The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Which, Daniel thought, this might as well be.

  He walked up to the desk where the women were answering phones. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m trying to find a teenage girl . . .” One woman held up a finger: Just a moment.

  He unzipped his jacket. Before they’d left, he’d packed a duffel full of winter gear; he and Laura were pretty much wearing everything they’d brought all at once. It was cold in Maine, but nothing compared to what it would be like in the Eskimo villages.

  The woman hung up. “Hi. Can I—” She broke off as the phone rang again.

  Frustrated, Daniel turned away. Impatience was a trait you developed in the lower forty-eight, an attribute that a child who grew up here didn’t possess. Time wasn’t the same on the tundra; it stretched to elastic lengths and snapped back fast when you weren’t looking. The only things that really operated on a schedule were school and church, and most Yupiit were late to those anyway.

  Daniel noticed an old man sitting on a chair, staring. He was Yup’ik, with the weathered skin of a person who’d spent his life outside. He wore green flannel pants and a fur parka. “Aliurturua,” the man whispered. I’m seeing a ghost.

  “Not a ghost.” Daniel took a step toward him. “Cama-i.”

  The man’s face wrinkled, and he reached for Daniel’s hand. “Alangruksaaqamken.” You amazed me, showing up unexpectedly.

  Daniel had not spoken Yup’ik in fifteen years, but the syllables flowed through him like a river. Nelson Charles had, in fact, taught him his very first Yup’ik words: iqalluk . . . fish, angsaq . . . boat, and terren purruaq . . . you suck the meat off an asshole, which is what Nelson told him to say to kids who made fun of him for being kass’aq. Daniel reached for Laura, who was watching the exchange with amazement. “Una arnaq nulirqaqa,” he said. This is my wife.

  “That kind’s pretty,” Nelson said in English. He shook her hand but didn’t look her in the eye.

  Daniel turned to Laura. “Nelson used to be a substitute teacher. When the native kids got to go on field trips to Anchorage that were subsidized by the government, I wasn’t allowed to go because I was white. So Nelson would take me on my own little field trip to check out fishnets and animal traps.”

  “Don’t teach these days,” Nelson said. “Now I’m the race marshal.”

  That would mean, Daniel realized, that Nelson had been here since the start of the K300. “Listen,” he said, and he found himself slipping back into Yup’ik because the words, thorny on his tongue and in his throat, didn’t hurt quite as much as they did in English. “Paniika tamaumauq.”

  My daughter is lost.

  He didn’t have to explain to Nelson why he thought that his child, who lived a whole country away, might have wound up in Alaska when she went missing. The Yupiit understood that the person you were when you went to sleep at night might not necessarily be the person you were when you woke up. You could have become a seal or a bear. You might have crossed into the land of the dead. You might have casually spoken a wish aloud in your dreams and then found yourself living in the middle of it.

  “She’s fourteen,” Daniel said, and he tried to describe Trixie, but he didn’t know what to say. How could her height or weight or the color of her hair convey that when she laughed, her eyes narrowed shut? That she had to have the peanut butter on the top side of the sandwich and the jelly on the bottom? That she sometimes got up and wrote poetry in the middle of the night because she’d dreamed it?

  The woman who had been on the phone stepped out from behind the table. “Sorry about that—the calls have been crazy. Anyway, the only kids coming through here I didn’t know are the Jesuit Volunteers. One girl flew in late, because of the snowstorm, but by now, they’re all up at Tuluksak, manning the checkpoint.”

  “What did she look like?” Laura asked. “The girl who was late?”

  “Skinny little thing. Black hair.”

  Laura turned to Daniel. “It’s not her.”

  “This girl didn’t have a warm coat,” the woman said. “I thought that was pretty crazy for a kid who knew she was coming to Alaska. She didn’t even have a hat.”

  Daniel remembered Trixie sitting in the passenger seat of his truck in the middle of the winter as they drove up to the high school entrance. It’s freezing out, he’d said, and he handed her a hunter-orange wool stocking cap he’d used when he was out cutting wood. Wear this. And her response: Dad, do you want people to think I’m a total freak?

  There had been times, when he lived in Akiak, that he would know things before they happened. Sometimes it was as simple as thinking of a red fox and then looking up and seeing one. Sometimes it was more profound: sensing a fight building up behind him, so that he could turn in time to throw the first punch. Once it had even wakened him out of his sleep: the sound of a gunshot and the echo of basketballs thudding when the bullet upset the cart they were stored on.

  His mother had called it coincidence, but the Yupiit wouldn’t. People’s lives were as tightly woven as a piece of lace, and pulling on one string might furrow another. And although he’d dismissed it when he was a teenager in Akiak, he recognized now the tightening of the skin at his temples, the way light moved too fast in front of his eyes a moment before he pictured his daughter, not wearing a hat, or anything else for that matter, shivering in what seemed to be a haystack.

  Daniel felt his heart jump. “I have to get to Tuluksak.”

  “Ikayurnaamken,” Nelson said. Let me help you.

  The last time he’d been here, Daniel hadn’t wanted anyone’s help. The last time he’d been here, he’d actively pushed it away. Now he turned to Nelson. “Can I borrow your snow machine?” he asked.

  • • •

  The checkpoint in Tuluksak was at the school, close enough to the river for mushers to settle their dogs in straw on the banks and then walk up to the building for hot food. All mushers racing the K300 passed through Tuluksak twice—once on the way up to Aniak and once on the way back. There was a mandatory four-hour rest and vet check during one of those stops. When Trixie and Willie arrived, a team of dogs was idling without its musher down at the bank of the river, being watched over by a kid with a clipboard who asked if they’d run into anyone else on the trail. All but one of the mushers had passed through Tuluksak, detained, presumably, by the storm. No one had heard from him since he’d checked in at Akiak.

  Trixie hadn’t really spoken much to Willie this morning. She had awakened with a start a little after six A.M., noticing first that it wasn’t snowing and second that she wasn’t cold. Willie’s arm was draped over her, and his breath fell onto the nape of her neck. Most humiliating, though, was the hard thing Trixie could feel pressing up against her thigh. She had inched away from Willie, her face burning, and focused on getting herself fully dressed before he woke up and realized he had a boner.

  Willie parked outside the school and climbed off the snow machine. “Aren’t you coming in?” Trixie asked, but he was already tinkering with the engine, not seeming the least bit inclined to finesse an introduction for her. “Whatever,” she muttered under her breath, and she walked into the building.

  Directly in front of her was a trophy case that held a wooden mask decorated with feathers and fur and a loving cup with a basketball etched onto it. A tall boy with a long, horsey face was standing next to it. “You’re not Andi,” he said, surprised.

  The Jesuit Volunteers who were in charge of the checkpoint at Tuluksak were a group of college-age kids who did Peace Corps–style service work at the native clinic in Bethel. Trixie had thought Jesuits were priests—and these kids clearly weren’t. She asked Willie why they were called that, and he just shrugged.

  “I don’t know about Andi,” Trixie said. “I was just told to come here.”

  She held her breath, waiting for this boy to point a finger at her and scream Imposter! but before he could, Willie walked inside, stamping off his boots. “Hey, Willie, what’s up,” the tall boy said. Willie nodded and walked into one of th
e classrooms, heading toward a table set up with Crock Pots and Tupperware. He helped himself to a bowl of something and disappeared through another doorway.

  “Well, I’m Carl,” the boy said. He held out his hand.

  “Trixie.”

  “You ever done this before?”

  “Oh, sure,” Trixie lied. “Tons of times.”

  “Great.” He led her into the classroom. “Things are a little crazy right now, because we’ve got a team that just came in, but here’s a five-second orientation: First and most important, that’s where the food is.” He pointed. “The locals bring stuff all day long, and if you haven’t had any, I recommend the beaver soup. On the other side of the door where you came in is another classroom; that’s where the mushers sleep when they come in for their layover. They basically grab a mat and tell you when they want to be woken up. We rotate shifts—every half hour someone’s got to sit out on the river, which is cruel and unusual punishment in this kind of weather. If you’re the one on duty when a musher comes in, make sure you tell him his time and call it into headquarters, then show him which plywood corral has his gear in it. Right now everyone’s a little freaked out because one team hasn’t made it in since the storm.”

  Trixie listened to Carl, nodding at the right places, but he might as well have been speaking Swahili. Maybe if she watched someone else doing what she was supposed to do, she could copy when it came her turn.

  “And just so you know,” Carl said. “Mushers are allowed to drop dogs here.”

  Why? Trixie wondered. To see if they land on their feet?

  A cell phone rang, and someone called out Carl’s name. Left alone, Trixie wandered around, hoping to avoid Willie, who was doing such an effortless job of avoiding her. It seemed that the entire school consisted of two classrooms, and Trixie thought of Bethel High’s complex layout, a map she had memorized all summer before starting ninth grade.

  “You made it.”

  Trixie turned to find the vet who’d been on the bush plane with her from Anchorage. “Go figure.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll see you outside. I hear there’s a nasty case of frostbite out there with my name on it.” He zipped up his coat and waved as he walked out the door.

  Trixie was starving, but not enough to want to eat something that might have beaver in it. She gravitated toward the oil stove at the corner of the room and held her hands out in front of it. It was no warmer than Willie’s skin had been.

  “You all set?”

  As if her thoughts had conjured him, Willie was suddenly standing next to her. “For what?”

  “This.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Piece of cake.” He smirked and started to walk away. “Hey. Where are you going?”

  “Home. This is my village.”

  Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to Trixie that she was going to be by herself again. As a teenager, she was always part of a greater whole—a family, a class, a peer group—and there was always someone sticking a nose in her business. How many times had she stormed off after a fight with her mother, yelling that she just wanted to be left alone?

  Be careful what you wish for, Trixie thought. After a single day spent on her own, here she was getting all upset about losing the company of a total stranger.

  She tried to wipe all the emotion off her face, so that it reflected back at Willie the same indifference he was showing her. Then she remembered she was still wearing a coat that belonged to someone he knew, and she struggled to unfasten it.

  Willie pushed her hands away from the zipper. “Keep it,” he said. “I’ll come back for it later.”

  She followed him out of the school building, feeling the cold rake the hair from her scalp. Willie headed toward a cluster of small houses that seemed two-dimensional, sketched in shades of smoky brown and gray. His hands were dug deep into his pockets, and he spun around so that he wouldn’t have to bear the bite of the wind. “Willie,” Trixie called out, and although he didn’t look up, he stopped walking. “Thanks.”

  He ducked his head deeper, an acknowledgment, then kept moving backward toward the village. It was exactly how Trixie felt: If she was getting anywhere on this journey, it was still the wrong way. She watched Willie, pretending she could see him even when she couldn’t, until she was distracted by the sound of barking near the river.

  The JV they’d seen when they pulled up in their snow-go was still on the ice, watching over the same dog team, which panted in small frosty bites of punctuation. He grinned when he saw Trixie and passed her the clipboard. “Are you my relief? It’s brutal out here. Hey, listen, Finn Hanlon’s up taking a leak while the vet finishes checking out the team.”

  “What do I have to do?” Trixie said, but the boy was already halfway up the hill, making a beeline for the warmth of the school. Trixie looked around, nervous. The vet was too busy to pay attention to her, but there were a few native kids kicking a Sprite can, and their parents, who hopped from foot to foot to ward off the cold and talked about who would win the race this year.

  The lead dog looked tired. Trixie couldn’t blame the poor thing; she’d traveled the same route on the back of a snow machine and it had nearly killed her; what would it be like to do that barefoot and naked? Taking a glance at the vet—he could keep an eye out, just in case that last musher came in, couldn’t he?—she walked away from the team to a set of plywood lockers. Rummaging inside one, she grabbed a handful of kibble and walked back to the husky. She held out her palm, and the dog’s tongue, rough and warm, rasped against her skin to devour the treat.

  “Jesus,” a voice yelled. “You trying to get me disqualified?”

  Staring down at her was a musher wearing a bib with the number 12 on it. She glanced at her clipboard: FINN HANLON.

  “You’re feeding my dogs!”

  “S-sorry,” Trixie stammered. “I thought—”

  Ignoring her, Hanlon turned to the vet. “What’s the verdict?”

  “He’s going to be fine, but not if you race him.” The vet stood up, wiped his hands on his coat.

  The musher knelt beside the dog and rubbed him between the ears, then unhooked his traces. “I’m dropping him,” he said, handing the neck line to Trixie. She held it and watched Hanlon reconfigure the tug line of the dog that had been Juno’s partner, so that the sled would pull straight. “Sign me out,” he ordered, and he stepped on the runners of his sled, holding on to the handle bow. “All right,” he called, and the team loped north along the river, gaining speed, as the spectators on the bank cheered.

  The vet packed up his bag. “Let’s get Juno comfortable,” he said, and Trixie nodded, holding the neck line like a leash as she started to walk the dog toward the school building.

  “Very funny,” the vet said.

  She turned around to find him in front of a stake hammered into the grass along the edge of the river. “But it’s so cold out here . . .”

  “You noticed? Tie him up, and I’ll get the straw.”

  Trixie clipped the dog’s neck line onto the stake. The vet returned, carrying a slice of hay in his arms. “You’d be surprised how cozy this is,” he said, and Trixie thought of the night she’d spent with Willie.

  A current suddenly energized the small tangle of spectators, and they began to point to the spot on the horizon where the river became a vanishing point. Trixie gripped the clipboard with her mittened hands and looked at the pinprick in the distance.

  “It’s Edmonds!” a Yup’ik boy cried. “He made it!”

  The vet stood up. “I’ll go tell Carl,” he said, and he left Trixie to fend for herself.

  The musher was wearing a white parka that came down to his knees and the number 06 on his bib. “Whoa,” he called out, and his malamutes slowed to a stop, panting. The swing dog—the one closest to the sled—curled up like a fiddlehead on the ice and closed her eyes.

  The children spilled over the riverbank, tugging at the musher’s coat. “Alex Edmonds! Alex Edmonds!” they shouted. “Do you rem
ember me from last year?”

  Edmonds brushed them off. “I have to scratch,” he said to Trixie.

  “Um. Okay,” she answered, and she wondered why he thought he had to make an itch common knowledge. But Edmonds took the clipboard out of her hands and drew a line through his name. He handed it back and pulled the sleeping bag off the basket of the sled, revealing an old Yup’ik man who reeked of alcohol and who was shaking even as he snored. “I found him on the trail. He must have passed out during the storm. I gave him mouth to mouth last night to get him breathing again, but the weather was too bad to get him back to the medical center in Bethel. This was the closest checkpoint . . . can someone help me get him inside?”

  Before Trixie could run up to the school, she saw Carl and the other volunteers hurrying down to the river. “Holy cow,” Carl said, staring at the drunk. “You probably saved his life.”

  “Whatever that’s worth,” Edmonds replied.

  Trixie watched the other volunteers drag the old man out of the dogsled and carry him up to the school. The bystanders whispered and clucked to each other, snippets of conversation in Yup’ik and English that Trixie caught: Edmonds used to be an EMT . . . Kingurauten Joseph ought to pay for this . . . damn shame. One Yup’ik woman with owl eyeglasses and a tiny bow of a mouth came up to Trixie. She leaned over the clipboard and pointed to the line splitting Edmonds’s name. “I had ten bucks riding on him to win,” she complained.

  With all the dog teams accounted for, the onlookers dispersed, heading into the village where Willie had gone. Trixie wondered if he was related to any of those little kids who’d been cheering for Edmonds. She wondered what he’d done when he got home. Drunk orange juice out of the container, like she might have? Taken a shower? Lay down on his bed, thinking of her?