I’m trying my best to get this machine working, but it’s not doing a thing. I’m sweating like a pig even in this cold. How did we end up here? How was I stupid enough to bring them here?
It’s killing me just how much I wasn’t thinking. What did I expect, dragging the two of them to someplace so far away from anything that you can’t even find it on a map? That she’d be sweet and hardworking like my mother when she never met a rule she didn’t want to break? That he’d magically turn into a good Alaska boy just like me?
Faye never came here. She couldn’t even dream of where we’d been raised, the way I’d grown up. She just let me leave with the boy, she didn’t even ask where I was taking him. She said that even hell would be a nicer place for the boy than New York.
What was I supposed to say to a woman who knew her days were numbered? That I’d grown up a woodsman, tracking and hunting with no bigger ambitions than being like my father and Cole, not having to answer to anybody, while my brother wanted books, knowledge, and all that? At some point Thomas told me that this world was closed off and it was a prison of my own and that I didn’t even care about where its walls were: I was chicken when it came to civilization. That’s the one and only time we got in a brawl, a real one. I was younger but I had more strength than Thomas: I bashed in his face and Dad had to pull us apart. I hated my brother for acting like he was better than me: he could appreciate the first ray of sunlight in spring, how pretty the waves on the lake were, while all I cared about was showing my father just how much of a man I was.
I was manly enough that the thought of living alone with this boy in the city where he was born—his city, his mother’s city—scared me to death. When she wrote to me years later to say that she had cancer and now her only option left was “palliative care” and that she wouldn’t even make it to the end of the year, she asked me to come as quick as I could. I never thought she’d trust me with this boy who wasn’t even mine, who I hadn’t seen grow up. According to the law, he was my son because she and I had signed an acknowledgment of paternity, but according to other men I was just a deadbeat dad who’d hightailed it back to Alaska. We got married in the hospital room: that was what she wanted. She was pale like she was already dead. I was fidgeting in a suit I’d bought in a rush, it was so tight on me that she tried not to laugh when she saw me. It sounded like a death rattle. And the boy beside us, the little one who didn’t understand anything, sitting through everything—a death he couldn’t even imagine and a father who’d turned up out of nowhere.
She’d planned it all out with her lawyer. After she died, I was responsible for a boy who was too shocked to put up any fight. I also got a pretty penny from her inheritance. There’d been a lot of ugly back-and-forths over the months. Faye’s mother brought in lawyers so she could get the kid, saying she was his only relative, that his actual father had never taken care of him. I didn’t know a thing about that woman, just what Faye had told me, and I had no idea just how much a mother and her daughter could hate each other. The courts ruled that the kid was staying with me: Faye had made her wishes clear enough that there was no ignoring them.
I left New York, I sent back suitcases of books, schoolbooks, and two years’ worth of clothes, and I drove the boy, with the things his mother cared the most about packed in two cardboard boxes. Two strangers in a rental car with nothing to say, barely even looking at each other. He thought I was his father, and the whole time I was driving I kept thinking over that lie. She’d made me swear never to tell anybody the truth no matter what, not until the kid was grown up. Since I had no idea what to do with a child, I decided we should go backward to every stop on the trip that had brought me to his mother. We went to see each of the Mayers who’d helped me years before. I wanted to show him that it was possible to fill a hole, no matter how big, with human warmth, little by little, like a measuring cup, tablespoon by tablespoon.
It wasn’t much, but there wasn’t much else I could do or much better I could offer him. My parents had been dead a long time and there was nobody waiting for us now.