The Long Way Back, page 3
Always take the long way back,
Charlie & Eva
[IMAGE CONTENTS: Two sets of snow skis sticking up in the air. They’re angled together to create a triangle that frames a gorgeous snowscape with Lake Superior in the background. The water is a deep, Prussian blue against a silvery, winter sky.]
Their first paid gig was a stay at Lutsen Resort. Well, technically, it wasn’t a paid gig. They didn’t earn a dime. But they were comped four nights in the resort lodge with a complimentary breakfast buffet every morning in the Strand—a waterfront restaurant with a glass wine cellar, leather chairs, and linen tablecloths that they immediately decided were far too fancy for their dumpy two-bedroom apartment and shabby backpack tastes. Still, there were Swedish pancakes with lingonberry compote and maple breakfast sausages that were positively swoon-worthy, and they decided they could be fake-fancy long enough to stuff themselves full of eggs scrambled with aged cheddar before hitting the slopes.
The Sutton Girls Instagram page had continued to grow in the six months since Eva’s mermaid portrait made a lucky splash. Charlie had no idea what they were doing, but Eva turned out to be unexpectedly savvy, picking up on trendy hashtags and following up-and-coming accounts that helped her and Charlie create an aesthetic that resonated with more people than they could have ever imagined. In many ways, Charlie felt like they had caught the tail of a comet and were just along for the ride. It was fun and exciting, a temporary side hustle that resulted in some fun freebies.
Line-minimizing facial masks. Body lotion. There were leggings and graphic T-shirts and candles. “Gifts” for “micro-influencers” Eva told her (they were micro-influencers?), and there was more where that came from. But while Charlie wasn’t ready to pump the brakes on the modest success they’d experienced, she was also unintentionally creating a code that governed what and how they posted.
No full faces. If Eva or Charlie appeared in one of the Sutton Girls photos, it was almost always cropped, off-center, blurred, or from behind. Charlie didn’t like the idea of strangers poring over her daughter’s lovely face—and she had no desire to showcase her own—so they were usually just beyond sight. The accidental result was that the Sutton Girls were shrouded in a veil of mystery.
Nothing artificial or retouched. In a medium where virtually nothing was authentic, the Sutton Girls were real. Charlie’s secondhand Canon EOS Rebel T7 was nothing special, but it got the job done, and she played with aperture and shutter speed the way an artist blended paint. A swirl here, a dab there, the result something new and unpredictable. Her unfiltered photographs were raw and arresting in a way that made people stop their scroll.
Emphasize the outdoors. Photographing their adventures had been a part of their lives since Eva was born. It was them against the world, a mother-daughter duo that stood with their backs together and their arms open wide. When Eva was still a baby, Charlie saved up for a Kelty child carrier so she could strap her daughter to her back and take her anywhere. They hiked, cross-country skied, swam in Lake Superior when it was still cold enough to take their breath away, and camped curled up together in a single sleeping bag while coyotes howled outside. Little changed as Eva got older, other than that they bought a second flannel-lined sleeping bag.
Showcasing where they went and what they loved in such a unique way earned them a private message from the Lutsen Resort’s director of marketing. They were local, causing a bit of a stir, and in exchange for six positive posts (tagging the resort, of course), Charlie and Eva could enjoy everything Lutsen’s had to offer. It was an easy yes.
“I don’t want to leave,” Eva said as they packed up on the last day. Her cheeks were pink with sun and windburn from long days on the slopes, and her eyes tired but happy. They had gone all out, posting eight times in the four days that they spent playing in the snow. But they had also sat in the hot tub late at night (with no camera in sight), watched Marvel movies in bed after luxuriously long showers, and slept in. It was the first non-camping vacation they had ever taken.
“I hear you, sister.” Charlie reached out to tug the end of one of Eva’s long braids. “But reality calls.”
Eva turned to yank the zipper closed on her duffel. Carefully, with her back turned to Charlie, she said: “What if this was our reality?”
“Living at a resort?”
“Traveling.”
Charlie’s exhale was more of a sigh. Although they could probably hand-draw a map to every worthwhile hike, swimming hole, and spot of interest in Northern Minnesota, the gorgeous National Geographic magazine spreads that they cut out of old magazines and taped on the walls of their dingy apartment in Duluth had created a shared longing for more. More to see, more to explore, more variety than their little—albeit beautiful—corner of the world had to offer.
Of course, Eva’s question was about so much more than travel. As their online popularity grew, Eva had only become more of an outcast at her Duluth middle school. She’d dared to aim higher than the bottom rung she’d been assigned, and nobody liked it.
But Charlie was a single mom working full-time in a warehouse and shooting a handful of senior photos and the occasional family portrait on the side. They couldn’t afford to travel. Eva had never even been on a plane.
“If wishes had wings…” Charlie smiled softly.
Eva sank to the unmade bed and flicked both of her dark braids over her shoulders. “It was dreamy, though, wasn’t it?”
“The dreamiest.”
And then Charlie took her camera out of its battered case and set it up on a chair. She grabbed Eva’s hand and dragged her to the balcony where a copse of tall evergreens wreathed in white created a backdrop worthy of a greeting card. They crouched in the snow, grinning at each other instead of the camera, and just before the timer hit zero and the shutter clicked, Charlie kissed her daughter’s forehead.
They posted one last time from the resort. The snow was stacked five inches high on the railing behind them, and the sun shining off all that white gave their matching dark heads halos. They were in profile, unobscured for the very first time, and they only wrote two words: Where next?
CHAPTER 3
SATURDAY
The two-story farmhouse that Charlie and Eva have called home for the last five months is dark when the police cruiser turns down the long, gravel drive. The lane is sloped, treacherous in winter, but currently rimmed with lupines in extravagant purple bloom. As the headlights sweep the tree-lined property, they glint off the silver side of a vintage Airstream trailer parked beside a small, detached garage.
Mia, the Landing police officer who has been tasked with driving Charlie home, speaks for the first time in miles. “Is that—” she stops abruptly and clears her throat as if somehow she can erase the question she was about to ask.
Those two short words tell Charlie that Mia knows exactly who she is—who Eva is—and that she recognizes the iconic Airstream. Maybe it was Mia who told Detective James about Eva Explores.
“That’s Sebastian,” Charlie says. Because of course it is. The motion-sensor activated floodlights have kicked on now and are illuminating the small yard. The garage is on the south side of the narrow property and painted red to match the 1940s farmhouse that can’t seem to decide if it’s Victorian or Colonial. It boasts the clean lines of a Colonial, but the wraparound porch and bay windows of a Victorian. Framed between the two buildings is a generous wedge of Lake Superior. Beyond the trees the night is black, but the movement of the water is unmistakable. A squat stone wall separates the green lawn from rough-hewn boulders and a slip of rocky beach. But newcomers—at least, those in the know—bypass the view to hone in on the Airstream.
The trailer—lovingly nicknamed Sebastian—is fully illuminated, practically sparkling in the fluorescent floodlights. The white-and-black checked buffalo curtains and Norway pine silhouettes subtly etched on the front are clearly visible. When they were refinishing Sebastian, Charlie had intentionally included several nods to their Minnesotan heritage so that they could take a piece of the North Shore with them wherever they roamed. But she didn’t realize that the scarlet-colored Lake Superior agate that she had carefully drilled a hole in and hung from the wide rear window would become a calling card of sorts. They had made themselves recognizable before they ever realized that notoriety might be a problem.
Mia puts the cruiser in park between the house and the garage and openly gawks at the Airstream. “Why Sebastian?” she asks.
So she isn’t a groupie who’s been with them since their Sutton Girls days. “Because in the beginning, people called Eva the Little Mermaid,” Charlie says. Her answer is rote, her soul numb. “And Sebastian was the friend who helped her get the life she always wanted.”
Mia makes a sound that could be interpreted as sympathy or schadenfreude, but Charlie is past the point of caring. She’s staring at Sebastian too. She’d give anything to be somewhere—anywhere—in that Airstream with Eva right now.
On the back of the trailer, beneath the window with the agate, are neat rows of decals that they lovingly, meticulously placed throughout their two and a half years on the road. All the likely suspects are there: Glacier, Yellowstone, Zion, Sequoia, the Great Smokey Mountains, the Everglades. But they didn’t just stick to the well-beaten paths, and Charlie can’t help but smile thinking of the road to Denali National Park and the weeks they spent on the Alaska Highway. Or the days they lounged in Dry Tortugas. They had to leave Sebastian behind to take a boat across the turquoise water. They pitched a tent the old-fashioned way and explored the island from the home base of the first-come, first-served campground. It was the first time they swam with sea turtles.
The silence in the car is suddenly deafening, and Charlie realizes that Mia is studying her. The smile freezes on her lips, then melts away as quickly as it came. Her daughter is missing and she’s smiling? Even in her grief-stricken, muddled state, Charlie understands how that must look.
“What now?” she asks quietly. She hadn’t wanted to leave the marina, but after Detective James took the call about the life raft, things seemed to intensify. Deep down, Charlie knew this shift was because the likelihood that Eva was alive had increased by a few percentage points. She couldn’t even go there—life, death, probabilities. Not yet. In the ruin that was her broken heart, the world could simply not exist without Eva in it. So when the detective kicked it into overdrive—he had no more time for an impromptu interview—Charlie was thrilled. They tried again to get her to take the ambulance to the hospital, and when she refused, she was sent home.
“Try to get some sleep,” Mia advises her now. “Someone will be here when you wake up.”
Detective James had already explained that someone would be around all night “just to keep an eye on things.” He didn’t elaborate and he didn’t need to: if Charlie had done something to Eva—or knew what happened—they didn’t want to risk her slipping away. But the presence of Landing PD in her driveway doesn’t comfort Charlie, and she knows there’s no way in hell she can sleep. Whether she likes it or not, she’s playing a momentous game of chess. Eva is missing, and the last person to see her was her mother. This will explode online, and in no time at all the whole world will know. Charlie just wants Eva home, safe, whatever the cost. The thought of the yellow life raft bobbing on the waves is a thread of hope that she clings to like a lifeline. She can’t even consider the why of it now.
Of course, Charlie realizes that to anyone from the North Shore, a missing life raft does not necessarily equate hope. Decades ago, a man had been convicted of murder when his wife’s body washed ashore after some alleged boat trouble. Later, when the raft was discovered with five distinct puncture marks, the defendant’s story began to deflate. The narrative is ubiquitous along the banks of Lake Superior: a horror story, cautionary tale, or tongue-in-cheek joke, depending on the company. Still, a frisson of dread sparks through Charlie at the thought that even now, people might be drawing comparisons between Eva’s disappearance and that infamous case.
When another vehicle turns down the driveway, Charlie lets herself out of the police cruiser wordlessly. It’s a second Landing officer, driving her truck with Frank buckled in the passenger seat. She hadn’t talked to her foster father at the marina—they escorted her into the waiting cruiser before she had a chance—but she gave instructions for him to be brought here instead of to his apartment in the independent living section of the Landing Retirement Home. She couldn’t stand the thought of him alone in that tiny one-bedroom apartment surrounded by the smell of cooked cabbage and the ghost of his recently deceased wife. Hattie had passed just before Christmas, and her sudden, precipitous decline was the reason Charlie and Eva came home to Minnesota in the first place. Charlie had never intended to stay, but the snow had been falling like a Hallmark movie when Eva stepped foot in Landing for the first time in years, and as she lifted her face to the sky and breathed deep, Charlie knew that an anchor had been dropped. Now Eva considered the lake house—not Sebastian—home.
The officer parks Charlie’s truck beside the patrol car and kills the ignition. Charlie can see that he is talking to Frank, but she opens the passenger door, unconcerned about their conversation.
“Oh, Charlotte,” Frank sighs, his eyes welling at the sight of her. “What are we going to do?”
He slides from the cab of the truck and she steadies him, wrapping him in her arms. When she was fourteen, and for all intents and purposes orphaned, Frank and Hattie Morrow had been her safe harbor. Charlie hadn’t always been appreciative, but they never wavered in their commitment to her. In response, she loved them bluntly, solid and straightforward. There was little need for tenderness between them—Charlie had never been the touchy-feely type—but she holds him now, inhaling the scent of pipe tobacco and peppermint from the roll of sweets he keeps in his breast pocket.
Frank patting her back is almost her undoing, but Charlie pulls away before she can wither to the ground.
“I thought we should be together tonight.”
“Of course,” he says, taking her arm and falling in step beside her. Frank is eighty-four, but fit and bright—he had only agreed to the retirement home a year ago because he could no longer handle Hattie’s care. By the time she stopped eating, and Charlie and Eva came home, he insisted he was happy where he was. And the Morrows’ waterfront property on the outskirts of Landing became the Sutton girls’ temporary haven.
The wind is fierce and the sky heavy with rain, but it refuses to fall. Charlie glances at the lake as she mounts the steps to the porch and tries to picture Eva in the raft, riding the white-capped swells. She prays for a hand to hold the inflatable platform—to draw back the rain and illuminate a path for the helicopters and bring her daughter home—but her heart is submerged before she can believe for even a second that everything will be okay.
A high-pitched whine from behind the front door reminds Charlie that Eva isn’t the only life she’s responsible for. “Scout!” she cries, lunging for the handle. Their golden mutt loves the trailer and life on the open road, but hates boats. He won’t step a single paw on the Summer Moon, preferring to sleep in a patch of sun on the hardwood floor in the kitchen while waiting for his people to return. But’s he’s been locked in the house for hours longer than intended.
“Sorry, old boy,” Charlie lets him out with an apology and a scratch behind the ears. Then he races into the yard, running a few circles around the two Landing police officers who are deep in conversation beside Mia’s cruiser, before disappearing into the trees. Charlie wants nothing more than to bury her face in her dog’s caramel fur, but it’ll have to wait.
“You can sleep in the main floor bedroom,” Charlie says, flicking on the lights as she steps inside.
“I can’t sleep.” Frank follows her through the living room to the eat-in kitchen at the back of the house. The bay window framing the small, round table looks out over the water, but there’s nothing but darkness beyond the panes. “I haven’t slept in years. You know me. Coffee?”
“Yes. Please.” Charlie sinks into a chair at the table. The sounds of Frank moving about his own kitchen—opening and closing cupboards, running water into the glass carafe, and setting a pair of mugs on the counter—rewind the years. How many mornings did they spend together sipping strong coffee as the sun came up over the lake? For a moment Charlie wishes she could be sixteen again.
“Have you called her?”
“Goes straight to voice mail,” Charlie tells him, but she slips her phone from her pocket and tries Eva’s number anyway. Like the last dozen times she called, Eva’s cheerful “Hey, leave a message!” plays almost immediately.
“I bet they’ll do that triangulation thing. You know, where they use cell towers to figure out where a phone is?”
The hint of a smile tugs at Charlie’s mouth. Frank loves his cop shows. “Yeah,” she says, but his casual observation makes her mind spin off in other directions.
On the way back from the marina, Charlie had tried Find My Phone to see if she could locate Eva’s cell. Unfortunately, the app simply said: No location found. Either the phone had been switched off or Eva had disabled location services, a thought that makes her physically sick. But the location of Eva’s phone isn’t the only thing that’s turning her stomach. As Charlie sits at the table, she scrolls through the last few texts from her daughter.
It’s stunning to her how a screen can give people permission to write things they would never dare to say. The epic fight she and Eva had just last night is a secret Charlie would like to keep, but Eva’s texts to her tell a pretty damning story. An ugly story. Can Charlie just delete them?
