Peace Like a River: A Novel

by Leif Enger

So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.

So let us leave. Let us get to the Plymouth with an impolite quickness—let us fly, as witnesses of eras past might say. Because at home, the hard and escalating war has paid a visit. And it’s Swede, my darling sister, who has met it at the door.

What I wanted was for Swede to be Swede: that is, glad and funny and belonging to me, as usual. We’d always been an exclusive pair, she being smart enough for the two of us and never begrudging me her secrets.

and it made me cross how close I was to crying.

The confidence with which Elvis knifed my brother’s honor left my mouth dry.

Her silence placed or revealed a nub of fear in me—an unreasoning fear that Valdez was no invention. That he was real and coming toward us on solid earth. A preposterous idea, wouldn’t you say? Yet it blazed up, so scary in its brightness that I made a wall against it in my heart, in the deepest place I owned.

Once traveling, it’s remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else—ignorance, for example.

“It’s a thing about fog,” he continued. “Doesn’t matter when it comes, it smells like April. Birdie was born April twenty-second,” he confided. “Every time it fogs like this, I tell her, Happy birthday, love.”

We baptized a few sugar lumps.

You know what we did? We laughed ourselves warm.

It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also.

She had a low beautiful laugh, and hearing it you could only wish you’d said the thing that brought it forth.

and she, all Frenchbraided, scarf unslung, resembled an opportunity missed by Rembrandt.

Goodness, I miss Dad.