Brian Freeman - Thief River Falls

Curtis touched her shoulder and gestured at the headset. She slipped it over her ears, and he spoke into the microphone.

“We need to keep an eye on this,” he said, his voice crackling into her ears. “Weather’s getting worse.”

Lisa nodded without a word. She left the headset on. Curtis’s face was calm, but that didn’t make her any less nervous. Her fingers were clutched around the leather grip on the door, but it was hard to hold on through the pockets of turbulence. They’d only been airborne for a few minutes, and the flight already felt long. Minneapolis seemed a world away. She looked back at Purdue, but he rode the waves like a kid on a roller coaster. She envied him that innocence.

Her eyes followed the squares of green fields, as dark as emeralds under the grim sky. The highway shot south like an arrow, but they were too high to see any cars on the road. A strange sense of foreboding clouded her mind, a feeling of danger and despair that she was flying into a nightmare. Through the window, between the raindrops, she could see a black snake on the ground, slithery and poisonous, coiling in tight swirls, and she knew what that snake was. It was the Thief River. And she knew why her stomach felt hollow, why she could hardly breathe, why tears had begun to leak from her eyes.

They were closing in on the town of Thief River Falls.

She could see it all from up here, every building she knew, every cross street, every park that had been part of her childhood. Thief River Falls, where the Thief River and the Red Lake River met in a kind of psychedelic Y. This was the town where she’d been born. Until recently, it was a town she’d loved and had never dreamed of leaving. Anyone who lived in this place had to embrace its fierceness and remoteness, because this was not a soft part of the world. It was a town that stared north at the bitter Canadian plains and pounded in tent stakes against the winter winds. It was a town dropped down in the middle of nothingness, where every mile looked like every other mile.

She loved the drama of its name, the way each word rolled off her tongue like a thriller with a twist ending. Thief. River. Falls. It was made to be the title of a book, the title of her book. When you saw the name on a highway sign, you knew you were coming to a place that had stories to tell, a place the Indians had made their own centuries ago, a place where pioneers had lived and died, a place of farmers and loggers. It didn’t matter how many years passed. Nothing changed. Drive a mile in any direction, and you went back in time, and the stories weren’t far away.

Thief River Falls. Population nine thousand. And they all knew their hometown girl, Lisa Power.

She knew it was wrong to blame the town for everything that had happened to her, but she did. Every house, shop, trail, and intersection was a reminder of what she’d lost. The thing about living where she’d been born was that all her memories made a chain, linked together, like pencil marks scratched on a wall as she got taller. There was a time when Greenwood Cemetery had reminded her of midnight adventures at homecoming. Now it was where Danny was buried. There was a time when passing the Arctic Cat headquarters had reminded her of snowmobiling with her brothers on Christmas Eve. Now it was a reminder that her brothers had both worked on the factory floor before they died in the flood.

She couldn’t X out her memories with a black marker. All she could do was run away from them, and that was what she’d been trying to do. When they started coming back, she ran even faster.

Slowly, the plane crossed over the town and left it behind. Lisa closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. But her relief was short lived. It was as if the town refused to let her go. As they headed south, the rain got worse, pouring in sheets across the windows and sticking with a kind of glaze. The plane yawed as it fought the wind, bucking like a mechanical bull. It felt like something was wrong. She saw Curtis twist his shoulders to look back and check the left wing. Whatever he saw made him bend his lips into a frown.

Then he took the radio and said one word. “Ice.”

Ice on the windows. Ice on the wings.

She mouthed back at him. “What do we do?”

“Land.”

She didn’t bother saying no. It wouldn’t do any good. She felt the plane descending; she leaned as it swung around. They weren’t going back north to the grassy runway they’d left. Underneath the clouds, barely a mile to the east, she could see the long ribbon of pavement at the Thief River Falls airport. That was where Curtis was taking her. She’d flown into one storm, and now she was flying into an entirely different storm. No matter how hard she tried to get away, the town clung to her like a hawk with prey.

The plane sank lower, struggling against the current that wanted to keep them airborne. The ground grew larger, coming up fast. The buildings of the small airport took shape ahead of them. She squeezed her hands into fists and closed her eyes, and she felt the plane bounce as the wheels hit the runway. When she opened them again, she saw the drab fields around them. Their speed slowed; the whine of the engine got softer.

Whether she liked it or not, she was inside the dark heart of the mystery.

She was home.

The IPA in Noah Power’s hand was cold and cloudy, and when he drank it, he could taste a bite of citrus in the back of his mouth. That was how he liked his ales. It was strong, too, with a kick that left a mellow haze in his head, particularly on his third pint. He sat on a stool near the taproom windows, looking out at the rush hour traffic on First Avenue in downtown Fargo.

Down, down, down came the rain.

Whenever it poured, he thought of it like that. Those were Lisa’s words from the prologue of her fourth book, Thief River Falls . He could still hear the words in Lisa’s voice. She’d read the book to the whole family after it was done. They’d spent an entire February weekend that way, with beers in hand and a fire roaring in the fireplace, all of them gathered around her. It was the last time he could remember the family being together like that. She’d spent ten hours reading the manuscript to them on Friday and Saturday evenings, from the first sentence to the last. Noah remembered how proud he’d been of his twin sister and how he’d known that book was going to change her entire life.

As he sat in the taproom, his mind sent her a message: Talk to me, Lis.

That had been their little game when they were kids. They would lie in their beds in the darkness and try to hear what the other was thinking. People said that only identical twins experienced a kind of telepathy between them, but Noah knew that wasn’t true. He and Lisa had it, too. Throughout his life, there had been moments where he was all alone and he would hear Lisa say something, as vividly as if she’d been standing next to him. There were other times when he didn’t hear words but simply felt a torrid rush of emotion, whether it was joy, or anger, or grief, or fear. And he knew in those moments that something was happening to his sister.

He’d never even told Lisa that it was the telepathy that had finally driven him away. It was one thing to live with his own grief, but he’d had to deal with hers, too. When she felt the pain, so did he. When she cried, so did he. The combination had been too much, like a weight on his chest so heavy that he couldn’t even breathe. He needed to find a way not to share it all with her. Yes, he’d been a coward. Yes, he’d run away. But the alternative would have been to take his life, like their father, and when he’d gone so far as to put a gun in his mouth, he knew he had to run. It was that or pull the trigger.