Living Together

Incomer

I N C O M E R In all of his imaginings Luke Klein had not imagined himself in jail. As in most things in his Detroit suburb, his cell, scrubbed clean, was upscale. There were even a few thumbed copies of Vanity Fair. Some preppy with time on his hands and no little talent had painted a pink-and-green crocodile on one of the cell walls. After a drunken teenager had been returned, penitent and tearful to his parents, Luke was the jail’s only resident. His wife, Miranda, was with her father, who was posting bail and who was furious with Luke. Luke’s foolishness would reflect on his fatherin -law and his father-in-law’s business. Luke’s own partners would not be happy. What was a doctor doing with a gun? He wondered if his rifle would be returned to him or confiscated. It was his dad’s and he wanted it back. Luke and Miranda had argued because Luke put out food at night for the coyote. Articles in the local paper said not to do that. A couple of little dogs had been attacked, and Luke and Miranda had a Bichon named Sip. The Bichon had belonged to Miranda before they were married, and it snarled and nipped at Luke when he got close to Miranda. It wasn’t a breed Luke would have chosen. When he was growing up in Michigan’s upper peninsula, his family had a series of German Shepherds with names like Blitz and Rebel. 1 9 Most of the homes in the suburb were comfortable three- and four-bedroom colonials with a few Tudors left over from the twenties . Their own place was located on one of a handful of streets of small spruced-up cottages. Mansions had once lined the suburb’s lakeshore, and the cottages had been homes for the servants who worked in the mansions. Living in the suburb was Miranda’s idea. It was where she had always lived and where all of her friends had settled. Luke disliked living in a servant’s cottage. He had grown up in one. But he was just finishing his oncology residency and it had been all they could afford. He was as much an alien in the suburb as the coyote. When he went for a walk he found handprints on everything, a landscape of plan and order instead of chance and scatter. Only the suburb’s trees appeared transcendent, their height and breadth making them too formidable to tamper with. The nearby lake was placid and no substitute for his boyhood Lake Superior, whose storms swallowed freighters. He had to make do with rabbits and squirrels instead of wolves and moose. He ignored the tame world around him and walked with the images of the wilder world in which he had grown up. Somewhere he had read that you could imagine only what was absent. Luke and Miranda met because Miranda’s parents came each summer to a private club, Arcadia, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Luke’s father, Ed, was the club’s caretaker, and Luke and his parents lived in a cabin on the club grounds. Luke would trail around after his dad as he repaired screens or primed a well. When he was little he had the idea the whole club would fall apart were it not for his father. The club members were polite to Luke, calling him by name and teasing him about his skill as a fisherman. That was 2 0 a double-edged compliment because the brookie he had caught when he was just twelve, one for the record books, had been caught in a stream that ran through the club and was for members only. Luke shouldn’t have been fishing there. He hadn’t had much to do with Miranda in those years. She was three years younger than he was, practically a baby. All the children of the club’s members had to have Minders. The Minders were full-time baby sitters, taking the kids on hikes, supervising their swimming in the club pool, and doing whatever it took to keep them out of their parents’ way. Luke’s mother hadn’t thought much of the arrangement. “What’s the point of having children if you’re not the one to bring them up? It isn’t as if those ladies had...