That night, when Billy went out on the back porch, she didn’t take a glass of chardonnay or the Jane Austen box set with her. She just sat out there, feeling completely numb, and it was only when Murphy nudged her hand with his head that she remembered his presence. “Hey buddy,” she said with a tired smile, “I’m sorry. I’ve been neglecting you.” She scratched him behind his ears then for an extralong time. After all, this was his nighttime ritual, too.
After Murphy had his fill of her attention and flopped down contentedly at her feet, Billy sat still, very still, and tried to understand what had happened between her and Luke tonight. Officer Sawyer had given them a ride back from the police station, and Billy had made small talk with him while rehearsing, mentally, what she would say to Luke—who was sitting stonily beside her—as soon as they got home. Things didn’t go exactly as she’d planned, though. First, Luke didn’t follow her willingly into the kitchen; she’d had to head him off at the door to his room and insist that he follow her there. Then, once she’d started speaking to him, the lecture that had come so easily to her in the police car was suddenly nowhere to be found. Billy loved words. Written and spoken. Where, she’d wondered, had all of them gone now?
Still, she’d stumbled along. She told Luke how disappointed she was in him. He’d missed Daisy’s wedding, he’d damaged public property and, most important, he’d risked his life in the process. He never looked up as she spoke to him. He was gazing, as usual, at the floor, but he made a tiny gesture, an almost imperceptible lifting of his shoulders, that seemed to imply she was overreacting on this last point. Billy was furious. She’d sputtered, angrily, about broken necks and spinal cord injuries and a boy she’d known growing up who was paralyzed after diving into the shallow end of a swimming pool. Luke seemed unimpressed by all of this, though, and Billy’s anger finally petered out. What was the point of it, really? She wasn’t getting through to him, and besides, she’d remembered something she’d read about teenagers recently. Apparently one of the reasons they were more likely than adults to engage in risky behaviors was because their prefrontal cortexes had not finished developing yet. Still, she couldn’t just hope for the best while she waited for his to mature, so she changed tack and instead listed the new rules she’d be instituting.
He’d have no Internet or cell phone use during the week, and he’d have restricted use of both of these on weekends. He wouldn’t be seeing Van or J.P., either. Monday through Friday, he’d go to Nature Camp from nine A.M. to three P.M., after which he’d come directly to the library, where he’d stay until they left together at five o’clock. On Saturday and Sunday, they’d see. Maybe he could spend time with Annabelle, Toby, or another preapproved friend. Maybe he could visit his grandmother in St. Paul. But Luke being on his own, or at large in Butternut, or just “hanging out” with Van—that was over.
Luke was appalled. “Mom, you can’t stop me from seeing my friends,” he said, his blue eyes flashing.
“Actually, I can.” Leaning against the kitchen counter, she folded her arms and tried to project a confidence she didn’t really feel. “I can if I think they’re a bad influence on you. I mean, Luke, you’ve never been in trouble before—at least, not like this—and in the last week, you’ve been suspended from school and picked up by the police. Both times you were with Van. And as for J.P., honestly, what are you even doing with him? He doesn’t go to your school. He doesn’t go to any school. He does, however, have a juvenile record. Is that really the kind of person you want to spend your time with?”
“Maybe,” Luke said with a nonchalance that infuriated her all over again.
“So, this is someone you look up to? Someone you admire?”
“Could be,” he mumbled, but he didn’t meet her gaze. He looked down at his perennially untied shoelaces.
“Oh, Luke,” she sighed, her anger ebbing away. She wasn’t going to argue this point with him, either. How could she? He wasn’t ready yet to see what she saw. There was no way to force him to, either. Besides, she was getting off track. The how of Luke’s changing, she believed, was in some ways less important than the why. And it was the why she wanted to talk about. She took a deep breath.
“Luke, I know you don’t like it when I bring up Pop-Pop’s death, but I’m sorry, I feel like I need to. Because let’s be honest, he was more than a grandfather to you. He was . . . like a father to you,” she said. Luke didn’t raise his head, but she saw his body tense up. “We all miss him,” she continued gently. “You and me, and Grandma, and we’re all having a difficult time. But the two of us”—she made a gesture that included both of them—“we are our own family, and as the head of that family, I’m telling you there are going to be changes. There are going to be rules. Whether you—”
“But we’re not a family,” Luke broke in. “Not a real family.”
“Of course we are,” Billy said, shocked.
“I don’t live with a dad,” he said defiantly.
“A lot of kids don’t live with a dad. Look at your class at school.”
“No, you don’t get it,” Luke said, raising his voice. “They know who their dad is, even if he isn’t married to their mom. I don’t know anything about my dad.”
“That’s not . . . completely true, Luke. You know . . .” But she stopped herself here. For the simple reason that, for the past year, she’d known more than she was telling Luke.
“I know . . . what? His name?” he said, challenging her. “So what? That’s nothing. I’ve never even met him. I don’t know where he lives. Or what he even really looks like. And he doesn’t even know I exist. Like, at all,” he yelled. He ran out of the room and slammed his bedroom door so hard it made Billy jump. She turned, a little unsteadily, to pour herself a glass of water, less because she was thirsty than because she needed something to do. Well, he’d finally told her what he was feeling, she thought, sipping the lukewarm tap water. She just had no idea that he was feeling that.
Now, sitting on the back porch, barely conscious of the dusky twilight falling around her, she tried to think calmly about what Luke had said. This wasn’t the first time he’d brought up his father, of course. But it was the first time he’d brought him up with that kind of anger. Starting when Luke was around three, he’d asked Billy about his father many times, and she’d always tried to answer him as honestly, and as patiently, as she could. The answers didn’t add up to much. But at the time, Billy hadn’t known any more than what she was telling him.
When Luke was still quite small, she’d looked for Wesley on her own. She’d typed his name into her web browser many times. Wesley Fitzgerald. There’d been other Wesley Fitzgeralds, just not her Wesley Fitzgerald. Even in the age of Google, not everyone was a click away from revealing himself or herself. At some point, though, around the time she and Luke moved to Butternut, she’d stopped looking for him. And until a year ago, she was left with nothing more than her memory of him, and of the night they had spent together.
She thought back to this night with Wesley now. As so often happened in Billy’s life, it had begun with a book. This time it was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and she was reading it in, of all places, the lobby of a fishing lodge in Alaska. Coming here had not been her idea. It was April, and spring had finally, tentatively, arrived back home in St. Paul. Yet here she was, an hour outside of Fairbanks, where the daytime temperatures were still barely edging into the fifties and the nighttime temperatures were hovering close to zero. But Billy’s father, an avid fisherman, had given himself this trip for his sixtieth birthday—fly-fishing for arctic grayling on the Chena River was a longtime dream of his—and since Billy’s mother refused to go anywhere near a fishing rod, he’d invited Billy to come along with him instead. So there she was, on their last night at the lodge, curled up in an oversized leather armchair in front of a crackling fire, and so deep into one of her favorite novels—she’d just gotten to the scene where Heathcliff sees Catherine for the last time—that she was only tangentially aware of someone saying her name.
“Billy?”
“Uh-huh,” she murmured distractedly, not bothering to look up from the page.
“It’s Billy, right?”
Finally she glanced up. It was the fishing guide from that morning. Wesley. She’d liked his name because it had struck her as romantic. And the man, she’d thought, had fit the name. In fact, if Heathcliff had been an Alaskan fishing guide instead of—
“Your name is Billy, isn’t it?” he asked, smiling down at her.
“Yes, it is,” she said, blushing. “And you’re Wesley.” She straightened up in the armchair and closed her book, though she was careful to turn down the corner of the page to mark her place in it first.
“That must be a really good book,” Wesley said. “I’ve been walking by you all night, and you’ve never once looked up from it.”
“It’s Wuthering Heights,” Billy said, holding it up. “Have you ever read it?”
“Nope.”
“Really? Not even in school?”
“Especially not in school. I didn’t particularly like school. There were . . . too many books,” he said with a half grimace, half smile.
“Oh, right,” Billy said. She was always forgetting that not everyone loved reading as much as she did. “Well, you might like this one,” she said. “It’s very . . .”
“Very what?” he asked, sitting in the armchair opposite her. She’d assumed he’d said hello to her out of politeness, but now she realized he seemed to be enjoying himself.
“It’s very . . . you know, romantic,” Billy said, blushing again.
“Ahh,” he said. “Romance. Maybe I should give it a try, then.” He smiled as he reached for it. “That was the part of high school I actually liked.”
Billy gave him the book, but he didn’t open it. He talked to her instead. He was good at talking to people, she realized. Good at making them feel comfortable, and drawing them out of themselves. It was part of being a guide, he explained to her later when she commented on this. You had to know a lot about fishing, yes. But you had to know a lot about people, too. There wasn’t really any way to learn this, though. Not in any school, at least. You either understood people or you didn’t.
Now, as the nearby fire hissed and popped, they talked about their fishing trip that day. Wesley had taken Billy, her father, and four other guests fly-fishing on an “iced-out” stretch of the Chena River. “You’re pretty good with a rod,” he said approvingly of the graylings she’d caught.
“My dad saw to that,” Billy said. “I’m an only child, so either I was going to be his fishing buddy, or no one was.”
“It’s just you and your mom and dad?” Wesley asked, surprised.
Billy nodded. She didn’t think she was meant to be an only child. Her parents, she knew, had struggled to have a child. They’d both been in their early forties when she was born. If they were disappointed by the size of their family, though, they’d never shown it. She was the center of their lives. And maybe because she was an only child of older parents who adored her, she was that paradoxical blend of precociousness and naïveté. She always had friends, but they tended to be like her; they were more likely to spend weekends studying than sneaking alcohol or cigarettes.
Wesley, it turned out, was one of eleven children. He’d left his family’s home in South Dakota at sixteen. Billy was shocked to discover he was only twenty now, just two years older than she was. He looked so much more mature than the boys she knew at home. Then again, the boys she knew at home were from the Catholic boys’ high school that was the brother to Billy’s school. She couldn’t imagine any of those boys being out on their own at sixteen. Their mothers were still laundering their school uniforms and packing their lunches.
“Didn’t your parents miss you when you left?” she asked Wesley.
“I’m not sure they even noticed,” he said. When Billy shook her head in wonderment, he added, “No. They noticed. Of course they did. But, still. It was one fewer person to keep track of. My dad probably said something like, ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’”
He told her about his travels a little bit, about some adventures he’d had out West and then in Alaska. He’d been a cook at a logging camp—he’d scrambled a thousand eggs a day there, he told Billy—he’d worked on a commercial fishing boat, and he’d been a rafting guide. But he’d landed here last year and it had felt right; he’d been fly-fishing since he was a kid. The money was pretty good. The guests were all right, or more than all right—here Billy got another smile—and the fishing, the fishing was fantastic. He could do a lot worse, he figured.
Billy listened to all this with fascination. Maybe it was the novel she was reading, or the firelight, or Wesley’s rugged good looks—dark hair that was just a little longer than regulation length at the boys’ high school, one blue eye and one brown eye, which Billy had never seen before and thought was incredibly exotic, and a nose that might have been broken before, in a fight, she secretly hoped—but the whole night seemed suddenly charged with possibility.
“Uh-oh, it looks like they’re shutting down for the night,” Wesley said finally, glancing around.
“Are they?” Billy said. She’d lost all track of time. But it was eleven o’clock already, and here was a middle-aged woman, the front desk manager, moving through the lobby, turning off all but a few lights. She gave Billy and Wesley a pointed time-to-be-saying-good-night smile.
Wesley gave Billy her book and they stood up. There was an awkward pause—awkward for Billy, not for Wesley. “Well, your dad’s probably wondering where you are,” he said.
Billy shook her head. “We have separate rooms. He said he was going to turn in early, though. Knowing him, he’s already asleep.” She hesitated. She didn’t want to stop talking to Wesley, but it seemed they were out of options.
He, apparently, thought differently. “Do you want to go to a party?” he asked.
“Now?”
He nodded. “It’s in one of the employee cabins. It’s a nightly thing. We take turns buying the beer and . . .” He shrugged.
Billy looked around the lobby. The desk manager was gone. Everyone was gone. She was excited to be alone with him, but at the same time, she was also a little nervous.
“If you’re too tired, though, I understand. That was an early call this morning.”
“No,” Billy said suddenly. Decisively. “I’m not tired. I’d like to go to a party.” After all, she thought, the only things waiting for her in her room were more books, and for once, they didn’t seem like they were going to be enough. Besides, her parents were always encouraging her—their quiet, studious daughter—to get out in the world more. The fact that this probably wasn’t what they had in mind wasn’t lost on her. Still, she had to take her opportunities as they came. “Let’s go,” she said, smiling at Wesley.
“We’re going to go out the back way,” Wesley said, leading her through the lobby and then down a corridor she hadn’t noticed before. “Technically it’s against the rules for employees to fraternize with the guests after hours,” he added. “But it happens. Usually the management looks the other way.”
When they got to the back entrance, though, Billy stopped. “I don’t have a coat,” she said, turning to him.
“That’s all right,” Wesley said. “You can borrow mine.” He left her there for a minute and came back with a big down jacket that he bundled her up in before they left the lodge. “It’s not that far,” he said as they hurried along a walkway that led to employee housing. Billy nodded but didn’t say anything. She was too cold to talk. Her cheeks stung, and her breath left wispy clouds around her face as her boots squeaked on the hard-packed snow. “Here we are,” Wesley said, steering her toward the first in a row of small cabins. He banged loudly on the door, but when no one answered, he opened it himself. They came into a bright, warm living room filled with the sounds of music and talking. Billy was instantly self-conscious. What kind of person brings a book to a party? she chided herself of the novel she was still holding. And then there was her outfit: an Irish knit sweater, blue jeans, and a pair of UGGs. But as Wesley closed the door behind them and helped her out of his coat, she looked around and saw that the “party” was just a group of people—dressed, like her, in jeans and sweaters and boots—hanging out and drinking beer. Wesley introduced her to a few people who looked around his age, and then he went to get her a drink. She didn’t like beer, she told him, so he came back from the tiny kitchen with a rum and Coke he’d mixed for her. Billy took a hesitant sip. It was sweet and fizzy, and if not for the funny taste in it, the taste that was the rum, she would have liked it. She took one more sip and then set it down. He found a seat for the two of them on a couch, and he talked to his friends—who called him Wes—about fishing, and different kinds of rods, and a road trip they’d taken to Anchorage earlier that spring. Billy listened, relieved that he didn’t seem to expect her to contribute anything to the conversation. At one point he put his arm loosely around her, and she leaned, only a little self-consciously, against him, pressing her cheek to the soft flannel of his shirt. He smelled good, she decided, especially considering that he spent a good part of his time with fish. One of his friends got up then to get another beer but didn’t come back, and Wesley talked only to Billy now, talked to her in that easy way he had, asking her questions about St. Paul and high school, and even books besides Wuthering Heights that she’d read and liked.
“You have no idea how pretty you are, do you?” he asked her at one point. Billy shook her head, her face warm. “Well, trust me, you are.” He leaned down and started to kiss her, but there was a commotion at one of the windows of the cabin and Wesley stopped, grabbed her hand, and dragged her over to it.
“What is it?” Billy asked, disappointed that the kiss was over almost before it had even begun.
“It’s the northern lights,” Wesley said, making room for Billy at the window. “You don’t always see them at this time of year.” She looked outside. Bands of green light were shimmering in the night sky.
“Have you seen them in Minnesota?”
“Yes, but not like this,” Billy said as a red band now shot across the sky.
“Come on,” he said. He bundled her back into his coat and took her outside to get a better look at them. The bands of light, now green and red mixed together, rippled and swayed against the night. “They’re amazing,” Billy breathed, tipping her chin up toward the sky.
“They’re putting on this show for you,” Wesley commented, and while this might have sounded corny coming from anyone else, it sounded just right coming from him. She smiled at him, and he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. She’d been kissed before, a couple of times, but not like this. Her first kiss, in the hallway outside the gymnasium at a high school dance, had been especially disappointing. The boy’s tongue, heavy and damp, had lain on the bottom of her mouth like an old rug that Billy had longed to push out of the way. And another, more recent kiss, this one at a party, had been with a boy who’d thrashed his tongue around in her mouth so relentlessly that in the end it had felt more like an assault than a kiss. This kiss was different; this kiss was perfect.
“Do you want to come back to my room?” Wesley asked finally, looking down at her. Billy nodded. At this point, she probably would have agreed to go anywhere with him, including the waters of the icy river.
On the narrow bed in his cabin—his roommate was blessedly absent—he stopped kissing her long enough to ask, “You’ve had boyfriends before, right?”
“Right,” Billy said. Wrong. She’d had crushes, flirtations, and a short relationship carried out almost entirely through text messages, but she’d never had an actual boyfriend before. She understood, though, that that wasn’t the real question that Wesley was asking her. He was asking her if she was a virgin, and while in old-fashioned novels, a young woman’s virginity was often a gift to be given away to the man she loved, Billy suspected this was one gift Wesley might not particularly want.
“I’ve had a couple of boyfriends,” she said softly as he eased her bulky sweater off.
“Are you . . . on the pill or something?” he asked hopefully.
Billy nodded yes. What? She was most assuredly not on the pill. So why hadn’t she told him this? And since she had no protection, why hadn’t she asked him to use some? These were only a few of the questions she asked herself in the days and weeks and months that followed. Sometimes she blamed her pregnancy on her Catholic education. Thirteen years of school and not a sex ed class in sight. But she’d known better. Of course she’d known better. She just hadn’t wanted him to know she was a virgin, hadn’t wanted him to know she wasn’t on the pill. If he’d understood the truth, the night’s momentum would be interrupted, and this thing, this amazing thing, would never happen. After all, she’d read enough novels to know the night’s narrative was moving forward; it had a logic and a momentum of its own. She shouldn’t interfere with it or change it or, worst of all, end it. She was meant to lose her virginity tonight, and she was meant to lose it with Wesley.
Later, of course, when she told her parents, when she postponed college, when she went shopping for maternity clothes while her friends were going to fraternity parties, she felt more than a little overwhelmed and more than a little critical of her own judgment that night. She’d made her choice, though. And comforting to her, in those often lonely months after her friends had all started college, was the image she remembered seeing outside Wesley’s window as they made love. Through the opening in the tacked-on red-and-white-checked curtains, the northern lights, magical and mysterious, were still visible. That must have been a good sign, she told herself. Her child was conceived under the northern lights.
In any case, after the night was over, Wesley walked her back to the lodge and up to her floor. He’d kissed her good-bye since she and her dad were leaving early the next morning, and waited while she let herself into her room. It wasn’t until Billy was right on the edge of sleep that she remembered her copy of Wuthering Heights. She’d left it at the party.
She went home without the book, and her dad left empty-handed, as well; the arctic graylings they’d fished for were catch-and-release only. But he did have an unexpected souvenir from this trip. Eight months, two weeks, and three days later, he had a grandson who weighed in at seven pounds, eleven ounces, and who had a dramatic thatch of black hair that the maternity nurses couldn’t help but admire.
A mosquito buzzed in Billy’s ear now, bringing her back to the present. The mosquitoes were out in full force. She considered going inside and making dinner. She’d offered to do this earlier for Luke through his closed bedroom door, but he’d called back to her that he wasn’t hungry. He should have been hungry, and so should she. The last time she’d eaten was at the wedding, and even then she hadn’t had more than a few bites. Oh, that food, she thought now. That must be the food they served in heaven. As delicious as it had tasted, though, it hadn’t been the best part of the wedding. That was the ceremony—so simple, but beautiful and heartfelt at the same time. Remembering it, she allowed herself a moment of wistfulness, but only a moment.
Now Murphy raised his head off his paws and, suddenly alert, growled low in his throat. It was probably Mrs. Wheaton’s orange tabby in the next yard over. Billy petted Murphy again and tried to think of something pleasant and upbeat to talk to him about since she’d been such poor company tonight. Oh, I know, Murph. I met someone at the wedding. Cal. Cal Cooper. He gave me a ride to the police station. He’s from Seattle, though. He’s just passing through. In a Porsche, no less. She gave Murphy’s ears a final rub.