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Ulla danced her fingertips over to Linnea’s. “What should we name her?” she asked, looking around the interior of the Galaxie.

“The car?” Linnea smiled. “How do you know it’s a girl?”

Ulla laughed. “They always have girl names.”

“Probably because of men.” Linnea snorted and tucked a piece of Ulla’s hair that escaped her ponytail into the elastic band. “You’re sure this car is the one? The one you’ve been searching for your whole life?”

Ulla rested against the cracked, two-toned blue seats with spilled stuffing. She rolled her head to Linnea with a deep grin. “I’m in love.”

Linnea kissed her. “Me too.”

Ulla closed her eyes, the sun filtered through the dirt-caked windows and cast her face in a glow.

How is it that the most beautiful girl in the world loves me? Linnea thought back to those one hundred and twelve days in 1981, ripped from one another and placed under the temporary guardianship of Kanabec County, where two questions consumed her every day: Would she ever see her parents again? Would she ever kiss her best friend again?

Everett Barnes had kissed her first on that awful Halloween night, but kissing him during spin-the-bottle was like holding onto a car door handle around a fast turn. He lodged his tongue against hers, leaving indents from his braces on her lips and saliva in the corners of her mouth. She dismissed Ulla’s soft and slow kiss as something born from desperation. So why did it leave her insides in a flurry? The memory had soothed her to sleep in the children’s shelter, and she held Beskyddaren, the horse figurine, against her heart. She lay in the squeaky bunk bed and listened to her sister, Abby, snore above her. It was Abby who scolded the adults for continuously attempting to interrogate Linnea. “Don’t waste your time. Linney won’t talk to anyone.”

Linnea remained mute in her foster home in Ogilvie, fifteen minutes from Mora, but feeling like a whole country away. Stuck in a new school, they tried to get her to talk. At the doctor’s, she only cried. They prescribed her an antidepressant. Linnea spat the pill into the toilet every night.

After her parents passed supervised visits, cleared drug screens, and her mother obtained a job cleaning office buildings at night, Linnea was sent home. But upon pulling into the driveway, she sprang from the car and ran for Ulla’s. The Bergstrom women engulfed her, and oh, how she wished Ulla’s mother could be hers, too. Despite Ulla’s hatred of Ronja’s lies about her father, the only truth that mattered to Linnea was Ronja’s singular devotion.

Linnea wondered how her own mother could crave something more than her children’s happiness and safety, and she promised herself never to touch a drop of anything that would split her into two different people. While her parents were sober from drugs and alcohol, the demons that lurked inside them were angry at being starved.

In better moments, after the demons that possessed her mother and shoved Linnea into a corner, backhanded her, or were dried out on the floor pleading about how fucking hard detox was, there were quiet and genuine apologies for the forgotten birthdays, the insults during highs, the missed parent-teacher conferences, the neglected school choir concerts, and plays. During visitations in foster care, Linnea had taken these apologies as performances, but there were times her mother would come into her room, kiss her hair, and stroke it as if worshipping. Linnea would pretend to sleep, squeeze her eyes, wrapping herself in the only fond memories she had of her parents. Of fishing on Lake Mora. Of her mother snapping a picture of the pike she and her father caught together: Look at that, baby! Big smile! Where was that picture now?

Abby was by far the more hardened one, determined to finish high school and get as far away from Mora as possible. Linnea, though, was content in Mora. Mora had Ulla and Ronja. Where they went, she would go. At night, she would continue to hold Beskyddaren and kiss the jewels. Ulla never asked her to return him, so, wanting to keep its magic and protection, Linnea kept him.

Now, in the back seat of the Ford, two years later, Linnea still believed in Beskyddaren’s power, as sunbeams filtered through the dust and radiated onto Ulla. “What kind of car is this again?”

Ulla opened her eyes. “Ford Galaxie.”

“How about Lexie?”

“It’s perfect.”

Just like you.

Chapter Forty-Eight

August 1986

Three Years Later

Linnea

The summer before their senior year in high school, Everett Barnes waltzed back into Mora. Right into Dairy Queen.

Linnea had worked there since she was fourteen. It was a good job. She didn’t have to talk to anyone. Not really. Just take orders. Ask scripted questions, which mostly were, What size? She subjected her anxiety to the job because it was her ticket to freedom.

She’d saved every penny in her own bank account. The teller at First Nation knew enough about Linnea’s parents to make sure it was kept secret and out of their clutches.

By now, she’d saved enough to fantasize about the cool breeze and warm sands of the Pacific Ocean, where she and Ulla would be tanning on a California beach, hands laced together, marveling at their love and life’s possibilities. A telephone operator would track them down in their remote bungalow asking if Linnea knew of anyone named Margie and Dick Larsson of Mora, Minnesota, and Linnea would tell the operator she had the wrong number. Her parents had died a long time ago.

Yes, with the passing of each day toward their senior year, the more of a reality this dream became, and the lighter she felt. The flutter inside her ribs, like a gentle ripple of the wind, would lift her off the ground and away to a land where girls kissed freely and deeply under the sunshine.

But that all changed with Everett Barnes on a humid August day. Exactly eight days before school started.

Linnea peered through her bangs at him.