Arrowood by Laura McHugh EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Laura McHugh
- Language: English
- Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
I used to play a game where I imagined that someone had abandoned
me in a strange, unknown place and I had to find my way back home.
There were various scenarios, but I was always incapacitated in some
way—tied up, mute, missing a limb. I thought that I could do it blind,
the same way a lost dog might trek a thousand miles to return to its
owner, relying on some mysterious instinct that drew the heart back
to where it belonged. Sometimes, in the towns where I’d lived after
Keokuk, in a bedroom or classroom or while walking alone down a
gravel road, I’d pause and orient myself to Arrowood, the Mississippi
River, home. It’s there, I’d think, knowing, turning toward it like a
needle on a compass.
Now, as I crossed the flat farmland of Kansas and northern
Missouri, endless acres of wheat and corn blurring in the dense heat,
I felt the road pulling me toward Iowa, as though I would end up
there no matter which way I turned the wheel. I squinted into the
bright afternoon sky, my sunglasses lost somewhere among the
hastily packed bags and boxes I’d crammed into the back of my
elderly Nissan. It was late September, the Midwestern air still
stifling, unlike the cool sunshine I’d left behind in Colorado, where
the aspens had just begun to turn.
Back in February, when I was still on track to finish my master’s
degree, my recently remarried mother had called to let me know that
my dad, Eddie, had keeled over dead on a blackjack table at the Mark
Twain Casino in LaGrange. I hadn’t heard from my dad in the
months leading up to his death, and hadn’t seen him in more than a
year, so I had a hard time placing my feelings when I learned that he
was gone. I had already lost him, in a way, long ago, in the wake of
my sisters’ disappearance, and while I’d spent years mourning that
first loss of him, the second loss left me oddly numb.
Still, I’d wept like a paid mourner at his funeral. The service was
held in Illinois, where he’d been living, and most of the people in
attendance, members of the Catholic parish he’d recently joined,
barely knew him. I hated how funerals dredged up every shred of
grief I’d ever felt, for the deceased or otherwise, each verse of
“Amazing Grace” cutting into me and tearing out tiny bits of my
insides. The priest wore a black cape over his cassock, and when he
raised his arms to pray, it spread out dramatically, revealing a bloodred lining. He droned on at length, reminding us how much we had
in common with the dead: We all had dreams, regrets,
accomplishments, people we’d loved and disappointed, and at some
point, for each of us, those earthly concerns would fall away, our lives
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