But in fact this dress was the only article of her sister’s clothing still in existence. A year after Jacqueline’s disappearance, their father had destroyed her entire wardrobe. Elisabeth was a senior in high school before she ever thought to ask her aunt Ethel about the clothes’ absence. Her father was dead by then, and she was living with Ethel and her uncle Harry. In cleaning the house one idle Sunday, Elisabeth came across six boxes of her childhood clothing—intended hand-me-downs—and immediately she noticed that there were no boxes of Jacqueline’s clothes. Why not?
“Your father gathered everything up,” her aunt explained, “and he burned it all.” And when Elisabeth had asked why he’d ever do such a thing, her aunt had simply said, “Drink,” though of course Elisabeth understood that it was much more than that. Losing a loved one was terrible, but losing a loved one and having some hope of that person’s return was something entirely different—and entirely worse. That was why her father had burned Jacqueline’s clothing. Bitterness comes easily from the things you have lost, but more easily still from the things you have lost but not lost completely.
So all her sister’s clothing had been destroyed, yet here was this dress. Here, because of Alfred, was the single surviving piece of Jacqueline’s wardrobe. Her body, Alfred had asked for, and in exchange, what he had given Elisabeth was her sister’s body. She saw the symmetry of it right away. Their mutual gifts.
But how—how had he gotten it? That was the important thing. There was one simple explanation, and again Elisabeth felt that icy coolness sweeping through her when she thought of it: The dress had been the dress that her sister was wearing when she disappeared.
Wasn’t that the only explanation? The only possibility? It was, but Elisabeth wracked her mind, and for the life of her, she couldn’t remember with certainty what her sister had been wearing the day she disappeared. She had been wearing a dress, and it was white, but she and Jacqueline had owned at least a dozen white dresses, and she couldn’t remember the details or design of the one in question. MISSING GIRL, the signs and tabloid advertisements had all read. BLONDE. ELEVEN YEARS OLD. GERMANIC. TALL FOR HER AGE. TALKY. LAST SEEN WEARING A WHITE COTTON DRESS. JACQUELINE METZGER. BRING OUR GIRL HOME. There had been no specifics, not that Elisabeth could recall.
And God, how she wished there had been. She sat at the kitchen table, and she rubbed at her temples. White dress. Your sister. The year of all years. The smell of summer. Think. But she couldn’t remember. It was too far away. She couldn’t be sure.
But she didn’t have to be. That was all beside the point. This was Jacqueline’s dress, and that meant one thing: Alfred had known Jacqueline—or their family—after she had disappeared. This was more than a lead. There was no chance for coincidences here. This was bona fide proof of his involvement, and perhaps something more. Elisabeth searched every inch of the dress’s fabric, looking for stains, marks of any kind. There was nothing, but in studying its seams and wear and tear, what Elisabeth noticed most about the dress was how the fabric felt—how soft it was, and how sheer. It had the feeling of a dress that had been worn and washed many times.
And yet how many times could Jacqueline have worn it? How long would it have fit her before she disappeared? A year, at most? And it wasn’t as if the dress was one that Jacqueline had worn frequently before her disappearance; Elisabeth would have remembered it otherwise. Margaret either. Today was just the second or third time that Margaret had worn the dress, partial as she was to more rugged clothing: canvas skirts, knee-high socks, thick cotton shirts. But this dress—this was a dress that had been worn dozens and dozens of times. Well used. Well taken care of. Lived in.
I want you to visit me in Fairbanks, Alfred had written. He wanted to talk with her, one-on-one.
Nothing would please her more. Just keep running? To hell with running. She was sprinting now.
CHAPTER 19
Mack’s potlatch was held that Sunday and, with it, Elisabeth and John faced a difficult decision. They could attend the potlatch and risk being unwelcome guests, or they could avoid it altogether and risk offending Mack’s memory and the entire town along with it. Elisabeth wanted their family to attend. John felt otherwise.
“It’s an Athabaskan function,” he said. “We’d be out of place.”
But that wasn’t entirely true. They had been to a handful of these events in the past, and they had never felt unwelcome. Then again, they were always out of place to some degree in Tanacross, and even more it was clear that this was going to be an event much different from the other potlatches that they had attended.
For one thing, the scale of Mack’s potlatch seemed large enough for a town two or three times the size of Tanacross. There were boxes of gifts and guns and food, but as it turned out, those were just the beginning. The Sanford family made dozens of blankets, mittens, hats, necklaces, tunics, and ts’enîin tl’ŭul’—beaded slings for carrying babies—a quantity of gifts that must have entailed almost round-the-clock work since Mack’s murder.
Peering out the living room window, John was watching some of that work right now. It was just before noon, and Henry Isaac was busy draping all the soon-to-be-gifted blankets and clothes on the beams of a makeshift fence near the banks of the Tanana River. The effect was a bending sprawl of color as long as several houses. Nearby, Daniel Nilak and his two older brothers were constructing a kind of open-air pavilion, complete with a patchwork floor made of teal linoleum that they had flown in from Fairbanks.
“There’s no way we can go to this,” John said, stepping away from the window. “It’ll be awful. Everyone will be glaring at us the whole time. We’ll ruin the whole thing.”
“We have to go,” Elisabeth insisted. “We’ll stand out like sore thumbs if we’re not there.”
“Then we’ll be sore thumbs. To hell with it.”
“Think of what our absence would say. It’d be totally disrespectful to Mack, and wasn’t Mack our friend? Isn’t that reason enough to attend? This is his funeral, for God’s sake. His Athabaskan funeral. Think of what we’ll imply if we don’t attend. It’ll look like we’re admitting fault for what happened. It’ll look like we’re standing by Alfred, not Mack.”
John paced across the room, clicking his teeth as if he were chewing food, an old habit of his that Elisabeth had always found irritating. “We’re not the most popular folks in town right now,” he said.
“And we’ll be even less popular if we don’t show up,” Elisabeth told him, but she really didn’t have to. She could tell that John was already starting to waffle.
Around five o’clock, the shooting began. A volley of shots cut through the air, followed closely by another, then another after that. On cue, people started shuffling outside and, with Margaret in tow, John and Elisabeth followed suit. The shots went on for five more minutes, and soon Elisabeth was standing with everyone else in front of their source: Daniel, his brothers, Henry, and several of Mack’s other cousins and nephews were lined up along the river, each of them firing a gleaming new rifle into the air and over the water.
From the looks of it, the entire town was in attendance. Even the Ingrahams were there, despite how much they kept to themselves, and it was especially surprising to see Rita. Although Father Ingraham rarely traveled, Rita spent entire months at a time in Juneau, absences that suited Elisabeth and everyone else in town well enough. Rita wasn’t exactly well liked. She was condescending and unapologetically blunt, a bad combination, and during her many years in town she had managed to offend almost everyone at one point or another. Oh, but think nothing of it, she would often add on the heels of some muted insult. What I feel is only what I feel. Once, she scolded Elisabeth for letting Margaret read so much, saying that little girls who read too much grew up to be either bachelorette librarians or pompous schoolteachers.
“Oh, but think nothing of it,” Rita had added, true to form. “What I feel is only what I feel.”
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br /> “What I feel,” Elisabeth had told John later that evening, “is that you’re a nasty old bitch.”
But tonight, at first, Elisabeth did her best to be the friendly neighbor. When she and Rita spotted each other in the crowd outside of the pavilion, Elisabeth was all smiles. Rita had been out of town since late May. Thank God she hadn’t been in Tanacross in July, and thank God she had returned only a few days ago. Mack’s murder would have been the gossiping event of her life, but it was difficult to gossip through once-a-week letters shared only with your buttoned-up husband. Even if Rita had sent messages to other folks in town, Elisabeth doubted that she received many replies.
And if Rita wished to gossip now, she wasn’t letting on. She and Elisabeth chatted about their sleep, the sun, the war in Europe. Everything, it seemed, but the murder. They talked about Rita’s new granddaughter—“Cute,” she said, “but a bit too fat, even for a baby”—which had been the occasion for her recent stint away from town. Only when the conversation began to dwindle did Mack come up, and even then, they avoided direct references to what had happened.
“I won’t pretend I knew him very well,” Rita said, glancing off to the side and taking a survey of who might be listening. Then she leaned forward and added, crooking her jaw, “I know he wasn’t much of a churchgoing man, so of course there’s that,” and it was easy to understand from her tone that this charge was aimed also at Elisabeth and John; they attended Father Ingraham’s services about once a month, if that. Pfautz, she remembered Rita saying the first time they met. Is that Jewish? And Elisabeth had told her that, no, it was simply German. Ah, Rita had said, and the face she made in response was very similar to the one she was making now, a face unafraid to show its casual disdain, its haughty disapproval.
“What say we all sit together?” Rita said.
And Elisabeth paused for a second, and replied, without thinking or filtering, “I would, but I’d rather not listen to your bullshit for the whole night,” and a second later she and John and Margaret were shuffling inside the pavilion while Rita stood dumbstruck behind them.
Let her gossip. If anything, that single sentence would do more to endear them to the town than anything else in the whole three years they had lived here.
The day had already cooled off, and the air inside the pavilion was sweet and thick. Four separate bonfires surrounded the enclosure, filling the space overhead with wisps of ribboning smoke. Moving in one slowly shifting motion, the crowd arranged itself into rows that formed six concentric squares, everyone facing the center of the pavilion. When the crowd sat down, knives and forks and ceramic cups and bowls were passed from person to person, and a minute after that everyone was knocking their bowls against the linoleum floor, a torrent of clattering noise that sounded like driving rain. Grinning, enthralled with the potlatch already, Margaret joined in.
“Stop it,” John said, reaching out and snatching at her wrist. But, really, who was he to stop her? Why should they seem any more out of place than they already were? Elisabeth picked up her bowl and clasped it, unmoving, in her hands. She wasn’t sure what to do, so she just sat there.
Massive kettles of tea began moving through the crowd. Each person—Elisabeth and John included—doled out one cup at a time, drank it quickly, then waited for the next kettle to come around. All the while, Elisabeth expected the eyes to start falling on them. She expected to hear murmurs, the furtive whispering of judgment and doubt. But nothing ever came. The kettles moved, and people talked and nodded happily among themselves. Elisabeth felt no twinge of awkwardness in the air. She had no sense that they weren’t welcome. Not yet.
After the third kettle of tea had been served, the music began, and with it some of the older people in the crowd rose to their feet and began to sing, their voices breathless wails that sounded to Elisabeth like melodic weeping. As they sang, they danced. Men and women laid down their cups and then stood, breaking into song before they had even left their rows. Most of the young people remained sitting, but in time a few joined the chorus—Kira Denali, Clarence Sanford, Big Paul Elmer, Mary Mabel Mildred—all of them noticeably stiffer than the older dancers, stiffer and, Elisabeth could tell, less sincere.
“Care to dance, Else?”
Teddy was standing above her, smiling as he bowed cordially.
Elisabeth feigned a little laugh, though she wasn’t sure if she should be laughing at all. Perhaps he was serious. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about it,” she said. “I couldn’t keep up.”
Teddy shook hands with John and exchanged a quick greeting. Then he was sitting down beside them. “Oh, I’m sure you could manage,” he told Elisabeth. “The dancing is like”—he thought for a second, turning his head toward the center of the floor—“well, it’s like painting or drawing, that’s all, and you can draw, can’t you?”
She thought of her self-portrait from only days before. She’s drowning, isn’t she?
“Stick figures,” Elisabeth said. “Not much more than that.”
Teddy laughed. “Well, I’m sure they’re brilliant stick figures, Else. I’m sure you’re the Michelangelo of stick figures.” His attention trailed off. He was listening to the music, watching the dancers again. “Yeah,” he finally added, “Mack was a hell of a guy.” Teddy laughed, though it wasn’t as much a laugh as a sigh, a single jolt that moved his entire body. He smiled, shaking his head. “This may look like a big deal, but it could never be big enough. It could never do him justice.”
That almost broke Elisabeth down. She had braced herself for this potlatch—she had sworn that she would keep a good face, not free of sadness necessarily, though at least free of weakness—but Teddy’s remark made her chest go tight. Because, of course, he was right. Nothing could ever give Mack what he deserved. The world owed Mack something more than dying on the landing strip. Something better than that, something justified. But that wasn’t this world. This was a world of hook wrenches. A world of murder and hatred and dying in the dust. A world of disappearing children.
Her eyes were throbbing. It was all she could do to keep herself from crying, however sensible crying would be, tonight of all nights. The singers wailed. The crowd beat their cups against the ground. Around the fires, men and women were leaning forward to singe their hair, and the breeze was sharp now with the bitter smell of burning. Dusk was fast overtaking the sky, its shroud of thickening blue creeping up from the horizon, and against the fires’ heaving light the distant trees seemed to slope ever closer with a life of their own. Elisabeth stared down at the floor. She closed her eyes. She tried to breathe.
Then there was Teddy’s voice cutting through it all, and his words were soft and easy once again.
“And how about you, sweetheart?” he said, speaking to Margaret. “Do you want to dance?”
“No,” Margaret said. “I can’t draw either,” and Teddy laughed.
The potlatch went on. Dancing, singing, music, kettle after kettle of tea, round after round of food, dumplings and caribou and salmon punctuated strangely with the food that the Sanford family had flown in from the city—glazed ham, oranges, pineapples, ice cream, Hershey’s chocolate bars.
“A taste of home,” John said, snapping off a piece of the candy between his teeth. “But I would have preferred some Wilbur’s.”
The singing never ceased, but in time the melodies shifted in tone and temper. Doleful songs gave way to lighter music, and soon the potlatch felt very different from the way it had begun. At no one’s concentrated direction, it became a celebration—a raucous, convivial party. By eight o’clock, the air was as rich with laughter and chattering voices as it was with singing. Despite the tears that had hung in Elisabeth’s eyes only hours before, the night began to melt away with talk and food; she spoke at length with Henry and Kira and half a dozen others, conversations coming comfortably and naturally. Maybe, Elisabeth thought, John’s sense of things was wrong. Maybe both of t
hem were wrong. There was no hint of wariness in anyone’s eyes, no note of hesitance in anyone’s voice. No one seemed to treat her any differently than they had before the summer, before the war, before Alfred. Unexpectedly, Elisabeth found that she was having a wonderful time.
Then, winding back to her original seat, she saw that the same couldn’t be said for John. She had been away for only a few minutes, but now John was sitting with both hands balled beneath his chin. His eyes stared off to the side. His lips faintly grimaced. Later, Elisabeth would remember Daniel Nilak walking heavy-footed in the opposite direction, but for the moment, he was simply one more swaying body within the crowd, one more person among so many.
“Ready?” John said, looking up at her.
“Ready for what?”
“To leave.”
“It’s still early,” Elisabeth said, and then—reaching for a joke, just a little one—she smiled. “You haven’t even asked me to dance yet.”
But John was having none of it.
“Else,” he said, “we should go.” He turned to the side and pointed at Margaret with his chin. She was leaning her head against his arm. She had dozed off.
“Oh,” Elisabeth said, and she took a step back. “Well, we at least need to get in line before we go.”
“What line?”
“The receiving line.”
John stood, and Margaret, blinking sleepily, rose beside him. “I don’t think I want any gifts,” John said. “I don’t think we need any gifts.”
“Well, yes, but it’d be rude if we didn’t accept something. It’s part of this whole”—she searched for the right word—“tradition.”
Silent, John watched her for a moment. Then, rolling his eyes, he took Margaret’s hand.
The receiving line was actually two separate lines: the first for men and their Winchester rifles; the second for women and everything else. Although the night was still young—one of Henry’s brothers had told Elisabeth that the potlatch would last well into the morning—a number of families had already begun to gather around the lines, though the men’s line seemed to move much quicker. John split off from Elisabeth and Margaret, and it wasn’t five minutes later when he returned, one hand clasping the tall profile of a new .30-30 rifle. Its stock was solid wood, but its barrel and the loop of its lever twinkled like polished glass in the light of the nearby fires.
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