The next morning, Quinn stood in the bread aisle of the IGA and considered the selection. There seemed to be as many different kinds of bread as there were people in Butternut to eat them. She’d come into the store to pick up a Minneapolis Star Tribune and a cup of cheap coffee before heading over to the Butternut Library to write, but she’d ended up roaming the aisles, curious to see what had changed. There was a tiny gluten-free section now, and some half-hearted organic selections in the produce department. Quinn was about to leave the bread aisle when she saw Theresa Dobbs come around the corner. Her first impulse was to hide. Her second was to run. She went with the second. She turned and headed in the other direction down the aisle, brushing past an older man who’d stopped to pick up some rolls. She made it as far as the crackers—walking as fast as she could without attracting attention—before she heard her name being called.
“Quinn. Quinn!”
Oh, God. Not this again, she thought.
“Quinn, wait!” Theresa called from directly behind her. Quinn stopped. Best to just get this over with, she decided. She turned around. Theresa, who was holding an empty grocery basket, looked better than she had several nights ago. She was wearing a Minnesota Wild T-shirt, a pair of skinny jeans, and a quilted down coat, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. When she came up to Quinn, though, and stood much too close to her—what was it about this woman ignoring personal space?—Quinn saw that her nose and cheeks were covered with tiny, spidery red veins. Gin blossoms, they were called, though in Theresa’s case, vodka blossoms might have been more accurate. Quinn could smell it on her breath. Gabriel had said Theresa drank a lot, but he hadn’t mentioned she started before noon.
For some reason, Quinn saw an image of Jake’s mother, Maggie, sitting on her living room couch three days ago, her hair in an elegant twist, her clothes neat and chic as she sipped her Lipton’s English Breakfast Tea and made polite conversation. Who would Quinn be, who would any woman be, she wondered, when faced with the kind of loss these two women had suffered? Would they start their day applying lipstick in the mirror, or downing a fifth of vodka? Or would they muddle along somewhere in between the two? Probably the latter. Though, on the worst days, she thought, it might be tempting to take the vodka-for-breakfast route.
“Quinn, you’re still here,” Theresa said now, taking her arm. She didn’t seem angry anymore. She seemed, instead, possessed of a fierce sense of urgency. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you again.”
“I have some errands to run,” Quinn said, taking a step back. She tried to shake her arm free of Theresa’s hand, but Theresa didn’t appear to notice. It was almost as if, having placed her hand there, she was no longer responsible for it.
“What happened that night, Quinn?” she asked, leaning closer. “The night of the accident? I never got a chance to ask you before. You left. And then you didn’t come back. Until now. And I want to know what happened.”
“You know what happened,” Quinn said.
“I wasn’t there,” Theresa said.
“Neither was I. When it happened. I left before . . .” Before Jake drove out on the ice.
Theresa shook her head with vigor. There was a strange gleam in her eye, almost as if she’d caught Quinn in a lie and she relished the opportunity to confront her with it.
“No, before that, Quinn. What happened before you left that night? I know some of it. Dominic called me on his cell phone. From the lake. Did you know that?” she asked, as if she was goading her. “Did you know I talked to him that night?”
Quinn shook her head. She hadn’t known that. And she realized she didn’t want to know that now.
“Oh, he did,” Theresa said, breathing in Quinn’s face. A woman with a little boy passed them and the little boy looked back at Theresa. “He called me,” Theresa continued. “He always called me if he was going to be late. That’s the kind of kid he was. He’d call and he’d say, ‘Mom. Mom’ . . .” Theresa appeared to lose her train of thought here, and Quinn wondered if she was done. A woman walked by the two of them, pushing a grocery cart, and Quinn longed to follow her, wherever she was going. Anywhere was better than here.
Now Theresa shook her head, as if clearing it, and continued. “Dom called and he said, he said, ‘Mom, Jake and Quinn got in a fight. And Jake’s drunk.’ And I was like, ‘What? Jake doesn’t drink.’ And he said . . . something about he’s drunk because he was fighting with Quinn, and he’s acting crazy, and then he said something about a ring being lost. He said, ‘Jake won’t leave the lake until we find that ring. I’m gonna help him find it.’ Then he had to go. And I said . . . I can’t remember what I said. I probably said something like, ‘Dom. Come home. It’s late. And you sound like maybe you’ve had a little too much to drink too.’ He hung up, though. That was it.” She looked at Quinn as if she still couldn’t believe it. “That was the kind of kid he was. Always helping people. You know what I mean? Those kids?” Her animosity was gone now. She was waiting, it seemed, for Quinn to agree with her about the kind of kid Dom had been.
Quinn couldn’t speak, though. The mention of the lost ring had made her feel ill. It was that hot, cold, prickly sensation that had come over her at the dedication. This was worse; this feeling had come with a new knowledge she hadn’t had before. She hadn’t known that Jake was planning to look for the ring that night after she left.
“Was it your ring he was looking for? Is that what you and Jake were fighting about?” Theresa asked her now. But she seemed to discount this last question as soon as she asked it because she then said, “It doesn’t matter. You fought with him and he got drunk. If he hadn’t been drunk, my Dom would be alive right now.” And she seemed to be looking not at Quinn, but just past her.
“Theresa, I have to go,” Quinn said, brushing her hand off her arm. “I need to leave. I shouldn’t have stayed.”
Incredibly, this seemed to cheer Theresa up. “Oh, you can’t leave, Quinn,” she said, a strange smile on her face. “You can’t just go away. You’re stuck here. With the rest of us.”
That’s crazy, Quinn thought. She turned and walked as quickly as she could down the aisle, past the checkout counter, and into the parking lot, where the blacktop felt soft and putty-like beneath her shoes. She didn’t check to see if Theresa was following her. She got in her car and pulled out of her parking space, her hands clumsy on the steering wheel. One quick look in her rearview mirror showed Theresa standing now in the front of the IGA. Quinn stepped on the gas and tore out of the parking lot before she realized what she was doing and slowed down.
Theresa had accosted her twice now, Quinn thought. Once in a restaurant. And once in the IGA. And both times she’d overstepped boundaries; both times she’d said things that were inappropriate. “It’s been a long ten years. Thanks to you,” she’d said at the Corner Bar. And what had she said a few minutes ago? “You’re stuck here. With the rest of us.” What had she meant by that? Who knows. Maybe she didn’t even know herself what she was saying.
Except . . . except that she’d mentioned the ring. The lost ring. And that Dominic was going to help Jake look for it. Was that true? She’d never heard this before. That didn’t mean that Quinn hadn’t been haunted, over the years, by the possibility that Jake had driven out on the ice that night to find the ring.
“Oh my God,” she murmured. She drove without thinking and pulled over on a residential street. She couldn’t keep going. She couldn’t make her hands do what she wanted them to do. She looked at them. They were shaking. She felt ill. And she felt dizzy, too. Only her dizziness was more like vertigo. It was like the feeling she had in dreams, the ones where she was standing on the edge of something. A building ledge. A cliff. A yawning abyss. One wrong move, and she would fall.
And in that moment, Quinn thought she understood Theresa’s smile. It was a smile of triumph. Theresa had finally found someone to blame for the accident. It was you, Quinn, that smile had said. It was your fault. All of it. You set it in motion. Was Theresa right? Had Quinn caused this tragedy? She’d long ago pushed this possibility out of her mind, but she wasn’t sure she could any longer.
She sat in her car and fought an overwhelming urge to go back to her cabin, curl up on the bed, pull the covers over her head, and sleep. Sleep for days. She ruled that out. She needed to think this through. Right here. Right now. In the days and weeks after the accident, she’d had so many questions. Why had Jake driven out on the lake so late in the season when the ice might be unstable? Why had he taken his two best friends with him? Why had he been drinking that night when he never drank during training season? And why had he stopped his truck in the middle of the lake for several minutes, a decision that might have caused the ice to give way? Had what she’d said to him earlier that night had anything to do with it? And finally, why had he lied to her earlier in the day about why his truck was parked in front of that house on Scuttle Hole Road? It was this lie, after all, that had triggered their fight.
Yes, she’d had questions. But it was the tumultuous feelings she’d had that she thought about now. She’d felt shock, initially, that Jake had done something so . . . so unlike himself. So reckless. But the shock quickly gave way to grief, a feeling she’d never felt before that spring. And there was heartache, too, and sorrow, for the loss of him. Which brought her to guilt. At first, this promised to be the most damaging, the most paralyzing of all her emotions, especially since it came with an endless round of what-ifs. What if Quinn hadn’t argued with Jake that night? What if she hadn’t told him about losing her ring? What if she hadn’t left him at the bonfire? And, most crippling of all, what if she hadn’t left the bonfire with Gabriel? For guilt, and regret, were as much the result of having failed to act as they were the result of having acted.
The sheer hopelessness of the what-ifs, though, led her to another feeling. That had been harder to come by, and slower to take hold. But eventually, after the accident, when the days had turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, she felt a flicker of resolve. She would keep going. She would go to college. She would rebuild her life, one way or another. If she was going to survive, though, and maybe, who knows, even thrive, she would have to stop thinking all these thoughts. Feeling all these feelings. She would have to put the past behind her. Either that, or it would drag her down.
There had been setbacks. Most memorably, during her junior year in college. And yet, for the most part, her life had continued to move forward. The guilt remained, but she’d pushed it under the surface. She’d kept it at bay, not realizing that in doing this she was compounding the problem by not confronting it.
But the guilt had always been about not stopping the accident. It had never been, at least not consciously, about causing the accident. Theresa had changed that. What had she said, exactly? Something about how Dominic had told her that Jake was looking for a ring, and that he wasn’t leaving Shell Lake without it. Dominic was going to help him find it. Unbeknownst to Theresa, of course, was the fact that it was Quinn’s ring that Dominic was talking about, the ring that Jake had given her. The ring that she’d lost earlier that day. Had Jake really gone out on the ice that night looking for it? Think, Quinn. Think. Remember that day, that night. Remember it in all its details.