad said. “I don’t even remember the last time you took a real vacation.” He paused. “What did you say to Theo, though? About the personal essay?”
“I told him . . . I told him I didn’t know. I mean, that’s not my specialty. And I’m not sure I want it to be.” She rolled onto her stomach. It was true. Personal wasn’t her specialty. Writing, on the other hand, was. And since she wanted to write, needed to write, must write in order to feel complete, she knew she would write something during this trip to Butternut. And she couldn’t imagine how, in doing this, she could avoid the personal.
“Well, whatever you write, I’d love to read it,” her dad said. “And by the way—stop me if I’m being too personal—is this thing with Theo an editor-writer thing or something more?”
“It’s not clear yet,” Quinn said. “I’ll let you know before Thanksgiving, though.” She smiled. It was a standing joke in their family of three that Quinn never brought the same man twice to Johanna and Gene’s Thanksgiving dinners. Although for the last two years, she’d come alone.
He chuckled. “Well, you have lots of time to figure that out.” Then, after a moment of silence between them, he said, “Quinn, I wasn’t sure, at first, about your going back to Butternut. I didn’t know if it was a good idea. But I’m behind you now. This whole thing, though, this facing the past, it might be harder than you think.”
“I know, Dad,” she said, thinking to herself that even though she’d told him this was her plan—to return to Butternut and “face” the past—she wasn’t entirely sure what facing the past entailed.
“I’ll let you go, Quinny,” he said.
“I love you. And tell Johanna I love her, too.”
“I will. And it goes without saying we love you.”
After she put her phone down, she remained, for several minutes, lying on the bed, staring at the hideous pattern on the bedspread. She wanted to fold it up and hide it in the closet, but she didn’t have the energy. She’d only stopped twice during her ten-hour drive from Evanston, once for coffee and gas and another time for fast food. When she finally stirred now, it was to get an envelope out of her handbag. She sat down on the edge of the bed and examined it. The postmark on the envelope was from Butternut, but there was no return address and the handwriting—a neat cursive—was unfamiliar. The sender had addressed it to Quinn LaPointe at Great Lakes Living, and the magazine had forwarded it to her Evanston apartment. When she’d opened this envelope the first time, several weeks ago, standing at the kitchen counter of her apartment, her earbuds still plugged in from her evening run, she’d tipped the contents out and discovered there was no letter inside, no note, no explanation, just a clipping about a dedication ceremony from the Butternut Express. She’d felt, for a moment, while reading the clipping, the kitchen floor soften beneath her, as if her running shoes had sunk a few inches into the linoleum. It was a form of emotional vertigo, she knew. Now she took the clipping out again, unfolded it, and read the first few lines:
A Dedication for Three Young Men Who Died Ten Years Ago
A special ceremony is scheduled for Saturday, March 25, 11:00 A.M., at the Shell Lake Beach and Picnic Area off Birch Road. A dedication stone will be unveiled and Jack Mulvaney, the Northern Superior High School principal; Jane Steadman, the Butternut mayor; and Jeffrey Dobbs, Dominic Dobbs’s father, will all speak.
A short article followed this, but Quinn didn’t read it now. She folded the clipping and put it back in the envelope. Who sent this to me? she wondered, not for the first time. Someone who wanted her to know about the dedication, obviously. Someone who wanted her to come back to Butternut for it. But who? It was getting dark outside now, and she considered turning on some lights but instead lay back down on the bed. She wanted to rest for a minute. Then she’d get up and find some dinner.
It must have been more than an hour later when she woke with a start. The room was dark now and the light from the motel’s parking lot cast a yellow band onto the floor beside the window. She sat up. She felt feverish. She’d had one of the dreams.
Jake sat in the front seat of his old blue Ford truck. It was nighttime, and the truck’s headlights illuminated the leafless birch trees and the frozen expanse of Shell Lake before it. Smoke from the truck’s exhaust pipe drifted into the starry sky and mixed with burning filaments of ash from the nearby bonfire. Jake’s window was rolled down and music from the radio sounded tinny in the cold night air. Quinn stood a short distance away. Someone, a shadowy presence, stood somewhere behind her. Jake leaned out of the truck window and called to her, “Quinn. Quinn! Don’t let me die.”
But she had. She shivered now, violently. She already knew how that night had ended.