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“You saw what you wanted to see!” She scooped the remaining items, slammed the lid on, and stood, hugging the box to her chest.
The two women stared at one another across a crevasse, widening with each rapid breath.
“You believe him over me?” Ulla’s voice shook.
“Yes.” Analise’s reply had no hesitation. None. Leaving Ulla mired in the same grief that overtook her that night twelve years ago when she watched Analise fall. When she thought, No, no, God, please not again. “You don’t understand. It’s complicated.”
Analise brushed past her. “No, it’s not. Taylor’s mother owned up to everything.”
“Wait, what? You-you saw her?”
“She wanted to meet her granddaughter.”
“You had no right! That woman does not deserve . . . ” Ulla bit her upper lip. “What did she say?”
Analise rubbed her eyes. “That it was her fault your mother died.”
“And that isn’t enough to choose me?”
“What did she do?”
Ulla felt the horror strain against her will to keep it buried. The horror she thought certain if she’d kept alive, it would kill her. And she needed to live for Analise. For Penelope.
“Just tell me,” Analise pushed, “it’s not that hard.”
“You wouldn’t fucking know about hard!” Ulla yelled, immediately regretting her abrasiveness, but it was too late.
Analise fixed her bewildered eyes on Ulla. “You’d rather lose me and Penelope than tell the truth?”
Analise had no idea what she was asking. That demanding Ulla resurrect the most traumatic moment of her life was like holding a gun to her head.
“Fine,” Analise cried, “I don’t want you near me or Pen, and I definitely don’t want you at my wedding. I can’t stand liars.” She left, sentencing Ulla to solitary confinement, save for a photograph on the floor, one that Analise had overlooked: two seventeen-year-olds enraptured with one another. She recognized that look.
She’d felt it once.
Part VII
Angels come and
make me pure
so that I may come
to them in heaven.
— Traditional German prayer
Chapter Forty-Seven
Mora, Minnesota
August 1983
Linnea
The summer before ninth grade, it was inside a piecemeal 1969 Ford Galaxie that Linnea and Ulla first made love. Linnea shared an exhilarating giggle with Ulla, and they swiped their clothes back on while Sugar, the dog, snuffled tiredly around the junkyard.
Ulla clasped her bra and scraped her sweaty, long strands of hair into a ponytail. The two had been inching toward this moment over the past eighteen months. Hands held underwater in the lake, eventually roaming over breasts and underneath waistbands, long make-out sessions. But they’d never been fully naked with tongues and fingers over and inside places that shocked Linnea. She had no idea her body could experience that kind of pulsating pleasure. It was all the more exhilarating because it felt daring, like a delicious secret. In middle school, their peers relentlessly teased them for always holding hands like a couple of “lezzies.” But fags and lezzies existing in Mora were as mythical as apocalyptic zombies, and Ulla and Linnea could hide their affection in broad daylight because girls could hold hands and play with each other’s hair. Lezzie didn’t hurt nearly as much as retard—because Linnea never talked. Dopehead—because her parents were addicts. Sometimes, for an added measure of cruelty, they combined the two—Dope-tard.
