I made Leon sit in my kitchen until the coffee was gone and tell me the rest of it, slowly, the way you would walk someone down a steep staircase in the dark. Danny was alive. He had never died on the ice. Gary found out in 1985, when a letter with a Canadian postmark came to the steel plant, and for thirty nine years afterward Gary sent him two hundred dollars a month by money order to a post office box in Thunder Bay, on the promise that he would never come back to Duluth. Leon had known only since the day Gary was dying. “He said you had suffered enough,” Leon whispered.
I remembered the winter of 1978. I remembered the long sleeves in July. I remembered a cracked rib that I told the emergency room I got from a fall on the ice, because I was a nurse, and nurses are supposed to know better. Gary had known. He had been the friend who sat with me on the back step the night after, and he had never said one word about it. So when Danny vanished, Gary had believed that he had killed my husband, and when he learned that Danny was alive, he was more afraid than relieved. He had bought my safety, month by month, for the rest of his life.
Leon placed a folded sheet on the table. It was a letter that had come to Gary two weeks after the funeral, forwarded by the post office. The handwriting was shaky. “Gary. The money did not come. I am seventy four years old and I have a bad lung. I do not have long. I am not asking for anything but to see her face one time and tell her I am sorry. I have been sober thirty one years. Please. Danny.” I read it three times. Then I picked up the telephone and called my daughter to tell her I was going to Canada.
A man can spend forty years paying for a sin that was never his, because he could not bear to ask for the truth.
We drove up the north shore of Lake Superior on a cold gray morning in November, Leon at the wheel, me holding the wallet in my lap. The road follows the water for hours, past little harbors and frozen waterfalls, and I watched it go by without seeing it. At the border, the officer asked the purpose of our trip. “Family business,” I said, and it was the truest thing I said all day. We reached Thunder Bay in the late afternoon and found the house on Algoma Street, a tired gray boarding house with a porch full of folding chairs.
The man who opened the door was small. That is what I remember first. In my mind Danny had always been a tall man with a red face and a heavy hand, and the person standing in that doorway was thin and stooped, with a tube in his nose and white stubble on his chin. He looked at me for a very long time. Then his knees gave a little, and Leon caught his arm. “Sharon,” he said. “You got old.” I laughed, God help me. “So did you, Danny.” He took us into a tiny front room that smelled of tea and cigarettes he no longer smoked.
He told his story without asking me to forgive him. He had gotten up from the ice that night with blood in his eye, driven north until the gas ran out, and kept going because he could not stand to look at himself. He had meant to come back. Then a month passed, and then a year. He drank for ten more years in lumber camps. Then a woman at a church basement meeting handed him a cup of coffee and a coin, and he stopped. “I took the money of Gary because I was too ashamed to take a job near you,” he said. “That is the truth. I took it because I was a coward.”
I did not forgive him, and I told him so. I told him the winter of 1978, plainly, in the calm voice I use for hard news at the bedside, and I watched him take every word like a blow. When I finished, I said, “Danny, I do not forgive you today. But I want you to know what Gary did. He believed he killed you. He carried that for forty five years, and he paid for something he never owed.” Danny covered his eyes. His chest rose and fell under the thin sweater. For a long time, no one in that small room said a word.
Then I opened the wallet. Inside, behind the cracked license, was a photograph I had forgotten existed, a wedding picture, with me in a borrowed dress and Danny in a rented suit, both of us twenty two years old and squinting into the sun. I put it in his hands. I kept the paper napkin with the handwriting of Gary, because that belonged to me. “It was a good picture,” I said. “We looked like children.” He nodded and cried quietly into his hand. On the wall behind him hung a small framed coin that read, in plain letters, thirty one years.
Back in Duluth, a lawyer named Mr. Halvorsen confirmed what I had worried about all the way home. Danny had been declared dead by a court in 1986, so my marriage to Gary had been entirely lawful, and every year of it had been mine. I arranged for a hospice volunteer in Thunder Bay to look in on Danny each week, and I wrote him a card at Christmas. He died in March, in his sleep, with the wallet on the table beside the bed. Leon went to the funeral. I did not. I sent a single white rose, and the card said only, “Rest.”
When the snow melted, I went down to the basement and opened the gun safe one last time. I handed Leon his old deer rifle, and he held it as if it were a sleeping child. Then I changed the combination to the date that Gary and I were married. On Sunday I took my seven grandchildren to the pier at the harbor to watch the ore boats come in, and the youngest one asked me why I was smiling so much. “Because the lake is open again,” I told her. And it was, wide and blue and silver, all the way to the edge of the sky.
