• Friday, September 2 •
Home of Nelda Qivits, Chukchi
Active and Grace walked through the kunnichuk of Nelda Qivits’s cabin next to the Chukchi hospital and Grace knocked at the inner door. They stepped back a little to wait.
Being in Nelda’s kunnichuk took Active back to his last visit with the tribal healer a few years earlier.
He was having the bullet dream, night after night. A shadowed figure would come at him with a butcher knife. He’d try to shoot, but his gun wouldn’t fire. It would jerk uselessly in his hand until he woke up panting, and he would be done with sleep for that night.
The thing was, Nelda had rarely asked a question about the bullet dream or offered advice. She had never reacted to anything he said about the dream, but still her magic had worked. She would chatter away like any old aana, swapping idle gossip till he found himself pouring out what was on his mind. Afterward, he would feel better and the dream wouldn’t come for a while. He had never figured out what the dream was about, but eventually it didn’t come at all, and somehow that was because of Nelda.
They heard footsteps behind the door, then fingers at the latch, and the door creaked open. Nelda’s thick cataract glasses flashed at them like headlights as she leaned her thin old frame on a thick spruce walking stick. “You come,” she said, and motioned them in with an impatient wave that seemed to say they were the ones who had kept her waiting.
The cabin was hot inside, as was customary among the Inupiat, particularly if the Inupiaq in question was old. They followed as she hobbled into the tiny kitchen, the hem of her green atiqluk swinging. Nelda was past eighty now, Active guessed. Her short white hair was wispier and her back a little more bowed than he remembered. Kay-Chuck’s Gospel Hour blared from a clock radio on the counter. Its time display blinked “12:00” in red numerals.
“I’m making sour-dock tea,” Nelda announced as they took seats at her kitchen table. On the stove, water in a battered saucepan burbled as she threw in a handful of the root reputed among the aanas to cure almost everything.
“Too much worry, Gracie. I see it in your face.” The old woman turned off Gospel Hour in the middle of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and pulled three mugs from a doorless cabinet. “So, good thing you come. A winter baby is something to look forward to, like when them little uqpiks come up through the snow.”
“It’s not the baby that worries me.” Grace shot Active a sideways glance. “It’s Nita.”
“And the ghost of your father.”
“You know?” Grace asked.
“You tell me a little, Nathan tell me a little. There’s talk and stories on Kay-Chuck radio from that time. Some things I put together.”
Grace sat with her head bowed in silence. The pot on the stove bubbled and hissed. Grace’s hair hid her face so that Active couldn’t see her eyes. But her shoulders shook a little. He put his hand on hers.
Nelda poured tea, set the mugs on the table, and settled into a chair.
Active sipped the tea and for a moment the bitter taste put him back in his bullet-dream days. He took another sip and was in the present again.
Nelda slid a cup toward Grace. “I never think you’re bad. You come back here, you save Nita from that man, you adopt her.”
Grace raised her head and wrapped her palms around the steaming mug. “But I never told her who her mother is.”
“Or her father.”
“Of course not.”
“Hm.” The old woman leaned on her cane and rocked gently back and forth.
“She was just a little girl,” Grace said. “She couldn’t have handled anything like that.”
“Ah, things are simple to little children, they see fish in a clear stream, no muddle-up water from adult messes.”
Grace sipped at the bitter tea.
“But she’s not a child anymore,” Grace said. “She’s thirteen, going on twenty sometimes. She hears things at school and she’s asking questions.”
“And you wish she never do that.” Nelda nodded to herself.
“I don’t have answers.” She looked down at her belly, which still didn’t show except when she was naked, and then only a little. “And I don’t think I can face these questions again with another child someday. Maybe I shouldn’t have it.”
Nelda drank her tea and set the cup down. “I think you have answers like Nita want, ah?”
Grace looked exasperated, presumably because Nelda seemed determined to ignore the main question on her mind.
Active put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed a little.
Grace sighed in apparent resignation. “But how much should she know? All of it? I mean, the pain it will cause her. And when do we tell her? And how?”
“She knows some already, ah?”
“I’ve . . .” Grace’s fingers tightened around Active’s. “We’ve told her that the person she thinks was her Aunt Ida shot and killed the man she thinks was her Uncle Jason. But we haven’t told her why.”
Nelda sipped tea, shut her eyes, rocked on the cane again. Her chin fell to her chest. Active thought she might have dozed off.
Then she spoke, her eyes still closed. “A baby starts inside, so tiny, it needs its mother’s protection, but one day it just come out.” She smiled. Grace strained forward. “If it know what’s out here, maybe it’ll stay in there, ah? But nothing can hold it back when that time come around.”
Active didn’t know if Nelda had switched to the pregnancy or if she was speaking in metaphors about everything else. But Grace seemed to catch on right away.
“You’re right, she’ll want the whole story at some point, or at least she’ll think she does.” Grace looked at Active. “So when she asks, we decide how much she can understand at that moment, and then we answer? We take our cue from her instead of torturing ourselves about it?”
Nelda didn’t speak, but a smile creased the weathered brown skin at the corners of her dark eyes. She labored to her feet and set her empty mug in the sink. “Finished?”
“Uh, not yet.” Grace looked at Active’s half-full cup, took a sip from her own, and grimaced at the taste.
“I still don’t know what to do about—” She looked at her stomach again, and this time she patted it.
“A little at a time is best way,” Nelda said with a soft smile. “Until it’s all done.”
She leaned on her cane again and looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to sit or stand. After a moment, she took something from a basket on the sinkboard and twisted it in a cloth.
“This sour-dock root, ah? You take it with you, keep you calm, keep the baby safe.” The old lady fixed her eyes on Grace.
Grace broke her gaze, but closed her fingers around the little bundle. “Thank you, Nelda.”
“Always two people make a baby.” Nelda let the words hang in the steamy air. “Better if two people carry it, ah?”
“I think I’m pretty much the one—”
“Nathan knows what I mean.”
Grace put her hand over his, which shook a little as he held the cup. “Nathan?”
What was this rush of emotion—anger? pain?—welling up inside him? The sour-dock tea was pulling up something as bitter as the root itself.
“You say you’re ready to have the baby,” he said in a near shout. “We told Nita, we told Martha. Then you say you don’t know. Then you say you think you can’t go through with it. I feel like a fish flopping on a line.”
“I’m sorry, baby. I’m trying, but it’s so hard.”
Active lifted Grace from her chair and pulled her onto his lap. As he cradled her head against his shoulder, he heard Nelda walk out of the kitchen, her stick tapping the floor. A draft blew in as she opened the front door.
“You two always stay inside too much,” she called. “Good afternoon for a walk, talk a little maybe.”
Active tightened his arm around Grace’s shoulders and pulled her close in unspoken apology for the outburst at Nelda’s as they sat on a blanket draped over the hood of the Tahoe. They gazed in silence out over Chukchi and the bay beyond from their perch on Cemetery Hill, east of town on the back side of the lagoon. Then she put her arm through his and squeezed, which he took to mean, “Apology accepted.”
“Much better than a walk, ah?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I haven’t been out here in a long time, not since Jeanie’s birthday last year.”
Active chided himself. Grace’s older sister, along with their parents, were buried in the cemetery behind them. Jeanie had been one of Jason Palmer’s victims, too. Her suicide had set off Grace’s perilous journey from Chukchi to near self-destruction on Four Street to the beautiful fox-eyed survivor now at his side. He kissed her temple.
“Sorry, I didn’t think. And I’m sorry for losing it back there. Like I said before, it’s your call. I don’t want to add to the pressure.”
She squeezed his arm again. “Thank you for understanding.”
The midafternoon sun glinted off the distant bay where water and sky got lost in each other. Below them, a pickup crawled across the bridge over the lagoon and up the road that looped south behind them along the bluff.
Grace snuggled her cheek into Active’s neck. He lifted her chin for a kiss.
“You taste nice,” she said.
He found himself stirring. “That’s just the appetizer.”
“There’s a main course?”
He slid his hand under her blouse, across the soft swell of belly and the warm curve of breast, up to the firm berry of her nipple. “Or dessert.”
“In broad daylight? I don’t know.”
“It’s no honeymoon suite, but this thing does have a pretty big back seat.” Out of the corner of his eye, Active saw the pickup, an old blue Ford, approaching along the Loop Road.
“Huh,” she said. She turned and contemplated the space behind them.
The blue Ford backfired twice from out on the road. They both jumped. It drew closer and they heard country music—something about friends in low places—blaring from an open window as the truck turned onto the little side road to the cemetery. They separated and returned waves from the truck’s driver and his two passengers as they went past. The truck parked thirty yards or so down the bluff.
“So . . . ?” Active said as they sat side by side, decorous now except where their thighs touched.
“Too much company, maybe?” She nodded in the direction of the pickup.
Active felt himself wilt and sighed in resignation. Grace slid her arm under his bicep and pressed her cheek to his shoulder in what he took to be sympathy, or perhaps apology.
“When’s the last time you were out here?” she asked.
He thought about it for a moment. “Last spring, I think. It was when Ernie Miller got into a knockdown-drag-out with his neighbor. When he heard we were on our way, he stole the neighbor’s truck and made a run for it.”
“Seriously?”
Active nodded. “A true criminal mastermind. He ran out of gas right there on the Lagoon Bridge, at which point he threw in the towel and waited for us.”
“Well, that’s pure Chukchi.” She smiled and gazed out over the wind-ruffled blue of the lagoon and the shining gray sea beyond.
“You know what sticks in my mind about that case? The truck had a busted headlight, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that song they play on Kay-Chuck. ‘One-Eyed Ford’?”
“Don’t remind me. If I hear it one more time—”
“Seriously.”
They sat in silence again. The blue Ford cranked up, turned around, and pulled past them on its way out of the cemetery. The occupants waved again and they waved back.
His fingers edged onto her thigh, then stroked the taut muscle under her jeans.
She looked at her watch. “Nita will be home from school in twenty minutes. I don’t like leaving her on her own these days.”
“Twenty minutes?”
“Yep.”
He tilted his head toward the Tahoe’s interior and raised his eyebrows. She grinned, nodded, and slid off the hood.