We had driven across British Columbia and through Resurrection Bay and all that time my mother kept reminding me that we weren’t running, we weren’t escaping, we were going someplace, and when we got there all the hardship would be worth it. This was 1977 and half of the gas stations along the Alaska Highway were closed and the rest were charging crazy prices. She had begun paying with balled dollar bills and change and once just before the border—I remember this distinctly—she filled the tank, gunned the engine, and laughed as she peeled out onto the main road. “Stealing is wrong, Daniel,” she told me. “There are a lot of things that are wrong. Your father might say that this whole adventure is wrong. But sometimes you have to do those wrong things anyway. The best you can do is make it up somewhere else along the line.”
I looked up in the rearview at the gas station growing smaller and smaller. A human figure emerged, hands on its hips, and watched us go.
Her brother worked in Seward on the boats and I think she was hoping he’d have some money for us once she reached him. After all, she had helped him out many times when he was down and out. “Remember that time when he came with us for a few weeks in the winter? We didn’t tell you this then, of course, but he was getting out of his own bad situation. Remember your father pouring wine down the drain before he got there?”
“I don’t,” I said, which was the truth.
“Well,” she said. “He did.”
We camped so close to the road that sometimes the headlights of passing cars woke me up in the middle of the night. I was twelve then and she joked that in a couple of years I’d be ready to work right alongside my uncle. “It’s not dangerous work if you know what you’re doing,” she said. “Better than selling cars. People should take risks, don’t you think, Daniel?”
“I think so,” I said. “I think you’re probably right.”
I was imagining my father at the dealership waiting for people to come on the lot so he could jog out of the building and tell them all about the new Chryslers and Chevrolets. I wondered if he was at work right at that moment. Time had gotten all mixed up and it shocked me to realize I didn’t even know what day it was or what time it might be back there in Colorado Springs where my father possibly sat at his desk watching out through the glass wall of the building at the expanse of shiny cars and potential customers.
We had left Colorado Springs heading due west in the middle of the night and I think my mother was thinking about California, the place where she had grown up. After three days we changed direction and began our move upward into the Dakotas and then Montana and then the Canadian border. Somehow, she convinced the border guard to let me through without my birth certificate. “We’re attached,” she said to him, and she clasped my hand and held up the grip for the guard to see through the window.
“Your uncle came here when he was nineteen,” she said. “Can you imagine that? Nineteen and he hitchhiked all this way. Your grandfather was a bit of a tyrant. We both rebelled in our own ways.”
At the tops of the mountains you could see sheep standing in clusters of five or six. Nothing more than specks against the snow but if you looked long enough you could see them moving, changing configuration. That’s how you knew they were alive: the way the points formed different shapes. Anything could be alive and you had to really look closely or you might miss it. I had never seen so much beauty. It overwhelmed me. “Over there,” I told my mother whenever I saw something interesting, and she’d turn her head and give the sight a quick acknowledgement.
She had brought binoculars, but it was hard to focus them from the moving car. I wore them around my neck, though, in case we should stop, and sometimes even in the tent at night. I counted up the sheep so I could have a story to tell. Something like, “I saw forty-six sheep,” and I’d know it was exactly correct because I had been meticulous. That’s what I was trying to do in everything: in the way I ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the morning, slowly, tasting each bite, and the way I spoke to her when she talked about my father and why she had done this thing.
“I always wanted to live an interesting life,” she said. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask, is it?”
Just over the border into the Yukon we camped again and my mother spoke to me in the dark about my father. “You should have seen him in his glory days,” she said. “This was before you were a baby, before I trapped him, you might say. Before everything trapped him. Should you blame a whole country for your failures or just yourself?” I felt her hand reach out to touch the skin of my arm just below my elbow. “You’re going to have to worry about this too,” she said. “In a way that’s my fault. For not falling in love with someone different. My parents thought I did it to get them angry, just like Adam heading off to Alaska, but it was true love, or honest feeling at least.”
“Do you hear that?” I asked, because something was out there.
I could hear her move upright, the shuffle of her sleeping bag. “Bear,” she said, but that wasn’t it. I could hear a voice, two voices, growing louder. “It’s someone talking,” she said, and then the voices called out to us. “Don’t talk,” she whispered to me, “and they’ll just go away.”
The first voice called out and said something about almost hitting our car and the second, a deeper tone, but still a lot like the first, wondered if we were okay. A couple of flashlights strobed down the nylon of the tent and I could see my mother’s face briefly in the glow. She held a gun in both hands and I couldn’t help but think of a child holding a teddy bear the same way. I had never seen the gun before and I would never see it again but the fact of it—stubby and black, small as a toy—impressed itself on me and for the first time on that long trip I knew things were not going to work out. It was just a question of what accidents might befall us and when. The voices called out again, asking if there was anybody there, if we needed any help, and finally she whispered to me, “Tell them to leave. Yell it.” She had pulled the pistol into her chest, flat, as if she were protecting it from theft.
“Go away,” I yelled, trying to put on my gruffest voice. “Get out of here.” That didn’t seem good enough so I barked out another, “Go. Go now.”
I could hear the two men talking to each other. The flashlights dropped lower and then vanished altogether, skittering off in the opposite direction, maybe back toward the way they had come or over to the station wagon. One of them said, “Are you alone in there?”
I didn’t say anything else. In the dark my mother’s pistol had ceased to exist and in a way she had too. I needed to do something and the hardest thing to do was to sit still, quiet, and let them talk. The longer I waited the longer I felt I could wait, and after a while I could hear them moving back to the road. An engine started and they drove away, slowly, and when they were gone I sat there listening for any sign that my mother was still with me. After a long time, she said, “Let’s sleep.”
In the morning, driving in the early sunlight, it was as if it had never happened, or at least something very different had happened than what I had remembered. Nosy, she called them, and she told me not to worry, the gun didn’t even have any bullets. “A knickknack from our time living in Brooklyn,” she said. “People used to shoot up in the hallway of the first floor of our building. A different kind of danger. Hey, look at that. Are you going to count those or what?”
A half dozen specks dotted the snow on the mountain off to the west, clinging to the side in a way that seemed impossible. I wondered how they could do such a thing. “Already saw them,” I said.
“You’re getting good at this,” she said.
We had forgotten to make sandwiches that morning but I was eating a candy bar and rested both of my bare feet on the dash. My mother had washed her hair by pouring a jug of water over it and now it was tied back in a tight bun and she looked much like she did back in Colorado Springs. I imagined her on stage speaking out above the heads of the audience, reciting something profound from memory, and it was easy to believe that a person who could do such a thing could get us to Seward and get us back again.
But that had been a long time ago. Now she was a massage therapist and a healer and she liked to talk about the previous lives of the people she loved. Mine had been a king, way back there somewhere, and she had been a queen, but on different continents in different times. This, she said, was the first time we had ever met, but we had a lot in common. My father, who had also been an actor—that’s how they met in Los Angeles—liked to say that he had been a horse carriage salesman in his previous life, and before that he had sold chariots. “And before that the wheel,” he said. “But that was a long, long time ago.” That one even made my mother laugh and he liked to bring it up whenever she was talking about all the lives that trailed behind us back to the beginning of time.
“You have to be on guard,” she was saying as we drove. “You have to be prepared. Is that how the scout motto goes?” She pointed out again at another mountain peak, but there was nothing there. “I’m not just talking about protecting yourself against strangers. I’m talking about everybody. You can’t just glide around with your heart on your sleeve. I’ve learned that the hard way, let me tell you.” She stopped the car and way, way up ahead on the road I could see a bear, a small one, moving out into the center of the road. We let the engine idle until it crossed down the embankment and into the trees. “He’s got the right idea, doesn’t he?” she said. “Can you believe it? Did you ever think this would be happening to you?”
Just past the Alaska border the mountains receded and the land turned to scrub brush and dirt and stunted trees sometimes exposed at the roots, all tilting in the same direction as if blown by a great storm. It all reminded me of bad weather and disasters, something half-destroyed and then forgotten.
My mother pulled over and said, “You know what, kid? We’re either going to have to sleep or you’re going to have to drive. What do you say?” So I drove, slowly, while my mother cracked the window and let her fingers dangle out, moving them as if waving to someone just past my line of vision. She reminded me of myself when I was eight or nine, playing with the rush of air, feeling the pleasure of it and not really thinking about much else. “You’re doing really well,” she told me. “Just don’t ride the brake so much. How long has it been since we’ve seen another car?”
“Hours,” I said. “The Chevy with the broken grill. Remember that?”
“Right,” she said.
That’s how we arrived in Seward, with me driving, maybe thirty miles an hour, until buildings began to appear among the damaged landscape and my mother told me we should switch again. “Good job,” she said. “Really good job. You’re the kind of person a woman can trust, do you know that? Don’t ever lose that. It’s a precious commodity.” She scooted across the seat and I walked around the front of the car. My palms were sweating and I wiped them on my jeans. They came away dirty. I had worn the same pair all week and they were dark with campfire smoke.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking that this is crazy. But I trusted you and you have to trust me. Everything I’m doing is because I love you. I know you hate hearing that word but there it is.” She made a sound like our cat puking a hairball and she laughed. “Right there in the car with us. So trust me. When you’re an adult you’ll look back at this and say, ‘Man, she did right by me.’”
Seward came into view: a long road wet with that morning’s rain crowded by low buildings. Out in the bay another crowd of boats and beyond them a wall of mountains, smaller and gray in the foreground, towering snow-covered ones looming behind them. I realized that what my mother had been telling me—that the sight would take my breath away—had been sincere, and that she was amazed too. She slowed the car down and we watched the horizon and the ships and the play of the light on the water. It was blue and green at the same time, sometimes one, sometimes the other, and sometimes both, and the white of the mountains was like no white I had ever seen. My mother must have glanced at my face because she said, “I told you so.”
I remembered my uncle as a big man with a thick beard who had slept late during his time at our house, sometimes rising at noon and grunting as he moved around upstairs. He told funny little stories about growing up with my mother, stories that always showed her in the best possible light, as smart and courageous and funny and more than a little rebellious, and I believed that she was still all these things in the right proportions.
My father had looked at my uncle like he was a thing he was trying to figure out, a puzzle spilled all over the kitchen table, but they had joked good-naturedly and when he left at the end of the two weeks, my father said, “Independent thinkers. That’s what this country needs. I’d probably last a day up there, don’t you think? Maybe two?” And he produced a bottle of wine from somewhere—my mother laughed to see it—and poured two glasses. “A toast,” he said. “To adventure,” and they twined their arms together like the necks of swans I had seen in a picture book once, tipped the cups to the other’s lips.
In 1977 Seward was a place you could go if you wanted to erase your name from society’s ledger. My mother said that the people who lived there, my uncle included, did not want to be found, but he was in there somewhere, on one of those boats clustered into a miniature city. It would take patience and that was okay.
This is what he saw when he woke up every morning: the water and sky and the frame of mountains on three sides, the ocean on the other. We seemed to be falling into all of it. I could practically feel the tug of gravity as we followed the road down a long slope into the center of town. Trucks traveled the other way, moving slow over ruts in the road, turning and twisting around the worst potholes. Occasionally another driver opened a hand in a wave. We passed a sign for the Wells Fargo bank, another for a restaurant that said simply Good Food. I was still trying to remember the number and name of the day. We drove the wet main street at a walking pace and my mother said, “We’ll need to handle this gently. Your uncle Adam is going to be a bit surprised.”
I said, “I thought you two had talked this out. What about the phone call?”
“That was to your father,” she said, “and I ended up not making that one either.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I didn’t want to let him know,” she continued, as she moved around a little crater of mud. “He would have talked me out of it. He’s always liked your father, you know, even though it might not seem like it. Or at least he thinks your father is good for me. I guess that’s not the same thing, but close enough. So yeah. There’s going to be a reaction.” She laughed a little. “Be sure to get a good look at his face. Another reason we should have brought a camera, right?”
“Right,” I said.
We slowed for a group of men crossing the road. They wore bright all-weather gear even in the sunshine and took their time getting to the other side. One of them drank from a beer bottle and he tipped it up high to get the dregs, then kept moving with his arm draped to his side, holding the bottle by the neck in a gesture that was almost gentle.
The mountains seemed further away the closer we got to the center of town. I could see the mud flecked trucks, the dogs wandering free with lowered heads, sidewalks made of wood. I could see my mother’s face smiling as she nodded, affirming this or that with a motion of her head. Possibly she had been able to imagine us making it all the way. What could she do now but let the joy wash over her and ignore what might come next?
I was fourteen then and I suppose young for my age. I’m more than triple that now and my work takes me many places, although I can’t say many of them are especially interesting. Still, I know that impulse to move, the clarity of a suitcase full of clothes and car odometer putting on miles. It’s like a lot of things—its power not any less so because it’s illusionary.
I’ve often thought about my mother’s words. She believed that time would judge her kindly, or maybe that was just her hope against the odds, a leap of faith similar to getting into the station wagon with a pup tent, a road atlas, and her only child.
Later when I returned from Alaska my father did not speak about my mother for a long time except to say that she would be back soon, he was sure of it, and that we should both have faith—both in the kindness of others and in her own love for us. But then he began to tell me things I had never heard before, filling that open space her absence had created. “I met your mother when she was acting in Othello out in San Francisco,” he said. “She wasn’t Desdemona, but she was the best performer in that play. You could tell just from the way she carried herself, before she even spoke a line.” He had just come home from work and he still wore his white shirt and tie, although the tie was loose around his neck and his sleeves were rolled up his forearms. We stood on the back porch watching our small square of yard. He narrowed his eyes as if he saw something weird out there in the dark by the fence and bushes, a thing he didn’t like. “Maybe it was a mistake to fall in love with someone on a stage. I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking much about the future. I certainly wasn’t thinking about someone like you being in my life.” He turned to me and touched my shoulder and smiled and then he looked down because he had always been shy with me.
“Who was she then?” I asked.
“Emilia,” he said. “A minor character. Well, not so minor, but it’s not important.”
“And who were you then?” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“In the play,” he said. “Who were you?”
He laughed. “That was a long time ago,” he said. “I was the lead, but I crashed my way through it. All bluster and muscle. I think I screamed every line. What else could I do? An audience full of rich white people.”
I could tell he was remembering it vividly, and even though he was looking out there at the edge of our property, what he was seeing now probably had something to do with that young man, the only Black man on stage, pacing as he yelled his lines. He looked embarrassed by the whole thing. He said, “These were the days of segregated lunch counters, so it was an important part. But you wouldn’t know about that. You’ve grown up in a different world.”
“Right,” I said, although I’d been insulted at school plenty of times. I watched the place my father was watching and I swore I saw something move. A dog probably, but still, it made me happy to think that maybe something wild traveled through the neighborhood on all fours, digging beneath fences and searching for food.
“I wasn’t old enough then to be playing a role like that,” my father continued and it seemed like he was speaking to himself now as much as to me. “And now I’m a little bit too old. There was a very small window I missed.”
He didn’t seem old at all, although his shortly cropped hair was flecked with gray. I said, “I’m glad we live here,” because at that moment it felt true and because I knew he was thinking about what might have been.
It had been more than a month since my trip to Alaska but our little suburb still seemed tight as a cage. Still, I was happy to be speaking with my father, happy to be back in school. The story was that I had been very sick but I was better now. “I should probably take that stupid thing down,” he said, meaning the swing set. “You haven’t used it in years, have you? And I just left it there. Let’s take it down this weekend.” He put his big hand to his chin and rubbed. “You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you?”
“I really haven’t been through anything,” I said.
“You don’t have to protect her,” he said. “Let’s talk honestly.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m talking honestly.”
“Okay, then,” he told me, and there seemed to be nothing left to say. He nodded, as if agreeing with himself that yes, the swing set needed to come down. Maybe he’d find out about that animal too, if it was an animal. Other things needed to happen. The lawn needed to be mowed. The garage needed painting. I could tell he was probably making a list in his head. He wanted a good life for all of us, me especially, and this was one way to do it.
“What else were you in?” I asked him.
“Nothing much. Too good-looking for character parts and not good-looking enough to be a leading man. That was my problem. And I didn’t care that much when it came down to it. It was just a thing to do. A hobby.”
He grimaced and took his tie off completely, let it hang down at his side. I thought of the man with his bottle crossing the road, all of those men exhausted after work, but I also thought that he was very good-looking, the most good-looking man I’d ever seen, and that in a way all of this was a performance. He seemed to be striking a pose, the pose of a tired family man finished with his day. I could tell he was thinking about sleep, but I had something else to say. I said, “You know, she didn’t really want much. I learned a lot of things about her when we were traveling and that’s one of the main ones.”
He grimaced again and blinked his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that’s true. But what’s that little thing then? Tell me that.” And then he smiled again and it was as if those words had never come from his mouth. “You’re a good kid, Daniel. A really good kid. God knows you don’t deserve this.” He laughed and added, “Maybe in the next life we’ll work it all out, eh? I wonder if she’s going to be a queen again. There aren’t as many of those as there used to be, but I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“Me neither,” I said. “I bet she’s working on it.”
“I bet so too,” he said.
“You know,” I said. “She mentioned something in Seward. Can you tell me if it’s true?”
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
“She said you performed in London once,” I said. “In The Black and White Minstrel Show.”
That grimace again. “It’s a hard life when you can’t trust your mother,” he said.
“Right,” I said, and that was that. I think that’s when I made my decision, somewhere at the base of my brain, although it would be two years until I followed through on what my mother had begun. What she had said in Seward had actually been, “Your father was afraid of becoming a colossal failure so instead he decided to become a minor one.”
She had still been pretty, I decided, and still young, young enough and smart and strong enough to get what she wanted. Anything could have happened in her life.
We were waiting for her brother to return from the sea. We had thrown his name around town and although nobody knew him they said there were boats coming in that night and we should stick around, so we walked up and down the pier and she began to tell me about the past in small pieces. The word tyrants came up again, bigots, small-minded backstabbers. Her brother had solved all that by cutting the knot.
“Mom,” I said. “I’m cold.”
“Me too,” she said. “And it’s April. Who could have figured?”
Out on the water I could see small patches of ice moving, I decided, like the boats moved: in small clusters configured by a logic I didn’t understand. The wind blew my mother’s hair around her head and although she was smiling she looked frightened and alone. I was there, right with her, but I’m not sure I counted in the way she wished. My presence seemed to make her lonelier the longer we waited and she touched her fingers one at a time, rubbing them for warmth. I said, “Remember the caribou? That was my favorite part.”
“Yes,” she said. “We had to stop the car. A whole parade of them across the road.”
“Like a train,” I said, because it had taken them that long to pass and because they had walked in single file, almost as neat as a set of boxcars.
“London,” she said. “Can you even imagine?” but I didn’t respond. Then she looked out to sea and said, “They’re coming. I can see them.”
I held up the binoculars. A line of white hulls and a mess of rigging, at least a dozen boats, probably more, and they moved together like birds did, arranged in tight design. I moved my eye across them, acknowledging each one and then the next, and sometimes I could see smaller details.
He would be surprised and angry. They’d probably go away and have a talk and leave me to watch the ocean with his heavy coat around my shoulders.
But he didn’t arrive. The boats came into the docks and the men came up the ramps but he wasn’t one of them. Someone had caught a particularly large halibut and they hung it from a hook and gathered around. “That’s bigger than you,” my mother said to me and I could tell she was trying very hard to keep her good attitude. “I’m sure this is the place,” she added. “I have the letters. I remember him telling me. You remember, right, Daniel?”
She took me by the shoulders and crouched slightly and stared right into my face. She repeated the question but I wouldn’t answer. I think part of me wanted to see her this way, dumbfounded and frustrated, the beauty drained from her face and replaced with anxiety. Her lips were chapped and bleeding at the corner of her mouth and her hair whipped upward and around like a mad thing. “Daniel,” she said. “Talk to me. Don’t tell me that you weren’t dying there too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
She released me and I stumbled back a bit, caught myself before falling. “Oh, great,” she said. “This is it, isn’t it?” And she clapped her hands together and laughed. “We’ve come all this way. Please don’t quit on me now.”
Just then someone walked up to us and we both turned and for a second I thought it was my uncle, but then I noticed the beard was dotted with gray and there was something distant in his eyes. He didn’t know us and he didn’t care to know us, but he did want a cigarette and when my mother told him we didn’t have any he looked insulted. “I saw you earlier,” he said. “With those things,” and he pointed at my binoculars and I felt like a fool.
We tented out on the beach and even made a small fire of driftwood. The next morning, I woke before my mother and headed up the coast, picking up especially interesting stones and then sending them out to the breakers. I was debating whether I should head back to my mother or head out on my own to find my uncle, to find someone, to maybe just find a pay phone and call my father collect. We had been gone two weeks, but it seemed much longer and a childish part of my brain thought he might not recognize my voice if I called—that I had somehow grown beyond his recognition. It was a stupid thought, but I allowed myself to luxuriate in it, to find strange pleasure in it, and then I kept going until I could no longer see any sign of my mother’s tent. I imagined that I had come here alone, that I would stay here and that my mother was back with my father in Colorado Springs and they were both happy. I knew I was happy right then, but I didn’t really know why except that the little stones felt good in my hands when I picked them up.
I knew where to find him. He had mentioned the name of his boat, The Bobbysocks. He had mentioned it to my mother too, but she must have forgotten. I walked around the docks, up and down, until I found a small fishing boat with that name and sat down on the dock and watched it. People came and went up the dock, but none of them were my uncle. I could watch the sunrise and then the boats leaving, the smell of diesel. I tried to imagine myself as a native kid, someone who belonged there, but everybody I saw gave me a once over. I waited for more than an hour and then I stood and looked at the name again and decided that yes, I was right, this was the name of his boat. It had featured in a number of his stories and I thought of my father laughing at them and then waiting for another one. “That’s nuts, man,” he’d say, or, “What the hell are you talking about?”
Finally, my uncle appeared, but he was not surprised to see me and not surprised to see me alone either. “There you are,” he said, and he took me in for a hug. He was with a couple of other men and they receded politely into the background. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I’ve been talking to your dad and we thought you might make an appearance.” He looked me over from head to toe, as if checking for wounds, but he did it in such a good-natured way that I couldn’t figure out if he was joking or not. “We’ve been worried sick but you’re going to be okay now. What do you need? Do you need some food? I bet you’re hungry as hell.”
“I am,” I said, and even that felt like a betrayal.
The four of us moved together in the same way I had seen the men crossing the street. We found a restaurant, the one my mother and I had seen entering into town, and slid into the booth. “This is my nephew,” he told the waitress. “He’s had quite an adventure, so treat him kindly.”
“The opposite of the way you treat us,” one of his friends said, and everybody laughed, including the waitress, including me. I found out that the halibut from the day before weighed three hundred and seventy pounds, the biggest my uncle had ever seen, and although he had nothing to do with the boat that caught it everybody in town shared in the pride of the thing. I remember my uncle shaking his head in mock disbelief. It gave them something to talk about for the rest of the year at least and sometimes you needed something like that to get through the winter. “Two miracles in one day,” he said. “That’s enough to talk about until March.”
When my mother found us on the dock she began screaming before she even reached us. Then she was running up the dock, sprinting, a ridiculous sight amid all that cold serenity. She grabbed me and pulled me behind her and pushed up into her brother’s face and for a moment I thought she might strike him. I’ve been looking all over, she kept yelling, and my uncle’s friends had to pull her back away from him. I remember them smiling as they did it, as if this kind of thing happened all the time here—or it didn’t happen enough.
“Let’s talk about this, Sherry,” my uncle said. “There’s a lot we need to sort out.”
It seemed like the typical kind of lover’s quarrel I had never seen happen between my father and mother: the hysterical woman, the placating man. One of his friends held her around the waist. She shook her body and he let go.
“Get in the station wagon,” she ordered me, but I stayed put. She spun around and said it again, louder, “Find the station wagon and stay there,” but I wasn’t going anywhere. A few other men gathered around further up the dock listening to her.
“Sherry,” my uncle said. “Everybody’s fine. The boy’s fine and you’re fine. I’ve been talking to Don. He’s sick with worry, but he’s not angry.”
“I’m not going to lose him,” she said.
He said, “We should talk about this in private.”
“I knew it,” she said. “You were pissed off at me when I married him and now you’re pissed off that I’m leaving him.”
“In private,” he said.
“You’re my brother,” she said, and something caught at the back of her throat. She seemed about to gag.
I realized then that even though I was full she had not eaten anything all day. She had probably been pacing up and down the beach waiting for me to return. The mountains and ocean must have seemed impossibly big to her then as one hour turned to two and then three. But we were together now and my uncle was at least part right. I was fine. And I believed that my father was not angry. I had never seen him angry in my life. At some point he had given up on that feeling, replaced it with something greyer and yielding. I thought of what my mother had said, that he had performed in a play I had never heard about before, and decided that if it meant nothing to him anymore then it was probably best if it meant nothing to me either. My mother was still yelling, but she wasn’t saying anything new, and my uncle stood with his palms open, head slightly turned, as if he was prepared to take this all day. Finally, she turned and began to walk back up the dock and said as she passed me, “Let’s go.”
I began to walk with her, but slowly, so that she had to slow down too to match my pace. The dock shook beneath her heavy steps.
“My brother,” she said. “My own brother.”
“Mom,” I said. “Stop. Where are we going to go?” and I grabbed her by her wrist. She pulled back her hand and we struggled for a moment. I could hear my uncle coming up behind us.
“My brother,” she said, “and my son.”
Then she headed up the dock. My uncle came up behind me. “Let her go,” he said. “She just needs to cool down.”
But when I went to look for the station wagon later it was gone and so was the tent. It was dark by then and my uncle kept insisting she’d be back. We sat on his boat and he took out two small glasses and a bottle of whiskey and said, “I don’t think Don would mind if I gave you a little bit of this while we wait. And it’s up to you to tell him.” He poured me an inch or so and I took it and it burned the back of my throat. I could hear people on the shore yelling and laughing and I thought that my mother might be one of them but that seemed an idiotic thought and I tried hard to ignore it. Better to not think about it at all and hope that she returned the next morning, her expression more composed, and although she wouldn’t be ready to apologize—I had never heard her say I’m sorry—she’d at least be ready to sit down and share breakfast with us. By then she’d be starving.
“I want to tell you something about your mother,” my uncle said, and I noticed that he was glowering at some point in the middle distance. He looked to me like a man looking into a mirror and he didn’t exactly like what he saw. At least I hoped that he wasn’t looking at me. “This is a good one,” he said, and did his best to grin. “Your mother, Sherry, she was two years older than me, see? She is two years older than me. She always will be.” He grinned a little harder and I tried to smile too. “I always looked up to her, and when she met your dad, well, I had to get my mind around that, not for the reasons you’re thinking, but just because I knew it was going to make it harder on her. But I guess I ended up looking up to him too. And when you came along, I thought, God damn, these are people who are going to have it all. I mean, they were going to have everything.”
This didn’t seem like a story at all. It didn’t have a beginning or an end. It was just the state of things, once, a long time ago, and I wanted him to stop. I wanted to hear my mother’s voice calling out down the dock, which is to say, that I wanted time to spin backward. Across the bay I could see lights strobing along the water from one of the larger boats and I wondered what they were doing out there. I could hear what I thought might be fish breaking the surface, but it could have been something else, it could have been anything really. Two miracles, my uncle had said. But both of them were just luck. One good. One bad. I grinned and wondered how well he could see me. “When I come home from school I walk in and there she is,” I said. “Sitting in a chair.”
That was important to tell him: her body reclined, her chin lifted to the door, fingers scratching at the armrest. She seemed to awaken from a stupor as I entered.
They flew me home the next day, first on a single engine into Anchorage, then south to Detroit, and finally to Colorado Springs. I called my father collect from the Anchorage airport and when he answered the phone he was breathing hard. “I thought something might have gone wrong,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Nothing like that. I’m right here.”
“Enjoy this if you can,” he said, “and if not then just sleep through it. I wish I could have come out and gotten you, but this seemed the easiest way.”
“Have you heard from Mom?” I said.
“Not yet,” he said, “but who knows? She might be on her way back here right now. We’ll both be here when you get home.”
“Sure,” I said.
“It’s hard to hear you,” he said.
Through the glass I could see them loading the bags onto my plane, the one I would be boarding soon, and I spotted the army green duffle my uncle had given me to pack a few of his oversized sweatshirts. My clothes were in the station wagon along with everything else except some change in my pocket and my binoculars and a few of the stones I had decided to keep. I thought of my mother during the first few days of the trip when I wasn’t quite sure where we were going or why. We slept next to one another in the tent and sometimes she’d click on the flashlight and say, “Do you hear that?” And I’d say, “What?” and she’d say, “Do you hear the quiet? It’s incredible. You can hear yourself think.” She’d reach out from her sleeping bag and touch me, touch my cheek or my hair, and then withdraw, and the light would go out and I would do the difficult work of wondering what might happen next.
For weeks after my trip to Alaska the phone would ring in the middle of the night and I’d hear my father speaking in a low voice from the kitchen. We lived in a small house and if I rose from my bed and stood by the door I could hear the words as clearly as if they were spoken into my ear. “It’s not your fault,” he’d say, and I’d know it was my uncle again, had known it the second the first ring of the phone jolted me awake.
I’d hear my father scrape a chair across the floor to get settled in for a good, long talk and the next morning he’d be blurry-eyed and distracted. They had found the station wagon a few hours from the Arctic Circle not far from a town called Coldfoot. The car had been parked just off the Dalton Highway, the tent set up a hundred yards off in the tundra. She’d found a pretty place to stay the night. That’s how I pictured it, with nobody around and only the noise of ravens and maybe one of the quick-running streams I had seen on our trip together, streams so fast they churned up mud and stones on their way to wherever they were going.
My father told me the news in the early morning and before he had even begun I knew what he was going to say. “Where do you think she was trying to go?” he asked me, and I said that I didn’t know, she hadn’t told me anything.
I never spoke to my uncle again. What did he feel? This was 1977 and none of this was anything to talk about—except late at night when you’ve had a little too much to drink and you do the math on the difference in time zones and then decide, what the hell. You do that again and again expecting the man on the other end to ignore you, but he never does. I could hear it all. My father said, “What else is up there once you pass that line? Is it a place you’d want to live? What could a person like her do there?”
That went on for weeks after they found my mother’s body and then, finally, it stopped, and I missed it. I would wake anyway, but there would be no sound, no voice. That was a little bit worse, I guess.
They found her in the tent. That’s what my father said. I imagine her body resting there for days. A gun accident. He insisted on this when he first told me the news and he insisted on it the next week when I asked him again. He insisted on it to my uncle during those long talks. He insisted on it years later when I called him from the road, drunk myself, and full of snarling hostility. The first time it had seemed true. After all, so many strange things had happened recently. He seemed almost hopeful as he told me the news, as if some greater disaster had been averted.
My mother said a lot of things. She sometimes said people were made of light, and I thought of that as we sat at the kitchen table in the dark of the early morning. The refrigerator ticked behind him, some defect deep inside it that had been there since I could remember. The last light had gone out in my father. Or maybe not. I was still there, after all, and sometimes when I walked to the dealership to meet him after school he’d bring me into him with a slap on the back and a laugh. He would say this much to the other men in suits and ties: that I had been on some adventures you wouldn’t believe. I had been across the country and I had seen a fish, and then he’d turn to me and say, “What kind of fish was that anyway? How much did it weigh?” An incredible actor, my mother had said. He had performed in London at the age of twenty-three. In the evenings he searched through my mother’s pots and pans, flipped through her cookbooks.
The next time I made my escape I did it alone and this time it stuck. Years later, as my mother’s voice traveled through me and I slurred out those insults over the phone, my father took them in with a perfect blend of generosity and indifference. “You know what?” he said after a while. “I’ve done amazing things with my life. Every day I wake up and go to work and I sell cars. Me. I’m the best salesman there and everybody knows it. The best in Colorado Springs. I sit there at my desk and the white people come in and they look surprised when they see me—they look petrified—and then I sell them a car.” His voice broke and he said, “Have you ever done anything like that?”
At the time I was hitchhiking to the West Coast. This was 1981 and the sight of strange man, a man like me, on the side of the road elicited all sorts of reactions, but I was making slow progress. Soon I’d be in San Diego and I planned on taking off my shoes and running hard into the surf as if to win a race.
“Every day I get up,” my father said. “Every day.”