Eight flights of stairs later, Nicky caught up with Josie, who was leaning against the wall, trying to catch her breath. Without a word Nicky passed her sister and pushed the door at the top, which groaned as it opened, letting in a gust of moist salt air. She put a hand up to fend off the glare as the sun poked out of the clouds, making the deck and railings shine.
Half of the deck was protected from the weather by a glass ceiling. On the other half, toward the back of the boat, Nicky counted eight, nine, ten tents, each set up inside squares marked out with black tape, the quadrants spaced six feet apart. “We’ve got a mandolin player,” their father said, coming up behind them and nodding toward a corner where a white-haired man wearing oil-stained jeans and a tattered yellow rain hat plucked away.
“Talk about unsafe!” Josie said, pulling off her mask. “We might as well be in the city. Riots, sickness. Everyone squished together. There’s no way we’re sleeping in a tent out here.”
Their father scanned the deck, shading his eyes against the sun. “Look! The rain has cleared. People are distancing. The deck is taped off. It’s just like the old homesteaders, each with our own plot of land. C’mon, pioneers!”
The squelch of duct tape and sounds of harmonica and mandolin filled the air as they walked toward an open spot in the corner, near a young couple lashing down a red tent. The man wore a newborn on his chest. “Shall we put down our stake here, girls?” their father said, dropping the tent onto the concrete.
The young couple nodded a greeting. Josie gestured at the horizon, where gray clouds gathered. “We’re going to wake up underwater.”
Their dad laughed. “That’s east, J. The weather’s behind us. Only sunshine from here on out. A thousand miles north, and we’re home.”
Josie lifted her eyebrows at Nicky, questioning their father’s idea that “home” existed on an island of the Alaskan panhandle. Or that the sun always shined in the rainforest.
Nicky let it pass. She didn’t much care anymore. After almost a month in the camper, with the taupe furry ceiling just above her head, she wanted to wake up in a place where she could think of her mother coming home from the hospital, turning the shiny black pickup in to the driveway, waving at them through the windshield. Telling them that she was fine, and that everything would soon return to normal again.
When she got no response from Nicky, Josie turned and said, loud enough for people around them to hear, “Mom would have hated this.”
Their father froze. Slowly, he picked up the tent from the deck and set it down on a white plastic beach chair. He zipped his black windbreaker to his Adam’s apple and squinted at the sun setting over the water.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe she would have. But she’s not here anymore.”
“That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to think of her feelings,” Josie said, her voice trembling. “And that doesn’t mean we can’t count the days until we’re allowed to make our own decisions. Five years and 323 days”—she glanced at her watch—“nine hours and thirteen minutes.”
“You can think of her feelings,” their father said. “Think of what she would say, and do—think of all of it. But right now, what’s important is that we’re here, together. On the way to an island in Alaska where your aunt, uncle, and cousin are waiting for us.”
Josie’s face remained scrunched up while her father just stood there looking over the water.
Even if it had been the wrong thing to say, Nicky knew her mother would have hated the ferry. Sleeping in a tent, making food in a cafeteria. The smell of ammonia from the seagull poop. No place to run, or private area where she could do her yoga. Her mom coughed easily, because her lungs were weak. She walked her bike up the hills around Danville that the the twins could easily climb. She was always joking that her lungs would do her in, while at the same time exercising to make them stronger.
The virus took a family joke and turned it serious. Both of Estelle Parisi Hall’s daughters had grown up accustomed to seeing her in a long white coat, chestnut hair tied up in a bun, hazel eyes unblinking as she bent over a clipboard, explaining to patients in the emergency room what she had done, or what she could do, to make them better. It still seemed like some awful dream, watching through the glass at the ICU—her mother had convinced the hospital to let her family in—seeing her mother’s tan, healthy skin pale and her hair turn wiry and gray.
Nicky hated her sister for bringing their mother up like this. How her mother had asked one of the nurses to dye her hair back to brown while she was in her bed. The job wasn’t perfect, but she looked more like herself. Nicky cringed with the memory. She just wanted a calm place where she could allow herself to recall her mother when she was healthy—her spiced scent, and the feel of her hands, warm from doing the dishes at night, rubbing the back of Nicky’s neck.
For a couple weeks after their mother’s death, Nicky was convinced Estelle would simply appear. In the shade of Uncle Max’s corncrib, or at the crest of his farm, looking out over the Susquehanna Valley. Or even with a fishing rod at the pond, standing in Uncle Max’s grove of Norway spruce, or knee-deep in the spring corn. Nicky listened for the shuffle of her mother’s espadrilles in the dirt, the low murmur of her voice as she explained how the valley had once been underwater. How the corn furrows were once home to trilobites and periwinkles, their shells now inscribed into stones that farmers tossed off to the side so their tractors wouldn’t flip.
Tent poles clattered about as Josie dumped the contents of the tent bag onto the concrete deck. Nicky stared at the mess of red fabric. This was what Josie did when she went too far. Create a problem, then solve it.
“I don’t even care where I sleep. I just want to be in one place,” Josie announced by way of truce.
“Me too,” Nicky said quickly, eager to bring things back to normal. Anything to make these last three days of their trip to Jackson Cove, Alaska, peaceful. She just wanted to get to the ferry terminal on Friday, where Aunt Mall and her cousin Clete waited, like presents to be unwrapped.
“Great,” their father said, smiling back at them. “Let’s get this tent built.”
Nicky picked up the instructions. Josie grabbed Nicky’s aviator glasses from her sweatshirt pocket and put them on, peering over her shoulder. Nicky glimpsed her own reflection in the lenses, her strawberry-blond curls blowing across her eyes as she unfolded the directions in the sunlight.
“Are you looking at yourself? Don’t be weird.” Josie said, snatching the paper from her hands. “Okay. Nick, put all the poles together, and lay them out there. Insert the tip of the pole A into C. This shouldn’t be difficult.”
The sun slipped behind a cloud. Nicky fit the poles together, watching her sister out of the corner of her eye as she read.
Since kindergarten, Josie and Nicky had been in the same class. Book reports, science fairs, sports teams—Josie breezed through all of it, approaching each task with the same dogged, methodical attitude. Lanky and purposeful, she memorized speeches, aced math tests, and never seemed to care what others thought of her. When she brought in the iguana for Show Your Pet Day, Nicky’s friend Sonya made a joke about Watermelon’s name. Josie delivered back such a sharp response that she had people laughing and scared at the same time. “What’s that goblin you brought? I thought Snickerdoodles were cookies, not dogs.”
Even with her more recent moves—dyeing her hair, becoming a vegetarian, and her infatuation with yoga—Nicky was pretty sure that as soon as her sister arrived in Jackson Cove, she’d have people copying her. Suddenly the pharmacy on the island would be out of green hair dye—if it even carried hair dye in the first place. Like her mother had always observed, Josie marched to the beat of her own drum.
Though every once in a while, she relaxed her guard, and then the two sisters would charge around with their mother through the grass fields behind Uncle Max’s farmhouse, catching fireflies in mason jars. Josie kneeling as her mother made surgical holes in the lids with her pocketknife, dropping in blades of grass as Uncle Max drank a mint julep. Nicky watching as her sister lifted the jar to eye level to peer inside, the collective glow of the fireflies lighting up Josie’s light freckles and rare smile.
The tent started to rise, the pole making a neat arch. “Yeah!” their father said, coming back to life as he watched them. He slapped his baseball cap against the railing. “Look at that. My two girls. Building us a home.”
A horn sounded from above. Nicky and Josie ran to the railing to watch the workers below retrieve the thick ropes connecting the ferry to the dock. The boat started to drift. A second horn blew, and Nicky’s rib cage rattled as they powered forward. Gulls came together and tore apart, shrieking just above their heads.
“Kiss the rest of the United States goodbye,” their father said from behind them. He squeezed Nicky’s shoulder. She could feel his excitement through his fingers. “You guys are each going to have your own bed up in the attic of this miner’s house Aunt Mall found us. It’s just up the hill from the harbor in town.”
“Your Alaska dream,” Josie muttered. “Just what I’ve always wanted.”
He went on, ignoring Josie. “You’re going to learn all about how the Russians came to the island and fought the Tlingits for the land. Land that your uncle’s family has lived on for ten thousand years. Can you imagine that? Ten thousand years.”
Nicky watched as the brick ferry terminal grew small behind them. An American flag snapped in the wind above a larger midnight blue flag showing the stars of the Big Dipper, and the North Star. She watched the rush of water beneath her, trying to imagine the world below, but seeing nothing.
“I need coffee,” their father announced, suddenly sounding tired.
He left them, slipping his mask back over his ears. Nicky dropped her head against her sister’s shoulder, which felt hard against her temple. Their mother had given them both olive skin, narrow noses, and large, wide-spaced hazel eyes. They got their dimples and their lighter, slightly reddish curls from their father. Uncle Max called them “Ellis Island Twins,” because of their mixed heritage, or just “The Mutts,” though their mother always scolded her younger brother. “Don’t tease my girls,” she’d say, pulling them close.
Nicky rose to wrap her arms around Josie and tell her how much she loved her, and to feel her heart against her own. But Josie seemed to anticipate the move, and she pulled back.
“You know we’re on our own now, right?”
Nicky blinked. The lowering sun lit up her sister’s faint freckles. Her green-brown eyes focused on Nicky, unwavering.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re twelve. No one on this island’s going to tell us what to do.”
Nicky felt her heart cool. “I guess. How is it any different than Danville?”
Josie stared back over the water. “You’re a young twelve, Nicky. Just like Dad. Only difference is he’s forty-one. Me, I’m more like Mom.”
Nicky didn’t know what to say to this. She only knew that her sister’s words hurt.
Josie shook her head and started off for the stairs. “Just like I thought. You wouldn’t understand.”
Nicky blinked back tears as her sister took off, grinding her molars as the churn of water behind them blurred. Just because Josie and her mother could both solve math problems, or put together puzzles, didn’t mean that Josie was more like their mother.
When the virus first broke out, Nicky had overheard a conversation between her parents in her father’s woodshop.
“There’s no reason for you to go to the hospital,” her father hissed. “You have an underlying condition.”
“That’s not how I work,” her mother responded. “You know that.”
“You’re putting yourself in danger, with your lungs. You’re putting us in danger.”
“I’m a medical doctor,” her mother had said. “This is what I do. It’s what supports us, and it’s how I feel useful. This was our plan, and I’m not going to let some virus stop us. I took an oath. The whole point of being an ER doctor is to be there in a crisis. This is a crisis.”
Nicky’s breath went shallow. She tried to swallow back the sadness of knowing the person she loved most on this earth had known what she was doing, living in a separate wing of the house, waving to them in the morning from out the window before climbing into her pickup to go to the hospital. An essential worker—no one more essential than her mother. She stopped using their kitchen, which meant the stove got crusty from her father’s fry grease, and the refrigerator emptied out until it was just milk and eggs, the trays sticky from where the sugar-free syrup he let them dump on their toaster waffles dripped. Had their mother really thought she was keeping them safe, when she took the risk of continuing to work in the most dangerous place in the hospital, the ER? The question felt like a stone lodged in Nicky’s throat.
Nicky just wanted this travel, this movement, to be over. No more Uno, no more breaking down the dinette table to make Josie’s bed in the RV, no more sleeping in Walmart lots, masking up and wandering the aisles for breakfast when the stores opened, before the crowds arrived. No more waking to the rumble of the engine as her father pulled onto the interstate and reached forward to reset his mileage counter for the day.
She did like the RV parks—the whoosh of the air conditioner as their father locked in the fifty-amp cord and attached the drain so they could shower and do dishes without worrying about water. Nicky would light citronella candles as their father unzipped his guitar case. Josie unrolled her mat by the firepit to do yoga while Watermelon perched on a nearby rock. Nicky would watch from her camp chair as the candle guttered, the sparks rising from the fire, pulsing for a moment before rising into the dark.
People often gathered near their campsite, careful to keep their distance, remaining just outside the circle cast by the flames as they listened to her father play his guitar. As she sat in the glow of the fire, Nicky would close her eyes, watching the music rise against the backs of her eyelids. Letting her mind wander down a path that led to a truth she knew she needed to hear, but didn’t yet have the courage to listen to.
Their father had promised that this journey would change them, lighten their spirits, and get them grounded. What he didn’t understand, Nicky thought, was that their lives had already changed. The anger over having a mother, and then, in the space of just a few weeks, not having a mother, had spun them around until they didn’t know which way was up. The trip had also changed her relationship with her sister. Their father seemed too caught up in his own sadness to see that.
“You okay, sailor?”
The older man who had been playing mandolin observed her from beneath his yellow rain hat. He had a lined face, and pale blue eyes rimmed with red.
She nodded.
The man opened his arms, and Nicky saw two golden eyes peering back at her. “This here’s Rooster, my cat. She can’t stand to be alone, which is why I brought her up from the truck.”
The cat blinked at her, then burrowed farther into the man’s coat. Nicky gave a polite smile, laughing in her head at a female cat named Rooster. She let the wind push her hair from her face, then focused on the crumpled water far below.
When she looked back again, both man and cat were gone. She couldn’t see the ferry terminal behind her, just ribbons of whitewater in their wake as the boat sailed north, picking their direction for them.