Rennie’s Log Slide Dream (What Happens Next): Part One

November came. Rennie’s daughter invited her to come down to Lansing for Thanksgiving, but Rennie said no. She’d met a man. “What man?” her daughter asked, and then said, “Bring him, Mom! He can meet all our crazy relatives.”

            Rennie said no, that wouldn’t work, and her daughter didn’t press it because she was used to her mother being such a Yooper, so Scandinavian and private. And Rennie knew this, that if she dropped the subject the way that she did, no one who grew up in the U.P. would ask any more questions. Questions were poison to a Yooper.

            Every day in November, before H-58, the road to Log Slide, was closed for the winter, Rennie walked the rim of the dune. Sometimes she sat with her jeaned legs hanging over the side and grabbed handfuls of cold sand, just for the feel of it, and then let the sand slide out of her fists, like sand from an hourglass. She knew Peter was down there, at the very bottom of the dune, and she knew he was gone. She thought of making the trek down to make sure but she was afraid to find him. Instead, she watched a freighter pass. The Edmund Fitzgerald sank in November. They never found the bodies.

            Deep winter brought some relief though she still missed Peter in a secret and profound way. At night, in bed, she would kiss her hand the slight feathery way Peter had kissed it and then put her hands over her face as in a prayer. It became a ritual, so deep an observance, that she took to doing this during the day. In line at the grocery store, while she waited at the doctor’s office. Maybe a dog would help. She resolved to think of this in the spring when it would be easier.

            It was March when the local TV station ran a banner at the bottom of the screen. “Human remains found at the bottom of Log Slide.”

            The newscaster, a young man with a butch haircut and a too fat tie, told how late season ice climbers had happened on the partially snow-covered corpse of a man wearing a blue hoodie. He looked to be older, probably over seventy, and there was no evidence that he’d fallen or been injured in any way. The authorities determined he’d died of natural causes. Rennie kissed her hand and put her hands over her face. A blessing. A benediction.

            No one knew who he was. There was no wallet or ID, and so the police were asking the public for information. Rennie had information. She knew his name was Peter and that he probably died by taking some pills and that he had been alive when she left him that day to go back up the dune. And she loved him which she knew to be stupid and silly but true just the same. She told the police none of this.

______________

To be continued.

This is the beginning of the story in three ‘episodes.’

Rennie’s Log Slide Dream: Part One – Red’s Wrap (reds-wrap.com)

Rennie’s Log Slide Dream: Part Two – Red’s Wrap (reds-wrap.com)

Rennie’s Log Slide Dream: Part Three – Red’s Wrap (reds-wrap.com)