by Leigh Newman
One Saturday at home, after breakfast, my father looks over at me and smiles. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Dad.” I scowl. “Cut it out.”
“Ten’s old enough for a little fun, isn’t it? How about you and me go blow up some cans?”
I nod, carefully casual. He unlocks the heavy, wooden door to his sacred gun closet and hands me the .22 his dad once gave him. Our new quality-time occupation is decided: firearms.
Dad does not fool around with guns. All I have to do is look at the engraved metalwork on a wall-mounted shotgun for a warning to thunder forth: Never pick up a firearm without permission! Never pick up a firearm without knowing if it’s loaded! Never trust anybody who says it’s unloaded! Never get snow down your barrel! Never believe your safety is on when it’s on! And never, ever, ever point your weapon at anybody unless you’re prepared to kill them! “Are you prepared to kill somebody?” Dad finishes that first afternoon, in a crescendo of bulging eyeballs and forehead veins. “Are you?”
“Uh,” I say. “No?” I look down at the concrete floor of the garage. I’m not sure what killing means exactly. I know what dead is. But killing—not a fish or a mosquito, but something with a face and lots of blood? I don’t know. And this is clearly not the correct answer. The person you’re pointing the gun at is supposed to be scared, not the person holding the gun.
Dad lifts up my chin. “It’s good to be scared, Leifer. Fear keeps you careful.”
What he doesn’t say is that guns are the greatest thing since firecrackers and water balloons and the birthday candles that fizzle but don’t blow out. I can’t get enough. On the weekends, Dad and I fly out to the cabin and shoot beer cans lined around the trash pit. We shoot up bottles balanced on hay bales. One time, we shoot up a life jacket that we drape on an oar and stick in the tundra—causing a Native man, rightly, to three-wheel over from his village and yell at us. On rainy days, we drive to the range outside town to shoot holes in bull’s-eyes and blast clay pigeons from the sky, checking in at the counter manned by potbellied Old Great Alaskans who pat me on the head and give me chocolate bars free, along with the purchase of a box of ammo.
We are the same as always, the two of us in hip boots, trudging through the mud and alders with overloaded duffels of outdoor equipment. But something feels different about shooting. We do it next to each other—shoulder-to-shoulder, gun-to-gun—but not with each other. I don’t mind so much, not really. Something funny always happens to me, especially with a rifle—lining up the bead, then the bead in the loop, then the bead in the loop and the center of the target, easing back on the trigger slowly, so slowly that time turns smudged and runny and everything outside the narrow range of focus fades away. There is no sound of the wind or leaves or birds, no sound of thoughts even, including the dull chant that plays in my head, leadenly, relentlessly—about Dad and Abbie, about Mom and the IRS money, about Mom and me going homeless and Dad living in a fancy house, about not crying, not talking, not asking, not thinking. There is only quiet, then a distant, alien crack.
Like most Alaskans, Dad is an outdoorsman. That means he and I will walk for miles, loaded down with packs and equipment, just to find the ideal spot to cast. But to walk just to walk? To climb just to climb? This is like people who go into the bush and set up a tent and just sit around, calling it camping.
Abbie, though, has a nature-girl streak. She makes salads out of weedy-tasting herbs and brown kernels. She grows ferns in macramé holders. And this August, three weeks before I’m due to leave again, she wants us to hike a few mountains.
Crow Peak is our first big trip. The trailhead begins only an hour’s drive from Anchorage. We start at sea level, crossing a narrow valley that runs along a stream. Up we push between two mountains, and set up a small camp by a glacial lake. Against the hot sun and white sky and black shale, that glacial lake looks so eerily, so strikingly phosphorescent—a blue, liquid version of the green glow inside fireflies. I feel a rushing need to crash into it, to break it by plunging in my hands. At which point the cold strikes, and I scream.
The next morning, we start up the peaks, crawling over boulders and along a spiny ridge. There is hardly enough room for our feet to fit on the trail. We stop only to guzzle water. For hours, we pick our way higher and higher. “I can’t do it,” I say, flinging myself on the ground. “And don’t say can’t lives on won’t street.”
“Suck it up, now, honey,” Dad says, pulling me up over a boulder. Then another. Abbie holds out bribes of sugar-covered jelly orange slices, patting me on the back.
At the summit, we all collapse. The lead-colored waters of Turn-again Arm and the massive Chugach Mountains spread all the way to the horizon. I crawl forward, leaning over an outcropping, imagining the fall, the scream, the splat on the craggy boulders fifty-five hundred feet below. A strange, scary, but excited part of myself wants to do this.
“Hiking’s not so bad,” I say to Abbie, but into the wind where she can’t hear it.
A few hours later, it’s time to head down. The light is failing. The temperature is dropping. We work our way along the ridge, trying to maximize the amount of daylight left by taking the shorter route down the opposite side of the summit.
But the ridge gets slimmer, steeper, higher. Did we end up on the wrong trail? Far below us, in the shadows, our tent hunches ever so brightly, a dome of fluorescent orange beside the lake. But directly ahead of us lies a snowfield. Our options are: Cross it or retrace our steps all the way back to our original route.
Dad and Abbie huddle, but I can hear.
“What about hypothermia?” Dad says. “Not to mention falling in the dark.”
“We don’t have ropes,” says Abbie, in a worried voice. Contrary to the basic rules of outdoor Alaskan life (pack for panic! pack for disaster! pack tents, food, jackets, ropes, matches, guns, bungee cords!), we have brought only day bags, loaded with water and granola bars. “What if it’s not a snowslide? What if it’s a glacier?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough, Jim.”
I try to not think about the snowslide, which looks so harmless, a gentle slope of glowing white. Do crevasses plunge below it? What if we fall in? What if we break our legs and have to lie at the ragged icy bottom, simultaneously freezing and starving to death?
“We’re too tired,” Dad says. “Not to mention dehydrated. The snow’s shorter by hours.” He buckles all of our belts together, plus ties together all of our jeans, hoping that the improvised line will be sturdy enough to hold our combined weight if one of us falls through. Off we go in our underwear and jackets, crossing ever so slowly: Abbie in the lead, me in the middle, my dad anchoring in back.
“Feel out each step,” he shouts. We shuffle onward, easing our boots over the snow. With a branch, Abbie pokes each patch ahead of her, testing whether or not it will hold. I step exactly where she stepped, Dad steps where I did. Our progress is slow, clumsy, nerve-racking. Nobody asks how you’re supposed to feel out your step if you’re falling already.
At last, we come to the end of the slide. We throw down our packs, whooping and dancing. Then we pull our jeans back on and slide down the loose crumbled shale, all the way back to camp.
After dinner, by the fire, Abbie asks me to wash the dishes in the lake. I do it, but not without first thinking, Wash your own stupid dishes and find your own stupid family. It’s strange to hear that hateful, singsong voice in my head, a voice that pipes up all the time back in town. Up on the mountain, it had disappeared. I had tethered myself to Abbie, without question or pause or commentary, trusting her the way people normally do with only their closest family.
Six months later, I come back for Christmas. Winter is one of my favorite times in Alaska. It’s not what people from the Lower Forty-Eight expect. Twenty hours of daily darkness isn’t actually that dark. What soaks through the sky is a hushed, dense purple that glows from the light of the snow, even as the snow glows from the light of the moon. Peop
le speak more quietly during these slow, secret-feeling months. Errands are postponed in favor of naps. Whole days go by where you never change from pajamas into jeans and snowsuits.
Except during Christmas. For two weeks, the world wakes up and blooms. Sledding parties whoosh down the backyards. Lights blaze through the trees, massive Alaskan-sized light displays, as if designed to spread the visible cheer all the way over to the gloomy Soviets across the Bering Strait.
This particular Christmas is no different, except that Dad and Abbie are getting married. At the end of last summer, when I’d left to go back to Baltimore, they’d told me that they’d set a date—New Year’s Eve. At the time, that seemed far, far away, like Easter or college or the black, burning end of the sun. All that subsequent fall, living with Mom, I just didn’t think about it. The wedding disappeared, along with Dad’s face.
Now that I’m back, I find a dress waiting on my bed. It’s my dream dress, a Gunne Sax with white puffy sleeves, perfect for a flower girl. I lift it up, rubbing the soft red velveteen fabric against my cheek. But even so I’m crying; I’m going to stain it. I’m going to ruin the wedding—and my dad is never going to forgive me or speak to me again.
I have to pull my face together.
Luckily, the house looks more like Christmas than a wedding. The kitchen is filled with gifts prepared by seasonally manic neighborhood friends: blueberry jams, cured salmon, caramel popcorn balls, a homemade beaver-fur hat. Moose wander through our backyard, stuffed and stunned on pickings from the garbage cans, the delectable twigs of our landscaped blue spruces.
Dad and Abbie have bought a huge tree at the feed store. “This is going to be a great Christmas!” Dad says. “Just terrific!”
In the living room, Abbie gets on the ladder and I hand up ornaments. They’re chintzy, supermarket items—generic sparkles, bland silver balls. I miss all our old decorations, wrapped in tissue paper, stored in the cardboard trunk. Mom took them when we left: the squirrel with the fluffy real fur tail, the little Jesus asleep in a cradle made from half a walnut shell, the Alaskan Santa on cross-country skis.
According to our phone conversations, Mom is spending Christmas Day feeding the homeless. I don’t know what she does all the other days. Except that I do know. She’s probably sitting alone in the living room, listening to opera. Or sitting in the den, looking at old pictures of us together in her thick, huge scrap-books: The three us by a glacier! The three of us by the pop-top VW camper! The three of us in our first apartment in Anchorage, down by the port!
“Isn’t this great!” says Dad from the sofa.
I turn around. His eyes feel like cameras, waiting to pop the flash. And I smile, oohing and aahing over the handful of boring box tinsel that Abbie holds out. Later, in the kitchen, I make sure to laugh while she and I bake sugar cookies, laugh loud enough for Dad to hear us, tying flies in the living room. I know what he wants. My first night back home, he came up to my room, sat on the edge of my bed, and asked me, “Do you like her?”
I waited—carol music tinkling up from downstairs, my dad’s face looming over me, pale and anxious. I didn’t know what to say.
He took my hand. “I love you,” he said. “It’s important to me how you feel.”
Inside me—a long, white whistle of silence.
“My parents never talked to me about anything. Not even when my dad died. Or my sister. I want us to be different. I want us to talk. Do you like her?”
More silence.
“Leifer?”
I looked in his eyes. I said, “Yeah, Dad. I like her. I like her a lot.”
He hugged me. His eyes got wet, as if I’d given him some huge, sparkly present.
Days pass, full of fires in the woodstoves, snow up to the sills. I’m tired, for no apparent reason. I sleep ten hours, then go back to bed for a nap. I don’t skate, I don’t sled. I don’t call Francy. I don’t go to the grocery store with Dad and Abbie to load up on low-fat eggnog. But I’m relieved when they’re gone. I pull down Dad’s address book. I find the number under M for Mary and call my nana.
Nana lives on an island off Seattle, deep in the forest. She has a little red house on the beach where we collect seashells. Even though she’s Dad’s mother and not Mom’s, Mom and I stayed with her for a few months before we went on our cross-country trip to Baltimore. She knows about things: my rash, my lice, my nightmares. She says there’s nothing you can’t fix with a martini or a peanut-butter-and-butter sandwich. She wears her dyed-silver hair sticking straight up and her go-go pink lipstick all over her face, except for her lips. She has a booming voice that’s louder—and deeper—than Dad’s. All the grown-up relatives call her “a character.”
“Love!” she says.
“Nana?” I say. “I wish you were here!”
There’s a long crackled quiet.
“I’m going to be the flower girl at Dad and Abbie’s wedding. I get to throw rose petals!”
A sharp, sudden breath comes over the phone. Then … is that crying? It’s deep and mangled. It’s awful. It’s like Dad crying. Why is she crying? She never cries.
“Are you okay, Nana?”
End of crying sounds. “That’s my new dog, love. He got attacked by a raccoon last week. I had to take him to the vet.”
“Oh,” I say. Then I say something really dumb. I say, “That’s so funny, Nana. I got attacked by a raccoon, too. He bit me on the arm.” But I’m not crying, the way Nana did when she lied, which made her lying okay. I’m just lying-lying. And Nana knows there are no raccoons in Alaska—only wolverines, which I’ve never seen.
“I have an idea,” she says, very kindly and softly, not like Nana at all. “I’ll meet you in Sea-Tac on the way back to Baltimore. We can change planes together. Won’t that be fun?”
I hang up. I pull open the golden binder rings that hold the address book together, then let them spring shut. I do this again and again, each time listening to that crisp, office-sounding snap of metal on metal. In three days, I have to stand up and get my picture taken at the wedding. I have to be tougher. I have to suck it up and not cry and not let my face or eyes or voice break and go crumpled. If I didn’t fool Nana—even on the phone, where she couldn’t see my face and only my voice counted—there’s no way I’ll survive all those guests and neighbors and cameras.
Two days before the wedding, Dad asks me to help load the plane. He and Abbie are flying out to our cabin on Shell Lake as soon as I leave for school. The pile of gear in the garage, as always, takes up enough space for a few trucks. All of it has to be dragged down the icy hill in our backyard. And it is dark out already, and one or two degrees below zero.
First comes our beloved emergency box, a cooler-sized plywood trunk with rope handles. Inside it lies everything you’d ever need to live on in the bush: a tiny stove, fuel bottles, containers of coffee and tea and Tang and liquor, salt and pepper shakers, a tube of matches. But we never use it for emergencies. We use it like a wilderness kitchen. A very heavy wilderness kitchen. You need two people to lift it.
Dad takes one end, I take the other. But I’m carrying without carrying—my glove is on the rope handle without supporting any weight. Dad has to feel what I’m doing. He slings up the whole box himself finally, banging his hand against the wall of the house. He cries out. I wander off, ignoring the blood on his knuckles as I drag sleeping bags through the snow (getting them wet), as I drop tackle boxes (losing lures all over the yard), as I go to the bathroom, spending ten or twenty minutes washing my hands while Dad loads up the ice auger, the rods, the duffel bags, the rifles, the shotguns, and probably another two hundred pounds of miscellaneous equipment.
I can feel the ball of frustration in him, compressing, held tight. Even as I pretend to sweep up the garage, tripping over the broom, spilling the dustpan. He sweeps up for me. Then takes out the garbage cans.
As I head upstairs to my room, he stops me on the steps. “Leigh,” he calls up. “There’s a couple of presents up there in your room, wra
p them up for me, will you?”
“Whose presents?”
“Abbie’s.”
We’re on the landing of the stairs. I start to shake. And this rage, it isn’t about Dad and Abbie’s wedding or their honeymoon or their matching champagne flutes. It’s about the subject directly in front of us—the presents. Because it’s all of a sudden obvious: My dad is a cheater. A stinky, lying, disgusting cheater! He’s going to try to give Abbie presents that I wrapped, as if he’d wrapped them himself. And I wrap presents perfectly, with tight corners and invisible seams and crisscrossing ribbons like people give each other on soap operas, which I watch in the basement in the dark in Baltimore alone, waiting for Mom to come home from work.
Cheater, I think. You’re a cheater! But what comes out of my mouth instead is low and wrong and whispered. “You’re a bastard,” I say.
“What did you say?”
I lift up my face so he can see my mouth. “I said: You’re a bastard.” Even before it happens, I know what’s coming. Dad lifts up his hand, and then it’s slamming toward me, fast and hard and big. I’m ready for it. I deserve it. Except. I duck. And Dad misses, his hand slashing right over my head.
Run, I think. Run. But I can’t. I crumple to the floor, right at his boots.
Dad swings me over his shoulder and throws me into my room. I hit the bed and roll off it onto the carpet. The door slams. I wait for a while, then pull the comforter off and lie there on the floor, the late-afternoon moon shafting through the slats of the blinds. I’m crying but that’s okay, it’s just scared-crying, not the hurt kind.
Hours later, Abbie comes in. She has a plate of moose hot dog with her, cut up into little chewable pieces, as if I were a baby. She holds one out. “Just one bite.”
I shut my eyes.
She is quiet for a long time. I hear her breathing. I can feel the warmth of her body in the air, even though she isn’t touching me. “I guess,” she says, finally, “what your dad’s upset about is that you think that way about him.”