Family of Origin by CJ Hauser

Author:CJ Hauser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

Lake Itasca

TEN YEARS BACK

Years before she swam in the silty Gulf where the Mississippi lets itself go, Elsa went to Itasca, the river’s Minnesota headwaters. The Mississippi ran clear at the source, as yet unmuddied by its travels, and how Elsa loved its clean-pooling mouth.

It was Ian who took her. The first time she had seen him since the troubles.

Keiko had been sick, but she was fine, Ian said. A touch of cancer. She was being treated and they expected her to soon go into remission.

This story had come confusedly across the telephone line as Ingrid used a porous blue sponge to delicately soap away egg yolk and crumbs from fruit-patterned plates. Elsa sat at the kitchen table and watched Ingrid, the cordless nestled into her shoulder. People often called Ingrid when news of sickness came; a hospice nurse, they imagined, would know what to do. But this was different. Ingrid hrmmmed at Ian, while she looked not at the plate she was redressing so tenderly, but out the window, at the shore of Potato Lake, where a plastic six-pack ring was being lapped at on the shore, a six-pack ring almost certainly left there by a lakeside boy who’d spent all night waiting for Elsa to come out and fuck and when she hadn’t, had found no consolation besides whatever those rings had contained.

Elsa thought Ingrid looked at those rings like she knew.

But Elsa had stopped going out to the lake.

Since she had driven to see Nolan and he had kissed her in the truck, she’d felt wobbly and frightened, like the past was going to explode in on her again at any moment. As a preventive measure, she had called the man named Dylan who had written his number on her arm that same night. The numbers were smudged when she’d arrived home after the long drive from Northfield, but they had worked. She and Dylan had been dating for a month now, and in spite of her reasons for calling him, Elsa found she actually liked Dylan: liked his worn jeans and sly humor, liked how he was the only thing that kept Elsa tethered to the present at all.

Still, when the phone rang, and it was Ian, Elsa felt sure that despite being twenty-five years old, she was about to get in trouble with her parents all over again.

Ingrid said, We’ll see you soon, and hung up the phone, and tousled the little fruit plate dry with a clean towel, and placed it carefully back in the cabinet, while Elsa told herself she would not ask her mother who was coming. She could not make it so plain that she cared. Ingrid lifted the next dish from the breakfast table, jam smeared across it obscenely.

Who will we see soon? Elsa asked, even though she hated herself for it.

Life is too short, Ingrid said. It was something, as a hospice nurse, she was allowed to say. But it wasn’t an apology. It was the kind of empty sweetness she’d tried to fatten Elsa on for years.

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