IT WAS ABSURD TO lock a house where they were squatting, but Josie did lock it, knowing that if they returned and saw any sign of new arrivals—for example the rightful occupants—they could probably make it to the Chateau without being detected. She debated whether or not to take the velvet sack with them, but because the cabin was their home now, she felt it was safer inside than with them. She hid it behind the household cleaners under the sink.
They took the trail up past the last of the mine’s buildings, a shack now with but one wall standing, stepped over the low fence and continued. The path rose up the hill for a quarter-mile before it turned and wound around another low peak, one they hadn’t been able to see from the cottage.
“This must be Franklin Hill,” Paul said, and Josie had the thrill of believing that this was possible: that they could set out in unknown territory, with a handmade map, and they would see actual landmarks that bore some topographical resemblance to the map in the cabin. They rounded the hill and passed through a huddle of pines and just like that, they could see the town below, very small, no more than a few hundred residents, most of the buildings standing by the bend in the river. The water was blue and brown, and traveled slowly but shimmered boldly in the midmorning sun. The rest of the walk, about a mile downhill, was giddy, the children galloping down the dusty path, with Follow ahead of them, then behind them, circling, everyone thinking they were doing something extraordinary.
Separating the trail from the town was a small RV park, a circle of vehicles surrounding a picnic area, white tables arranged in a half-moon. Josie stopped, looked at her kids, hoping they had the appearance of a family returning from a short hike in the hills. Ana was wearing simple sneakers and Paul was wearing his leather boots. Paul was carrying a school backpack and Ana was carrying a stick in the shape of a machine gun—she had assured Josie she would not fire it. They put Follow’s rope leash on her collar, and emerged from the trail. The RV park was empty but for an older couple sitting on folding chairs, staring into the sun from the opposite side of the lot. When they arrived at the town’s main street, they saw that it was not a regular day in town.
“Mom, is this a holiday?” Paul asked.
Josie had to think about it for a second. Was it Labor Day? No. Too late for that. But the streets had been blocked off for a parade. It was just ending, but Josie and Paul and Ana found a spot on the curbside and sat down just as a high-school band, small but loud, passed by, playing some seventies soul song Josie couldn’t place and which was suffering greatly. The band was followed by a group of elderly women steering riding lawn mowers. Then a convertible carrying JULIE ZLOZA, TREE FARMER, TEACHER, who was running for state representative. Then a dozen or so kids on bikes, dressed like Revolutionary soldiers. A group from the local ASPCA, hoping to entice onlookers into adopting six or seven parading dogs, two of them missing legs. The local middle school had a float, where all the school’s extracurricular activities seemed to be represented—twin girls in karate outfits, a tall boy in a basketball uniform, a small boy wearing a gold medal, likely some kind of academic decathlete? Walking behind the float was a lone boy in football gear. The final parade float carried a band, ten or twelve adults in close quarters, playing guitars and banjos and fiddles, all acoustic, sending an Americana sound into the air, to the general indifference of the dissipating crowd.
They followed the few hundred people in town to a park, where a sign gave notice that there would be a birthday party, starting in minutes, for Smokey the Bear.
“Who’s invited?” Ana wanted to know.
“It’s not that kind of party,” Paul said.
“Can I see the invitation?” Ana asked.
When they got to the park, at the foot of a small wooded hill, they found most of the residents of the town, some gathered around picnic tables, others lining up for the bouncy house, in the shape of a cresting wave, complete with a trio of inflated surfers.
Already there was a table set up with a large sad sheet cake saying only SMOKEY, and around the cake were various brochures about fire safety, urging celebrants to support local rangers. Ana and Paul were drawn to a fire truck, where a goateed firefighter was demonstrating the use of his ax. Next to him, a woman in khaki, with a high bouffant, was showing the assembled kids the workings of a high-pressure fire hose. Josie thought of the strange math of the firefighting business at the moment. These two were here celebrating Smokey’s birthday, all patient and nonchalant, while elsewhere in the state a platoon of inmates were trudging off into the unknown.
There was a gasp, and all heads turned. Coming down the hill behind them were a pair of women in overalls, each of them holding the hand of a giant bear in blue jeans. It was Smokey. But this Smokey had aged, had lived a sedentary life. This Smokey was walking very slowly, and he wore his pants high around his stomach. He emerged from the woods resembling an elderly man who had been in the hospital for many months, and was for the first time walking in the light of day, more or less under his own power.
Smokey stepped carefully in front of the audience and waved a small, tentative wave. He was not the same bear they’d been seeing on the ubiquitous television spots about fire safety. That Smokey was an insurmountable brown monument. That Smokey had intermingled with Josie’s thoughts while Jim was pressing himself into her, in the Chateau, a lifetime ago. This Smokey, standing in front of a birthday cake (no candles) and still being held steady by the two assistants, had no idea where he was.
Ana and Paul grew distracted by the inflated wave. Ana asked, and Josie consented, and Paul followed his sister, relinquishing the dog’s rope leash. Josie and the dog meandered across the park, then, not wanting to be in the circle of parents watching their children climb up and slide down—Josie was not ready for conversation yet—she stopped under a small pine, and heard the faint sounds of live music, starting and stopping, sounding like the band from the parade.
She looked around her, and finally saw, in a wooded corner of the park, a circle of adults playing guitars and harmonicas and was that an oboe? It was the same band, but now expanded to nine or ten. Their arms were strumming furiously, their shoulders turning, and one man, the one facing her most directly, was sitting bow-legged, flapping his legs up and down like a frog to the rhythm. When he lifted his head, though, Josie ducked behind a tree, and for a while she stayed there, feeling ridiculous, given Follow was clearly visible, her leash giving her away if anyone cared to look.
“I see you,” a voice said.
Josie said nothing, did nothing.
“Behind the tree. We all see you and your pig-dog. Come over.”
Josie wanted to run. They didn’t know her face yet. If she ran back, maybe she could return, later, not as the woman behind the tree, but as a regular person. She could bring the kids.
“Come on,” the voice said, and Josie emerged, bashful, walking over to the circle, seeing that most of the faces were looking up at her, all of them smiling with perfect openness.
“Come sit,” the first face said. This was the voice who found her, had spoken to her. He was bearded and thin, in the realm of forty, lithe and bright-eyed, wearing a plaid shirt and a baseball cap. He indicated a place near him but across from him.
“My kids are on the bouncy wave,” Josie said, nodding to the giant wave-balloon across the park. She sat between a blond woman holding some kind of harpsichord and the man with the oboe. The bearded man began to play again, and the sound was bigger than before. She was in the middle of the sound, the crashing chaos of it, the diagonal violence of the strumming, the jagged strokes of the violinist, and yet the music was joyous, rollicking. What was the song? It was folksy, but had some bossa nova in there, and when she thought she knew it, a man near her, easily seventy and with a wild tangle of grey hair and grey beard, the swirl of it like an aerial view of a hurricane, began singing.
In che mondo…
Viviamo, im-pre-ve-dibile…
Was that Italian? She did not expect Italian language to come from this man’s mouth in this remote town, in this park near the Yukon. His eyes were closed. He could sing. What did it mean? Josie assumed it was something like “In this world/that we live in/incredible.” Then he sang the same verse, or some version of it, in English, and it was not quite what she expected.
In this world.
That we live in. Unpredictable. Unpredictable.
In this world of sorrow, there is justice, there is beauty…
A beautiful song, far too beautiful for this park on this afternoon, far too beautiful for her. The sun was directly above, performing its intoxication, and Josie was immediately caught up, and nodding her head, bouncing her feet.
In che mondo…
Viviamo, im-pre-ve-dibile…
Josie glanced to her right, to see the man playing the oboe, and when he saw her watching him, his long fingers on that long black tube, he winked. Was there ever anything more phallic and less alluring than an oboe? Across the circle, a woman was playing the violin, though in this context it was probably a fiddle. Josie watched them all, their hands shooting up and down again. These were unnatural movements. Without sound the motions they made would look mad. These drastic gestures up and down, their chins and cheeks stuck to these wooden instruments, fingers touching strings in certain places at certain times.
And suddenly the song was over, and Josie felt spent. These people didn’t know what they’d just done. What they were capable of. These goddamned musicians. They never knew their power. To those with no musical talent, to Josie, what they could do sitting in a park near an inflatable wave was both miraculous and unfair. They were sitting there, adjusting strings, smiling at her, murmuring about keys and about the weather, when Josie felt like she’d just heard something absolute in its power to justify her life. Her children justified her daily breaths, her use of planetary resources, and then this—her ability to hear a song like that, in a group like this. Those were the three primary justifications for her living. Surely she was forgetting other things. But what?
“We’re just jamming,” the bearded man said.
Goddamn you, she wanted to say. It’s more than that. It’s so easy for you, so hard for the rest of us.
“You have any requests?” he asked. “I’m Cooper.”
Josie shook her head, now trying to shrink. She wanted just to listen, not to be part of this. She wanted to go back behind the tree to listen unseen.
“Anything,” she said. She grabbed at a patch of grass underneath her and pulled. Was this a crowd that would know Carousel? she wondered. Kiss Me, Kate?
“Name something. I bet we know it,” Cooper said. Now most of the faces were looking at her, actually wanting a request. Maybe they were bored with one another, these spoiled magicians.
“Okay,” Josie said, her voice sounding hoarse. There were songs Josie knew, and there were songs she knew they would know, and there were songs she knew they would want to play, so she went for the third category.
“ ‘This Land Is Your Land?’ ” she said, shrugging, though knowing they would love this. There was some nodding and grinning. She had made a good choice, and they began to get themselves into position. The harpsichord began, and the rest of the players followed. They went through the whole song, all six verses, eight choruses, and they insisted Josie sing, too. The song seemed to last twenty minutes, an hour. She glanced at the bouncy house periodically, catching sight of Ana and Paul climbing the inflated steps, sliding down, starting over.
“You play anything?” the oboe man asked her.
She told him no, she had no aptitude at all.
“Ever try to learn?” he asked.
“So many times, Jesus Christ,” Josie said, and this was true. All the way through her teens and twenties she’d tried the piano, the guitar, the saxophone. She was equally inept at all of them.
And now she saw Paul standing at the bottom of the inflatable wave, looking around him, hand shielding his eyes, a scout watching for reinforcements.
“I have to go,” Josie said, and stood. There were a few murmurs of regret, and someone, maybe Cooper, told her to come back again, that they played every Saturday and Sunday at noon, that anyone was welcome, and while he was talking, Josie realized it must be Saturday that day, thus the parade, thus everyone off work, and that tomorrow they would be playing again, that she wanted to be there.
She walked back to the bouncy wave, and for a while watched her children sliding down, jumping off, climbing back on. This was not civilized, though. There were too many kids, and they were all bigger than Paul and Ana, and bodies were everywhere, tumbling over one another on the way down, feet and elbows narrowly missing faces and necks. “Careful,” she said, but her children were not listening. They were not afraid, they were capable of fending for themselves. Here Josie was watching resilience at the genetic level. She watched them climb the inflated steps, kids above them, feet stepping on their hands, and then watched them tumble down, their heads landing on the knees and stomachs of other children, and though Paul’s and Ana’s eyes were first round with shock and awareness that they could be aggrieved by their slight injury, they chose to roll off the wave, and climb back, again and again.
“Wait here,” she said to Paul. “I’ll be right back.”
She turned around, walking back to the circle of musicians, but they were gone. She scanned the park, and finally found one of them, Cooper, walking toward the parking lot. She ran to him, making sure she could still see the wave that contained her children. He saw her approach, and a curious smile overtook his face.
“Woody Guthrie,” he said, standing still, holding his guitar case.
“This will sound strange,” she said to him, “given I don’t know anything about music, but for a while I’ve had some music in my head, and ever since I heard you guys playing, I’ve wondered if you could help me.”
“You have music in your head?”
She gave him an imploring look that said Please don’t mock.
“No, no,” he said. “I get it. You need a composer?”
Josie didn’t know if it was composing or something else she had in mind. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think if you play some chords, I would know which ones were the sounds in my head, and we could go about it that way.”
“Hm,” he said, staring at the grass, a private smile overtaking his face. Josie knew he was thinking this was some excuse to get him in bed. She needed to keep this linear, and this required a lie.
“We’re up here for a few weeks while my husband is in Japan on business,” she said, happy her children were not near, hearing this canard. “But when I saw you guys playing, I had this thought. I could compensate you guys. I couldn’t help noticing that dental care might be welcomed among some of your band. I’m a dentist.”
Cooper rubbed the stubble on his cheek. “So, lessons in exchange for dental care?” he said. He seemed to find this a perfectly rational transaction.
“Not exactly lessons,” Josie said, and explained that she wanted him to play, and she could listen, and when she heard something she liked, she might tell him to play it more, and faster or slower. She would know what she wanted to hear once she heard it. That she had no musical aptitude, but she knew music, or had heard it, and had composed countless tunes in her mind, or had thought of them at least, flashes here and there, but couldn’t articulate the music in her head, or write music on paper, or even know which instruments made which sounds.
Cooper nodded slowly, taking it all in.
“Makes sense,” he said.
“Where were you?” Paul wanted to know.
“Over there,” she said. “Just near the trees.”
For some reason she didn’t want to explain the hootenanny circle to him just yet, though she couldn’t figure out why. Paul, being all-knowing, knew she was withholding, made this clear with his searching and disappointed eyes, but he didn’t press it.
“We’re hungry,” he said.
They walked through town, looking for a grocery store, expecting to find a small market, but instead, at the end of the main road, there was an enormous store, big enough to fit everyone in town. And in front, next to the entrance, was an incomprehensible thing: a pay phone. “Come,” Josie said, gathering coins. They set up in front of the booth, Paul and Ana and Follow, watching the locals come and go into the store, restocking their barbecues and picnics. Josie’s stomach leapt. She had been living for weeks utterly removed from her Ohio life, from Carl, Florida, lawsuits, possible police pursuit.
“Ready?” she asked her children.
“For what?” Paul asked.
“Nothing,” Josie said, realizing she was asking herself, and knowing the answer was God, no. She dialed the number without thinking. A distant tinny ring came through the line.
“Hello?” Sunny’s chandelier voice.
“Sunny, it’s me,” Josie said, and looked down to Ana, whose eyes opened wide. Josie’s eyes filled.
“Oh Josie honey,” Sunny said, “where are you now? I talked to Sam. She said you left without saying goodbye.”
Josie pictured Sunny in her house, the same house, sitting in her dining room, where she liked to take phone calls as she watched hummingbirds alight on the feeder she’d installed.
Josie did a messy job of describing something of their trip since seeing Sam. It seemed years since they were in Homer.
“I always wanted to go up there,” Sunny said. “Too old now.”
“Shush,” Josie said.
“Carl called,” Sunny said, and seemed to be waiting for some expression of shock, but Josie couldn’t breathe or muster words. Given Sunny’s age, Josie wondered: Could she have given Josie’s location away?
“What’d you tell him?” Josie asked.
“Oh, I didn’t answer. I didn’t call back. Should I?”
“No, no. Please don’t. I’ll call him.”
Ana was reaching for the phone, and Josie relinquished it. “Hi,” she said. “This is Ana.” For a minute Ana held the phone close to her face, nodding occasionally. She tended to forget the listener couldn’t see her, and thought facial signals would suffice. Losing interest, she handed the phone back to Josie.
“Josie,” Sunny said. Her voice had dropped an octave. “Did you know she died?”
“Who died?”
“Evelyn Sandalwood.”
Josie did not know.
“It was just five days ago,” Sunny said. “She was undergoing some procedure related to the cancer.”
Josie said nothing.
“You didn’t know—oh god, that’s what I figured. Josie?”
“I’m fine,” she said, but heard a hoarse tremble in her voice.
“Helen took the liberty of calling your attorney. Apparently nothing’s changed. But you probably could have assumed that.”
Josie had no idea what to say. She looked around her, to the tops of her children’s heads. Ana was stroking Follow’s tail, while Paul was watching one of the parade floats, now disassembled, drive home.
“All that struggle, it meant nothing,” Sunny said. “She gets nothing from it all. She’s dead. You get nothing. It’s senseless. But Josie.”
“Yes?” Josie said.
“They did not defeat you.”
Josie knew this. “I know,” she said, then felt a surge of strength. What she was feeling was not defeat, but triumph. She was thinking: Evelyn, I flew north of your rage. She thought of Evelyn’s son-in-law, the lawyers, all their devious eyes, and she thought, I flew north of your anger. I flew away and felt none of it. I was gone. I am gone.
“You’ve had plenty of reasons to doubt,” Sunny said.
But Josie did not feel doubtful. She felt invincible. She felt like continuing. She needed nothing she did not have there with her. She had Sunny’s voice, she had Ana, she had Paul. She told Sunny that she loved her, that she would call again soon, but she wasn’t sure when that would be. She had planned to call Carl, too, but now she felt that could wait. Enough news from home for today.
“Gotta leave him outside,” the checkout woman said. She’d seen the kids and Follow all this time, and when they tried to enter with the dog, the woman was ready.
“It’s a she,” Ana told her, but the woman did not care.
They tied Follow to a pole outside. “We’ll be quick,” Paul told Follow, who was dancing around in a way that implied they would return to find that she’d peed or defecated on the sidewalk. Josie made a mental note to buy plastic bags.
“Bright,” Ana said, and the three of them spent a full minute standing in the doorway, the store seeming an acre wide, two dozen rows of food stocked seven feet high. It had only been a few weeks since they’d been in a store like this, but it seemed like years. The customers were the same people she’d seen at the parade and the park, denim and baseball hats, but now Josie felt foreign among them. Under these lights, amid all this abundance, everything so clean, the antiseptic floors and blue-white lights, she was uncomfortable.
“Can we use the real bathroom?” Paul asked.
“If you can find it,” Josie said, and Ana went with him.
Josie grabbed a cart and went about quickly loading into it everything they needed—rice, beans, cans of soup and corn. Evelyn Sandalwood was dead. She thought of the funeral, all that anger. Sunny had sounded so old. What was she now? Seventy-five. Seventy-six. Josie would need to see her soon. Oh god, she thought, thinking of Sunny older still, unable to care for herself. What would happen then? Some combination of all the young women she’d helped would come to her aid. Josie would need to see her. Josie would be there for her. Oh god, she thought. She missed Sunny desperately at that moment. She wanted to call her again, see her immediately. But then her mind reversed itself, insisting that she needed to keep moving. That she was healthier here, that she and her children were growing far beyond what she could have imagined a month ago. Did that mean they could never return to their former lives? No decisions were necessary now, she knew. Right now they would get food, and would return to the cabin, and then what?
Paul and Ana emerged from the bathroom. They filled the cart with bread, canned juice, regular milk, powdered milk, cereal, granola, vegetables, an array of meats, and brought it all to the woman who had barred Follow’s entry.
“Can we go see her?” Paul asked.
“Stay on the sidewalk,” Josie said.
Before she was finished paying, though—$188, a crime, a travesty—they were back. “There’s a lady there,” Paul said.
“Mean one,” Ana said.
Josie paid, left the bags inside and followed the kids outside. Standing over Follow, holding the dog’s leash, was a large woman with black hair streaked in blue. “This is my dog,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Josie said.
“Where’d you take her from? Do I need to call the police?” The woman was wearing a puffy vest and jeans, and had already taken out her phone. Paul’s eyes were wet. Seeing his state, Ana began to cry, the tears like tiny plastic jewels tumbling down her face.
Josie explained that Follow had been all the way over the ridge, in the mine, at least two miles from town, that the dog had been scared and desperate. “Your dog followed my children home,” she said. “We fed her and took care of her.”
“No one lives there,” the woman said, meaning the mine. “I think I need to call the sheriff.”
“We’re house-sitting,” Josie said, already feeling the need to leave this conversation, this woman, her posture aggressive, her eyes wild with indignation. Paul and Ana were standing behind Josie now, hiding. Josie knew the dog was lost—the woman was clearly the owner—and the town was small, and this woman likely knew everyone in it. “We saved this dog,” Josie said. “My kids rescued her.”
The woman leaned back and crossed her arms, nodding and smiling, as if she’d heard this hustle before. It was all Josie could do not to say You don’t deserve this dog or Go to hell but she knew they needed to get away, to evaporate. “Let’s go,” she said, and hustled her weeping children back into the store, where they gathered their bags and went out the rear exit.
“It’s okay,” Josie said as they walked to the trailhead, knowing it was not okay. Paul shuffled behind Josie and Ana, sighing, his shoulders collapsed. “She’s got a good home,” Josie said over her shoulder, knowing that was not true, either. In an effort to cheer up her brother, Ana was walking with her hands down her pants.
“Hands in my pants!” she roared, and Paul rolled his eyes.
They were almost at the trailhead when Josie realized they couldn’t go there, either. Not in the light of day. The chances were remote, but the woman who owned Follow might have reported that a woman with two children had found her dog there, might be squatting out there, were likely to steal other animals and care for them.
“Hold on,” she said, and looked around her. There was the RV park ahead, a woman working on a satellite dish installed on her roof. There was a seaplane flying low over a row of pines. And beyond the trees, there was the Yukon. “Let’s go there. Picnic.”
They settled at the bend of the river, Ana finding a sharp stick and wetting its tip in the water. She brought the point to her nose.
“Smells clean,” she said.
They ate sullenly and watched an unmanned dinghy pass, taken downstream by the current. Josie thought of Evelyn, wanting to conjure some sadness for her death, but felt only the waste of it all, the misplaced rage, the inevitability of victims begetting victims.
“Getting darker,” Paul said, pointing to the leaking light.
“Let’s hustle,” Josie said. She was carrying the groceries in six plastic bags, three dangling from each hand. Paul and Ana had pleaded to carry their share, but she knew they would relinquish them in minutes, so she balanced the weight and they walked swiftly.
“Too dark,” Ana said.
By the time they arrived, night had come on, and the RVs in the park were bathed in moonlight. It was a quarter-moon, tinged with orange and pink, and not bright enough to guide them.
“Sorry,” Josie said.
There was one store open nearby, a gas station they’d passed that looked to have a convenience store attached, so she brought the kids along the frontage road and under the bright lights and into the store. She had eight dollars left with her, and held out hope that the store would have some smaller model of light, the kind of thing attached to a keychain.
They had no such thing. She sent Paul all over the store to no avail. They had one flashlight for sale, a forty-five-dollar machine that seemed capable of signaling planes and ships.
“You have just a regular flashlight?” she asked the woman behind the counter.
“Sorry,” she said. “We have candles, though. You lose power?”
Apparently there had been some power outages related to the wildfires, and the store had had to stock up on candles. They’d sold out three times in the last month, the clerk explained. And so Josie left the gas station with a twelve-pack of candles, each with a tin rim to catch the wax, and a pack of matches. With these they would make their way through the forest and over the ridge and back to their cabin.
“We get our own?” Paul asked.
Josie was sure that the only way she could manage to get her children aboard for this task, walking through a black forest at nine o’clock with only candles to guide their way, would be to allow each of them to hold their own.
“Yes,” she said, as if it had been the plan all along. Then, realizing that with her hands full of grocery bags she wouldn’t be able to hold a candle at all, she delivered the coup de grace. “You two will have to light our path. I can’t do it.”
It sounded more dramatic than she’d intended, but they took the bait. They made their way down the road and at the RV park they ducked across the frontage road and into the darkness. The candles gave them a circle of light that allowed them to see one another, their shirts ghostly white. But the short reach of the candlelight meant that all around them was still darker. All along the walk, trees arrived in front of Josie’s view with alarming suddenness. She could only keep faith that they were on the right path, that the path did not split or detour, and that because it was inclining slightly all the way, they were making their way up the hillside and over the ridge.
“Smell’s getting worse,” Paul said. He was right. The wildfire’s acrid air seemed to be stronger, denser.
Tomorrow she would return to work with Cooper. She smiled to herself, disbelieving that she’d made a proposal like that to a stranger. He had agreed, and now her head was full of ideas, elaborations and reversals. The show about Grenada? Would that be the first thing to explore? Or Disappointed: The Musical? Or something encompassing all of Alaska. Alaska! No, without the exclamation point, because this was not a demonstrative place, no, it was a place of tension, of uncertainty, a state on fire. Alaska with a colon. Alaska: Yes. The show would start with Stan. Stan and his wife, awash in white carpet, closing the door on Josie and her children, the Chateau in motion. Josie thought briefly of Starlight Express, the actors on roller skates—that kind of debacle could be avoided. There would be Norwegians, and naked showering nymphs, magicians from Luxembourg. The zip code guy? He’d tip the show, obliterate all else, as he did on the cruise ship. You could get Jim in there, Grenada. You’d have to have Kyle and Angie. Guns everywhere.
“Mom?” Paul asked. “Has anyone ever done this before?”
Paul asked this question every so often, when they were in new situations, when something seemed wrong. He’d asked it once when he peed in his pants at school. Has anyone ever done that before? he wanted to know. There was comfort in precedent. Happens every day, Josie had said then. Now she said, “Walk in the dark? Every night, Paul, someone is walking in the dark.”
For a moment it seemed Josie’s wording had made it worse, conjuring an army of stealthy night strollers, but Paul seemed satisfied, and Josie returned to her show. Could it be that there would be periodic shots in the theater? The actors would sing, the orchestra would play, but every few minutes a rifle shot, the pop of a handgun, would break open the air, and there would be little to no attention paid to it. Who was shot? Was it real? The play would go on. Josie thought she would try that the next day with Cooper’s group—some kind of arrhythmic interruption that might mean death but would not stop the music. The crazed music—for it had to sound like organized lunacy—would always go on, loud and ceaseless.
“Champagne on my shoulders!” Ana yelled.
Then: “Stab stab stab!”
And: “PBS kids dot com!”
Josie laughed, and Paul laughed, and they both knew that by her getting a laugh, Ana would not stop until forced to. Encouraged, she sang louder. “Champagne! On my shoulders!” Where could she have heard these things? But then again, Ana was tuned to a different galactic frequency, and there was no telling what signals she was picking up. Josie had no choice but to allow Ana’s babbling nonsense; she needed both kids to be happily distracted from the fact that they were walking without the dog they had in the morning, over a mountain in the dark holding disintegrating candles.
“Mine’s almost done,” Paul said, and they stopped so Josie could transfer the flames from the gnarled and spent candles to the pristine new ones, and the kids seemed similarly re-energized with the new candles. Josie chose not to think about the possibility that they would be attacked by bears, wolves or coyotes. She had seen signs warning of the presence of all of these animals nearby, but she guessed, without any evidence to support her thesis, that the candles would ward them off.
So there would be periodic gunshots. Mortar fire. Thunder but no rain. There would be horns, and strings, but the woodwinds would dominate. The clarinets—and flutes! They sound innocent but always signal deviance. They would underline the madness. The air would be full of smoke. At times the audience would barely be able to see the action, and everyone, especially the Alaskans, would wonder why Alaska, the last frontier, pure and undiminished, ragged and filthy, endless, independent but then wholly dependent, which had sent billions of gallons of oil through a pipeline to be burned and sent into the atmosphere, was now on fire. And so there would be tragedy, too.
“There it is!” Paul yelled. On the opposite side of the ridge, the rusted roof of the mine was visible, just a slant of black against the sky, and Josie had the strange sensation of being home. The abandoned mining town was now their home. The path was illuminated by the partial moon and the kids could find their way.
“Wait,” Josie said, and scanned the area for cars. She half-expected a police car to be waiting. But there was no one. They were still alone, and her heart swelled.
“Can we run?” Paul asked.
Ana looked to him, as if unsure if she could support this suggestion. Then she nodded vigorously, kicking herself for doubting any radical act, especially one involving running.
“Just to the cabin,” Josie said, and enjoyed saying that. The kids ran ahead, down a dark path, toward the amber light.
Could you have animals in the show? she wondered. Wolves and bears. A bighorn sheep. An eagle dropping it a thousand feet to a silent death. Cruel logical murder in the wild. More gunshots. Someone would die but no one would care. The fires would burn. That could be part of the soundtrack—the slow hushing crackle of the fires. Sirens. She couldn’t help picturing the curtain call: cops, prisoners, firefighters. Evaders and crusaders. The fires, on stage, would rage behind them, pushing them to the edge. Finally the actors would leap into the audience, flee for the doors. More gunshots, real or unreal, no one would know, as everyone left the theater and ran into the night. When they left the theater, they’d forget where they’d come from.
Josie unlocked the front door, let the kids in and turned the light switch on. Nothing happened. She tried again, nothing. They entered the cabin by candlelight, trying anything electric, and found that something had happened: the power was out. She opened the fridge, feeling its fleeting cold, threw their groceries in, and closed it, wondering what among the things they’d just bought would go bad by morning.
“Is this okay?” Ana asked.
Josie turned to find her face, orange in the candlelight, her eyes shining. What Ana meant was: Should the lights really be on? Did someone turn off the lights because we shouldn’t be here? Should we be in Alaska, in an abandoned mine, alone, in this home that isn’t ours? What does it mean that it’s dark here, and we have only candles, and we just crossed a mountain to get here, and were not harmed by beast or man? How is this all allowed?
“It’s fine,” Josie said.
They lit more candles and brushed their teeth, and Josie read them C. S. Lewis from a copy they found in a bathroom drawer, and in the flickering candlelight, while reading Prince Caspian, Josie felt that they were living a life that had kinship with the heroes of these books. They had only walked two miles through the dark, through a forest and over a ridge to their home in a twice-abandoned mining town, but she felt there was not so great a difference between what she and her children were capable of and what these other protagonists had done. Courage was the beginning, being unafraid, moving ahead, through small hardships, not turning back. Courage was simply a form of moving forward.