“This feels like one big bad dream,” Josie mumbled as their father bent to peel duct tape off the deck with the blade of his knife. Nicky rolled up their tent. “Doesn’t where we’re staying have a fireplace or something? Don’t all houses in Alaska have fireplaces?”
Their father slung his duffel over his shoulder and lifted his guitar. Red and pewter whiskers coated his cheeks. Nicky thought he looked tired.
“Not ours. It’s an old miner’s apartment, with views of the ocean and forest.”
“Do we have to take the stairs again?” Josie moaned.
“All right. I’m sold on your elevator.”
She perked up. “Really? You have no logic. You’re okay with taking the elevator down, but not up,” Josie observed.
He didn’t even answer, just marched forward.
When the doors opened onto the car deck, Josie ran over to their camper, unlocked the door, and lifted Watermelon from her cage, nuzzling the iguana’s scales with the tip of her nose. Nicky started transferring her dirty clothes from her backpack to her duffel.
“Folks, welcome to Jackson Cove, King Salmon Capital of the World!” the captain announced. “All vehicles disembarking, please do so now.”
Engines on the car deck fired up. Their father dropped into the front seat and turned the key. “This is us, girls! It’s go time.”
Josie set Watermelon back on her rock, and Nicky tossed the rest of her clothes onto her bunk. Their father snapped his magnetic glasses together over the bridge of his nose. A masked attendant gave them an urgent wave, pointing toward the daylight at the end of the boat. “Hurry!” the man shouted.
They weaved among the other RVs, taking the last place in line. “Whew,” their dad said. “We almost ended up in Fairbanks.”
“Oh my god,” Josie said. “Even I know Fairbanks is landlocked. I need coffee. Hey. What’s that smell?”
Josie peered back into the camper, where Nicky perched on the edge of her seat in the dinette, waiting for a glimpse of their new home. She was also thinking about ghost trees and nurse logs, and what it might be like to walk through an old forest searching for just things, when she also smelled something. Something burning.
“The heat lamp!” Josie shouted, turning around in her seat. “Nicky, get the T-shirt off Watermelon’s bulb!”
Nicky looked down. Clothes were strewn all over, mixed in with the food wrappers and damp towels. Then she saw smoke rising from Watermelon’s cage. A flame bloomed, blue at the root. Josie moved past her, pulling the burning T-shirt off the lamp. With her flip-flops she stamped out the flame.
“What is wrong with you?” she shouted, her eyes flashing at Nicky. “Would you quit daydreaming for once and join us in the real world?”
“Josie, relax,” their father said as they bounced over the steel ramp connecting the ferry to the dock. “The iguana’s fine. We’re fine. Eyes forward. Who can find Aunt Mall and Clete?”
“She’s your sister,” Josie grumbled, returning to the front seat, cracking a window to allow smoke to escape. “I just wish mine would get her head out of la-la land before something bad happens.”
“Who knows. Maybe I won’t recognize her. It’s been five years since she came back East, when Grandpa died,” he said. “Look for a woman with my color hair, standing with a boy your age.”
A moist, lemony sea-salt balm seeped into the vehicle, which clunked onto asphalt and started up a short hill to the terminal. A soft drizzle coated the glass. Their father rolled down the window, letting in another smell that made Nicky’s nose crinkle—a dank, rotten stench, much worse than burning cotton. Not so different from the smell of whale breath.
“C’mon, girl. You can do it!” their father chanted as he pounded the steering wheel. The engine revved up the incline.
In the front seat Josie cooed, petting Watermelon’s head. “You okay, little one?”
As they crested the hill Nicky saw a small crowd in front of the ferry terminal. People wore raincoats, their faces shadowed beneath hoods and baseball caps dark with rain.
“There they are!” their dad shouted, pointing to a tall woman hopping up and down, waving her hands. A boy in jeans and a camouflage coat stood in front of her, tracking their progress.
Aunt Mall pointed to a spot in the lot beside a rusty forest-green pickup truck. The camper stopped with a jolt as their father shoved the gearshift into park.
After hearing her mother talk about “Wild Aunt Mall,” Nicky expected a woman dressed in wolf skins with dreadlocks. With a rifle lashed to her back, a collection of foxtails and bear claws strung over her chest.
Instead, Nicky saw that her aunt wore cherry-red lipstick. Her painted fingernails flashed at the tips of her impossibly long, willowy arms. The tall boy beside her wore a brass belt buckle that seemed to hold his gangly body together. Aside from his long frame, he seemed unrelated to his mother, with his red and purple flannel shirt beneath his camouflage coat, and caramel skin. His thick dark hair was pulled into a tight bun. As Nicky looked closer, she saw that he held in his hands a clutch of pink flowers. She recognized her own lean features in the boy, her elongated jawbone and feline eyes, and a certain watchfulness that she instantly understood.
Aunt Mallory pulled open the side door, fluttering her hands.
“Welcome, family! I know your daddy wants you to be cautious, but I’m not hearing another word about social distancing. Y’all get out of this bus this moment and give your old Aunt Mall a hug.”
“Mallory, let us at least get a test since being on the boat. I don’t think it’s safe.”
Their aunt shushed their father with a wave of her hand. “I know you all been holed up in this tin can, and we’ve got not one active case. My nieces need a hug. I can see it in their eyes. Your daddy also needs to a break from this bus—he looks like someone wrung him out to dry. Don’t you have a stove in this spaceship? You all need some meat on your bones, you twins need to stand together to even make a shadow.”
Josie barely had time to slip Watermelon back into her cage before Aunt Mall snatched her from the front seat into a bear hug. Josie went limp in Aunt Mall’s great arms. Her aunt’s hair was pumpkin-orange, a few shades brighter than her father’s, which Nicky saw now had turned coppery as silver began to work through it.
“Must be five, six years since the last time I saw you two,” trilled Aunt Mall. “Your mother had you dressed in some lovely striped twin outfits—in different colors, though. Now what happened here?” Aunt Mall asked, reaching for Josie’s hair. “Someone went and dunked you in a vat of green paint. Jackson Cove has a single hairdresser. Even if she’s not keeping regular hours we’ll get you set up in the chair above her garage. Uncle Cliff’s got work to take care of at the mill, with the cut coming up, otherwise he’d be out here to greet y’all. We’ll do a salmon dinner tomorrow night out on the island. It’ll smell much better than these dying fish you’re scenting now. I’m looking for someone else hiding back there in that tin can. Is that little Nicole? Now don’t I remember you from when.”
Nicky stepped into the light. She saw how the boy hovered behind his mother, inspecting the asphalt. As she came down the steps of the camper he glanced up at her.
Aunt Mall set Josie down and opened her arms to Nicky, who allowed her aunt to gather her up as she came down the steps. At first she resisted the woman’s strength. Then the arms squeezed, and she smelled lavender and something else, bark, maybe, woody and strong. After a moment she let her cheek rest against the woman’s skin, then relaxed completely, gripping her aunt by her large shoulder blades, which felt like wings, and clutching her.
“Ah, pet. You poor, sweet child. There it is. You just rest. You all have been through so much, and to top it all off, this harebrained trip of your daddy’s. I kept telling him to just wrap you in Tyvek and set you on a plane.” Her heavy hand raked through Nicky’s curls. “Too much for any two girls, really.” Nicky could feel her aunt’s head shift to look at her father.
Nicky detached from her aunt and met her cousin’s eyes. He stared back at her. His eyes were set so deep into his head she couldn’t make out his pupils.
“Clete, you planning on giving that fireweed we picked any time soon?” Aunt Mall clucked.
Clete held out the flowers to Nicky. Josie took them, sniffing the petals.
“These smell like weeds,” Josie said, laughing. “Did you just pick them from the side of the road? Like, the moment before we got here?”
Aunt Mall laughed too. “Someone’s got some sass in her. They say here in Jackson Cove that when the fireweed loses the last of its purple petals, it means summer’s over. How many weeks do we have left, son?”
Clete stepped back, seemingly relieved to be rid of his burden. His hands returned to the pockets of his camouflage coat, and he looked down at his brown boots, shiny with the rain.
A rusty old truck growled past. Aunt Mall waved. Nicky recognized Sven in the driver’s seat, with Rooster perched on his shoulder. The cat pivoted its head to watch her.
“Grumpy Sven,” Aunt Mall said. “The black sheep of the Ruger family. And his trusty cat, Rooster. He’s got a house right next to your upstairs apartment.”
“Is that right?” their father said. “He can play a mandolin, I’ll tell you that.”
“It’s his rich brother, Lars, who runs the Norseman Mill, where Cliff works,” Aunt Mall said. “He’s the one who wants to buy up the valley behind town for logging.”
“Sounds like that’s what everyone’s talking about,” their father said as he crouched in front of Clete. “Hey, guy. You don’t remember me, do you? Your parents didn’t bring you along when they came back East.”
Aunt Mall watched her son. “Clete, you need to stop looking like the cheese fell off your cracker, and start talking like a person. Doesn’t matter if you don’t recall your uncle, give him a hug. That’s my younger brother.”
“Leave the boy alone, Mall,” their father said, standing again, but not taking his eyes off Clete. “Those fish jumping out there, you gonna help me catch a couple?”
They all looked over the water, just as two fish almost collided in the air.
“We don’t catch humpies,” Clete mumbled.
“I’ll catch just about any salmon I can get,” their father said, smiling. “You’re going to have to teach me a thing or two about fishing. We’re all used to bass and catfish in Uncle Max’s pond. I was always the last to get a bite.”
It was true, Nicky thought. Their mother usually had three or four fish in the grass before their father’s bobber even twitched. Their mother liked to tease him, giving him a push and saying how lucky he was to have caught her.
“At the moment, Clete’s lower ’an a gopher hole because of that Sky River Valley,” Aunt Mall explained. “His daddy of course is trying to keep food on our table. Speaking of which, when you come out to the island tomorrow night we’ll transform you into real Alaska girls, feed you some salmon and give you some boots. In the meantime, you just forget about this dusty old RV. Forget it like a bad dream. You girls have a real home now. Clete’s going to paint you the attic with some blue we’ve got lying around, and put in some insulation for the winter. I have to say, at this moment the three of you don’t look much better than this vehicle, like a chewed piece of twine. Tell me your daddy didn’t put you up in that tent on the ferry.”
“He did!” Josie yelled, splaying out her hands at the injustice.
“We were just being safe,” their father murmured. “If I had my way, we would have stayed in the RV with the iguana.”
“Her name is Watermelon. Can we go, Aunt Mall?” Josie asked. “I want to see our new home.”
“Of course, darlin’. You got the ocean as a front yard, and miles of forest as your back. You’ll be getting a nice deep sleep tonight. Clete, you ride with Nicky here in the pickup. Danny, you follow along, make sure you don’t turn that bus of yours into a submarine by driving off the road.”
“Why does he keep staring at my sister and me like we just stepped out of another universe?” Josie asked, looking at Clete. “Just because our mother died of the virus doesn’t mean we’re sick too, okay?”
Aunt Mall’s eyes went wide. “Oh, sweetie. Clete doesn’t think that.”
“Josie, let him be,” her father said, taking her shoulder. “Go on, Nicky. You and Clete hop in there.”
The hinges on the front door of Aunt Mall’s truck screeched. Nicky pulled herself into the cab by the handle.
“There you go. This old rig’s nothing but scrap metal, but we only got ten miles of road on the island, so it does us just fine. It does have a blower hotter than a burning stump, I’ll say that for it. They say the sun might come out tomorrow, but it could be a month. Nicky, those seat belts don’t work so well unless you tie them to the clipper, but I wouldn’t worry. No one does above thirty around here, for fear of sailing off the road into the ocean. And if we did go for a swim, you wouldn’t want to be tied in anyway.”
Nicky shifted across the worn bench seat. Clete slipped in beside her as Aunt Mall slammed the door. Then it was just silence. She stared forward as she unzipped her coat. She could feel Clete’s eyes on her.
“What?” she finally said. “Why are you staring at me?”
His head snapped back, and he looked down at his hands. “Sorry.”
Her cousin reminded Nicky of the white-tailed deer in Pennsylvania. They watched you from the other side of barbed wire, their heads turned almost completely around, desperately curious, with their bodies positioned toward the trees. Ready to bound off at the slightest scent of danger.
Nicky took a deep breath, waiting for Aunt Mall to get in.
“I just want to say that if the virus got real bad, you’d be safe on this island,” Clete told her. “People still know how to live off the land. My family has, for thousands of years.”
“Okay,” Nicky said slowly.
“Did you know there’s a spruce in Sweden that’s nine thousand five hundred years old? That tree started growing back when people were hunting and gathering.”
“That’s cool,” Nicky said, looking out the window, thinking of the clearcut Sven had shown her just a few hours earlier.
“You know what else?” he said, continuing to watch her.
“What?” she said. If Clete had spoken like this to Josie, she would have bitten off his head.
“I can hear the trees. I’m telling you because I bet you can too.”
She turned to her cousin, but before she could answer, the front door opened. Clete didn’t blink.
“Nicky, you doing okay, pet?”
As Aunt Mall slid in she put her arm over the bench seat and turned around, her wide hands gripping the upholstery. Despite her upbeat nature, her green eyes, rimmed with eye shadow, appeared watery and concerned. Nicky gave a quick nod. Her aunt turned back to the windshield, but didn’t start the truck.
“Your mother’s a hero, you know that? She was just about the smartest, most thoughtful person I ever knew, and I can see now she passed it down to you girls. You loved her something awful. Things in Danville go just like clockwork; it’s why I ran off to Alaska. I just couldn’t abide it.” She turned to stare at Nicky. “I have a suspicion you might be an Alaskan girl. You could teach your cousin Clete a thing or two—I keep waiting for him to catch fire.”
Nicky glanced at Clete, whose shyness had returned, like cloud cover. The truck frame shook as the engine snarled. They rumbled out of the parking lot, with the camper behind them, and started along the two-lane road hugging the ocean toward her new town.