Fly by Night

by Andrea Thalasinos

  Amelia thought of their Minneapolis apartment with no Christmas anything yet. Alex was due in four days, they’d have to find a tree and do something festive. Maybe Jen had already.

  The Revolution House would have been all “Yankeed” up, as Alex used to say. Christmas tree and decorations, bayberry candles, pinecone wreaths, fir garlands draped across the fireplace mantel, a strand of old sleigh bells hanging from the front-door knocker that Amelia had discovered in the attic. This was the first Christmas in decades she wouldn’t be in the Revolution House, though Alex would be with her. She buried her nose in the two pups resting in the crook of her neck and closed her eyes.

  “Look at her.” Charlotte stepped up to study the female pup, turning her head as she did so. “It’s a whole new universe, little one.”

  TJ bent over to look.

  They stood watching the two as they looked around like moles coming up from their burrows after a long winter.

  “Is this tree from your land?” Bryce asked.

  “Yes,” TJ said. His eyes darted to his wife. “Charlotte hates that I cut one.” She turned her face away.

  “It’s a waste of nature,” Charlotte said.

  “I love a real tree,” TJ said.

  His wife crossed her arms and pawed the floor with her foot.

  “It’s true the kids and my sister’s grandkids love it when they come home.” Charlotte uncrossed her arms. She looked up the length of the tree. “A fake one would be just as beautiful,” she said in a way that spoke of old disagreements.

  “I’d miss the scent,” TJ protested.

  “Scented candles, darling, scented candles,” Charlotte said.

  “It’s not the same,” TJ said.

  “I feel sad for the tree,” the woman said. “Here this glorious thing has struggled for twenty-five years, competing for sunlight to thrive and become the magnificent thing it is, and there goes TJ with his chainsaw, props it up so I can watch it slowly die over the course of weeks for the benefit of everyone’s enjoyment.”

  “She’s still angry.” TJ winked and pointed to her with his thumb. “Too much of a softie,” he said. “But that’s why I like her.” He reached over and hugged her as she smiled but pulled away.

  “Why don’t you all go sit by the fire,” Charlotte said. “I’ll get the next feeding ready, put in powdered antibiotics for those puncture wounds. TJ, help her,” she said and held out the puppy bottles for him. “I’ll put out some snacks and fix us lunch.”

  TJ set down the bottles on the coffee table and then dragged over two chairs and an ottoman toward the hearth. He opened the fireplace doors and tossed on another log. Grabbing a black poker he stoked it up. Red sparks and cinders filled the firebox like a cloud of angry wasps.

  Charlotte became a flurry of activity in the open kitchen.

  TJ set up the bottom half of a molded animal carrier near where Amelia was sitting and tucked a soft blanket over the heating pad.

  “You can set them down after they’re done,” he said, shaking the bottles and handing one to Amelia.

  “Thanks,” Amelia said. But so far holding the pups was as much a comfort to her as it was to them.

  TJ stepped over to take the female, his clothes smelling of fabric softener, and then sat down on the sofa.

  Amelia felt him studying her. It felt like an awkward first date where she didn’t know what to say yet felt the burden of conversation was on her. She couldn’t muster the guts to ask why he hadn’t taken her calls.

  He seemed at ease with the mounting silence. And then it dawned on her: it was like being with her father.

  TJ set the female down on the blanket after she’d polished off the bottle. Amelia struggled with the male as he kept losing suction. Then after he finished she set him down and the two began ambling along in the crate. Looking at the lit tree, their heads bobbed before rolling against one another, and in moments surrendering fast asleep.

  Alongside the table was a wooden buffet decorated with a pine garland and red candles, the wall above a collection of framed photos.

  An entire time line of images spanned the early twentieth century, arranged in groupings of families and children. Some people were posed by photographers, several weddings and events, others holding up fish on fish tugboats, canoes with people waving, some black-and-whites, and fading color snapshots, others very old and yellowed.

  Amelia walked over to the photos of her father as a young man. Images of him she’d never seen. A few arm in arm with a young woman she presumed to be Gloria.

  “Over there,” Charlotte motioned from behind, “are my relatives wearing traditional Ojibwe clothing.” She pointed to photos of her relatives in full regalia. “These are clustered by clan—Bear, Wolf, Marten.”

  Amelia studied the faces of her father and the woman, both in Navy uniforms looking nestled together like they fit—their bodies as relaxed as their smiles as if finally home. Beneath was another of the same woman in what looked like a wedding suit, her father in military dress, she with a bouquet, him looking stalwart and very Greek, like photos of her grandfather on Ellis Island.

  Amelia stopped. A photo of her as a baby. She had the identical one back at the Revolution House in a box with all her parents’ photos. Then, photos of her at about seven with a stuffed whale, a dolphin, and then one of her posing with her first bike that she’d just learned to ride. How proud her father had been. Holding on to the bike seat she’d remembered saying, “Don’t let go, promise?” and then looked back to see him standing by the curb, smiling at how she’d been already riding like that for almost a block without her knowing it.

  They’d always take his film to double photo day at the drugstore. She remembered asking, “How come we always get doubles?” and her father would launch into the Doublemint gum commercial jingle: “Because it’s two, two, two mints in one,” and she’d join in, too distracted by his silliness to ask again.

  Tears filled Amelia’s eyes. She was on this wall, part of a family she’d never known. She didn’t know what to say.

  Amelia began breathing more deliberately to manage the emotion.

  “What it must be like to have a place where you belong,” Amelia said, thinking half out loud.

  Charlotte turned slowly. “Don’t you have one?”

  She said nothing. Home was where the heart is until it’s broken. Home is where the children are until they grow up and leave, home is where the dogs are until they grow old and die.

  To belong to a place, to a set of people was an experience, a feeling of protection she’d not had. She’d known it sparingly and conditionally for periods of time but was at the mercy of circumstance. The D’Agostinos were for a while, but they were not her family. Bryce and Jen were her family. The lab had existed at the pleasure of the NSF until funding was withdrawn. It was an endless merry-go-round of uncertainty, the familiar trappings of the Place of No Comfort. And while happy for families like this, encountering them often reinforced all that she didn’t have. Feeling more at home underwater than on land, perhaps it was a flaw in her DNA.

  And when Amelia would point out how lucky her friends and colleagues were with such close families, they’d dismiss it.

  The people from Rhode Island she’d known had extended families of cousins, aunts, and uncles, people whose family had been there for generations and so rooted that they’d pass up job opportunities even a few counties away if it meant having to move.

  The ache in her chest was a primal pain with no resolution. Like baby orcas separated from the pod, a dolphin longing for its mate that had gotten caught up in tuna trolling nets, and the grief that she’d so closely observed when a sea horse loses its mate. She’d witnessed these creatures in perennial grief, their Place of No Comfort, and it would shoot through her like touching a live wire on an aquarium light fixture, an ache for a life that so far she’d not been able to assemble and was beginning to doubt if she ever would.

  Maybe her father had felt the same. Maybe he thought
he could adopt his wife’s roots, rip off her heritage, and assume her sense of belonging. Always being the perennial outsider, only it hadn’t worked. Belonging nowhere, she pictured her father traveling between New York and Wisconsin until his life was claimed by his ancestral home. Go figure.

  Standing in front of the photo wall was everything that she’d never have. At first she’d blamed the death of her parents, the affair with Alex’s father. All she’d had was Alex. For years she’d fought off the terror of something happening to him until something finally did. He grew up. Finished his education, got a job, and moved to Vancouver. And now his serious girlfriend was looking more and more like the cement that would anchor him on the West Coast.

  She needed to sit. She picked up the puppies and sat down on the leather ottoman.

  “How long has your family been here?” She turned to Charlotte.

  “Who knows?” The woman laughed and pushed aside her bangs. She set down a tray of cheese, crackers, and smoked walleye on the coffee table. Handing out plates and forks, she said, “A little something until the whitefish stew heats up.”

  “So how long?” Amelia asked.

  “There are stories and there is documentation,” Charlotte said as she sat. “More than a thousand years at least. Long before the treaties.”

  They both sat looking at the photo wall.

  “Can you tell me who these people are?” Amelia asked.

  “They’re in groupings of clans,” Charlotte began. “Those tiny frames are daguerreotypes. That one’s of Chief Buffalo.”

  Amelia leaned down and rested her cheek against the pup’s charcoal head, inhaling its nutty smell. She would never be away from these animals. She knew it more than had decided it.

  “Chief Buffalo canoed all the waterways through the Great Lakes in a twenty-four-foot birch bark canoe from Madeline Island to Washington, D.C. From Superior through the lakes into the rivers to meet with President Fillmore to ask why the treaty rights of the Anishanabe had been terminated after the Sandy Lake Tragedy of 1850 where hundreds of people starved and froze to death. The chief got them to reinstate the conditions of the treaty.”

  Looking into the fire, Amelia imagined canoeing all that way and then looked up at the wall of photos.

  Bryce plopped down next to her on the ottoman, his hip bumped hers. He took off his cap and slipped off his sweater, tossing them onto the floor. The collar of his Sea Life polo shirt was half tucked in.

  Amelia chuckled and pulled out the collar to straighten it.

  “She’s always trying to improve me,” he said.

  “He’s like an unmade bed.”

  He turned to look at her, his eyes widening. “When you’re perfect…”

  “Yeah right.”

  Both women laughed in unison.

  “Don’t mean to be nosy,” the woman said and tipped up the bottle as the pup drank. “But are you two a couple?”

  “A coupla what?” Amelia asked. They all laughed but then Amelia felt an uncomfortable silence.

  “Let me hold them,” Charlotte said and reached for both pups. “Take a plate and eat, Amelia.”

  She took food and then leaned back in the sofa, her shoulder against Bryce as she listened to the crunching sound of his jaws devouring crackers. She wanted to lean her head on him. He was the constant of her life, yet she feared one day he’d fall in love and leave. And she’d understood that someday she’d get eased out, though not intentionally. That day would come and for his sake she hoped it would.

  “Look at that little guy,” he said. They both watched as the male pup twitched and then settled into bliss, like a slab of breathing meat in Charlotte’s lap. Amelia rested against Bryce as they watched.

  “Should we name them Lacey and Jethro?” she suggested.

  “I like it,” he said. “In homage to their parents.”

  “That’s very traditional of you,” Charlotte said.

  “I’m a traditional kinda guy.”

  In a weird way it was true.

  “But remember,” TJ said from where he’d been leaning on the kitchen counter. “We don’t know that Jethro isn’t alive.”

  “Okay,” Bryce said. “Junior then.” Watching the sleeping puppies, feeling the excitement and fear of taking on two new creatures, she felt the same closeness with Bryce as she had under Gloria’s deck.

  “Jen’s gonna go nuts,” Bryce said.

  “Should we tell her or ambush?”

  They nodded together saying, “Ambush.”

  Charlotte bent over and set the pups down. “Stew’s ready.”

  TJ and Charlotte stepped into the kitchen. Sounds of pots being set down on the stove, plates on the long wooden table, silverware, Charlotte and TJ chatting as the phone rang.

  It felt overwhelming. Amelia wished to be home in the Revolution House on her couch, by the fire, tucked beneath the down throw, home with Alex when he was little, when everything felt solid and unchanging, not hollow and loose.

  And now she was free-falling with no one to catch her, to call her own, no safe place that couldn’t be ripped out from beneath except for the ocean floor.

  She longed for the tickle of the limitless sea to lift her hair and be lost in the saltwater from which we’re all made, back to our primordial home.

  She looked around at the domestic scene, as rootless as the orphaned puppies that she’d stumbled upon. How their cries had prompted her to dig through a foot of snow on the deck like a lunatic and then hold them like her father had held on to her as if she was his anchor, perhaps now they were hers. Instead of ticking down all fifteen thousand reasons why she shouldn’t take on two pups, she’d not thought of one.

  It was almost too painful to soak up the goodwill of TJ and his wife. Maybe because it would only be a dream the minute she’d climb into her Jeep and shut the door on the drive back to Minneapolis. Amelia pulled inward. Her ribs felt as delicate as a discarded blue crab’s shell left behind on a beach.

  “I-I’ll be right back.” She backed away toward the foyer, the coats, boots and the front door.

  The three of them turned as if she’d asked a question.

  “Left something in the Jeep,” Amelia half-mumbled as she slipped out the interior door.

  Slipping into wet boots and wrestling into her coat Amelia then grabbed keys from where Bryce had set them on the bench.

  Opening the front door, she stepped out and held the edges of her coat together. The wind chill stung her hands.

  Snow blew in striations of white, looking more like fabric. Traipsing through the snow that was now up to her knees, she kicked through it and hurried to the Jeep.

  She pulled the door handle. The driver’s side was frozen. She leveraged her weight and then shoulder-butted the door to break the ice. After a second try it opened.

  Climbing into the driver’s seat she pulled the door shut. Oh thank God. Quiet. She breathed the ever-present rubbery smell of dive equipment and rested her forehead on the steering wheel, a substitute for the stillness of being underwater.

  Just as the confusion of tears was about to release, the passenger door crusted open.

  She startled.

  Bryce climbed in.

  “Am.”

  She rested her head down again.

  “You okay?”

  “No.”

  She felt his attention.

  “Something’s happening, Bryce.” She turned and leaned on him.

  “What?” He circled her in his arms.

  “Seeing that wolf in the woods today, finding the pups under Gloria’s house.” She looked up and then turned on the map light to better see him in the dimness of the storm.

  Bryce looked tired. “The way it looked at you too.”

  He lowered his head and nodded.

  “Bryce.” She touched the arm of his sleeve. “What’s happening?” She shivered from the cold.

  He hesitated; she sank into the puffiness of his coat.

  “I keep seeing the outline of th
e wolf’s head in my mind,” she said.

  The snowy, heavy-laden branches of fir trees, the way the wolf had hopped through snowdrifts and then scampered onto the animal path. She’d felt the power of the animal’s breath in her chest, its excitement as it knocked snow off branches as it brushed past as if playing before darting deeper into the woods.

  “Something’s changed me or changed in me,” she said. “Like the first time we saw a deepwater reef. Remember?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “You don’t think it’s real, like you’ve been transported to some alien wonderland.” The way he said it made her laugh.

  “How sunlight disperses the jewel colors, fluorescing like nothing else I’d ever seen in the topside world.” Its vividness was right before her. “Never thought anything could touch me like that again.”

  She looked up at him.

  They sat in the quietness of thought.

  The cold was making her nose drip. “Like I’ve fallen in love with a whole other world—with creatures, rhythms, and a language of its own that I don’t speak—one I was never aware of until now.”

  In the quietness of the woods it had found her. Looking into the wolf’s face the rusty gates of her heart had creaked open, with curiosity being the oil to ease its hinges.

  She tugged on the collar of his jacket.

  “We saw the face of wild again, Am,” Bryce said.

  She looked at him, they both smiled.

  “Am I nuts?”

  “Of course you are.”

  She laughed darkly. “Was hoping you’d say that.”

  He brushed aside her hair.

  She paused. “It claimed me, Bryce, as corny as that sounds, know what I mean?”

  She heard the swish of his coat collar as he nodded.

  “Like the first sea horse,” he said.

  “Yeah, but now it’s the woods, the snow, Lacey being killed.” She sat up and gestured out the windows. “Only you’d understand; only you would know because you always do.” She rested back onto his coat, folding her hands into his pockets for warmth.

  Amelia’s eyes darted, realizing the Jeep was her only home. Minneapolis wasn’t home, there was nothing to go back to—their airport apartment, the NSF grants—bits and pieces of somebody else’s life they’d been trying to tape together.