My cousin Elna arrived mid-December the year I was fourteen. I didn’t even know she’d been invited to stay. I’d only seen her a single time before, when I was in first grade, at our grandfather’s funeral in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Autumn of 1990. The memory was a blur to me: the chalky, sweet smell of white flowers, six tall men in dark coats on either side of a lacquered casket, and, faintly, Elna, staring at me from the other side of the grave site as the dirt was piled on.
I was sitting behind the cash register looking at one of my maps when the bells on the front door rattled. A tall, slim, red-headed girl in a mint green winter coat was standing there, looking around. She had two bags with her, both also green, and was wearing a pair of silver winter boots. She was very pretty. From twenty feet away, I could see that. I blinked at her, baffled, and before I could open my mouth to say anything my mother came swooping in from the back room in her coveralls, securing the red-haired girl in a firm, two-handed grip on the shoulders. They spoke some muffled words to each other, too faint for me to hear at the other end of the store, and then walked past all the shelves over to where I was seated at the counter. The girl shook some snow out of her long hair, fluffing up her bangs with her fingers. I noticed that her nails were painted a bright, pearlescent pink, filed into slender ovals. She wore several rhinestone rings, a shiny gold charm bracelet, and a pair of star-shaped earrings with little purple crystals in them.
“Ida,” my mother said. “You remember your cousin.” It took me a moment to understand who, exactly, that was. Apart from the hair, she looked nothing like the child I distantly remembered.
“Hello,” I said.
My mother went on, “She’s going to stay with us for a little while. Maybe through January.”
Elna gave a coy half-smile to neither of us in particular and placed both her bags on the ground. She slipped out of her wet snow boots and began to wander around the store, stocking-footed. She inspected the place slowly, prowling between the shelves like a panther dropped in a new enclosure, skittish and aloof at the same time. She tapped her nails on the glass refrigerator case, then turned to us and said in a wispy voice, “I’ve had a very long bus ride,” before brushing aside the curtain that divided the store from our living area and slipping out of view. My mother paused uncertainly mid-step with her hands outstretched toward Elna’s suitcases. I almost never saw her like that. She was always in motion: hauling bulk shipments of beer and canned beans in from the curb, chasing a bat or a raccoon out of the store with a broomstick, lugging twenty-pound jugs of detergent down to fill the pay dispenser in the basement laundry. But now she was very still. It made me uneasy.
I looked at Elna’s empty shoes. “She’s here alone?” I asked. My mother cleared her throat. “Your aunt Candace isn’t coming,” she said.
“Why not?”
“She isn’t well right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s having a lot of problems.” My mother and I did not discuss her sister often. Sometimes, I overheard the two of them on the phone. I could always tell when it was Candace on the line. The conversations took on a hushed, tense tone. It didn’t sound angry to me, not like the tension of an argument, but more worried, with a fraught closeness that was hard for me to understand though unmistakable in the sound of my mother’s voice.
I’d only met my aunt twice—first at the same funeral in Idaho where I met Elna, and then another time when she visited on my tenth birthday, without her daughter, just for the day. She brought me a brilliant pink spiral seashell, with a softly worn fifty-dollar bill wedged inside. My mother deposited this money at the bank. Candace drove back that night to where she was staying in Seattle with an ex-boyfriend, after she and my mother took a long cigarette walk together. I remember seeing them folded into a hug from my bedroom window. Candace had a bag at her feet with some sundries from our shop. Gifts, I understood. Her car was banged up around the sides and had many glittery stickers on the back, two plastic rosaries dangling from the rearview mirror, and a steering wheel cover made of fake purple fur. I knew she lived in San Francisco. I knew she had appeared in a handful of commercials, and in three episodes of a TV drama. She was two years younger than my mother. I got the sense she’d always had a lot of problems.
I could hear Elna in the back, her feet shuffling in the hall, the sound of a glass being set on a counter, the bathroom faucet going on and off. “No one told me she was coming,” I huffed.
“No one needs to tell you anything,” my mother replied. “Least of all me.”
“Where’s she going to sleep?” I asked. “Upstairs is full.”
“She’s not staying upstairs with the tenants, even if there was space. She’ll stay in the spare room next to yours.”
“It’s full of boxes.”
“I’ll move them.”
“There isn’t even a bed in there.”
“We have an extra cot.”
“How long have you known she was coming?”
“I wasn’t completely sure until she arrived, honestly. I’ve told you how your aunt can be.” My mother picked up Elna’s bags and carried them to the threshold of our rooms, then turned around and looked at me. “You don’t mind her being here for a little bit?” she asked, her voice now hesitant and very quiet.
I could tell she wanted reassurance more than anything else, but I answered honestly. “How can I know if I’ll mind or not if she’s only been here for ten minutes?”
“I mean do you think you will mind?”
I craned my neck around and saw Elna through a space in the curtain, flitting between the bathroom and the spare room, which she’d clearly already figured out was meant for her to stay in. Her winter coat had come off. She was wearing a purple miniskirt and a matching sweater with a glittery butterfly on the chest. I watched as she paused on her way into the bedroom, toiletry case in hand, stopping to look at a picture in the hallway. It was a photograph I’d taken last summer, of my mother and Jen, her girlfriend, in the yard behind the store. They’d just rebuilt the back porch together. There was white paint smeared on their faces. Elna reached up and straightened the frame, setting it even on the nail.
“I don’t expect to mind,” I finally said.
The store was open for another three hours. I watched the register while my mother helped get Elna settled in. One of the boarders, Charlie, came down to buy a box of cereal and some milk. He paid with exact change, like he always did, and retreated upstairs. His steps came as a slow, echoing creak as he made his way back to the third floor. An older girl I recognized from my school came in to buy a large bag of barbecue chips. I could tell she didn’t know who I was. Two other girls were idling in a car parked out front, waiting for her, playing music. After that, no one else came in. I unfolded the map I’d been looking at earlier and spread it across the counter. It was a close-up depiction of the Pacific Islands I’d recently gotten from a mail-order catalog. The ocean was colored in shades of blue, the variations indicating the way the depth leveled off near shore. It showed the highest point of elevation on each island, the trenches and ridges that sat between, rising up from the sea floor. I ran my finger across the Tropic of Capricorn. I recited the names of the atolls under my breath.
When my mother emerged from the basement with the cot, I stood to help her and was promptly shooed away. “What would Dr. Fields say?” she muttered, wrangling the metal frame with bare hands.
What he would’ve said was, Limit exertion. No horses, no bicycles, no gymnastics, no tree climbing, no leaping from barn windows into stacks of hay, no stickball, no tetherball, no relay races. Better not to risk the annual presidential fitness test. Best to sit out of gym period altogether. He’d given permission for me to learn how to swim years earlier, deeming it a safety precaution in our area with its many dozens of rivers and lakes, but lectured for a long five minutes about restraint. “Absolutely no cannonballs,” he said. I could hear the low, droning croak of his voice coming round and round like a loop in my brain for weeks after. “No flinging yourself around like a fish. No underwater tea paties. No racing anybody to the bottom to collect coins, or what have you.” I heard his voice loudest the first time I stood on the edge of the dock at Needle Lake, alone, in the early morning, my whereabouts unbeknownst to anyone but me, and threw myself from a running leap down below the surface. Once I was underwater, I couldn’t hear him anymore.
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From Needle Lake by Justine Champine. Copyright © 2025 by Justine Champine. Excerpted by permission of The Dial Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
