The bedrooms lock from the inside, but not from the outside. You push Jacqueline’s door open and stand in the hallway for a minute, looking in. It occurs to you: You’ve never gone into her bedroom like this. You’ve never sneaked behind her back. You feel like a traitor. You feel disloyal.
And you’re frightened, too—not by the possibility of Jacqueline running away, but by the reality of what she’ll do when you stop her. She’ll be furious. She’ll hit you. She’ll never forgive you. Despite it all, you’re still not certain that she’ll really even do it, and if she doesn’t, what then? This will be for nothing. And imagine her fury in that case.
But you’ve got to do it, and once you step inside her bedroom, you move faster and more easily. You move with purpose. You crouch on the floor beside her bed, and you reach. There’s the dagger wrapped in its towel. And there—there’s the hatbox. You leave the dagger where it lies, and you slide the hatbox out from underneath the bed.
It’s empty. The tickets and money are gone. But you’re not surprised. Wouldn’t you have done the same? You know your sister as well as you know yourself, and you expected her to take extra precautions. After all, she knows you, too.
What she doesn’t know is this: You’re no dummy. You’ve got her figured out. You know about a second place where she hides things: the vanity that used to belong to your mother. It has three drawers—one in the middle, and two in the sides, and the drawers in either side pull out if you lift them from their tracks. There’s just enough space behind them to hide something. Before the vanity was kept in Jacqueline’s room, it was kept in yours; the two of you have agreed to share it, passing it back and forth in yearlong intervals. When you had the vanity to yourself, you liked to hide knickknacks and notes from boys behind the drawers, not because they needed hiding, but because it was fun to have a secret place all your own. And when you noticed one recent afternoon that the right-side drawer was slightly crooked, not quite on its track, you knew that Jacqueline had discovered the same thing about the vanity that you had.
Carefully, you remove the right drawer. It sticks for a moment, as if something is holding it back, and when it finally comes free, you see what that something is: dollar bills caught in the track. You pull them out, and in a minute more you have the rest of the money, all one hundred dollars, heaped on Jacqueline’s bed. She’s stashed the tickets with the money, and you take those, too, but after you’ve loaded the money and the tickets into your grocery bag, you pause for a second and think.
The other drawer. What’s she hiding there? You’ve got what you came for, but you can’t help but look. You remove the left drawer, and in the narrow cavity it conceals, Jacqueline has hidden a dozen folded papers. The letters from Jacob.
His penmanship is, perhaps, the nicest you’ve ever seen. That’s the first thing you notice. Swift and elegant, perfectly lined and evenly spaced, it reminds you of your teacher’s writing, and Miss Heidelman claims that she still practices lines on the chalkboard every morning before school. For a moment, you just hold the letters and study their grace, but then you start reading.
She sounds like a dope, one reads.
If she talked to me like that, reads another, I’d slap her teeth out. She deserves it.
That’s you they’re talking about. You’re the dope. You’re the one who deserves to get her teeth slapped out. Of course, you’re not the letters’ only focus. Mostly, Jacob boasts about Germany. About wealth. He brags about his wife, her beauty, her kindness. Endlessly, he praises your sister, calling her brilliant and beautiful and brave. He knows all about The Plan, and in his letters he responds to it with enthusiasm, soothing your sister’s doubts and driving her forward. But among all the boasting and praise, in almost every letter he writes about you, too, responding in kind to the unspecified things that your sister has said about you. They’ve even got a nickname for you.
And when it comes to Booby Beth, one paragraph reads, don’t listen to her. She sounds about as fun as a boiled egg, and about as smart, too.
The first time I meet her, reads another, I’ll tell Booby just what you suggested, but if she starts to cry, try not to laugh.
That’s the last thing you read. You crumple the page in your fists, and then you’re shoveling all the letters into the grocery bag, heaping them on top of the money and the tickets. You replace the drawers, but before you leave, you open the vanity’s center drawer, too, and you snatch up the photograph of Jacob’s wife. You take the dagger while you’re at it, and then you retrieve the cigarette case hidden in your room. You rip out its portraits without lifting the clasp, and you toss the pictures into your bag with the money and the tickets.
The dagger and the cigarette case come first. Your arms want to work. You want to break something. In your father’s workshop, you take a pair of tongs and a straight-peen hammer from the wall, and you set the case on the anvil. It doesn’t take much. The metal is thin and malleable. Friendly, your father calls it. You hold it steady with the tongs, and you strike it again and again, until at last it’s as thin as a buffalo nickel and cracked around the edges, the clustered ivy nothing more than trampled smears.
The dagger is tougher, less friendly, but with effort it warps all the same. You keep it in the scabbard and start at the bottom, flattening the blade and its sheath inch by inch. The filigree goes smooth; the ribbons spread flat. Then you hammer the grip. The pearloid shatters instantly, showering the workshop with crystalline shards. One nicks your open eye, but this only emboldens you, and soon you’re hammering the grip with breathless ferocity. You gasp for air through your open mouth. Your arms burn. Your back sweats. Twice, you miss the grip entirely and hit the anvil instead, and sparks spurt through the air. But you keep hammering, until at last the grip is a mangled, twisted waste.
You hide the dagger and the cigarette case behind the crates in the corner. Then you step outside, and you circle around to the back of your father’s workshop. You pile the money together, just like you would paper and kindling, and soon the bills are caught and smoking.
They burn quickly. The flames eat them up like they’re newsprint, but you’ve got plenty to stoke the fire with. When the money’s all gone, you feed the fire with the train tickets and Jacob’s notes, two at a time, those beautiful loops and lines all burning to ash. Finally, you add the pictures of Jacob’s wife. At first they only curl, but then the fire engulfs the lot of them, and the marvelous woman is gone, vanished a dozen times over into a soup of crackling bubbles.
You watch the fire die away, and then you spread the heap of ashes with your foot. Slivers of the money and corners of the notes litter the grass, and you’re glad that they do. You don’t want the fire to eat up everything. You want bits and pieces. You want your sister to see this. You want her to know that you really did it—that you’re not playing some trick on her—but mostly you want slivers and shards because you know that they will make it hurt more. You know that something left behind is worse than nothing left behind.
With two fingers, you lift one triangle of blackened paper, and you let it flutter back to the grass. You close your eyes for a minute. You breathe the acrid smell of smoke, and you listen to the birds singing across the yard. The wind gently blows, and it feels good against your damp skin. Your heart is racing. Your hands ache. But you feel triumphant, better than you have all week.
And yet, you feel like crying. You stand in the shadow of your father’s workshop, and you fight the lump that’s growing in your throat, the tightness in your chest. You wish your sister were here. You wish that none of this had ever happened. You wish that you and Jacqueline were together again, and you feel an uncanny sense of terror that she and your father will never return from Ephrata.
“Listen,” you say, and you shut your eyes tighter. “Just listen.”
The katydids are chattering. Listen. The wind whistles past your ears. Listen. There’s the rumble of a car struggling up
the hill around the corner, and there’s the sound of your breath, your pulse in each ear. Listen. Just listen. That’s all you have to do. Take it in, and calm yourself down.
Your sister and papa will return. Everything is fine. What you’re feeling is from the work you’ve just done. The exertion of it. The work has made your head go funny. You’re being unreasonable. Your sister and papa will come back from Ephrata, and then—then Jacqueline will see what you’ve done.
But she’ll forgive you. She has to. In time, everything will be as it once was.
CHAPTER 18
Margaret’s twelfth birthday came, and the strawberry whipped cream cake was not well received.
“I don’t even like strawberries,” Margaret said. “Don’t you know that?” And without taking so much as an appraising bite, she scrunched up her face and added, “It’s too sweet. It’s ick.”
In unblinking silence, every eye in the room was watching Elisabeth, which meant that all of Tanacross was watching her, too. Only a handful of families had turned out—five families, to be exact, a total of sixteen people—but Elisabeth knew well enough that these couples and their children were scouts of a kind. By tomorrow afternoon, the entire town would know every detail of this get-together, but only one detail would stick. The spoiled child. The haughty white girl. The daughter for whom nothing was good enough, and wasn’t a daughter the product of her mother?
The Athabaskans loved rich food. They ate butter like candy, chunks of fat like vitamins. Once, Elisabeth saw a boy and his father eating Crisco like a tub of ice cream. In far-flung Alaska, a strawberry cream cake was nothing short of an unparalleled delicacy. Margaret’s reaction was tantamount to spitting in Elisabeth’s face. Spitting in all of their faces. Elisabeth traded a look with John. Then she pulled out a chair and took a seat.
“This is the cake I made,” she told Margaret, “and it’ll have to do. You can eat it, or you can sit there and be rude. That’s all there is to it.”
And in the end, Margaret did eat a piece of the cake, chewing glumly, as if the frosting were made of sand. Everyone else seemed to love the dessert; Elisabeth had made enough for twenty guests, and what little cake remained after the initial round was quickly consumed.
If there was one saving grace to the party, it was Margaret’s gratitude when it came to opening gifts. With the exception of Deborah Denny and her mother—who had gifted Margaret a pair of traditional beaded mittens, deshoz jeyh—every guest gave her a book, and Margaret was thrilled with them all.
“Tsíná’ęę,” she told them. Thank you very much. “Tsíná’ęę de’ishłęę.” I’m grateful.
And at least to Elisabeth’s blunt ears, Margaret spoke as smoothly as a native speaker, and her words sounded sincere. Elisabeth had to choke back an unexpected surge of tears.
The party lasted through the late afternoon, and it wasn’t until eight o’clock that night that Elisabeth realized she had neglected to retrieve the mail. It was Thursday, the second and final delivery day of the week, but somehow that fact had escaped her. Cooking and preparing for the party had been distraction enough, and then there was the odd way that summertime days in Alaska all blended together. When the sun barely set—when it dipped beneath the horizon one minute only to rise again the next—it was easy to mix days up. The first summer they had spent in Tanacross, Elisabeth had x-ed out the days on her calendar with the diligence of a prisoner notching weeks into the plaster of his cell. It was the only way that she could keep things straight.
John was busy grading in the spare bedroom. With her head resting on Delma like a pillow, Margaret lay reading on the living room floor. Neither of them noticed Elisabeth leave. Crossing the town in a hurry, she felt like a woman sneaking out for a tryst, which she supposed—in a way—she was.
The box of mail still sat on the landing strip. A wealth of packages and crates sat beside it, deliveries of food and clothing and gifts for an upcoming potlatch in honor of Mack. For weeks now, the Sanford family had received shipments of goods just like this. On Monday, the delivery had been large enough that it took Mr. Glaser and Henry Isaac—a second cousin of Mack’s—nearly half an hour to unload it all.
“Those are for the potlatch, too?” Elisabeth had asked, nodding at a massive wooden crate stamped with a block of text that read WINCHESTER REPEATING ARMS CO. WCF .30, in fat black letters.
“The potlatch? No,” Henry said, deadly serious. “These are for killing Nips.” Then he and Mr. Glaser had burst into laughter.
Elisabeth was glad that today’s box of mail was largely lost among the bigger packages, and she was even more relieved to find that, in spite of the time, the box was still stuffed with catalogues and envelopes. She wasn’t the only person who had forgotten to check the delivery, and Elisabeth counted her blessings for that. Had a solitary letter been waiting in the crate, one embellished with Alfred’s florid script, that wouldn’t have looked good. It didn’t look good regardless, but among a mix of magazines and other envelopes, Elisabeth’s mail blended in. Or she hoped it did.
And indeed a letter from Alfred was waiting for her. She could hardly resist tearing it open right away, but first she hurried back to the house and took a seat on a stump by the woodpile, where the angle of the yard and the formidable stack of aspen logs hid her from the street and onlooking windows. She began to read.
Darling Elisabeth,
I received your package. To say I am pleased with your continued correspondence, and with the items you enclosed, would be an understatement. I am ecstatic, truly. I can think of no finer way to put it.
Do you know what that word means? Ecstatic.
Yes, of course you do — you’re a brilliant woman — but do you know its origin? The prison has a tattered old dictionary, and I looked it up. It comes from the Greek word ekstasis, which means entrancement to the point of insanity.
Isn’t that marvelous? It is marvelous, Elisabeth, because that is precisely how I felt when I received your items. They enraptured me. They took me to a place of belonging and beauty, and you were there with me. I am buried alone in the depths of this cage, but with your gifts I am with you, not only in thought but in body now, too.
Can you hear me speaking to you in your sleep? Each night as I fall away, I whisper to you, and I know that I am reaching you, if only in your dreams. You are two hundred miles away, but know that I am lying there beside you, and I am talking. I am reaching you, Elisabeth Helene Metzger Pfautz. I am penetrating your mind.
And that is how I know you are in trouble. Elisabeth: I worry about you. The woman in your portrait—she’s drowning, isn’t she? And the woman in your photograph — she’s weeping. You are crying out in anguish, but your husband and your family and your Indians cannot hear you. But I can. I hope you remember that, always.
You have spoiled me, Elisabeth. You have lavished me with generosity, and now words and ink and printed paper are not enough. Here’s the next part of our exchange, the second gift I want from you:
Your mind.
I want you to visit me in Fairbanks.
I want to see you in the flesh.
I want to hear your voice.
Come alone, and in exchange I’ll bring you one step closer to your sister.
The date is 16 September. I am waiting. And in the interim, I will be whispering.
Yours sincerely,
Alfred H. K. Seidel
P.S.
I did not forget my end of the bargain. In exchange for the package you sent, I offer you my own first gift. I’ve already delivered it, you see. It is hanging in Margaret’s closet.
Elisabeth lifted her eyes, and an icy coolness took hold of her. Then she stood, and she walked around the house and opened the front door. In the living room, Margaret was still lying in the same spot: supine, legs sprawled across the floor, Delma breathing gently beneath her head. She was reading L
ittle House in the Big Woods—a gift from Elisabeth and John, along with the next three letters of the encyclopedia—and she was wearing the same white dress that she had worn to the party. A beautiful dress, one with pink lilies embroidered around the shoulders. It was a hand-me-down, but for the past few months, it had fit Margaret perfectly.
And why wouldn’t it? It had been Elisabeth’s dress when she was a child, and her adolescent self and Margaret were almost exactly the same height and build. She and Margaret, and Jacqueline, too. Elisabeth stepped forward, and Margaret looked up.
“What, Mama?” Margaret said, lifting her eyes and lowering her book. “What is it?”
But Elisabeth just shook her head.
“It’s nothing,” she told her. “Never mind,” and she made herself turn and walk out of the room.
* * *
—
But it wasn’t nothing. The dress was Jacqueline’s, and Elisabeth confirmed as much later that night, after Margaret and John had both gone to bed.
She pulled the dress out of Margaret’s hamper, and she sat with it at the kitchen table. To keep their clothing sorted out, their father would stitch her and Jacqueline’s separate initials into the fabric of their dresses and skirts. He insisted on doing this even when Elisabeth and Jacqueline were older—older and more skilled at sewing than he was. His stubbornness and the untimely death of their mother had forced their father to learn certain skills. Embroidery and sewing were among them, though he wasn’t especially talented at either. His stitched letters resembled the handwriting of a child—blocky and inelegant and invariably lopsided—but those letters were still clear enough to read.
Elisabeth was looking at three of them now. JGM—Jacqueline Gabriela Metzger—stitched on the inner backside of the dress’s skirt. Elisabeth ran her thumb across the stitching, feeling the thread, closing her eyes. She had plenty of clothes from her childhood, and that was why she hadn’t singled out the dress as anything unusual.
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