In those last days my mother seemed to rally on the stage of the damp mattress, rising up and pushing at the blankets and speaking about the past as if it were a thing living in the room with us, sleeping right beside her like a loving husband. “Mom,” I’d say. “You have to calm down. Drink this,” but she’d twist her head away. For her it was 1975 again and she was stuck at Thompson Pass in a difficult Alaskan November. She seemed unsure what might happen next, but I was very sure. Her matchstick legs were cold to the touch.
Her story began at the end, after hundreds and hundreds of miles already crossed. Proud union men with neat collections of boasts gathered up from work in Texas and New Mexico and Colorado but when they stared at the mountainside they were as tentative as boys at a new school. They’d look and then look away and then look again as if that might change something about the altitude, the hard slant of rock and ice. All that was needed was one volunteer but the men would swear and laugh and shake their heads and then go sit at one of the big portable heaters and open a pop-top of peaches.
She watched the mountain too, but she made a point of telling me that she watched it for different reasons. The snow blew across the ridge in unpredictable arcs, and it reminded her of play, the swirl and trickery of it all, although she knew it could carry a human body along as easily as it might the tides of snow. The wind came across the ice field so hard you’d stop whatever you were doing and brace yourself, close your eyes tight and try to focus on all the money you were making for just sitting here and listening to them brag.
“Eat,” I’d say. “It’s good.”
I’d push the cup to her mouth and she’d shake her head no, no, no. I could appreciate being stuck somewhere and I decided it made us closer even though her eyes turned inward. She’d say, “Get that away from me.”
Maybe she wanted to address them privately—the men she had shared the journey with—but it seemed important for me, her only daughter, to understand it all. “We ate like kings,” she said once. “You wouldn’t think that, would you, but we did. Not like that slop you’re trying to give me.” They ate steak and eggs in the morning, more steak at night, drank peach syrup from the can like it was soda, set their plates on the ground so the dogs could finish everything off. They listened to talk about disasters nearly averted, big paydays, idiots and greenhorns lost to bad ideas. They were tiny though, all of them, including her, but at least she knew it. For the first time she felt stronger listening to them, small, yes, but stronger, like a hard, little stone. She smiled at this turn of phrase and her face tightened into a pale skull, unadorned by anything but her bright eyes. I went to kiss her forehead, to show my courage, my devotion, but she twisted away from that too. I didn’t mind. After all, I was the ghost haunting her present, always calling her back from the real thing into this shadowy place, the sweaty bed and the boring food.
She made her fingers into a tweezer shape to show the size of the thing. Her hand shook and if she were holding anything but that imaginary rock, her imaginary self, she would have dropped it onto her blanket.
For a moment I almost believed she was handing me a real thing. I almost held out my hand to take it. “Mom?” I asked.
They all agreed that the project was insane but the extent of that insanity was the subject of much deliberation. Often, they argued about it. They were boys talking in the schoolyard, pushing each other around, testing each other with feints and jabs. She had brought three cartons of Marlboros and they would give her a couple of bucks for a cigarette. “This when the dollar meant something and smoking wasn’t a crime,” she said.
They camped for three days playing cards and finally it was boredom more than courage that pushed her into saying she would do it. She was the smallest one, just touching five feet, and she’d rappelled before, in Colorado, and she was disgusted, both with herself and with these others. Even an accident, a tumbling blur of arms and legs, would have been a relief when compared to playing another game of rummy. They only had two decks and one was missing a jack and an eight.
So that was that. They’d put her up the mountain to the pass with thirty pounds of welding equipment strapped to her. The rest would watch from below. Except that she had broken the back of their fear, or replaced it with a greater one: the possibility that she might reach the top while they stared up from below. The runty guy with a Texas slur said he would go instead, then the big one with the missing thumb. Another man and then another. As if their fear had never even existed, that it had been some kind of trick they had played on her.
“Mom,” I said, but this part of the story was very important. It needed to be understood so she repeated herself. She pointed her finger at the air as if addressing those men, now much older and helpless. She liked to joke that they were all back in Oklahoma wearing adult diapers. The fact that many of them were probably dead did not seem to cross her mind.
In 1975 she was twenty-eight years old and had forty thousand dollars in the bank from this crazy job spreading pipe across frozen wilderness. The sky dwarfed her, the land dwarfed her, but no person could make her feel weak. The land had done that, yes, and that was fine, but not a man. She loved it all. She spotted lynx playing in the snow, moved so close they stopped what they were doing to look back. She walked alone waiting for the next incredible thing. Forty years later and Alaska continued to surprise. Just the other day a moose appeared as she was checking her mail.
Of course, that had been last winter, when she could still make the walk down the road to the intersection.
At the next part she slowed her voice to a crawl.
She might not have been the first to the pass, the first to light her torch, but she was the first to say yes. They couldn’t take that away from her. “Understand that,” she said, “when you look at me now.”
Almost three thousand feet to the ground below, down black rock slick with ice, to the rest of the men, the circle of military tents, the comfort of the small fires and generators and cans of salted pineapple ham. She clung to the metal and lit her torch. It hissed and spurted and then showered fire up from the contact point. They yelled to each other above the wind, all attention on the work now. She did not think about dying or even injury. She didn’t think about the cold and she did not think about her past in the Lower 48. She seemed to be floating. She could do this forever.
“Just have one sip,” I said.
At the end of the week she spent five hundred dollars in a bar in Fairbanks, drinking and laughing, chasing that feeling, but it never visited her again, not even once, not even when she told the story to her daughter: just the outline of the experience, a thing she couldn’t quite trust. It was that night, the night in Fairbanks spreading money around, when she met my father, and I’m guessing that he was one of the first people she told about that journey across the interior, and that he was impressed, even amazed, by what she had done. Although the thought has occurred to me that he simply did not believe her, but he liked her reckless smile, he liked all that cash and the way she spread it around.
It is 2015, another bad winter, and when I get home from the club my mother is sitting in the dark watching the TV. She calls out, “Is that you, Tamara? Did you get it?” even though of course it’s me. Who else would it be?
“Sure,” I say, and I put the paper bag on the table. I open the fridge before I even have my parka off and begin eating cold cuts right from the drawer. It’s not even that I’m hungry, although I’m starving. I want her to turn her head, notice me, tell me to stop, she’ll make me something. My uniform smells of smoke. At the club it’s all flashing lights and ancient hair metal, shouted choruses, jumping bodies and guys yelling out drink orders. Here the TV is turned so low I can hardly make out the voice. If I sit down, or even stand close, I know she’ll slide into her story again so I stand in the glow of the refrigerator light rolling a piece of bologna into a tight cigar shape.
“Can you be a dear and make it for me?” my mother asks. “Not much ice.”
“Sure,” I say. “Just give me a minute.”
The kitchen table is littered with the week’s mail, including a familiar letter from Local 798 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My mother still pays her dues even though she hasn’t worked as a welder in almost two decades. I drop in the ice, pour in some milk, take the Kahlua out of the paper bag. The bottle is Hawaiian-themed, bright and festive, with the image of some kind of jungle spirit on the label, open-mouthed and staring. I still haven’t taken off my coat and my boots are making wet marks on the linoleum. My hat is still on my head. I’m still eating while I finish up her drink. This is what I’ve been doing all night anyway—serving people—so it’s not difficult to do one more. I walk it over to her and she reaches up. She doesn’t say thank you but she nods her head to acknowledge me.
The house is cold. The fire’s almost out. That’s the next thing. So I grab a strip of birch bark. “Come over here,” she says.
I can predict her words the way I can predict the plot of the detective show on the TV. Everything a rerun. Hundreds of miles of frozen ground, the arrogance of thinking you could snake a pipe through all of that, that the things you learned in Texas and New Mexico and Colorado could actually be applied to a land like this. Amazing they had succeeded but a little sad too because it meant that the land had yielded and she was partially to blame. She swirled the glass and sipped from the rim. Moving slow, trying to be careful. That meant she was already standing on the edge of drunk and ready to step over. I decided to start first, cut her off before she had a chance to begin. “Good tips tonight,” I said, “but that guy was back. You know the one who asked me on a date?”
I don’t know why I lie about this. He hasn’t been back since I said no the second time. I guess I just want to share something.
“Yeah,” she says, and then, “That’s the murderer. Right there. That one. I figured it out in the first five minutes.”
There’s another letter too. This one has been opened and put to one side beneath an apple. I know what it is without opening it. It’s from the doctor in Anchorage explaining that my mother’s cancer is in remission. But there is no celebratory mood, not even a smile, because it’s an old letter, from the first round of chemo half a year ago. Sometimes she likes to take it out and reread it while she’s waiting for me. She says, “Eight hundred miles. I don’t know if you can imagine that but try to picture it. In weather like this. Worse than this.”
And then something unexpected, something I’ve never heard before.
“The first time one of them climbed into my tent and thought he’d get frisky with me. Have I ever told you about that? I punched him right in the nuts and then he must have told the others because they were more polite after that.” She ruminates on her drink for a moment and adds, almost as a joke, “I should have done the same thing with your dad, but I was always a sucker for a sweet talker.”
That last part I’ve heard before, the stuff about him being a sweet talker, although that’s as far as she’ll go with it. And then she’s back at the ridge, in the field of ice. She says, “Wolves followed us for days. You could see their eyes in the woods at night. Red points like hot coals.” She holds up her hand flat. “Scout’s honor they were out there, a dozen of them, watching us, and you know what? I wasn’t afraid. You know how dolphins follow ships at sea? It was like that.”
I’ve never heard talk of wolves before.
“Hundreds of miles. They were just curious, I guess. That’s all. Although they were hungry too. Maybe they were curious if we’d make good eating.”
She laughs and her face becomes all skull again. Despite myself I am back there with her watching the points of red light at the forest wall. It’s like a fairy tale and she is Little Red Riding Hood and the wood cutter all rolled into one. The wolves follow her all the way into the interior and then, finally, they leave her at the edge of civilization. That’s when she steps into Fairbanks, that’s when she finally has a chance to spend some money and meet my father. I am not even a possibility then, of course. I come much later, after a series of ups and downs, angry goodbyes and sheepish hellos. But at the time I must have seemed like the latest in a string of victories.
He’s impressed when she takes out the roll of cash and he slides a couple of chairs over and she likes his curiosity, his almost effeminate leanness. She wants to show off for the other welders, show them that she’s not a dyke or a prude—that none of them were worthy—so she puts her hand on his shoulder and laughs at his jokes. That’s how I imagine it.
My mother did not celebrate her remission. It was as if she expected it. She opened one letter and then she opened the next: an overdue notice from the library. My fault.
Possibly my mother did not celebrate her remission because she knew that her illness would return, that the cancer slept in her skull. It would wake up again at the tail end of October as she stepped outside in her pajama shirt and rubber boots. I found her there when I returned from work, belly down in the mud, her head turned to one side so she could see the house twenty feet away. She must have watched it for hours, unable to rise, occasionally yelling out to see if someone might help. She was naked from the waist down. I could see that from the car, in the glow of the headlights.
For some reason I sat for a moment, perplexed by the sight of her in this condition. Then I pulled her up to my shoulder and walked her back onto the porch. When she reached the threshold, she raised her chin and said, “I don’t want to be tracking dirt in there. Get me a towel.”
She hissed this as if I were to blame.
The next time she talked about the pipeline she spoke about it from her hospital bed. The wolves again and something else: a stupid man who raised a gun and shot in their direction. Sent a bullet into the night and the red lights vanished. She heard the gunshot from her tent. Or she saw it all and couldn’t believe it. Her mind played tricks on her because of the meds but she remembered the rapture on the man’s bowl-shaped face, his pride in being the group’s protector. I sat and held her hand. “It’s all so jumbled up,” she said. She needed to get out of here, get some fresh air, get the stupid needle out of her arm.
For some reason I wanted to lie again, tell her something interesting about the club. I had the drink prices memorized by now, knew all the regulars by name, but that didn’t seem worth sharing. She settled back again, took a deep breath, and said, “Naturally I was upset.”
So she climbed from her tent and across the camp and cursed him. He still held the gun in his hand, an old Sears catalogue kit rifle, a toy gun, really, and she wanted him to point it in her direction as if she were another danger. Then she’d have an excuse for breaking his nose.
And then just the act of imagining the gun pointed in her direction granted her license to step forward and strike him hard with the flat of her hand. And then again, her fist balled now and knocking him back into some of the other men, who caught him, lifted him up, and gave him a nudge forward. Some of them were smiling.
No more shooting at them, she said. No more.
She stopped speaking at the sound of the dinner tray’s wheels. “You didn’t touch your food,” the night nurse said.
What did she overhear? I was afraid the woman might see my mother’s story as ridiculous, and that she might make me view it that way too.
My mother said, “My throat is so dry.”
“Then drink,” she said, and she pushed the plastic cup into my mother’s face. A big flat-faced woman with a tight red perm and reading glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. She seemed suspicious of something, as if we were children up to no good. When my mother twisted her head away she simply put a couple of fingers on her chin and pivoted it back to the rim.
Many women took an instinctive dislike to my mother: teachers at my school and other mothers in our neighborhood. The nurse was most likely one of those. And she had broken the story in half. Because when she finally did leave my mother began complaining about the ache in her back, the smell of the room. The wolves vanished as cleanly as when the rifle had been fired.
That night I called my father in Detroit and told him the news. Or rather, I spoke the news into his voicemail. “I thought you would like to know,” I said. “Mom’s in the hospital again. She’s going to Anchorage tomorrow for more tests.”
He called me back a minute later while I was stoking the fire. “Tamara,” he said. “What happened? I thought everything was fine.”
It was past midnight in Fairbanks, later than that in Detroit, and I could tell I had woken him from a sound sleep. “I guess they were wrong,” I said. “That happens sometimes.”
“Yeah, well,” he said. “You should sue.”
Money again. He had fallen from a ladder while painting a house a few years before and he had talked about suing then too. “I have a weird question for you,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said.
“About what?”
I fanned the flames with a strip of bark, watched them glow brighter and stronger. Soon the stove would start to click and rattle from the heat. I was planning on staying up all night feeding it and I wanted to talk to him all that time, keep him up until the sun bled around his window shade.
He said, “You know. All of that. It’s ancient history.”
I suppose he meant my mother giving up her work to stay in Alaska, her long days at home with me as a baby, his jumping from job to job and finally his big jump to the Lower 48, first to California and then Michigan. He was still doing odd jobs at sixty-nine despite a bad knee and a worse heart.
“You know what?” he said. “I always thought it would work out. Even when things were really bad. I thought we could just hunker down and get past it. Not because of me or anything. I know who I am. But your mother is an incredible woman.”
I let his voice unspool. If I listened long enough, if I let the silences stand until he filled them, then he would keep going.
“There you go,” he said. “You got me.” I could hear a crack in his voice. I thought of the men at the club, all bravado and hoots and hollers until the end of the night when the house lights turned on. The stragglers always looked so strange in the glare then, bloodshot and confused. “Dad,” I said.
“What?” he said. “What are you blaming me for now? I didn’t make her sick.”
I made a noise of agreement.
“I just had to get out of there,” he said. “You don’t understand how it was then for us in the tribe. My father was always talking about the Athabascan people this, the Athabascan people that, pride this, pride that, and meanwhile he’d shit all over my mother.” He paused to let that sink in. “He’d shit all over every single one of us. Do you know how many of your uncles committed suicide?”
“Okay,” I said, because he was right, I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t feel even a small part of it no matter how much I tried. He was talking faster. His voice sounded like something that had got away from him, escaped his control, and now he was rushing to catch up to it. I wondered if he was alone or if he had someone there to say, hey, take it easy, a person to touch his back and rub in circles after this phone call from his old life. He said, “Even when your mother met me I was thinking about it. She was on her way in and I was on the way out. It just took me a lot longer because, you know, things happened.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s ancient history.”
“That’s what you should be thinking about too. Get out of there. Do something for God’s sake. Don’t live alone in that house after she’s gone.”
“Okay,” I said. “Enough. I need to sleep.”
“Now you’re tired,” he said. “Right.”
“I have to go.”
“One more thing,” he said, but I was saying goodbye.
The week my father left my mother said, “Things are going to be a little different now.”
She walked into the local Safeway holding me by my hand. “Now just keep your mouth zipped,” she said. “This is important,” and she walked to the service desk and asked for an application and a pen. I remember her clicking the ballpoint, testing it on the back of the single sheet, and then writing her name. The girl behind the counter, a teenager, watched us the way the nurse would watch us twenty years later: that same suspicious gaze hidden behind a half-smile.
My mother handed the finished sheet back to the girl and said, “I can start tonight if you want.” There were people in town, friends of hers I could stay with while she worked. Days would be better but she’d take anything. She said to the girl, “I’d like to do what you do, but I can stock shelves. I can grab those grocery carts out there. That’s something I wouldn’t mind doing.”
A union card from Oklahoma didn’t mean much in Fairbanks with the pipeline long since finished and the economy flatlined. And I think my mother had lost the ability to envision a fresh future for herself. She took what was easily available, which meant applying at some of the newest stores in town: the Safeway, the McDonald’s with its golden sign, the Kentucky Fried Chicken. She took my hand again and led me deeper into the store and bought me a candy bar for being so good. Outside she snapped off one end and handed the rest to me and we stood there eating our lopsided portions. I remember feeling annoyed that she would take some of it for herself and strangely happy that my father wasn’t there. After all, he would have taken the lion’s share.
She had not begun talking about the past yet but years later I’d think about that moment when she spoke about her decision. She would mention feeling small and hard, like a stone, and that’s how I felt standing in front of the grocery store watching the traffic push through the spring muck, like a small river stone found at the edge of the Tanana. They were always more beautiful in the water. You’d go through the trouble of picking one up only to find it lost some of its luster in your hand.
“This is good,” she said through her chewing. “It’ll be good to be working again.” But her face looked funny to me. She seemed to be talking to herself. She took my hand again and we walked to the car.
That night my mother said, “If the phone rings don’t answer it. He’s been calling and I don’t want him to ambush you.”
Food appeared from his sisters and his mother and his brothers’ wives, desserts made from blueberries and animal fat, a soup made from the head of a moose, dried salmon I carried around with me like a lollipop. It felt like someone had died—it was that final and ceremonious. “I’m not afraid of a little charity,” my mother said.
I hear this word again—charity—at the club years later, but the meaning is very different. It’s the name of one of the girls who whips her hair around her head. It’s three in the morning on a Saturday night and the club has closed and I can hear everything: the sound of glass being swept up in the parking lot, the cars running, her tight breathing as she holds her ice water with pink manicured fingers. She tells me she’s saving up money for a boob job and that if I lost a little weight I would probably make better tips. “You have a cute face,” she says. She even touches my cheek.
How did she pick this name? She’s touched on some deep understanding of what she does. I know when I watch her—I watch her all the time, she’s one of my favorites—it feels like she’s lifted something heavy from my shoulders. I don’t think about anything but the engine of her legs, her peroxide hair, the crazed action and motion.
They follow their scripts to the letter but when they’re up there it seems like anything might happen.
“I’m not going to be here much longer,” I tell her. “This summer I’m going to go work in a cannery. Head south or something.”
“The smell will never come off,” she says. “Trust me.”
She holds out her arm, shiny as a salmon, and for a moment I think she’s inviting me to run my face along it, sniff it up to the elbow. But she must be talking about old boyfriends. Off the stage she is all arms and gangly legs, sweat shining just above her breastbone. Her face glows. She reminds me of an athlete who has just lost a very difficult match. There’s a resignation to her but she’s smiling, taking pleasure in the big glass of water, the cooling of her skin. Or maybe all I’m thinking about is my pleasure.
I might never see her again. They fly them back to the Lower 48 and then new ones come up for the weekend. Of course, she could come back in a month with different colored hair. I need to tell her something very important about myself but I can’t think of what.
“Do you want to go out somewhere?” she asks.
“No, no,” I say instantly. “I have to get home. My mother, she’s sick.”
“So is mine,” she says. “In the head.”
She points to her own head and makes a funny face, tongue out, eyes crossed, and she is suddenly a little kid. Soon she will be flying back to wherever she comes from and she won’t even remember this conversation. It’s not so late. I could go. I could bring her home. My mother is in the hospital, after all. But as I think this I’m already rising, saying goodbye. “Hey,” she says. “Are you afraid of me or what?”
I laugh like it’s not a real question. But she seems to want an answer and then that’s it, with a turn of her head she’s given up on me. She must already be thinking about Anchorage or Portland or Detroit. She’s practically up there already, in the sky, looking out at clouds. I can see it in her eyes. “You know,” I say. “I’m not who you think I am.”
She looks at me like I’m one of the guys getting too loud and lewd with her. It’s a withering look and I recede back into the chairs and tables.
“Could you get rid of this stuff?” my mother asks when I visit her again. The room is spotted with modest flower arrangements and a basket of fruit. “They think they’re being kind but it’s just cruel. It’s like they think I’m having my tonsils out.”
Her arm is marked with thumbprint-sized bruises. She has small veins and putting in a new needle is hard. She always looks close though, as the needle enters the skin, the same way she watches the plumber when he’s fixing something, the electrician working on the circuit breakers. She wants to make sure they’re doing it right.
“I want to tell you something,” I say.
But the wolves have returned. They follow further away, although they still follow. Just when everybody agrees that they’re gone—when they start talking about missing them—then they reappear, and each time there seems to be more of them. The men start naming them after ex-wives, mothers, popular TV actors, pool players. They’re scared to death and then something even stranger happens.
The temperature dips on the eighteenth of November until it hurts to breathe. Down ten, twenty, thirty degrees. Everything grows as still as a painting. You can feel it in the air—even the snow beneath your feet feels different. The welding equipment begins failing. So does the human brain. One of the men begins muttering to himself. Another says they are going to die and the wolves know it. They’ve known it all along. Everyone has reached agreement: the project is completely insane. Most of them talk about quitting. What good is all that money if you’re dead?
And yet she spots birds the size and color of sparrows marching on the ice field. They’re light enough that they leave no tracks.
At fifty below her fingers stop gripping. Metal becomes dangerous to touch. One of the generators dies an undignified death and slows their work to a crawl. At sixty below even the wolves become confused. Suddenly there is a feeling that they are allies, united against the weather. “I feel sorry for them and they feel sorry for us,” she says.
They lose the jack of diamonds and the six of spades. And then they begin making a game of flipping the cards, one by one, into the center of the fire. She gives the rest of the cigarettes away.
On the third day of record lows one of the wolves enters the camp like a dog, head down, and it moves up to the bacon grease stewing on the fire. The men do not seem to care. It could drag one of them off and the rest would just keep staring at the flames.
The wolf digs into the pan, finds a square of fat, and licks it up. It’s big as two dogs with a crest of black and shoulders wide as my mother’s shoulders. That’s what she says from her bed as I am pulling the flowers together in a bundle. “Just throw them out the window,” she says.
Her blood feels like it’s come to a standstill. She watches the wolf move past her and then out through the tents. Some of the men don’t even bother watching, but for a moment she thinks of standing up, following it out there. That seems like one way, possibly the only way, to save herself.
There must be others out there waiting for this single explorer, this brave and curious one. She even takes a step in its direction. It stops and eats something else from the frozen ground. It bites at the snow, at some kind of human made stain, urine or maybe spilled food. Tomato soup? That’s the spot. It feels like an important realization, a sign that her mind is still working. It paws the spot and lifts its head. Then it exits the stage of their campground and out toward the tree line. It seems to fade instead of trot.
“That’s how I want to go,” my mother says. “Just slip away like that.”
So she does not go to Anchorage. Her mind is made up. There are no more tests and no more discussions of possibilities. No more good luck, no more bad.
I ask the nurses if anybody else wants the flowers. I bring them from room to room, a few here, a few there. I try to smile and ask how each person is doing. I feel imperial and strange, an angel of, well, charity I suppose, making the rounds.
She returns home with me and we make a bed downstairs.
A few days later she calls to me in the night.
“Water,” she says, but when I bring it she doesn’t drink. She doesn’t even seem capable of holding the glass. Her hands are small things arranged on the sheet, limp as rags, and her eyes are round and amazed. “Did I ever tell you about Thompson Pass?” she asks.
“Of course, Mom,” I say, and I reach for the brush. Her hair is a wet mess.
“That’s where they finally got us,” she says. “The people on the ground first. They came right into camp. The few of us up on the ridge watched it all happen. And then we watched them lick at the snow. Ketchup? It was blood. They took their time. And the three of us, the volunteers looking down, what could we do but wait? We knew they’d get us too.”
“You’re fine,” I said. “You’re with me. You’re in your house in your bed.”
“And they got us too. Each and every one. We had to come down eventually and they knew that. They stood there waiting.”
I told her she should rest but her body was as rigid as a board. I climbed in next to her and began rubbing her back. “No,” she said, and she pulled away as if I was one of them. “They got me. It took a while but they did it. Oh, they got me good.”
When it was finished I finally asked my father the question I had meant to ask before. “Do you remember Mom ever talking about wolves?”
“Wolves,” he said, and he laughed. “I have to get up early in the morning, you know. This city needs people like me.”
“I know,” I said.
“Your mother talked about a lot of things,” he said. “That sounds like her. Wolves. You know what? I told her a story about wolves once. Was she telling you that one?”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Just a depressing story,” he said. “One of those depressing stories from the village. A wolf killed a kid, a little girl. It didn’t make any sense. She was twenty feet from her back door. There’s more to it but it’ll just get you down. You don’t need to hear about that kind of stuff.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s fine.”
“Why?” he asked. “What did your mother tell you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just old stories.”
“She was talking about me, wasn’t she?” he said. “All these years and she couldn’t forgive me, not even on her deathbed, and now she’s infected you with it too.”
“No, Dad,” I said. “It’s not that.”
“Because I wouldn’t come and hold her hand.”
“She didn’t need that,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe how strong she was.”
“And also because you were holding it,” he said and he laughed. “No room for me.”
I could hear the thrumming of electricity in the line, the hissing distance. How could such a thing work, really? A person thousands of miles away talking to another person, through satellite or cables. It was just another thing I didn’t understand. And anyway, I didn’t hold my mother’s hand, not ever. Something about them scared me, their size and stillness on the bed sheets, the spidery bones beneath the bluish skin. She was not the kind of person who liked to be touched. But I rubbed her feet with cream and listened to her as she moved through that other land. It took every bit of my will to let it all in without saying, wait, what, really?
I know strange things happen all the time, but even here it’s hard to believe. It’s been a couple of years since my mother’s death and my father has followed her to that undiscovered place. His sisters appeared at my door one morning. “We don’t want to trouble you,” one of them said. Caribou stew, bread wrapped in dish towels. An old man sat in an idling truck waiting for them. His father had outlived him.
I am still at the house my mother bought with oil money from long ago. Sometimes in the early morning everything is quiet and my girlfriend and I let the dogs out and I can catch a glimpse of what my mother must have seen. They are running hard with a crazed abandon through the trees and it’s because they’ve spotted something, something to chase down in the snow, and even if they don’t catch it they’ll return stupid with happiness, panting hard, and then one of us will make the coffee and the other will light the fire.
There are still places like the ones my mother described. I want to believe it’s possible, just as I would have wanted her to believe that this thing unfolding right now is possible: these rituals, as intimate as her last days, the rubbing of her feet and combing of her hair. We coax the fire out of the tent of sticks and stir the cream into the coffee and the thermometer outside the window has fallen to another ridiculous number. The cold cures us of our ordinariness even when we have our jobs, our obligations, our mundane gripes about each other. We complain and we celebrate until they become the same thing. We pace the room like it’s a cage. Because just look out there—what else can you do?