“Dovetail saw,” she would whisper, and the air felt cold enough to freeze her heart. “Fretsaw. Backsaw. Bucksaw. Bow saw.”
* * *
—
It was around that time—the January term, midwinter—when Margaret started acting strange. She had taken the move to Fairbanks in stride, or so at least it seemed. When John and Elisabeth had asked her how she felt about enrolling at Ladd, Margaret had shrugged.
“That’s fine,” she told them, and then quizzically tilted her head. “But who is Ladd Airfield named after?”
If there had been a response more typical for Margaret, Elisabeth couldn’t guess it. She’ll be fine, Elisabeth had thought. In all likelihood, Margaret would thrive in her new environment. She was placed in a sixth-grade class, though her composition skills, arithmetic, and background in science were more in tune with a seventh- or even eighth-grade curriculum. She was more than adequately prepared in terms of her background, and when it came to making friends, Elisabeth had felt certain that Margaret wouldn’t flounder. Her intellectual curiosity had always lent itself to a brand of friendly effervescence; in Tanacross, she had been just as keen to learn about hurricanes or the life cycle of jellyfish as she was to share that knowledge with other children. Yes, Elisabeth thought. She’ll certainly be fine.
But almost straightaway, Margaret changed. She was quieter, but it wasn’t this alone that seemed strange. It was the mood of her quietness, the feel of it. Margaret’s reticence was weighty and foreboding. Her silence had all the tension of someone lost in thought on the heels of an argument. Once, the two of them were reading together in the living room, and Elisabeth noticed that Margaret’s eyes weren’t even moving. Her gaze was fixed on a page of her dog-eared cryptogram book, but she was sitting in motionless detachment like a person stuck in time. Even her blinking seemed to cease.
“What are you thinking about?” Elisabeth asked her.
“Leopards,” Margaret told her, but somehow Elisabeth sensed that this was a lie, not Margaret herself but a careful impersonation of her.
Her schoolwork had its own peculiarities. Her teacher gave frequent quizzes in math and spelling, and Margaret’s results were almost always the same: one or two answers shy of perfect. That was fine, naturally, but her mistakes were so out of step with her other answers that Elisabeth had to wonder if they were intentional. On one vocabulary test, Margaret spelled every word flawlessly but one—crystal, which she spelled krystelle. The following week was more of the same. Every answer was perfect but calligraphy, which Margaret spelled kayligrafy.
She was reaching out, Elisabeth guessed. She was pleading for more attention, more love, more something. And that seemed to make sense, the blame for which lay squarely on Elisabeth’s own shoulders. But when she confronted Margaret plainly about the quizzes, she swore that her mistakes were genuine, and she promised that everything at school was fine, perfectly fine. And was she making friends?
“Scads,” Margaret said. “Scores and scads.”
Then, early one morning, Elisabeth awoke to go to the bathroom and noticed that a light was shining from the hallway. She poked her head outside the door and saw that the light was coming from Margaret’s bedroom. At first, she didn’t think anything of it. After three years in Tanacross, they were all still getting reacquainted with things like electricity and running water. They forgot to flush toilets and turn off light switches, and more than once Elisabeth had briefly scolded herself for neglecting to stoke the fire in the kitchen, only to remember that their stove was now electric.
Yawning, she pushed Margaret’s door open and reached for the switch on the wall. Then she glanced at Margaret’s bed, and she saw that her daughter was gone. She padded down the hallway, presuming that a light would be on in the bathroom. It wasn’t. The kitchen, then, Elisabeth thought, but Margaret wasn’t there either. The refrigerator softly hummed and ticked, but the kitchen was dark and cold. Elisabeth paced through the house, not panicked, not yet, but she couldn’t find Margaret anywhere. It wasn’t until she circled through the kitchen again and walked past the back door that she noticed Delma and a solitary figure standing in the shimmering white expanse of the backyard. Margaret was still wearing her pajamas and slippers, but she was wearing nothing to sufficiently fortify her against the cold—no parka, no gloves, no scarves. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. The thermometer that hung outside the door read twenty-five degrees below zero.
For a second, the sight of Margaret was so surprising that Elisabeth just stood there in shock, staring. Then she almost screamed. She dove for the door, yanked it open, and rushed out in her bare feet, never thinking to pull on shoes. No matter. She didn’t even feel the snow and ice beneath her. With all of her strength, she grabbed Margaret from behind and heaved her up with both arms, flinging Margaret and herself back inside the house as if the entire yard were on fire, a deadly burning field. For all intents and purposes, it was.
She screamed some garbled approximation of Oh God as she slammed the door behind them, nearly clipping Delma’s nose in the process. Then she and Margaret were tangled up together on the floor, and she was pulling Margaret closer to her. Margaret’s skin—her legs, her ankles, her feet—felt soft but icy cold.
“What are you doing?” Elisabeth shouted. She pulled off Margaret’s right slipper and tucked her foot beneath her arm—Wrap, don’t rub, she had learned about frostbite when they first moved to Alaska—but Margaret jerked her foot away.
“Stop it,” Margaret said. “Get off me. We were only out there a second.”
She scooted back. She was scowling, angrier than she had been in years. Elisabeth was stunned. It was more than the abruptness of Margaret’s resistance, and it was more than just her words. What surprised Elisabeth was Margaret’s tone, which had all the scathing maturity of a girl much older than twelve. With her face pinched into a glower, she even looked older than twelve, as though the person that Elisabeth had pulled inside the house was a different girl than the one who had walked out of it only moments before.
And Elisabeth could see that it had been only moments. There was no trace of frosty whiteness on Margaret’s skin.
“Are you—”
“I’m fine,” Margaret snapped. “I was out there for just a minute.”
Elisabeth shivered. “But why weren’t you wearing anything?”
“I was looking at the northern lights,” Margaret said.
“But why in God’s name weren’t you wearing anything?” Elisabeth repeated, raising her voice, and again she reached out for her. Margaret pulled away, standing now.
“I’m fine,” she said, holding up both hands and splaying her fingers open as though that proved something. “I wasn’t going to freeze to death. I’m not an idiot.”
And before Elisabeth had a chance to respond, Margaret turned and stormed away. John was standing in the darkened kitchen nearby, but for the time, he said nothing. Elisabeth sat by the door for a minute more, feeling distinctly like she had just woken up from a dream.
CHAPTER 29
Weeks passed. The winter pressed on. Margaret’s aloofness continued, but there was nothing else alarming that went with it, not after the early-morning episode when Elisabeth had found her outside. If anything, Margaret’s days seemed comfortably bland. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, she’d return from school around three o’clock, play with her puzzle book or listen to the radio for an hour, eat dinner, help with the dishes, walk Delma. Then she’d start her homework, and it was eight or even nine o’clock before she was finished. Tuesdays and Thursdays were more or less the same, but Margaret stayed a little later at school; she had joined an after-hours jewelry-making club, and she often came home with colorful beaded necklaces, bracelets, and clip-on earrings.
“I made an orca,” she declared one afternoon, holding up a necklace with a beaded pendant the size of a fist. The blocky figure of a whale was b
reaching above a row of cobalt blue waves. “An Athabaskan lady came by and showed us how to do it.”
“That’s wonderful,” Elisabeth told her. “That’s beautiful.”
She was getting along all right, Elisabeth thought. Perhaps what she had said about her “scads” of friends wasn’t far from the truth. She rarely mentioned other children by name, and she never brought any girlfriends to the house, but Elisabeth didn’t find much cause for concern in that. Margaret was still fitting in, after all—she was still, Elisabeth could only assume, one of the “new girls”—but if her willingness to join an extracurricular club was any sign of things to come, Margaret was hardly being antisocial. All things considered, in light of the winter and the war and the move and everything that went with it, she was holding up rather well.
Then Elisabeth learned that she wasn’t. One afternoon in early February, she received a phone call from Catherine Curry, Margaret’s schoolteacher. There had been an incident—her word—and Margaret had been at the center of it.
“She’s still here,” Curry told her. “She’s serving her detention right now.”
Elisabeth went through the motions—the sighs, the apologies, the shaking of heads, the tsk-tsk of ticking tongues. Curry, for her part, wasn’t exactly sympathetic. She was terse, and her report of the incident was vague to the point of being mysterious. When Elisabeth asked what had happened, Curry just paused for a moment and said, “It really would be best if we talked about this in person.”
“Oh,” Elisabeth said. “Yes, that’s fine, but I’d really—”
“Are you free right now?” Curry asked. “You live just down the bend, don’t you?”
“We do,” Elisabeth said, the bend being local shorthand for the neighborhood adjacent to the airfield. Elisabeth had never understood the term; the neighborhood was nothing more than a straight-shot main street with ten avenues on either side of it.
“Excellent,” Curry said. “Can you be here in, say, half an hour?”
It took her a little while to get John on the phone. The upper school secretary placed her on hold for several minutes, then a second hold for several minutes more, then a third hold after that. Finally, John came on the line. He sounded winded and, Elisabeth could tell, more than slightly annoyed.
“And what did she say this is all about?” he asked.
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
“She must have said something.”
“She didn’t. She was very unspecific.”
John groaned. “Well, did she say how long this would take?”
“No,” Elisabeth said. “I told you, she was very unclear about the whole thing. I don’t know what else to say, but I thought you should be there, too. You’re not teaching now, right?”
“I’m not, but that doesn’t mean I’m not busy.”
“All right,” Elisabeth said, “but surely you can spare a few minutes.”
“A few minutes, maybe, but Else, I’ve got a hell of a lot to do.” He exhaled in a tight burst; he was smoking a cigarette. They were quiet for a moment. Then, “Listen, can’t you just handle this?”
“Of course I can handle it,” Elisabeth said, “but I thought it’d be nice for you to be there. Don’t you think so?”
“Nice?”
“Yes, nice,” Elisabeth said. “This is part of keeping up appearances. This is part of being a parent.”
“Thank you,” John said, and paused for effect. “I had forgotten what it means to be a parent, though I did think that my working all the time and supporting this family night and day had a little something to do with it.”
“Why are we even fighting about this? I just thought that you would want to know your daughter’s in some trouble at school. Don’t you care to know that?”
“I do,” John said. “I do care to know that, and now I’m well informed. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Elisabeth said, and it came off sounding even nastier than she had intended.
“But, again,” John told her, speaking slowly, the voice he might have used with an aggravating child, “it’d be nice if you could handle this.”
“You’re two minutes away,” Elisabeth said. “You’re one hallway and one courtyard away. Is this really too much to ask?”
“It is,” John said. “In a way, yes, it is.”
“It’s not.”
“It is,” John said, more adamantly now. “And, frankly, all of this is a lot to bear, too.”
“This?”
“This.”
“This what?”
“Your badgering me. Your pestering me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not exactly dripping with free time these days. I’ve got lesson planning, Else. I’ve got grading to do. I’ve got mountains and mountains of grading.”
She made herself breathe. “In the time we’ve been talking,” she said, “we could have met with Catherine Curry.”
“Maybe,” John said, “but that’s beside the point.”
“And what is the point, then?”
“The point,” he said, snapping now, “is that this is something I’d like you to handle. This is something you should handle. You have your job, and I have mine. Now let me do mine, and I’ll let you do yours.”
“That’s a shit thing to say,” Elisabeth told him. “She’s your child, too, you know, and it’s a little disconcerting that I should have to tell you that.”
“It’s a shit thing, Else, that you sit around all day and do nothing. It’s a shit thing that you don’t take care of your daughter. You, not me. You.”
It was all she could do to say good-bye, all she could do to keep herself from hurling the phone against the wall. “Good-bye,” she said, or heard herself say, and she slammed the receiver on its cradle. Her fingers clenched. Her toes curled divots in her shoes.
* * *
—
Catherine Curry wasn’t much older than Elisabeth, and perhaps was even younger. She was small and very thin—her collarbone jutted out so fiercely that it looked as if it were trying to break free of her—and a single curl of gray eddied through her otherwise uninteresting hair, a streak of sham sagacity that she was undoubtedly extremely proud of.
Elisabeth had met her only once before. Shortly after moving but prior to the start of the January term, Margaret undertook a battery of tests administered by Curry, the sum of which was aimed at assessing her readiness for the fifth grade. Margaret had passed everything with ease, including a brief geography test.
“It’s an absolute wonder,” Curry had said, shaking her head, leafing through her papers. “She’s a smart one—I’ll give her that. I don’t know how she managed it,” and although her remarks were likely made in innocence, Elisabeth had taken some offense at them. Not once had Curry acknowledged her instruction. Not once had she said, My goodness. You must have been doing something right these past three years. And hadn’t she? Margaret was gifted—that much was clear—but surely Elisabeth’s teaching deserved some degree of credit. She didn’t need the validation, but the total disregard of Margaret’s stint of homeschooling seemed to be a condemnation of it. I don’t know how she managed it. When Curry had said that, Elisabeth just nodded.
“It’s a miracle, all right,” she had said, as dry as she could manage.
The school’s windows were poorly insulated, and the classroom was as chilly as a catacomb. Elisabeth had expected Margaret to be waiting with Curry—she imagined Margaret banished to a corner, or perhaps writing lines on the chalkboard—but Margaret was nowhere to be seen. It was only Curry at her desk. A porcelain hula girl stood sentinel beside a stack of papers.
“Thanks for coming in so quickly,” Curry said, flashing an effete smile.
The incident, she explained, had occurred only hours before. Shortly after lunch, Margaret had asked to use the bathroom.
“We hav
e a hall pass,” Curry said. “One student at a time.”
But Margaret didn’t readily return. When fifteen minutes had passed, Curry sent another student to the girls’ room to check on her.
“And, surprise,” Curry said, “Margaret was gone. I had the students take up some silent reading, and I checked on her myself. I went from bathroom to bathroom, up and down the hallway. No Margaret. Then I noticed that her parka was missing from its hook.” Curry gestured at the door. “Each student hangs up their things in the morning, and each student has their own hook in the hallway. Now, you can imagine my alarm when I saw that all of Margaret’s things were missing. Her parka, her scarves, everything. For ten minutes, your daughter had a whole team of us almost losing our minds.” Curry leaned forward now, clasping her hands on the desk. “I don’t think I need to tell you this, Mrs. Pfautz, but our students don’t often play hooky. They’re military children, they’re obedient children, and a thing like this just doesn’t happen here, let alone what happened next.”
Elisabeth lowered her eyes. “What happened next? Where was Margaret?”
Again the affected smile, the pretense of civility. Curry leaned back.
“She was halfway to the airfield itself. She had gone clear through the courtyard, clear through the upper school, and down the service road after that. If you can believe it, she even passed through a guard station. Goodness knows how she managed that. A patrol finally stopped her and brought her back, kicking and screaming.” She added a little flourish here, kicking and screaming, dragging out the words as though they were an insult—to Margaret, yes, but an insult aimed mostly at Elisabeth.
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