Summer of 1998

Summer of 1998 is the season of Maren and Lee’s journey, a stretch of movement in which brief pleasures and makeshift refuges coexist with the history Maren carries. Its chronology runs from a June carnival notice through her late-July departure from an isolated farmhouse and on toward camping at Laskin National Park and the loss of their pickup near the end of August. The changing locations give the summer a clear outward itinerary; Maren’s confession and recurring unease make clear that travel does not leave the past behind.

The journey’s early summer

On the road toward Sandhorn, Maren says she would begin looking for her father with a phone book, while resisting the thought of arriving if it meant saying goodbye to Lee. Two miles beyond the turnoff for Friendship, a billboard announces the Mother of Peace Carnival Fundraiser in Gilder: rides, games, food, and prizes, open every night from June 7 through June 13, with directions from Exit 47. The sign redirects their attention. Maren and Lee exchange grins, and for one perfect second she forgets her bad dreams and the carnival nights she has taken from other people—even their names. The moment’s lightness is brief, but its terms matter: the advertised fair promises ordinary public pleasures, while Maren’s memory of other people’s lost nights makes that promise difficult to inhabit innocently.

They take Exit 47 through farm country and reach Gilder, a one-street town of antique shops and doctors’ offices on a narrow hill. Beyond it, the makeshift fairground appears beside a brick church with a white steeple: a Ferris wheel turns, and a Galleon swings back and forth. Lee parks at the edge of a soccer field across the road and leaves his Stetson on the seat. The specific, everyday details place their encounter with the carnival within a working journey rather than a separate fantasy. The sign offers a fixed schedule and a destination; the pair’s road life makes even this brief stop part of a larger, uncertain route.

The record Maren carries

A photocopied confession gives the summer a longer and darker chronology. In it, Maren identifies herself as responsible for ten deaths, beginning with Penny Wilson, in her twenties, in or near Edgartown, Pennsylvania, in 1983. The list then records eight children and teenagers killed between July 1990 and November 1997: eight-year-old Luke Vanderwall at Camp Ameewagan in the Catskills; ten-year-old Jamie Gash in Badgerstown in December 1992; and Dmitri Levertov, Joe Sharkey, Kevin Wheeler, Noble Collins, Marcus Hoff, and C. J. Mitchell, with their ages, locations, and dates also specified. Its final entry is Andy, an employee at the Walmart near Pittston, Iowa, killed in June 1998. The list’s dates show that the journey belongs to a present shaped by a much longer series of losses; Andy’s entry brings that record directly to the summer in which Maren is traveling.

After an hour without Sully’s return, Maren crumples the photocopies and feeds them to the fire one by one. She concludes that the truth will not set her free and that she will end up like her father. She then searches the cabin for a distraction, finding old paperbacks, including spy thrillers and romances she does not want to read. In the kitchen she looks for ingredients for hot chocolate and grilled cheese, hoping to make the cabin feel like home, or at least another version of it; finding no bread, cheese, or cocoa, she settles for beef jerky. The attempt to turn a temporary shelter into a home sits beside the destruction of the confession: the document remains a record of responsibility, but Maren chooses not to preserve or deliver it at this point in the journey.

Temporary shelter and the road onward

In the last week of July, Maren packs her things and climbs down from the farmhouse for the last time, leaving a hatchet on the hayloft floor. It had made her feel safe, but she cannot hitchhike while carrying an axe. Three days later, a woman trucker drops her in Tarbridge; Maren walks to Bridewell hoping to find the black truck and feeling certain it will not be there. The departure is defined by practical constraints as much as by fear or longing: she leaves the tool that had offered security because she intends to travel by hitchhiking, and reaches Bridewell without assurance that the vehicle she seeks is waiting.

Later, Maren and Lee drive to Laskin National Park during prime camping season. With so many other people around, sleeping in the pickup’s flatbed seems less appealing than paying for a campsite like everyone else. Alone in her little tent at night, Maren sees in her mind the snapshots from her parents’ perfect summer turning over in the dark and wishes that one of them owned a camera. The campsite brings a new kind of temporary domestic arrangement, while the imagined photographs connect her present journey to a family summer she can picture but cannot document herself.

The summer’s ending in motion

Toward the end of August, the journey loses the pickup. Maren and Lee have decided to fish in Door County; only a few miles outside the park, the engine coughs and Lee pulls over. He spends almost an hour bent under the hood before explaining a problem Maren cannot understand. He cannot repair it alone, and they cannot call a tow truck. As they unload their belongings for the last time, Maren tells him it is not his fault, though he remains prickly and quiet as they walk.

Lee puts out his thumb to passing cars, and after half an hour one stops ahead of them. A blonde woman wearing magenta sunglasses leans out of the driver’s-side window to ask whether they have broken down. The episode does not end the journey or separate Maren from Lee; it changes the means by which they can continue. Across the summer, the carnival’s bright promise, the cabin’s attempted homeliness, the tent, the abandoned hatchet, and the failed truck mark successive, provisional forms of safety. The season’s route is therefore not a simple escape: its destinations and vehicles keep changing, while Maren’s recorded past and her uneasy sense of what the truth will do remain present.