"I wanted her to say she was sorry," Carly said. "I drove all the way over there and I wanted her to say it so badly, and she didn't, and I sat in her kitchen and realized she's never going to. Not ever." She set the rabbit back in its place on the pillow, carefully, between a bear and a plush orca. "So I guess I have to be the one who says it. Since nobody said it to me."
She did say it. I wasn't there. I know only because Elsie told me, a few days later, in the truck, in the offhand way kids tell you the most important things. "Mom said sorry about the cupcake," she said, looking out the window at the lake. "She cried a little. I told her it was okay." A pause. "It wasn't really okay. But I didn't want her to be sad."
"You know you're allowed to tell her it wasn't okay," I said.
She thought about that for a long time. "Maybe next time," she said.
There were good days and bad ones. On the Fourth of July Finn spiked a fever and Carly went straight back into it, into the notebook and the thermometer and the two-in-the-morning vigil, and for three days she didn't seem to see Elsie at all, and Elsie went quiet and careful again and put her animals to sleep every night with a pat on each head. On the fourth day Carly came downstairs and found Elsie making her own peanut butter sandwich at the counter, standing on a chair, and she stopped in the kitchen doorway and stood there watching her for a long time. Then she went and got down a second plate and made one for herself and sat at the table with her, and neither of them said much, but they ate together. The therapist in Hermantown, a soft-spoken woman with a lot of plants, said that was what it looked like. Not a door that opens. A thousand small things, going the other way.
Mrs. Fjelstad sent a postcard in July, from a lake cabin up the Gunflint Trail. It was addressed to Miss Elsie Ostlund, and it had a picture of a loon on the front, and on the back it said, in neat teacher's printing: Dear Elsie, I am retired now and I am bad at it. I hope you are reading. I hope you are writing. The world needs people who tell the truth. Your friend, Mrs. F. Elsie stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a lighthouse that I bought her at a gift shop in Two Harbors when I drove up to clean out my locker on the Mesabi Pride.
Under the postcard, on a little square of corkboard Carly bought at the hardware store and screwed to the side of the cabinet next to the fridge, were the two stars. Elsie's on its bright new ribbon. Carly's beside it, on the ribbon faded nearly to gray. Carly put them up there herself one morning without saying anything, and Elsie came downstairs and saw them and stopped, and looked at them for a long time with her glasses pushed up on her nose, and then went and got her cereal.
Elsie turned eight on the fourteenth of August. It was the first birthday of hers I'd been home for in five years. Carly asked her two weeks ahead of time what kind of party she wanted, and Elsie looked at her suspiciously, like it might be a trick question, and said, "Can it be small?" and Carly said it could be whatever she wanted. So it was small. Lily Vang and her parents, my mother down from Cloquet, Carly and Finn and me, in the backyard on Robinson Street with the lake showing blue between the houses.