I stood at the window. The fireweeds edging the driveway looked blighted as they spit ruined cobwebs from their brown stalks.
“You still think we’re going on vacation?” Pei-Pei asked.
I nodded.
She shoved a few scraps into her pocket. “Get out,” she said, no longer with malice, and flipped a thumb at the door.
On the way, I put a hand on the wall, on top of the sun-bleached butcher paper with my father’s childlike scrawl. It crackled at my touch. When I gave the edge a tug, it came down easily, the tape apparently ready to give in.
Pei-Pei followed me down the stairs. The front door was wide open, and my mother was standing on the first step, taller than my father. He bent to pick up the book Natty had left in the doorway.
“Why won’t you answer me?” my mother said.
My father opened the book. It was a hardcover about flower arrangements, pulled from a library crate.
“Is it time to go yet?” Pei-Pei asked. “Aren’t we all packed?”
“No,” my mother said. “There’s something I can’t find.”
My father turned a page and smoothed it. It was cool and glossy, I knew, with pictures of artificial flowers being stabbed into foam.
My mother whipped around, barely aware of Pei-Pei and me, and charged up the stairs. I followed her into her bedroom and the big closet, where she started pulling shoeboxes off the shelves. When they tumbled down and the lids fell off, familiar yet miraculous objects landed at my feet. Things I hadn’t seen in years, that had stopped existing for me, were rematerializing. A shirt with a faded tomato that all four of us kids had worn. An ice-blue teething toy in the shape of a pretzel. The past was taking shape on the floor.
“She’s gone,” my mother said.
It dawned on me then what she was looking for. And that she would not find it.
My mother spun around in the closet. “For the garbage,” she said. “Everything is for the garbage.” Half of the clothes had been removed from their hangers, and my mother finished the job, yanking what remained and flinging it to the carpet. She reeled into the ravaged bedroom. Bundles of old clothing had been excavated from under the bed and opened, spilled in heaps like snowdrifts.
My mother lurched to the top of the stairs. She hollered down, “What did you do with her? Don’t lie to me.”
Pei-Pei was still standing at the bottom, and the back of my father’s figure was visible through the open frame. I took a step down and stopped.
“Where is she? Where is Ruby?”
My father did not turn to look at me. Pei-Pei gave me an astonished look, then hit my father in the shoulder. “What is she talking about?” Pei-Pei said. She hit him again. “What did you do?”
The longer my father stayed silent, the more he incriminated himself; even I saw someone past the question of forgiveness. As he turned slightly toward Pei-Pei, he leaned to one side, as though his spine had grown crooked. The sparse hairs of his sideburns were unruly. His thin waxed-cotton jacket was zipped all the way closed. He looked like a man who was on his way out because no one wanted him to stay.
“Tell me now or you will regret it,” my mother said.
“What’s going on?” Pei-Pei asked.
“He wanted to leave her here, in this place he thinks is so grand.” My mother breathed rapidly into my head. I felt moist heat on the back of one ear. “So he threw her away.”
“Threw her away?” Pei-Pei’s voice was strained. “What does she mean?”
My father finally closed the book and turned around to face us, though he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Our time is up,” he said. “We have to go.”
“Tell me,” my mother said. “Will I find her in the house?”
My father worked his mouth in a way that hollowed out his face. “No.”
I was the first one to move. “Vacation,” I said, and tore down the stairs and out the door. The sudden whiteness of the sky stung my eyes and stopped me in my tracks. Clouds coursed past our house and appeared to be converging behind the clearing.
I turned to the driveway and with dismay saw Ada standing right on it, a few feet from the truck where our furniture was piled helter-skelter. She held one good stick in each hand. Probably one of them was meant for me. I couldn’t run back inside; she had already seen me. Her mouth was slack and partly open. She stared at me, and then at my father, and then at me. Her sticks drooped to rest in the dirt. The front door had been wide open. What had been said? In what language, in what tone? What had she understood?
I didn’t want to go anywhere near the truck; I wanted to disown it. But I made myself keep moving. “We’re not free today,” I shouted at her, spending all the gaiety I had ever had. “We’re going to Seward for vacation.” I scrambled into the cab of the truck and slid into the bench seat in the back. After my father climbed in, I waved at Natty urgently.
He squatted beside the step and jammed his chin into his hands.
“Come on,” I said.
“I won’t go,” he yelled. “I won’t.”
* * *
WE DROVE SOUTH, toward the ghost trees. On our left, the familiar yellow and green mountains of the Chugach range swelled and dipped. Dark, dense shadows passed over them, so it seemed a fleet of airships might be sailing overhead, but when I looked above, there were only unremarkable clouds.
It was the distant mountains on our right, across the inlet, that we didn’t know, and it was this range I studied as we wound around Turnagain Arm. These mountains were blue and brooding, still splattered with snow. They had been cheated of sun and warmth and gentle slopes on which grass and wildflowers could grow and stain the ground with color. Constant landslides had left them cragged.
Natty was crying, but he was so quiet that my parents might not have known. Drops hung on the edge of his upper lip, fattening before they broke.
When we reached the ghost trees, my father pointed out the remnant of a collapsed house. It was surrounded by a marsh that had formed when the earthquake had sunk most of the town. Only the caving top half of the cabin was visible. “Roof,” he said, and cleared his throat as though more words were coming—but it was a false alarm.
I began to chatter. I tried to forget Ada. As my father took an unannounced detour off the highway, I pointed out everything we passed. The railroad crossing. The hawk perched on a broken branch. Far off, the waterfall of blue ice suspended midcascade down a mountainside. As we drove along the curving spur road bordered by aspens, the ice came in and out of view. Eventually the road forked, and the route we took ended right at the massive frozen waterfall, which spilled jaggedly into a lake. I read the sign aloud. This cold blue mass was Portage Glacier, and the lake was eight hundred feet deep.
“See that? Eight hundred feet, it says. How long do you think it would take to sink to the bottom?” I was just talking, just making sound. It wasn’t until later that night, when I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, that the fact of the lake’s depth caught up to me and disturbed the pumping of my heart.
The brand-new visitors’ center was closed and the restrooms were locked. A hard wind cut through the valley. We passed around some snacks while my father moved the table and crates around the bed of the truck. From inside the cab, we heard a great deal of scraping. When my father had finished clearing space on the large mattress, my mother went out and fastened a tarp over it. We brushed our teeth and washed our faces in the cold, low stream of a drinking fountain. While my face was wet, my mother ran back to the truck to look for a towel, but by the time she returned, my face was dry and chilled. Everything took three times as long as at home, and by the time we were all done peeing in the shrubs, it was well into night.
In a mass of blankets and towels, my mother slept with us. My father dozed practically upright in the driver’s seat, leaning on a pillow over the steering wheel. That he avoided sounding the horn all night seemed only to confirm his weightlessness, his inconsequence. “No one would even believe me,” Pei-Pei said the next morn
ing. “Our whole family in the back of the truck.”
When I said, “Not the whole family,” she gave me a confused look.
For hours I lay stiffly, trying not to bump Natty, who was curled into my side. His fist dug into my ribs. My mother’s arm extended over his head and into my territory. It didn’t touch me but I sensed it there, her hand somewhere near my neck. The tarp that sagged over us made a darkened space, and I was glad for it. There had been too many stars out and no moon to keep them fixed in the sky, to keep them from whirling. But even with our view cut off, it was impossible to erase the feeling of the unoccupied parking spaces around us. So many freshly painted rectangles and no cars. To one side was an empty building, to the other, empty roads. I thought of sinking, with eight hundred feet to go. The cold air hurt the back of my throat.
14
The next day, we caught glimpses of the Kenai River from the road. The opaque river coursed with water so turquoise, the trees and surrounding land seemed faded. My father pulled off into a small dirt lot, and we sprang from the truck. As we approached the bank, we could see fly fishermen casting with their thin, curved wands, trying to enchant fish out of the water. Though most toed the bank, a few stood, splendidly, right in the glimmering river, dipped to their waists. Behind them, on the other side of the water, was a small stand of Sitka spruces and two mountains heavily patched with snow. Some of the fishermen wore puffy coats, but where we stood on solid ground, the air was warm. The heat, the turquoise water, the glinting sun—they were swallowing us into a different world. I could almost believe what I had been selling. We were on vacation.
We stood captivated. It wasn’t long before a fisherman on the bank shouted. His rod was deeply curved, and the tip of it trembled. He reeled the line in, stepping into the river so the water sloshed around his waders. The hooked fish skipped in a zigzag pattern that approached the bank. Just a few feet from where we stood, the fisherman trapped the fish against the ground with his hands. As it flopped, he cut its gills, which bled.
“A bonanza,” said his friend, who raised a bent arm to recast.
The first man tinkered with the fish’s mouth.
“String her up,” said his friend. He gave a jut of the chin to a murky area in the water. I followed his gaze to a dense school of big silver fish swimming close to the bank. But when the fisherman tied a string to a tree and released his fish into the water there, I understood that these were dead fish, all of the fish they had caught, being iced in the river.
“Salmon,” my mother informed us, pronouncing it “saul-mon,” but the fisherman squatting by the tree understood her. He said in our direction, “It’s a good morning for silvers.”
My father echoed, “A good morning.”
“Got a line to wet?” he asked my father.
My father hunched over and contorted his face into a smile that showed no teeth. He nodded to the fishermen and ushered us away, back toward our truck with its jumbled contents.
In the lot my mother picked up a small dip net leaning against the clunky bear-proof garbage bin. The handle was snapped off, and the net was separating from the hoop.
“Don’t think you’re bringing that with us,” my father said.
“Why are you raising your voice?”
“There’s no room for more junk.”
“It’s not junk.” My mother rubbed the uneven end where the handle was missing. “We don’t need that part.” She turned the net over. “And this is nothing. I can tie it with floss.”
My father stormed to the driver’s seat. “You should listen to me,” he said. “Someone should.” My mother followed, holding the dip net against her hip and swaggering a little.
We climbed back into the truck and drove on. We hit a beach at low tide, walked along the snaking edges of the wet sand, collected kelp and a few intact shells, and turned around again. Everyone was saying gas prices were low, low, low, falling, falling, and we drove wastefully, exploring forks in the road and backtracking. In Soldotna, we found room for our truck at a campground, mostly RVs parked along a dirt loop, their elaborate wings and extensions creating outdoor dining rooms furnished with folding chairs and card tables.
My mother could not stop craning her neck, for she was curious about what people ate, and how, and this must have been the most access she had ever had. Pei-Pei and I were more preoccupied with hiding our own dinner, corn and Spam straight from the cans, supplemented with handfuls of the yellow kelp that my mother had made us gather on the beach. The kelp didn’t taste bad—a little briny, a little pickly—but we hid it in our hands and nibbled at it so that another kid watching us might have assumed we were popping M&M’s or Reese’s Pieces. Although there were several hours of daylight left, many of the RVs had fires going on the side, and Natty kept asking for his own. He hadn’t talked much all day, or maybe at all; now he sounded like a caveman, or a primitive creature bargaining with the gods. “Make me fire. I want fire, too.”
“All right,” my mother said. “Ask someone to help you. I saw lots of dead branches in the woods between the outhouses and the river.”
“Where are you going?” I asked. She had one arm through her winter coat and had pulled on her boots without my noticing.
“I’m going to catch some fish.”
My father chortled. “With that piece of trash?”
My mother slid her lower jaw forward and held his gaze until he scratched his nose and looked away.
“Can I come?” I asked.
“It’ll be dark soon,” she said. “Too dark for you.” She stepped up onto the rear bumper of the truck and leaned over the tailgate. “I just need to find the flashlight that works.”
After she left with her dip net, Natty and my father worked on gathering wood by the river. It took six or seven trips for them to heap together branches and break them down. Dead leaves still clung to many of them, and when the fire caught, the leaves flamed individually before the fire settled into the wood. We each wrapped a blanket around ourselves, except for Natty, who shared one with Pei-Pei. They sat on a rock that seesawed beneath their weight. She lifted her arms so the blanket made wings around them and said, “This is the story of a boy who disappeared from a camp near a river.”
Inside their pupa, Natty wriggled. His fingers curled around the edges of the blanket. He peered out with one eye. “And they found him?” he asked.
“I guess you could say they found him,” Pei-Pei said. “They did find a few pieces that belonged to him. The smallest part was his tonsils, which looked like two peas stuck together.”
“All right,” my father said. “All right.”
I asked him how many fish he thought my mother had caught by now.
“I used to catch fish, too,” he said.
“You?”
Outside his house, he said, there had been a series of drain channels that fed into a deep trench. After storms, he could climb a fence with friends, jump into the overflowing trench, and catch tiny fish with a mesh strainer. He kept them in a jar, but they never lived beyond a few days, so he started feeding them to his neighbor’s turtle. The turtle always ate them in the same order: tail, head, body.
When the blaze crept onto the large branch that jutted toward me, I could feel the jumpy heat on my face; it alternated with the cool breeze. I fell asleep with my elbow on a rock. My father must have added wood, for I woke a few times to a greater warmth and let my blanket fall away.
I woke to the sound of sizzling. My mother was soaked, and her sleeves were dripping water onto the fire. The flashlight was shoved in her chest pocket, the top of it sticking out to illuminate a diagonal stripe across her face. “Success,” she said. She hugged a bulging plastic bag to her stomach. The top handles had stretched and ripped, and the wind lifted them like flimsy ribbons.
“Did you go for a night swim?” Pei-Pei asked.
My mother’s laugh bounded away from her. “I’m not afraid of a little water,” she said. “Water is afraid of me.” She was shiveri
ng.
My father threw our wool blanket over her head. “Dry yourself,” he said.
She shook it off. “I want to prepare the fish.”
“I’ll do it.”
“You don’t know how to clean them.”
He rustled a leafy branch at the fire, creating a great plume of smoke.
“I caught five.” My mother crouched and turned the opening of the bag toward me, as though showing me the face of a bundled baby. “One of them is very big. Don’t you think I did pretty well?” My mother started laughing again. “There are bears,” my father said. “You should care about that.”
My mother continued to speak only to me, but a touch too loudly. “You should have seen me in the river. I could have caught enough to fill the whole truck, but I only brought one bag.”
With a knife, my mother gutted the smallest fish, a trout, she said. She balanced a frying pan right on top of the fire. The bottom of the pan blackened almost instantly. Soon the smell of crisped fish wafted around with the breeze. When we peeled bits of the meat from the pan, we found it unevenly cooked, but my mother said it was fine, the fish was fresh, it was practically still alive. “This is the way to eat it,” she said. “Not frozen and thawed and frozen and thawed until it’s been dead for longer than it’s been alive.”
“Come eat,” Pei-Pei said, but my father would not. Three empty beer cans sat in a neat line by his feet, and he held the precious fourth one with both hands. In the truck I slept next to his stash of liquor and beer, and I knew it was diminishing.
I wanted the RV families to see us, eating our fish by our fire just as they had. But they were asleep or watching TV, their windows dark or flickering blue. They saw us only the next morning, cooking another fish on a dirty pan for breakfast, the fire practically buried under ash, while they were milling around with their coffee mugs and clean plastic bowls of cereal. Soon they had all driven away, on to another site or off to the river for the day, and we were the only ones left. My mother set two chairs in the sun and rigged the long handle of a shovel between them. She cut the remaining fish into strips and salted them, then hung them from the handle to dry.
The Unpassing Page 14