Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl
you should try to understand that he was still my husband and the father of my children, and it wasn’t so long ago that I loved him very much. So don’t be upset if you see me crying a lot for the next few weeks.”
But I didn’t. Not even once.
* *
The House, Day Three
The sun streaming through the window in the gable awakens me. Sitting up, my head reminds me that it took more whiskey than usual to put me to sleep, probably because I took that detour down the dark alley off Memory Lane.
Now I am getting earnestly, gut-gnawingly hungry. If I am going to spend even one more day here, I must buy groceries.
The Piggly Wiggly where my mother worked is still on the same corner. It has gotten much bigger and now has a strip mall attached to it. I pick up a frozen pizza, a couple of frozen dinners, a bag of chips, some cans of soup, a sixer of beer and, for the sake of my health, an apple. I put the groceries in the trunk of my Dodge, right next to Mom.
On the way back I swing by Photo-Phast to pick up the prints I had made from the negatives in the envelope labeled “Lake/Audrey,” the pictures of my parents, my brother, and me in front of the lake cottage. The bright sun of the early morning is gone and the sky is now paved over with concrete-gray stratus clouds. A few snowflakes wander restlessly over the potholed street.
The Asian woman behind the counter has her black hair pulled into a sprightly ponytail today. She gives me a friendly smile as she hands me my prints, and I feel desire stirring. Too young, I tell myself, don’t risk making a fool of yourself. Besides, she’s probably just smiling because you look slightly ridiculous in your high school letter jacket. I return a minimal smile and retreat to the Dodge with my pictures.
The snow has picked up and it is starting to accumulate on the windshield and moonroof. I open the Photo-Phast envelope and pull out two four-by-six black and white glossies. The first shows my mom and dad standing on a wooden raft buoyed by oil drums, floating on a large, weedless lake. Behind them in the distance, a tiny motorboat pulling a skier churns a long, white wake.
In the second print, my parents are standing in front of a tidy cabin with window boxes full of geraniums. My mother is holding a baby and my father is holding the hand of a child who looks about two or three years old.
The child is not me. It’s not even a boy.
I look at the baby in my mother’s arms. When I looked at the negative, I thought the baby was my brother. In the print I can tell that he isn’t. I have seen enough family pictures lately to recognize myself as an infant.
There is something familiar about the little girl holding my father by his index finger. The mouth, the jaw, the contours of the forehead. No wonder I mistook her for myself in the negative. There is a resemblance. But I don’t know who she is.
I feel a flutter in my gut and an urgent need to take a drive out to the Kettle Moraine State Forest, to Lake Audrey. The Dodge hesitates before it turns over. Time for a new battery if I intend to hang around Sheboygan much longer. The tank is almost empty, not enough to get me out to the Kettle Moraine and back.
The attendant at the Amoco station is so covered with grease I hesitate to take change from him. He’s heard of Lake Audrey, but doesn’t know how to get there. A map costs me $4.98. They used to be free.
The snow is really coming down by the time I get on Highway 23, heading west. Even so, I can’t seem to hold my speed down. Traction is poor and visibility is worse. But the road is flat and straight, there is no traffic, and the freshly flocked trees fly past me on both sides until I see the sign for the Northern Unit of the Kettle Moraine Forest.
Here, the road starts to rise and fall, and several times I almost slide into the woods on narrow, hairpin curves. Much of eastern Wisconsin is so flat that it looks like God came down on it with a gigantic iron. In school I was taught that the reason for this is that a glacier came through during the last Ice Age and scraped the land smooth. But in some places the retreating glacier left behind humps and ridges of rock, sand and gravel in various characteristic forms. They gave the humps and ridges cute little names like eskers, drumlins, kames, and kettles. At some point they figured out that glacial detritus made for lousy farmland but nice scenery, and the Kettle Moraine units were set aside for tourism and recreation.
I don’t remember anymore what the difference is between an esker and a drumlin. I know it’s a bitch to drive through them with six inches of snow on the road and not enough tread on your tires. But I press on.
The wind is whipping the snow hard across the road, and I almost miss the small, brown wooden sign for Lake Audrey. At the end of a quarter mile of gravel road there is a deserted parking area and a small boat ramp. The lake is frozen and white as a wedding cake.
Wet snow sticks to my face and hands and invades my shoes as I walk out on the lake and look around. The lake is so small I can see the entire shoreline through the blizzard. I turn 360 degrees, wincing against the brutal wind.
So that’s why my father didn’t mention a vacation home on Lake Audrey. There are no homes on Lake Audrey. No log cabins, no cottages. No one would waterski on a lake this small.
A blast of snow accompanies me back into the car. My face and hands are raw, my feet are soaking wet. The yellowed envelope in which I found the negatives is crumpled on the passenger seat.
“Lake/Audrey,” it says. That slash between “Lake” and “Audrey” bothered me, but I’d ignored it. I look again at the picture of my parents with the two children in front of the log cabin, and now I know.
Audrey is not the lake. Audrey is the little girl. Who looks like me.
Who is she? Why is she in this picture with me and my parents, in front of a vacation cabin, grasping my father’s finger as if he were her daddy?
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