He read on, because it was there and because it was about his child, but when he came to the paragraph about the accident, he felt the need to physically avert his eyes. The idiocy of the impulse annoyed him. He knew what had happened, didn’t he? There was nothing new in those words, no reason he should feel like he couldn’t catch his breath. So he pushed himself to look down for seconds at a time, absorbing a phrase or two at each go.
“An ice bridge had formed across the surface of the river, and Tom urged his sister to climb out onto the sparkling surface …”
Take a break. Look up at the wooden slats of the ceiling, pick a knothole to focus on, gulp the air.
“… terrible crack … Tom ran for help …” Press a tender place where he’d accidentally hammered his thumbnail a couple weeks before.
“Marie Liles, doing the washing, heard her son’s shouts … rushed together toward the riverbank … jumped in after her daughter.”
Close your eyes. Breathe in, breathe out.
“Helpless and horrified … frozen … trapped under the lip of the ice.”
Even though two people had died that day, the article barely mentioned Marie at all. It was a reversal of the way most people seemed to want to talk about it, Howard thought, at least when they were addressing him directly. He’d noticed that his friends and neighbors and coworkers seemed to expect him to divide his grief in two. And if they saw fit to offer their comfort, they expected that in return Howard would tuck one half of it away out of sight.
Losing Marie was a panic and a weight. It was a hole so deep that he wasn’t sure he’d ever climb out of it. But at least it was something everyone seemed to understand. Pete Johansen took him aside one day at work and told Howard that after Gloria died, he went a full year without eating a hot meal. And Marty Willoughby over at the Kalakaket Creek site, whom Howard had never met but had spoken to over the radio often enough, told him that he still had dreams about a girlfriend who’d died when they were in high school. Even people who’d barely known Marie felt comfortable grabbing Howard’s arm and telling him she’d been a saint. That was the word he heard over and over again, and he appreciated the kindness of it, though he didn’t think of Marie as having the sort of bland goodness, the pale porcelain virtue, he’d always imagined when he heard that word.
But almost no one knew what to say about Beecy. There were a couple of men Howard knew who’d lost children (and one of them a cripple), but none of those guys seemed to draw any line between their own experiences and the airless, choking feeling Howard got whenever he pictured Beecy’s face. And maybe it was better they didn’t say anything; the ones who did couldn’t have gotten it more wrong if they’d tried. After the funeral, when the men moved from the church over to the Royal, Sheet Jennings clapped Howard on the back and said, “It’s better this way. There was no way she was going to grow up to be somebody’s wife. You and Marie would’ve been taking care of her till the day you died.” And not too much later, on his way back from the toilet, he overheard Don Mizulski, drunk and shushed quickly but not soon enough, say, “I used to look at that girl and think, they better not let her out after she starts bleeding, or they’re gonna end up with a whole litter just like her.”
It was hard for Howard to put into words what he had seen in Beecy that made her so dear to him. She was his daughter, certainly, almost from the first moment she entered their home, but she was also his most precious responsibility. He understood her, and she was a child he knew not everybody would understand. She wasn’t wild—that was the thing he kept coming back to. Every single article that had been written about her had used that word or a variation of it: feral, savage, like an animal. But putting her face in a plate of food because she didn’t know any other way to eat, soiling herself because no one had taught her any different—that didn’t make her an animal. It was the very fact of her humanity that caught in Howard’s chest. She was a child, a hurt, frightened little girl. And Howard’s only job was to show her that people in this world had the capacity to be kind.
It was Howard’s hands she’d been holding the first time she crossed the floor on two legs, Howard’s lap she was sitting on the first time she looked at the fire and said “Fa.” Of course, Tom had done those same things, back in his own infancy, back in Minnesota, and Howard had been as proud as any father. But when you buy a car new off the lot, it’s no surprise that it runs when you turn the key. The unexpected thing, the miraculous thing, is when a car that’s been shattered in a crash, that’s been left in the rain to rust for years at a time, can be coaxed to growl to a start and slowly begin rolling down the street.
• • •
Time passed, and Howard waited for the thaw. Walking the mud road to the base, slapping at mosquitoes, he looked at the landscape around him and tried to find some wonder in it. He remembered their first summer here, how thrilled they’d all been by the wildflowers and the racks of drying fish, the spectacle of a whale slaughter, the surprise of a bear cub eating blueberries from a bush. And later summers: Tom jumping from oil drums and Beecy laughing at husky puppies rolling in the dirt, Marie sitting outside the cabin after dinner, her hands empty for once, no basket of mending, no work to keep them busy. Now the world was melting again, and Howard wondered if the only thing he’d remember from this summer would be the shameful relief he felt whenever he arrived home to find his son wasn’t there.
Tom had found a girlfriend, which Howard couldn’t begrudge him, and he spent most of his time over at her house, where things were, presumably, less bleak. Tom’s life was going to keep going, even if Howard’s didn’t—a few more years and he’d be off to college or the army, a job in a less frozen locale, and eventually there would be marriage and children and days full to bursting. Howard knew that certainly a time would come when he would be sorry for the way he was behaving now, when he’d wish for the kind of connection with his son that he was all but murdering. The hell of it was, knowing it didn’t change a thing.
In early June, the sun rose and didn’t set. Through the nightless weeks that preceded Tom’s fifteenth birthday, Howard tried to imagine a way he might make things different. He suggested to Tom that they might want to take a trip—they could go camping, or even fly into Anchorage—but Tom wanted to stay in town and go to the July Fourth fair, just as they’d always done, though Howard was sure they were both thinking that there could be no more “just as they’d always done,” not really, not ever.
He had meant to go down to Peller’s to see about ordering Tom a camera, but the time got away from him, and so he ended up buying him a set of binoculars from the shelf above the counter. They were nice ones, and they’d be good for hunting or for hiking and climbing. A million uses a boy might have for binoculars here—wasn’t that exactly the reason they’d packed up their house and moved to this end of the earth in the first place?
When Howard woke on the morning of the Fourth, early as he always did in the summer here, in spite of the thick blankets Marie always hung on the windows, he lay in bed and smoked for a while before getting up. His birth day, he thought, testing himself, remembering the smoky waiting room and the tiny weight in his hands, Marie’s happiness and indeed his own. He remembered the sudden shyness he felt, walking into his wife’s hospital room with a bouquet of irises, and he remembered his mother spontaneously singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” when he called to tell her the news. He remembered looking at the clock and savoring the phrase “three hours old” as he held a bottle to the baby’s lips and watched him drink for only the second time in his life. Howard focused on these things, pushing out everything else, and he was rewarded with a small piercing feeling, but it was distant and bewildering, like hearing a few lines of a language you’d studied in high school.
He let Tom sleep late, then woke him with pancakes like Marie used to do. The line between nostalgia and playacting hadn’t quite solidified in Howard’s mind yet, but he guessed this would be something Tom would miss if he didn’t do it. They ate tog
ether, and Howard presented the binoculars, which Tom seemed pleased with, and then they set off for town.
They walked toward the water and Front Street, where the crowds had gathered. In the distance was the otherworldly silhouette of the White Alice site: the Martian-city radar domes and the billboard antennas that looked for all the world like the drive-in movie screens that had thrown patterns of light on the twining bodies of Howard and Marie in the days before they were married. He wondered who was working today at the site. Strange to think that as he and his son walked in silence, there were words flying through the air above their heads: messages and signals, invisible, bouncing off the lowest level of sky. People throwing their voices hundreds of miles, a modern miracle dressed down with secular words like “communication” and “defense.”
“You gonna join the blubber-eating contest this year?” Howard asked Tom. Trying. “They say it tastes like coconut.”
Tom looked at his father with half a smile. “I will if you do the blanket toss.”
Howard smiled, too, or something like it. It had been a joke last year, how Howard was the only one who wouldn’t take a turn being thrown up and down on the circle of sealskin. Well, that was something, he thought, a way of stepping out of the trap of “the way things used to be.”
“You got it,” he said.
They could hear the sound of drumming now, and Howard saw a banner strung up outside the Royal: “Happy Independence Day! 10 Years of Statehood: 1959–1969!” A makeshift stage had been set up down by the water, and the beautiful-baby contest was in full swing. Later there would be more competitions—sled dogs pulling weighted carts, men kicking fur balls hung above their heads, children drawing lengths of string into their mouths without using their hands. Already young women were lining up in parkas and fur boots to compete for the title of Miss Arctic Circle. It was a warm day, maybe seventy-five degrees. There were men grilling caribou sausages and Eskimo children holding miniature flags. Who would ever have thought that America would grow to encompass all this?
Soon after they arrived, Tom found some friends from school, and Howard stepped aside. He wandered around, talked to neighbors and coworkers he ran into. When the muktuk-eating contest began, he watched Tom up onstage with the others, gulping down black-and-white cubes of blubber and whale skin. And when the blanket toss got under way, he approached his son and tapped him on the shoulder like a boy asking a girl to dance.
They joined the group standing around the edges of the leathery blanket, everybody holding a piece and working together to move it up and down, propelling one person after another up into the air. There was a cheery feeling in the crowd, and Howard tried to breathe with the same rhythm, to enjoy the surprised cry of each new person who climbed up onto the blanket and felt themselves, for a few moments, freed from the ties of gravity.
When it was Tom’s turn, Howard jerked the blanket with the others, and he saw his son bounce up into the blue. He felt his body loosen, just the tiniest bit, and he laughed out loud at Tom’s shout when his feet hit the sealskin and he soared up again. Howard kept his eyes on Tom’s face as he flew and fell, coming in and out of focus. With each ascent, he became a blur Howard wouldn’t have known in a crowd, and with each drop, he settled back into the young man, nearly grown, who roused such a complicated range of feelings in his father’s chest. Howard remembered that when Tom was a baby, he hadn’t known how to answer the question “Who does he look like?” because there seemed to be such changeability to his newborn features. Howard could watch his son sleep and see one moment his own father and the next Marie’s mother, and so on through a dozen different expressions, until he understood finally what it meant to call a child “my flesh and blood.”
When Tom came off the blanket, he looked at his father with an open, questioning smile, and Howard smiled back and nodded. He worked his way onto the blanket and stood up in the very center. For a moment he was still, looking around at the circle of people he knew, friends and neighbors and coworkers who might or might not know him. And then they moved as one, and he was in the air.
It was not like jumping; it was not in his control in the same way that jumping would have been. He had no agency in this transaction. He simply rose and plunged, lifted by the hands of the community below. He was with them, then apart, with them, then apart. At his highest, he could see shacks of wood and sod, the ragged edge of the land and the dark water beyond. Radio towers and the White Alice antennas, and his son below him, his son.
He wanted to go higher, until he reached night, until he pierced the skin of the bright, endless day. He wanted to go until he hit the edge of the troposphere, wherever that invisible boundary might be, where men’s words flew back and forth, propelled by his own work. His voice was going without him, sounds flying out of his body without any volition. He yelled until even he wasn’t sure whether he was making angry noises or joyful ones. He rose and fell, free and weightless, a creature of earth and air. For a few moments he existed in a place between, nobody on any side of him, no one to hear him but the sky.
Excerpt from
TROPOSPHERIC SCATTER
By Octavia Frost
REVISED ENDING
Hi Lisa,
Still working on this one. I’ll get it to you ASAP.
Best, O
Chapter Eight
I stand for a minute at the edge of the crowd outside the Columbarium and study the scene. Of course, I knew that this would be a high-profile event, and that there would most likely be some media presence—the very reason I went to the trouble of buying new sunglasses and putting them on four blocks away. But now that I’m here and I see what a spectacle it is, it seems less likely that I’m going to be able to slip in undetected.
I feel I must clarify that I wasn’t worried someone might identify me from the covers of my books. Few writers enjoy that kind of fame, and I’m not deluded enough to think I’m among their ranks. I don’t get recognized, not when I sit on a plane with a manuscript on my tray table, title page up, not when I stand in a bookstore and purchase one of my own novels with a credit card bearing my name. Normally—or in the normality of the life I lived until Tuesday—it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to worry that someone might know who I was. But my picture has been broadcast so widely these past few days, always in pointed association with the murder of the very woman whose funeral I’m trying to crash, that I didn’t think I could count on not being noticed.
It turns out, however, that you can’t just walk into a celebrity funeral—which is what I suppose this has become—and casually join the rows of mourners, sunglasses or not. There’s security; I hadn’t counted on that. A man in an expensive suit is standing at the door with a clipboard, checking people against a guest list. And I don’t imagine my name is on it.
I stand back and try to figure out my next move. I feel foolish; I’m not even sure what I thought I could accomplish by coming here. I had some vague idea—not from any true insight into criminal behavior, but from a novel or movie, some other writer’s assertions about sociopaths and the way they act—that sometimes a murderer will feel compelled to join in the activity that follows his crime. Watch the faces in the crowd scene when the body is discovered; keep an eye on the guests who come to pay their respects. If I have any talent at all in social situations, it’s my ability to fade into the background and observe, and I suppose I thought that if I put myself in the right room, I might be able to zero in on a suspicious figure filling a plate at the hors d’oeuvres table, telegraphing his guilt to me and only me.
I watch the comings and goings for a little while. Guests arrive—no one famous, or at least no one I recognize—put on somber faces, and walk gracefully up the steps, pretending they don’t know they’re being photographed. Every so often someone comes outside to have a cigarette or to make a phone call. The windows of the building are all stained glass; no way to see inside.
I watch one of the smokers, a tall, slender woman who I think must be around
my age, though she might, from a great distance, be mistaken for someone younger. She looks familiar, but I can’t place her—is she an actress? She has dark hair, short and artful, and she’s wearing a black skirt with a sleeveless, beaded top: funeral meets cocktail party. She looks good, though. It’s not something I could pull off.
She lifts her head and sees me watching her. I look away, embarrassed, and pretend to search for something in my purse. I consider approaching her and asking for a cigarette, but I’ve never been a smoker, and I don’t think I could make it believable.
When I close my bag and glance up again, I see she’s still watching me. She finishes her cigarette and drops it on the asphalt; then she begins to weave through the crowd in my direction.
I smile pleasantly, noncommittal enough that it won’t be too awkward if it turns out she’s going to see someone else. She walks closer, peers at my face.
“Octavia?” she says.
So much for my brilliant disguise. “Yes?” I say mildly. I’m nervous, ready to turn and retreat if she starts yelling that the murderer’s mother is here. But instead she puts her arms out and pulls me into a hug. I’m slightly uncomfortable—I still haven’t placed her—but I’m touched by the gesture, so unexpected, here of all places. It occurs to me that I’ve been hugged more this week than I have in a year or more.
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