Mike McMahon had been worried when he rode the old Camden and Spearfish Lake way car up the tracks to the Warsaw Fire. As big a mess as it sounded like it was going to be, he knew there was going to be some danger, so he was worried for Kirsten, who was pregnant again.
Unlike Tiffany, who had been unplanned and had forced a lot of big changes in their lives, this pregnancy was as planned as it could be, if a little late.
Mike had been an only child, and he grew up lonely. Even before Tiffany was born, he’d told Kirsten it wasn’t nice for a kid to grow up that way, and it caused a lot of problems that a sibling could have solved. He knew.
But after Tiffany had been born, times had been tough and they’d been terribly busy. Mike and Kirsten did their best to be good parents, but there were hours upon endless hours to work at the Record-Herald and that got in the way of spending the time with the little girl as they should have. They really couldn’t have accomplished it at all without Kirsten’s parents, who helped take a little of the load off of their shoulders. Then, just as the load was easing a little and they thought maybe they might try for another kid, Homer Sanderson died, and there they were back to hundred hour weeks and lots of uncertainty, besides. The plans got put off.
Mike had hoped to keep the spacing between the kids fairly close. It was already much farther than he wanted when in the spring of 1980 they decided the time had come to try again. It was fall before Kirsten got pregnant again. Tiffany was almost four, then and they tried to make her a part of the process. They had become a close family, and Tiffany was still the delight of Mike’s life. He’d never dreamed fatherhood could be so enjoyable, and Mike’s one real worry – albeit a small one – was that Henry Toivo would come knocking on his door.
Since Tiffany’s birth, the subject of Henry Toivo just hadn’t come up very often, much to Mike’s relief. But Mike knew Henry’s ghost was lurking not far away, for on the odd occasions that he’d probed Kirsten lightly about the subject she was still as quick as ever to declare her devotion to him. Mike had known from the beginning, of course, of her obsession over Henry, but he’d hoped it might fade in time.
After the exhilaration and the excitement of the Warsaw fire, with Kirsten six months along and showing it, Mike finally decided for once he’d better not skirt the issue, but confront it. “Look,” he said one night after Tiffany was long asleep. “It’s not fair for the kids, either Tiffany or little what’s his name, for their parents to not be married. When they get a little older, it’s going to cause them problems. Kirsten, I think the time has come.”
Mike was not terribly surprised at her response. “You’re probably right,” she said, in a conversational tone. “But you also know my position. I told you way back in the beginning I had to stay available if Henry ever came home. That hasn’t changed a bit.”
“Kirsten, it’s been over ten years now, since Henry disappeared,” Mike told her. “There’s never been a trace of him, never a whisper, in all that time. We’ve been together over five years, six this coming summer. I think in the amount of time that’s passed we’d have heard something. Let’s face it, he’s got to be dead.”
“He might not be,” Kirsten said hopefully. “He might be lying in some veterans hospital somewhere, unconscious or with amnesia and not know who he was, and nobody else would, either.”
“I doubt that,” Mike said. “Even if he was in a coma, his fingerprints would be on record.”
“But what if he’d had his arms blown off?” Kirsten retorted, unwilling to give up. “Mike, we had an agreement. I’ve tried to do the best I could by you and Tiffany, be as good a wife as I could, be as good a mother as I could. I even think I could move out of town if we had to, not that there’s any real need to, now. I know there’s virtually no chance he’s ever coming back, but just allow me to keep the door open in case he does.”
There wasn’t much Mike could say to that. On balance, it was a small price to pay, and he knew it. “All right, Kirsten, you win,” he told her, feeling the weight of Henry’s ghost on his shoulders once again. The chances that he’d ever be able to really marry Kirsten were just as slim as ever. They might grow old together as close as a couple could be, but there would still be that small barrier between them that he could never cross, he knew now. Unless, of course, a miracle could happen and somehow it could be proved Henry was actually dead.
Mike thought back years to when he’d talked with Gil Evachevski about the chances of Henry being alive, or any trace of him ever being found. Gil had told him that if the chance ever arose, he’d promised Heikki Toivo – and Kirsten – he’d go and look for some trace of Henry Toivo. But that chance had never come yet, and might never come. Even if it did, Mike knew the chance of finding anything after all this time was pretty close to astronomical.
Much as he wanted to marry Kirsten, really marry her, for the sake of the kids if nothing else, he knew as certain as he could be that it would never happen, now, and he resolved to never raise the issue with her again. Henry’s ghost would just have to be a small part of their lives together, forever.
Though Henry’s ghost – at least the part of it that lived in Mike’s and Kirsten’s heads – was not necessarily a welcome part of their lives together, it was not dishonored, either. Mike proved it a few months later when he suggested to Kirsten that their firstborn son be named Henry Toivo Langenderfer-McMahon.