Where The Light Went

She married her father twice. Then she went back four generations to find out why. Tessa Hale grew up in the only colonial on Lake Kaniksu, reading the air in every room before anyone spoke. It was how a child survives a house where the mother drinks vodka from a juice glass and the father waits, mild and reasonable, for the pill to take effect before he brings something up. She left that house at eighteen with gravel in her hair and a talent she mistook for love. It found her a rancher's son who could not say what he wanted, and then a former linebacker who wanted everything, and by forty-six she was on a closet floor with a scar on her wrist and a seventeen-year-old daughter in the hallway on the phone with the police. Where the Light Went is the story of what came after: a glass of wine on a deck, three lists on a legal pad, a confessional, a rosary, a canoe coming around a point. It reaches back to a wheat farm in the Palouse and a grandmother mauled by a bull, and forward to three daughters who will never have to learn what their mother called the horse voice. It is a novel about narcissism and the women who are drawn to it, about generational patterns and the one person it takes to end them, and about the light in a woman's eyes: where it goes, and how it comes back. Four generations after a Swedish farm wife held her daughter's face together on a kitchen floor while her husband went up to bed, a woman on an Idaho lake finally sees the man she has married twice, and breaks a chain her family never knew it was forging.